15 - On the lack of incentive to labour in a communist society

Summary

‘Yes,’ said I. ‘I was expecting Dick and Clara to make their appearance any moment: but is there time to ask just one or two questions before they come?’

‘Try it, dear neighbour – try it,’ said old Hammond. ‘For the more you ask me the better I am pleased; and at any rate if they do come and find me in the middle of an answer, they must sit quiet and pretend to listen till I come to an end. It won't hurt them; they will find it quite amusing enough to sit side by side, conscious of their proximity to each other.’

I smiled, as I was bound to, and said: ‘Good; I will go on talking without noticing them when they come in. Now, this is what I want to ask you about – to wit, how you get people to work when there is no reward of labour, and especially how you get them to work strenuously?’

‘No reward of labour?’ said Hammond, gravely. ‘The reward of labour is life. Is that not enough?’

‘But no reward for especially good work,’ quoth I.

‘Plenty of reward,’ said he – ‘the reward of creation. The wages which God gets, as people might have said time agone. If you are going to ask to be paid for the pleasure of creation, which is what excellence in work means, the next thing we shall hear of will be a bill sent in for the begetting of children.’