Robin Hahnel, the founder of the planned economic model Parecon, criticized labor-time calculation in his May 2025 article “Labor Time Accounting: A Postmortem”:

“The point is that labor time is not the only real cost of making different goods and services. There are environmental costs, which along with labor costs, should clearly be accounted for in making decisions in any desirable, twenty-first century successor to capitalism.”

With our article “Decentralized Socialist Economic Planning: The Report of Labor-Time Accounting’s Death Was an Exaggeration”, we go on the offensive, directly challenging Hahnel’s critique of labor-time calculation and demonstrating why it fails—and why, for precisely this reason, it remains the cornerstone of the growing debate on democratic, decentralized socialist planning.