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.
1 Like
Hahnel argues that planners should take into account three different kinds of cost: work time, how soon the product or service is available (where something is worth more if you can have it sooner), and environmental costs. In our computer simulation modeling project, we are trying to address environmental costs under a larger heading of in-kind accounting according to a social budget, an idea that I think is compatible with participatory economics, but where our emphasis is on cybernetics-based automatic mechanisms that can be built into an economy so as to enforce the social budget. The cost of time to availability of a given product or service seems to me to affect planning decisions, but need not affect acccounting in the sense of prices and pay. In an ideal (neoclassical-model) capitalist market, the greater value for sooner availability is expressed through a demand signal, leading to a higher price. In our project (the computer simulation modeling project), we are developing cybernetic signalling mechanisms to replace fluctuating prices so as to ensure that supply meets demand, even while the value that a consumer transfers to a producer for a given good remains the socially necessary labor that went into that good.