Value, work, time — A reply to the critique of the Krisis group on labor time accounting

By IDA, Initiative demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung (Initiative democratic working time accounting)

German, Spanish

“(…)we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles.” (Karl Marx) [1]

A few weeks ago, Julian Bierwirth of the theory group Krisis gave a lecture on the recent debate on labor time accounting and subjected this idea to a fundamental critique.[2] In doing so, he explicitly based himself on the conception of labor time accounting as it has been developed by the Group of International Communists (GIC) in its Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution[3] and is also advocated by us. Labor time accounting is regarded here as an initially sympathetic alternative to the money economy, which, however, had structural similarities with the fetishism of commodity-producing capitalist society. Furthermore, it was claimed that a labor-time-based economy could not at all overcome the separation of reproductive (“care work”) from so-called productive activities, which is common in capitalism. Finally, the model of productive units, which are supposed to have relative autonomy, especially concerning plan-making, was also problematized since it continued to favor— as under capitalism— the externalization of costs that would be passed on to society. We want to comment on these three points in the following. Although the speaker, according to his statements, did not want to give any weighting to his three points of criticism according to thematic importance or relevance, the first point of criticism (fetishism) took up the most space in the lecture. This is hardly surprising since the critique of value and fetishism is ultimately the “specialty” of the Krisis group. Since the value critique is based on a specific understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy, this part will also be the most detailed in the text here. We would like to take this very point as an opportunity to make some methodological considerations about Das Kapital by Karl Marx and about the materialist conception of history as a whole and to elaborate on it somewhat further. Here, too, the other two points will probably fall behind again, although we consider the question of reproduction in particular to be extremely important. What is only briefly touched upon here in this respect must again have to become the subject of an independent theoretical discussion.

The status of abstract labor

Ever since Robert Kurz, the co-founder of the Krisis group, wrote his essay Abstrakte Arbeit und Sozialismus (Abstract Labor and Socialism),[4] the concept of abstract labor developed by Marx in the first chapter of Capital has been at the center of the critique of value. Since according to Marx, abstract-human labor, as a substance of value, constituted the value of the commodity, and since the commodity form of products, or socialization[5] via value, is considered by value critics to be the central moment of the capitalist mode of production, for them abstract labor and capitalism are also commonly the same thing. Julian Bierwirth expressed this several times in his lecture in such a way that already socialization via labor is a fundamental problem. In his essay at the time, Robert Kurz at least recognized the ambiguous status of abstract labor in Das Kapital, around which there was already a debate at the time, mainly following Isaac Rubin’s studies on Marx’s theory of value, in which Hans-Georg Backhaus and Dieter Wolf, among others, participated. It was mainly Backhaus who drew attention to the problem of an insufficiently carried out mediation of abstract labor, value and value form (exchange value) in the first chapter of Das Kapital. Following this, Robert Kurz considered that there must be two kinds of value forms: On the one hand, value as the form in which the total social labor expresses itself; on the other hand, the value-form as the appearance of value in exchange-value (money). In this context, Kurz speaks of the value form in first and second potency. The common Marx interpretation had mostly solved the problem in such a way that abstract labor as a substance of value is immediately absorbed into exchange value as a form of value, which makes a critical consideration of value per se impossible.

Kurz’s counter-argument now consisted of his holding on to value (the value-form of the first potency) and examining it more closely in its relation to abstract labor. In doing so, he drew attention to the thoroughly ambiguous character of abstract labor in Marx’s main text: on the one hand, it was labor “in the physiological sense” [6] as the pure expenditure of “brain, nerve, muscle, sense organ, etc.”,[7] i.e., labor as a kind of natural power of man, which was thus present in every society. On the other hand, there would be passages in which Marx makes it unmistakably clear that abstract labor is an organizational form of labor that occurs only under capitalist commodity production, such as the following passage:

“This division of a product into a useful thing and a value becomes practically important, only when exchange has acquired such an extension that useful articles are produced for the purpose of being exchanged, and their character as values has therefore to be taken into account, beforehand, during production. From this moment the labour of the individual producer acquires socially a two-fold character. On the one hand, it must, as a definite useful kind of labour, satisfy a definite social want, and thus hold its place as part and parcel of the collective labour of all, as a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold wants of the individual producer himself, only in so far as the mutual exchangeability of all kinds of useful private labour is an established social fact, and therefore the private useful labour of each producer ranks on an equality with that of all others.” [8]

Julian Bierwirth also seems to understand abstract labor in this dimension since he also understands labor time accounting as a system of private labor, which would be related to each other in the form of abstract labor in the labor certificates but more on this later. Robert Kurz now also resolved this ambiguity of abstract labor in favor of this second historically specific meaning: Marx, as a historical thinker par excellence, could not have meant this mere physiological-natural meaning at all with his determination of abstract labor since this was, after all, only a quite general unhistorical banality but he understood it as a “SOCIAL (uppercase in original) generality or determination of form” and as such it was “solely a historical phenomenon of commodity production.” According to Kurz, this purely physiological determination also includes the fact that labor is always also an activity with a specific duration, in the sense that Marx formulates in Das Kapital, that in “In all states of society, the labour time that it costs to produce the means of subsistence, must necessarily be an object of interest to mankind”.[9] Kurz does not deny that all economy must always also be an economy of time. Therefore, this could not be a specific feature of abstract labor. (However, this could already contradict the fact that it is precisely labor time that determines the value quantity). Finally, he also rejects Dieter Wolf’s formal-social but superhistorical conception of abstract labor, according to which it should initially represent only an aliquot part of the total labor in every society.

That this generality is a specifically capitalist one is now shown for Kurz in that abstract labor becomes independent of the social actors in value as a real abstraction— a concept he takes over from Alfred Sohn-Retel. This becoming independent of the real abstraction value then culminates for him in the irrational money form as an independent value figure, towards which the whole capitalist production, as the utilization of value, is oriented. Since that essay, it was a foregone conclusion for Robert Kurz, and basically for all those who feel somehow connected to the critique of value, that abstract labor was not only the exclusive form principle of capitalist commodity production but that labor had to be rejected as a socializing principle altogether. Value becoming independant from people in commodity production is generally regarded by the value critics as the scandal of capitalist socialization. The expropriation of the mass of people from their conditions of production, which is reproduced every day, the resulting alienation of people from their social activities, as well as the exploitation of labor by capital, which is limited in its technical possibilities only by the human physique, in short: foreign determination and domination are seen as derived from this and not seldom as subordinate phenomena.

In Abstrakte Arbeit und Sozialismus, Robert Kurz still held out the prospect, in connection with Hegel’s determinations of the general, that labor must be replaced by its abstract-general organization under capital by a concrete-general form of organization, which “contains the wealth of the many special useful labors, the real totality of social labor, and is not separated from it.” However, of this negative dialectic of labor, of which Marx himself remained quite aware when he described the capitalist production process as a non-identical unity of labor and valorization process, not much is to be found in the later publications of the value critics. There, labor, abstract labor, private labor, and wage labor are often used synonymously. This may be justified by the fact that all value-creating work in capitalism is organized under alienated and undignified conditions and that much of this work— from the view of use value— is also useless and meaningless. However, it leads to partly misleading assumptions about a political economy of socialism.

Let us summarize again: Neither the fact that labor is an expenditure of physiological forces with a specific duration nor that all human labor is always also part of the total social labor constitute, for Robert Kurz, the characteristic of abstract labor but that it is labor directed toward value, that is, commodity-producing labor— or as Marx also says— private labor, whose social character is then confirmed in the realization of the created value products (commodities) into money. What about the physiological “banalities” of labor in general? Daniel Dockerill, who has subjected Abstrakte Arbeit und Sozialismus to a somewhat lengthy critique, has pointed out, not without reason, that the exclusion of the physiological and superhistorical facts from the concept of abstract labor threatens to lead to a bad dualism since the historical and the superhistorical are no longer mediated in the concept.[10] Robert Kurz would certainly not have denied that human history and (human) nature are each specifically configured in their unity in the epochs of the various economic social formations, as he also adheres in his later writings to the idea of “metabolism with nature”, which Marx defines as the elementary generic capacity of human beings that makes history possible in the first place, even if Kurz no longer wants to call it labor. If this capabilities were called something else, for example, activity, the same problem would still be present: Abstract labor would be the unity of labor and activity, whereby the latter, as it is a component of abstract labor, would always already have the character of labor.

Marx was aware of this dialectical character of labor even in his earliest methodological reflections in Critique of Political Economy. Thus, he writes in the introductory draft of the so-called Grundrisse:

“Labour seems a quite simple category. The conception of labour in this general form – as labour as such – is also immeasurably old. Nevertheless, when it is economically conceived in this simplicity, ‘labour’ is as modern a category as are the relations which create this simple abstraction. (…)

It was an immense step forward for Adam Smith to throw out every limiting specification of wealth-creating activity – not only manufacturing, or commercial or agricultural labour but one as well as the others, labour in general. (…) Now, it might seem that all that had been achieved thereby was to discover the abstract expression for the simplest and most ancient relation in which human beings – in whatever form of society – play the role of producers. This is correct in one respect. Not in another. Indifference towards any specific kind of labour presupposes a very developed totality of real kinds of labour, of which no single one is any longer predominant. As a rule, the most general abstractions arise only in the midst of the richest possible concrete development, where one thing appears as common to many, to all. Then it ceases to be thinkable in a particular form alone. On the other side, this abstraction of labour as such is not merely the mental product of a concrete totality of labours. Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the category, labour but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States. Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and simple, becomes true in practice. The simplest abstraction, then, which modern economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society.” [11]

Labor is here, on the one hand, an abstraction of the mind that subsumes the various human activities in the different historical epochs under one concept. As such, it is an extremely formal abstraction with little scientific value, and it is precisely about a conceptualization of human history that its specification is necessary, as Marx then did in characterizing the various European modes of production (slavery, feudalism, capitalism). On the other hand, according to Marx, such a mental abstraction is only possible if labor is already socially organized in such an abstract way— if it is realabstraction. It is only through the capitalist division of labor and the exchange of the various partial labors with money that it becomes “practically true” that all human activities have specific formal determinations in common.[12] However, these are precisely the seemingly banal physiological qualities of labor, as examined in more detail by Marx in the chapter on the labor process. As such, on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, they have always been organized by the process of valorization but they have not been extinguished. On the contrary, it is precisely here that the physiological aspects of labor come into consideration, otherwise, the theory of value would lack any rational basis. After all, it is labor time, which, according to Marx, should determine the value quantity. Thus, abstract labor— as Robert Kurz rightly insisted— is historically specific but always in that it operates on this physiological basis— and under certain social relations of production, the capitalist ones. Dockerill formulates this aptly in the following way:

“Value, determined as the objectification of abstract labor, is initially only the content of exchange value, independent of the specific form of the commodity. This content is therefore not historically special in itself but only insofar as it is the determining moment of the historically special form of the commodity, more precisely of its exchange value. The fact that there are determinations of the commodity at all which, considered abstractly for themselves, show historically unspecific, i.e. overarching general character, does not take anything away from its particularity but only shows it as a historical product itself, belonging to one human history… ” [13]

In the context of abstract labor, Dockerill once again decisively points out the difference between value substance and value form, which makes the distinction between the value form of the first and second power superfluous, which rather complicates than facilitates the access to the understanding of the value form analysis in Das Kapital. Because such a distinction suggests that value can appear in a form other than that of exchange value. Abstract-human labor, as the substance of value, however, has no appearance in itself and therefore necessarily appears as something other than what it is, namely, as a third commodity that expresses its value objecthood vis-à-vis the other commodities because it is considered equal to them as the product of human labor. Value can appear only in exchange value; the commodity must double itself in commodity and money. Of course, Robert Kurz also assumes the necessity of this doubling. However it takes place because commodities are products of private labor and must first prove their generality as part of the total social labor on the market. Values are realized in market or production prices that deviate from them. Therefore, the connection between commodity and money, between value and price, can only be grasped in the progress of the theoretical representation of capital. As important as it may have been for Marx’s reception outside the traditional organizations of the workers’ movement at the time to account for the status of the categories in the first chapter of Capital, it is wrong to stop at the first chapter, at the consideration of the individual commodity, and to build an entire worldview on it.[14]

The same can be seen in the understanding of so-called private labor, which, according to Marx in the first chapter, is a formal prerequisite for labor products to take commodity form. Since Julian Bierwirth claims that these are also structurally presupposed in the labor time accounting of the GIC. What about these private labors under capitalism? It is by no means the case that any small producers (craftsmen and peasants) exchange their commodities with each other— a notion that, unfortunately, Marx favors himself at first since he repeatedly gives examples from craft labor and pre-capitalist communities in the presentation of the “simple circulation of commodities.” It is rather capitalist large-scale enterprises that possess the real power of disposal and control over the conditions of production, which constantly throw new masses of commodities into circulation in to realize their values or the surplus value generated by the exploited wage-dependents. Conversely, of course, the structure of these capitalist relations of production presupposes that there are wage-dependents in the first place, that is, a mass of people separated from these conditions of production and thus deprived of control over the production of wealth. Marx devoted a separate chapter to this historical process, the so-called primitive accumulation in England, to remind us of the violence with which this new mode of production came into the world. This is not a legal truncation of a Marx who is still entirely caught up in the ideas of the workers’ movement, as Bierwirth believes about Friedrich Engels’ idea of labor time accounting but a central idea of Marxist social theory! When Marx speaks of (private) property in this context, he does not primarily mean the juridical form that these relations of production have taken but the form of the real appropriation or expropriation of the social product and the conditions under which it is produced. The fact that the products take on commodity form and thus value objecthood is the daily anew reproduced result of these relations of production, not their precondition.

Since Robert Kurz thankfully instructs us in his essay about the status of Hegelian concepts in Marx’s Capital, it should be added here that the systematic architecture of the three volumes of Capital strictly adheres to Hegel’s precept from Logic that in logical representation reason and consequence are reversed: The complicated is derived from the simple but the complicated is at the same time the ground of the simple, so that the simple is only a moment of the complicated.[15] Thus Marx derives money from the commodity and capital from money but as the exposition proceeds it becomes apparent that commodity and money are only modes of appearance of capital, commodity capital and money capital. When he writes at the beginning of his book that wealth in societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities, then the fully developed capitalist mode of production is tacitly presupposed. However, what the characteristics of this mode of production consist of must then be shown in the course of the exposition. In this sense, terms such as abstract labor or private labor first form a very formal framework in which the value of an ideal individual commodity[16] is to be plausibly presented without having to presuppose knowledge of the overall capitalist process on the reader’s part. To what extent abstract labor is organized as total labor, and private labor as part of this total labor, and to what extent the movement of competition produces the socially average labor time is deliberately left out by Marx at this point. But that is why it is all the more essential to reintroduce these premises. Such dialectic is forgotten by those who want to see the esoteric, fetish-critical Marx cleanly divorced from the exoteric, worker-moved Marx. Then commodity fetishism is bent into the cause of alienation and is no longer recognized as a consequence of the actual social alienation, namely the separation of the producers from the objective conditions of their reproduction. One can indeed demand the abolition of all labor but the question will always remain open: who will produce my food or my furniture, who will take care of my dirty laundry, if I do not do it myself?

Abstract labor and labor time accounting

Let us now return to the starting point of the investigation, i.e., the question of whether labor time accounting, as conceived by the GIC, reproduces fetishistic structures analogous to those of capitalism; whether the works within such a labor time-based society relate to each other as private works. Julian Bierwirth seems to assume this because GIC starts from productive individual operational units with planning autonomy. Such a starting point is unavoidable if there is to be no central quasi-governmental planning authority that dictates to both producers and consumers. Instead, they should organize themselves in operational units[17] and consumer cooperatives and manage themselves through works councils. Now, the impression could arise that the fragmented structure of enterprises, as it is found within the social division of labor in capitalism, is not abolished at all but maintained and that the operational units compete with each other, in the sense that each operational unit must accumulate sufficient certificates through its distribution in order to be able to reproduce itself.[18] But precisely this is not the case. The productive operational units, while forming relatively independent units within the socialist economy, are from the outset socialized enterprises organized in cooperatives, in which associatedwork[gesellschaftlich Arbeit]is directly performed, as is evident from the planning procedure on closer examination. In the plans, which the individual operational unit draws up based on existing production data (capacity utilization, typical working day, output/demand), it becomes apparent what share of the total labor time their work has or will have. They submit these plans to the public accounting department, where they are checked for validity and, if applicable, approved. Once approved, the plants are credited with the hours they need to obtain the amount of production inputs and labor indicated in their plans. Then production begins, and the goods are distributed to the consumer cooperatives. There, the consumers can redeem these goods for the labor certificates they have received in their operational units. It should be noted that there is no exchange here (although there is a process of giving and receiving for society as a whole) because the certificates expire the moment they are redeemed. Neither are they owned by the consumer cooperatives nor passed on to the productive enterprises. They expire because the socially intended transfer has taken place. In this sense, the certificates possess no independent value objectivity; they can be neither exchanged nor accumulated, nor do they circulate!

As mentioned earlier, individual operational units do not rely on the certificates of consumers to reproduce themselves. They reproduce exclusively through the plans they submit. Of course, in this context, the units may have produced too much or too little of the products needed. This would be communicated to them by the consumer cooperatives. In their next planning cycle, they must correct their plans accordingly. Once the correction has been made, nothing stands in the way of further plan approval. This is what a decentralized planned economy means: plans are drawn up with expertise by those who not only have the most know-how of the production processes but also by those who are directly affected. These plans can be viewed and controlled by the whole society through public accounting. Accounting should not be understood as a state-bureaucratic apparatus of violence but as a repository of information with the help of which political decisions can be made. It is an apparatus appointed by society, i.e. it is not public accounting that controls the operational units but it is society, through accounting, that controls the operational units and thus itself. This would also settle Julian Bierwirth’s criticism that the isolated structure of the individual companies would enable them to externalize costs. First, there is always the possibility of public control, and second, the survival of units is not primarily tied to criteria of efficiency and productivity but to rationality. Efficiency, in the sense of resource-saving processing and higher productivity, insofar as it reduces unpleasant work, can be part of this rationality, but the interests of the producers and the feasibility of their plans are decisive. Mismanagement can, of course, always occur in individual cases. However,  it is not intrinsic to the economy because it does not rely on competition but on cooperation and control instead of assuming a communism with morally perfect people. This cooperation and control takes place based on a transparent unit of calculation, labor time, which takes into account not only the physiological fact that all products are products of human labor but also the anthropological fact that the lifetime of every human being is limited.

This brings us to Julian Bierwirth’s weightiest objection to labor time accounting, namely the so-called labor constraint. However, he might find himself in the version of the critique of value presented here, and even if he could accept that labor certificates are not money because of their lack of value objectivity, he would presumably still raise the criticism that it is still individually performed labor that determines people’s share of consumption goods. The coupling of individual consumption to individual performance is the starting point of the GIC concept, even if in the progress of the technical as well as moral development of humanity, the abolition of the performance principle is thought of with the transfer of the productive enterprises into the public sector, whose goods and services can be obtained without the redemption of labor certificates, i.e., without counter-performance. For this purpose, the GIC has introduced the factor of individual consumption (FIC), in which the labor input required for public operational units is offset against the total labor, with which it is then possible to map in each individual labor hour how high the share of labor is that is allocated to the public sector. If one-third of the total work is allocated to the public sector, the FIC is around 0.67, i.e., each worker receives 0.67 certificates for one hour of work. Already, the GIC envisaged expanding the public sector more and more and letting the FIC sink towards 0 but in the final instance, how fast and in which way the abrogation of the performance principle is possible remains open and has to be decided by the society itself. This is not the main issue here. Undeniably, the idea of performance remains inherent in the starting point of the concept.

However, this has, on the one hand, necessary factual and, on the other hand, eminently political reasons. The factual reason is, first of all, that everything that can be consumed must first be produced. That participation in social wealth should have nothing to do with an indivudual’s performance, is a humane view that should be applied in individual cases. However, it would be wrong to apply it to the species or society as a whole. With a view to the species, it becomes evident that there is always a whole series of work that has to be done so that society can maintain, let alone expand, its material and cultural level. The question always arises as to who does this work. The mechanism of individual labor certificates provides a decentralized control mechanism for this, which simultaneously sets supply and demand quantities in relation to each other. In capitalist societies, commodity markets perform a very similar decentralized allocation function but here labor time embodied in the products is expressed only very indirectly. The equilibrium of society as a whole is secondary here anyway because the markets serve private enterprises to realize profits. Product surpluses or shortages only become apparent there after the fact, when profit rates rise or fall. Within labor time accounting, the transfer of certificates organizes social planning and, at the same time, allows extensive individual freedom of choice and flexibility in consumption behavior. Or, as the GIC writes: “Setting working hours as a measure of consumption is nothing more than a technically necessary measure to be able to consume and produce according to plan.” [19] At any point in time, it remains transparent whether the products produced are needed and whether enough labor has been spent on specific products or product classes to meet social demand without the need for large-scale macroeconomic calculations to be carried out beforehand to determine precisely the total output and demand, on which the GIC is rightly skeptical. This is not only because calculating such quantities for millions of people seemed like a sheer impossibility at the time but also because such a calculation express social alienation between planning authorities, producers, and consumers. Here, producers and consumers would again be objects of planning, not its subjects.

This also leads to the political reasons that may have motivated the GIC to link performance and consumption: If much work has to be done in order to maintain and expand the wealth of society, then this work should be distributed more or less equally among all those capable of working. In Marxian terms, no more (“surplus”) work should be appropriated in an alienated way. To the extent that any surplus work has to be done at all, it should at least be visible and comprehensible to everyone. Domination and external determination should be impossible in any case, and for this, it is necessary to organize the work transparently. The fact that performance control could also be helpful is, of course, only understood if one assumes that exploitation is still a severe problem in capitalist societies. For Julian Bierwirth, however, the problem seems to be quite different. It is already a problem that people relate to each other through individual private labor and can only reproduce themselves in this way. What remains unclear here is whether  private labor is understood as commodity-producing labor directed towards exchange value; this would be a definition of private labor derived from the product side, as it was also made here in the text above. But this would hopefully already be sufficiently invalidated by the proof that the labor certificates possess precisely no value objectivity. Alternatively, he understands private labor as analogous to wage labor, in which case the labor certificates replace the wage but still determine and limit the producer’s share in consumption. In this case, the producer side would be more in the foreground. This would, however, give the concept of private labor a direction of meaning that cannot easily be derived from its concrete use in the analysis of the value form — where the producer side is not yet taken into consideration. In our view, the abstract concept of private labor should be exactly the placeholder for this provisional exclusion. However, there seems to be some evidence that Bierwirth takes the concept of private work in this sense: He also criticizes the isolation that would result from distributing labor certificates to the individual workers for their respective activities. The workers would have no genuine interest in their respective activities but would only do them to get the certificates, which would be nothing more than compensations entitling them to individual consumption. Taken by itself, this would indeed have strong structural similarities with the alienated wage labor relations in capitalism. But this overlooks the important point that the producers no longer face the operational unit merely as an alien power but have to manage the unit themselves, actively participate in shaping the unit’s life, and therefore also draw up the production plans on their own. Alienation at work is abolished by self-management. There is democratic collectivism in production and individualism and liberality in consumer behavior, of course, with the restriction that certain products are no longer produced from the outset because they cost society too many resources, are socially or ecologically incompatible, and the like. In this way, what some call the reconciliation of the individual and society would, for the first time, gain a more concrete content and finally shed the dubious consecration of a merely abstract-regulative philosophy. Moreover, it is precisely the principle that every hour of work counts equally, including the unpleasant work, that causes society to develop procedures to distribute this work fairly— or to replace it with technology. Equality in compensation thus ensures that this is not a mere gratuity of arbitrary activities but an instrument for the transparent distribution of work. This makes it possible to see who has taken on which tasks and makes any exploitation impossible.

Labor time Accounting and Reproduction

In this context, it is therefore particularly astonishing that Julian Bierwirth, in his second point of criticism that labor time accounting continues to reproduce the separation of reproductive from productive activities, refers to Heide Lutosch’s essay “Wenn das Baby schreit, dann möchte man doch hingehen”.[20] In her essay, Heide Lutosch criticizes ideas about communism that assume that care work is subject to a “completely different logic” than industrial work or services. In contrast, she insists that care work— regardless of its affective moments— should, first of all, be understood in a entirely unmystified way as physically strenuous work that should also be socially recorded, organized, and, if necessary, rationalized accordingly. She advocates “rationally” analyzing “care work with its affective and non-affective aspects, and examining the non-affective aspects for their quantifiability (bold by the author), collectivizability, automatizability, and digitalizability.” In which way should such a quantification succeed better than through labor time accounting, as developed by the GIC, in which the producers themselves record their labor time? Likewise, Heide Lutosch agrees that large parts of non-affective private reproduction should be withdrawn from the domestic domain and organized socially, i.e., in the form of public operational units.

Moreover, Lutosch’s criticism is directed primarily against utopian concepts that all too hastily assume a merging of the spheres of production and reproduction, in which people then negotiate the distribution of workloads and other problems with each other in a conflictual, self-confident, and yet respectful manner; in other words, which assume that everything will work out somehow. Not without reason, she raises the suspicion that in such utopias, all members of society are presented as masculine, healthy, academically educated, in their mid-thirties, and trained in conflict training. But it is precisely those forms of relationships without regulated and transparent procedures that are always confronted with the danger that the work will end up being done by those who feel most responsible for it – which, in terms of reproduction, is still women. Such a critique could also meet Bierwirth’s rather vague ideas of a liberated society while labor time accounting would offer a procedure to establish transparency and fairness in the distribution of tasks in the field of reproduction as well.

But in her essay, Heide Lutosch also takes sides with all those who are not capable of working because they are too young or too old, too weak, disadvantaged or simply too fragile. In this sense, Bierwirth will also have understood her text as a criticism of performance-based labor time accounting. But labor time accounting would also have certain advantages here: After all, the principle propagated by the GIC that every hour worked should count equally protects disadvantaged people. In an economy based on labor time, the disadvantaged would not be excluded from the economy from the outset and thus from the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the reproduction of society, nor would their work be massively devalued by ridiculously low pay— as is the case today in so-called sheltered workshops— but their work would then be considered equal to any other work performed for society. All that is needed is for this work to be submitted and registered as plans in the public accounts like any other. Whether it is necessary and desirable for every activity, no matter how small, to be recorded as work for society is not clear. Society will also have to develop sensible procedures for this, which everyone should be able to live with. This will certainly not happen without political conflict. However, labor time accounting and its principles of equality would at least provide a sensible and rational starting point for this negotiation.

Of course, such a society would be a society that continues to reproduce itself through labor, which will undoubtedly not please Julian Bierwirth and the value critics. However, is the work performed in such a society still value-creating or abstract work? The argument against the former is that, as we tried to show above, labor is no longer commodity-producing labor. Social planning aligns the production of goods with actual social needs. We are talking about a use-value economy. It was also attempted to show that labor certificates are not money, that they do not have their own object of value. Above all, they relate work performed and consumable work to each other. Of course, a certain mute economic compulsion is still present at first because one’s work determines the share of consumption. However, as productivity increases, this can be gradually softened by transferring companies into public enterprises. Nevertheless, society will always be confronted with the question of who takes on which tasks— especially concerning reproduction, where it would not be desirable for the amount of time and attention per person to decrease but rather increase— and there should be transparent procedures for this. We believe the decentralized planned economy based on labor time accounting is such a procedure. The critique of value not only deliberately closes itself off to such questions in its insistence on pure critique but it also tends to be cut off from them by its conceptual vocabulary because it lumps labor, abstract labor, and wage labor together. But what do we have to agree on if we want to shape actively a socialist society?

About abstract labor, the question is somewhat more complex because physiological and concrete social determinations are fused in it. If one were to start from a concept of abstract labor, as is common among value critics, then labor in labor time accounting should not be abstract labor at all. This is because we have already seen from Robert Kurz’s essay that for him, abstract labor is necessarily commodity-producing labor. He, therefore, also assumes a necessary doubling of the commodity into commodity and money. However, it remains to be assumed that this will not convince the value critics because it is precisely about the organization of labor in general, which is supposed to be the problem. However, using Kurz’s idea, the following could perhaps be said: in pre-capitalist societies, in which the various activities remain socially fragmented and also embedded in their ideological logics of reproduction, the concept of labor remains a rather intellectual abstraction, while it becomes a real abstraction through its value-based organization under capital. In a socialist society, as envisaged by the GIC and ourselves, abstract labour would be organized as a concrete whole, decentralized. Whether this is still abstract labor in Marx’s sense is a question left to the learned interpreters of the first chapter of Capital.

Source

Initiative demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung, Wert, Arbeit, Zeit – eine Replik auf die Kritik der Gruppe Krisis an der Arbeitszeitrechnung, 5. Juli 2023: https://arbeitszeit.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/05/replik-auf-kritik-der-gruppe-krisis/

Translated from German into US-English by F.C. with the help of Deepl.com Pro and Grammarly Premium. Reviewed by the author. November 2023

Notes

[1] Marx to Ruge, September 1843: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPTVMYHKz1g. Consulted at 31.05.2023. On Krisis, see Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krisis_(magazine)

[3] GIC, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, Red and Black Books, ISBN:9798615430794.

[4] https://www.exit-online.org/link.php?tabelle=schwerpunkte&posnr=7 Consulted at 03.07.2023. All citations from the text are taken from this online version, which is why further footnotes are omitted in the continuation of the text.

[5] Socialization, in German: Vergesellschaftung. However, in Marx’s example of labor in common, Vergesellschaftung is translated as associated labor; https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4]

[6] Marx writes: “(…) all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities.” (Marx, Capital, Volume I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S2). Bold by the author.

[7] “… in the first place, however varied the useful kinds of labour, or productive activities, may be, it is a physiological fact, that they are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles” (Marx, Capital, Volume I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)

[8] Marx, Capital, Volume I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)

[9] Marx, Capital, Volume I: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4)

[10] Dockerill, Daniel: Wertkritischer Exorzismus statt Wertformkritik. Zu Robert Kurz’ “Abstrakte Arbeit und Sozialimus”. Norderstedt, 2014. pp. 79ff. Unfortunately, his treatise has the same tendency to almost self-serving polemics that mostly afflicts the texts of the value critic he scolds. This not only makes the texts less enjoyable but also makes it more difficult to access the crucial content, which first must be shoveled free from under all the polemic.

[11] Marx, Grundrisse: Introduction, 3) The method of political economy: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#loc3

[12] Of course, in both Greek and Hebrew antiquity, there was always a general concept of labor as toil and torment but it was not a genuinely economic concept, which is why Aristotle did not come across the concept of labor in his Politics when he was researching what was commensurable with all goods. A case of its own kind might certainly be the social formations summarized by Marx under the term Asian mode of production, in which highly cooperative labor was organized on a large scale by the state to build irrigation systems, palaces, pyramids, and the like. And were not the first Babylonian characters inventory lists of state warehouses? But whether these modes of production are characterized by a (pre)form of abstract labor and are thus quite captured cannot be discussed further at this point.

[13] Dockerill: Wertkritischer Exorzismus. p. 89

[14] Then, perhaps, a prejudice that is as common as it is persistent among many critics of value would finally vanish into thin air, according to which capital would be completely indifferent to which use values it produces. For a given individual capital, it may certainly be true whether it exploits itself to the average profit by producing tanks or shoes but in society as a whole, the use-value comes into consideration again. Thus, Marx shows in the second volume of Das Kapital that a certain proportionality must always be granted between the different types of products, which are either means of production for industry or precisely means of consumption for the end consumer. This proportional distribution is “blindly” regulated in capitalism by the market mechanism and the profit rates, which is why it occurs in cyclical phases of oversupply and scarcity (crises)— quite apart from the fact that, of course, only solvent demand is taken into account here. Nevertheless, not all capitalists on this earth can only produce tanks— the material division of labor, and with it, society would immediately collapse. Certainly, Wolfgang Pohrt’s Theorie des Gebrauchswerts (Theory of use value) aimed at something else, namely the loss of quality of the products, to which also a loss of sensual experience would correspond. Moreover, Robert Kurz, too, has repeatedly demonstrated in other writings that he thinks in terms of the overall social context— after all, his crisis theory aims at nothing less. But it is precisely such misunderstandings that show quite clearly what misleading assumptions can be reached by theoretical directions that limit themselves only to certain aspects of the critique of political economy and thereby lose sight of the overall context.

[15] Hegel, G.W.F.: Wissenschaft der Logik. In: Werke, Vol. 6. Frankfurt a.M., 1986. p. 68f

[16] Robert Kurz himself has expressly drawn attention to this in his discussion with Michael Heinrich. Cf. Kurz, Robert: Geld ohne Wert: Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Berlin, 2021. pp. 167— 191

[17] The German word ‘Betrieb’ has a general meaning, independent from forms of ownership, and has been translated as ‘operational unit’ and not as ‘factory’ (a unit with an output of products as contrasted to services) or enterprise (a unit with private ownership).

[18] This is the same criticism that the Freundinnen und Freunde der klassenlosen Gesellschaft (Friends of the Classless Society) make against the Council Communists, following on from the Situationists. Cf. Freundinnen und Freunde der klassenlosen Gesellschaft: Klasse, Krise Weltcommune. Hamburg, 2019. p. 48. Perhaps this essay will also help to clear up the misunderstandings that exist there for once. Their writing is quite accurate in the analytical statements about the crisis state of the capitalist world economy and the resulting class situation but erratic in the usual way on the “world commune.” However, anyone who assumes that social accounting and operational calculation are only petty pedantry is not really a free spirit but thinks in an uncommonly primitive way.

[19] GIC, Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, p. 141

[20] [When the baby cries, one would still like to go to it] https://communaut.org/de/wenn-das-baby-schreit-dann-moechte-man-doch-hingehen. Consulted 26.05.2023.