Originally published at: https://www.indep.network/labor-time-accounting-a-postmortem-robin-hahnel/
In an article published by the Participatory Economy Project, professor Robin Hahnel offers a critique of labor time accounting, arguing that there are three different categories of real costs which rational economic decision making should take into account, only one of which is the amount of labor time required to make different goods and services. Excerpt: Of relevance…
The existence of a market and accordingly - commodity exchange, alone implies that a mechanism, which reduces every type of concrete labour to simple, standard labour, exists. This is also noted by Marx in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 1, when he was discussing the dual character of labour.
“The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.”
In the socialist society where distribution is planned consciously, society can decide for itself how to treat every type of concrete labour in their duration with respect to the standard equal labour (e.g. 1 hour of baking is translated to X hours of standard labour). This would be equivalent to assigning weights to each kind of labour. We cannot say how these weights would be determined but surely based on many factors, such as the expenditure of energy, the education and training needed beforehand, the risk, etc.
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