New Left Review I/91, May-June 1975

Miklós Haraszti

I Have Heard the Iron Cry

The piece-work system aroused my interest. Although I had read about it, its contradictory nature left me perplexed. I couldn’t even see it as a compromise solution. In one newspaper, for instance, a Hungarian expert in ‘management science’ claimed that payment by results was the most perfect form of socialist remuneration, since it embodied the principle: ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his work’. In the same paper, however, though not in the same issue, an old Communist who now holds a prominent position recalled in glowing terms a comrade who, before the War, had organized workers’ demonstrations against the Bedeaux system, the ‘scientific’ method of payment by results of those days. I looked up statistics and learned that the majority of industrial workers are on piece-work. I also found out—though this is common knowledge—that only workers are allowed to enjoy this chemically pure form of socialist wage-labour; their superiors have to be content with more backward forms. But what really interested me was a topic which no one had so far discussed in front of the esteemed public—myself included: what is it actually like to be on piece-work?

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