Overcoming Abstract Labor Time

Discussion

Matthew Thompson and Yousaf Nishat-Botero:

"Struggling with this thorny issue of time is a common concern in the history of economic planning. The European interwar council-communist movement produced a number of proposals for transforming capitalism beyond abstract labour time, not least The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution written in 1930 (see Bernes 2021). Bernes shows how this treatise makes a novel distinction between production of goods for individual consumption, recompensed by labour-certificates rather than money, and production of goods for general use, freely distributed to all who need them. The aim of the plan is to move societal production progressively from the former to the latter, so that more and more goods, from food and clothing to housing and healthcare, can be freely provided rather than exchanged, with labour-certificates eventually transcended altogether, as a transitional stage to communism. The extent to which such transitional plans can transcend labour time – through consumption credits or labour-certificates, or ‘coupons’ (Cockshott and Cottrell, 1993) – and thus abolish the law of value becomes the first of Bernes’ (2021) two tests of communism (the second is collapsing the gap between producers and consumers, for a ‘classless, moneyless, stateless society; freely associated workers meeting their needs with the means of production under conscious and planned control’).

Time – abstract labour time – is thus the primary target of economic planning, and for good reason (see Browne 2011)."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10245294231210980)