We are very pleased to be able to publish a text by Guenther Sandleben as a brochure. The text is based on a lecture he gave last year at our invitation and bears the title “Working Time Instead of Money. How Enterprises Can Calculate with Working Time.”
The text makes it clear that working-time accounting is not some abstract utopia, but something that can actually be realized – and that much of what is needed for it already exists.
The brochure, in German, can be downloaded free of charge!
Contents
Introduction – p.5
Working-Time Accounting: A Utopia? – p.8
Why Do Markets Exist? – p.16
General Working-Time Accounting Instead of Monetary Accounting – p.22
Market Socialism? – p.26
Enterprise Planning as an Element of Planned Economy – p.30
Cost Accounting and Working-Time Accounting Compared – p.36
The Problem of Allocating General Overheads – p.46
Example: Cost Price Calculation / Surcharge Calculation – p.52
Advantages of Working-Time Accounting – p.58
Introduction
As you all know, large and small enterprises, self-employed people, etc. calculate in terms of money and prices. They try to determine their costs when they produce a certain good (or service) and bring it to market. The difference between the realized market price – the sales revenue of the good – and the costs is the profit. Costs are nothing other than the prices of the production elements used and consumed. Personnel costs and material costs form the main components.
But cost or price accounting already contains a great deal of working-time accounting, though this is not always obvious. In section 1 I provide some evidence that working times are already being calculated – both directly and indirectly. To illustrate this, I will take you into a pizzeria. Let yourselves be surprised!
The production of a pizza, just like that of bicycles or other goods, causes costs, and all goods have a price that somehow forms on the market. But what do prices have to do with working time? What are markets? Such questions lead us to the character of commodities, to their value, and to the specifically social form of labor, which has much to do with prices. These questions will occupy us in sections 2 and 3.
Some may think that market socialism could be an alternative, since it might aim at a free association of producers. In section 4 I will set out my critique of this view. For me, market socialism is a sham package in which old market and power relations persist.
At the level of enterprises and companies, planning takes place intensively. The more labor is divided within a business, and the more partial functions and intermediate products must be combined into a marketable good, the more precise and comprehensive the planning becomes. This is why business administration raves about “enterprise-level planned economy.” Economists who deal with markets, however, sense the abolition of markets and capitalist property and panic.
In section 5 I want to contrast these different perspectives. I also want to show that inter-enterprise production linkages can be planned and organized in the same way as intra-enterprise production linkages are already managed today.
In sections 6 to 8 I compare cost accounting with general working-time accounting. A key focus is to illustrate the difficulties and shortcomings of cost accounting. Cost accounting contains certain pseudo-costs that serve to enrich property owners. Without working themselves, they receive property income such as interest, rent, lease income, and license fees. Added to this are the high incomes from consulting contracts, management, and entrepreneurial activity, which cannot be justified by labor.
But that is only one side. Another focus is on the methods and procedures of cost accounting, to examine the extent to which they are useful for working-time accounting. My conclusion: we can learn a great deal. In the final section 9, I summarize the advantages of working-time accounting.