At first glance, Internationalist Perspective’s critique of labor-time accounting appears radical. It opposes wage labor, value, the state, control, coercion, and every continuation of capitalist forms in the name of communism. This is precisely where its apparent strength lies. Yet on closer examination, a fundamental problem emerges: the critique does not categorically determine why labor-time accounting must necessarily reproduce value, wage labor, or the state. Instead, it largely replaces such determination with negative framing.

When labor-time accounting is described as “semi-wages,” “semi-money,” or “semi-state,” nothing has actually been explained. These terms merely suggest continuity with capitalist forms without demonstrating what this continuity supposedly consists in. The decisive question would be whether labor-time accounting continues to validate labor indirectly through exchange, or whether it instead enables the conscious and direct mediation of social labor. This distinction is consistently blurred.

The central error lies in the fact that Internationalist Perspective confuses the critique of the value form with the critique of every form of social measurement. Marx does not criticize the fact that society relates effort, needs, and products to one another as such. He criticizes the specifically capitalist form in which this mediation takes place through value, commodities, money, and the market behind the backs of the producers. The enforcement of labor-time accounting abolishes precisely this indirect mediation by regulating social labor consciously, transparently, and in a generally comprehensible manner.

Internationalist Perspective, by contrast, already treats the measurement of labor time as a continuation of value. In doing so, it collapses the distinction between value and conscious social accounting of labor. Value is not simply labor time. Value is labor time in a specific social form: as abstract labor that becomes socially valid only through exchange. Labor-time accounting in the Marxist sense means precisely not this retrospective validation through the market, but the direct social recognition and planning of labor by the producers themselves.

The blurring of this distinction also appears in Gilles Dauvé’s claim that labor-time accounting necessarily leads to the “imperative of being productive.” The argument, however, confuses productivity with its capitalist form. Under capitalism, productivity does indeed dominate the producers because the increase in productive forces serves the accumulation of capital and is subject to the pressures of competition. But it does not follow from this that the conscious social accounting of labor time itself reproduces capitalist domination. In this respect, the objection resembles the early machine critique of the Luddites, who did not criticize the capitalist use of machines, but the machines themselves. Analogously, what is criticized here is not the capitalist 1form of labor time, but social labor-time accounting as such. Communist labor-time accounting would have precisely the opposite function: not the subordination of producers to productivity, but the conscious control of social expenditure by the producers themselves.

A second problem follows from this. Internationalist Perspective’s conception of communism remains economically indeterminate. The text speaks of human community, needs, transformed labor, revolutionary enthusiasm, and conscious decisions about what is produced and shared. These are sympathetic images, but they do not amount to a determination of the relations of production. It remains unclear how needs, expenditure, scarcity, priorities, and production are to be concretely mediated. The positive form of the social relation is replaced by moral expectations. Formulations such as “The human community will take care of the human community” make this especially clear: social mediation appears not as a consciously determined relation of production, but as the result of a presupposed communal spirit.

This becomes especially evident where Internationalist Perspective assumes that the revolution will fundamentally change people. Revolutionary practice certainly changes people. But it does not follow from this that the material problems of social reproduction will solve themselves. Food, housing, care, energy, transport, infrastructure, and ecological repair still have to be organized. Needs are not the measure of themselves. They always stand in relation to the socially necessary expenditure required for their satisfaction.

It is precisely here that the natural-economic objection to labor-time accounting frequently enters. Raoul Victor, for example, claims that it is easier to determine needs and productive possibilities directly in physical quantities than through social labor time — for instance, the milk requirements of children on the one hand and the number of dairy cows on the other. But this merely evades the real problem. The mere knowledge of physical quantities does not answer the question of what social expenditure is necessary for their production, how different production methods and priorities are to be weighed against one another, or according to which criteria social labor as a whole is to be distributed. Natural quantities describe technical conditions of production, but not a general form of social mediation. Precisely for this reason, a communist society also requires a transparent social measure that makes different activities and needs socially comparable.

If this relation is not explicitly determined, mediation does not disappear. It merely becomes invisible. Decisions are then no longer made by the producers themselves on the basis of a transparent social accounting, but by informal authorities, moral pressure, situational power relations, or administrative bodies. This tendency already appears in the text itself when, instead of labor-time accounting, a “dynamic rationing system” is proposed. Rationing necessarily means deciding questions of access, priority, and scarcity. The question then becomes: who decides, according to which criteria, and under what form of control?

At this point, the seemingly anti-state critique turns into its opposite. Labor-time accounting is rejected because it allegedly presupposes control and coercion. In its place, however, stands an indeterminate administration of needs that must likewise regulate, allocate, and prioritize — only without a general transparent measure. The attempt to overcome control thus leads to the danger of concealed control. The attempt to abolish value ends in an indeterminate administration of scarcity.

The decisive point is therefore this: it is not labor-time accounting as such that produces domination, but the separation of the producers from the determination of their own social relation. Labor-time accounting is precisely the means by which this separation can be overcome. It connects control over the means of production with control over the social product. It provides the producers with a general basis upon which they can regulate their own relations of production.

Internationalist Perspective, by contrast, places great emphasis on the moral and cultural transformation of human beings. Communism thereby tends to appear as a condition in which social mediation is replaced by communal spirit. This is not a materialist determination, but an idealist hope. A communist society cannot rest on the expectation that needs, labor expenditure, and distribution will harmonize themselves through transformed consciousness. It requires a form in which these relations are consciously regulated.

The decisive question, therefore, is not whether communism can dispense with social mediation, but in what form this mediation is organized. Communism in the sense of implementing labor- time accounting does not mean the continuation of value, wage labor, or state control, but their abolition through the conscious self-organization of the producers.

With the abolition of commodity production, social labor is no longer indirectly mediated through market, money, and competition, but directly recognized as part of the total social labor of society. The producers thereby possess not merely formal control over the means of production, but also the general basis upon which they can regulate their own social relations. Labor-time accounting in this sense does not mean subordination to an abstract measure, but the conscious and transparent determination of social expenditure.

Precisely in this way, the separation between production and social control is overcome. Producers no longer confront their own social reproduction as an alien power, but organize it themselves. Questions of priority, expenditure, need, and distribution no longer appear as blind results of market movements or administrative management, but as consciously regulable social relations.

Under these conditions, communism does not designate a moral community that relies on transformed human beings or spontaneous harmony. It designates a determinate social form in which the producers consciously determine their own conditions of production and life. The free association of producers therefore ceases to be merely a political ideal and acquires, for the first time, its real economic foundation.