We have found several new texts dealing with one form or another of labour-time accounting and have added them to our online bibliography. Wherever possible, we have also included download links.
- One notable new addition is the state socialist Karl Rodbertus and his work Zur Erkenntniss unsrer staatswirthschaftlichen Zustände (1842). In it, he assigns a central role to labour-time accounting:
“All that would be required is for everyone, upon completing their work, to receive a certificate stating the amount of labour they have actually performed in hours, days, and weeks, which they could then use as an order at the state’s warehouses and shops to obtain any kind of goods representing an equal quantity of labour.” [Translated by us]
- Similarly, in Woman and Socialism (1879), August Bebel described how a system of labour-time accounting (organized in a rather centralised and statistical manner) would function in a “socialist society of the future”:
“If, for example, the average amount of social labour required each day to produce all the material necessities of society were four hours, then, under an orderly system of production, the quantity of products in one branch of labour would be equal in value to the quantity of products in another branch of labour when the same amount of labour time had been expended.” [Translated by us] - Coming from a very different political tradition, the insurrectionary anarchist Alfredo M. Bonanno rediscovered and promoted the labour-time accounting proposals of the Group of International Communists (GIC) a century later. In a review as well as in his book Autogestione e anarchismo (1975), he explains why the GIC’s basic principles remain “extraordinarily useful to this day.”
- Two books recently (re)published by red & black books in Hamburg also discuss labour-time accounting: The German translations of Peter Hudis’s Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2026) and Anton Pannekoek’s Die Grundlagen der sozialen Revolution: Band 1 Die Arbeiterräte (“The Foundations of Social Revolution: Volume 1 The Workers’ Councils”, 2024).
- Finally, we have also added Johanna Schellhagen’s recent book „Wie wir uns eine Zukunft auf diesem Planeten erkämpfen“ (How We Fight for a Future on This Planet, 2025) to the bibliography. The GIC’s model of labour-time accounting plays an important role in it.
These examples already show that our collection does not only include works dealing with the GIC’s council communist model of labour-time accounting, but also utopian socialist, state socialist, and cybernetic concepts of labour-time accounting. To make this distinction clearer, our bibliography now includes a new column categorising these different approaches.
Take a look—and let us know if we’ve overlooked anything important!