The Absence of Mediation as Mediation?

Stefan Meretz recently published an essay in which he responds to a critique by Hermann Lueer¹ of the book he co-authored with Simon Sutterlütti, Make Capitalism History, and in doing so once again formulates a fundamental critique of the necessity of a general economic unit of measurement („unit of account“).² Since in the last instance what is at stake here can only be labor time as the general measure, we would like both to publish his text here and to take a position on it.

The concrete-general measure

To begin with, Meretz rejects the necessity of a general measure for a communist economy oriented towards the manifold needs of people, with the fundamental argument that every general measure posits merely an abstract generality – one that is indifferent to all qualitative, material differences and even imposes an alien logic upon them. In this, it is said to be entirely irrelevant whether money, labor time, energy or anything else is elevated to the general measure: „…any other measure with a sufficiently general character would also be conceivable…“

Yet at this abstract-general level he already misses the actual point. For labor time is not one unit of measurement among many others; it is the human measure as such. Whatever people do, they must always give up a part of their lifetime for it. A day has only 24 hours, and human lifetime is finite. In this sense it will always be of interest to them how they dispose of their time – or whether others do so.

That this circumstance is repressed, or rather misrecognized, by the advocates of commonism³ becomes evident not least in the fact that Meretz places the unit of measurement of money directly alongside labor time, as though Marx had not demonstrated in the first volume of Capital that it is society-wide average labor time which asserts itself in the value of commodities and in their monetary expression (be it a gold commodity or a mere token of value). Labor time regulates the economy even when it is not raised to a conscious measure. Within the labor-time economy, however, the point is not the production of value at all, but a transparent mediation of need and expenditure for the various goods of an economy.

In this sense labor time is precisely the concrete generality that Meretz calls for in his text – for how can there be mediation without something that mediates? In his account, by contrast, needs are supposed to be both that which mediates and that which is to be mediated: an impossibility, as he himself is obliged to concede, which is why »referees«, mediators, fishbowl sessions, meta-commons and so forth basically have to be inserted between the needs. But even such politico-pedagogical bodies will hardly be able to reach decisions without factual knowledge.

Unit-of-account vs. in-kind?

Of course Meretz too must assume that there has to be factual information about the physical quantities and magnitudes of the various products, about energy consumption, supply chains and so on, so that reasonable decisions can be made. He conceives of this in the form of an in-kind accounting of „multidimensional natural quantities“, which he contrasts with accounting by means of a general unit of account. But here his false assumption – regarding labor time as an arbitrary unit of measurement among many others – takes its revenge once again. For 100 tons of steel, 500 meters of linen or 200 kilowatt-hours of electricity are always also the expression of particular quantities of labor, of so and so many hours of work. That is to say, in-kind planning too would in the end have to determine the labor expenditure for the various products. In Meretz’s accounting this would stand, so to speak, »alongside« the natural quantities as a separate item. That comes closer to the perspective of capitalist business administration, for which labor is likewise only one resource among many.

Within labor-time accounting, the natural quantities are immediately represented as particular quantities of labor as well. It is therefore entirely misleading to oppose in-kind planning and labor-time accounting as absolute opposites. In fact, enterprises would here always state concrete physical quantities (concerning both the consumption of means of production and the final products) and what expenditure of labor this means for society.

Incidentally, this bears only a formal resemblance to what Meretz calls „dual accounting“, which under capitalism arises from the dual character of the commodity as exchange value and use value – for money in fact falsifies any exact information about expenditures. And this not only because, for capitalist enterprises, the expenditure of labor always splits into paid and unpaid labor, the latter appearing merely as profit (a circumstance that the so-called value critics seem to find ever harder to grasp, since for them every form of remuneration for work is „wage“), but also because the prices of the various products can rise and fall independently of any change in their value.

In calculation on the basis of labor-time accounting, a growing or shrinking expenditure of labor provides immediate information about the state of the productive power of labor in an enterprise, in a branch of industry, and finally in society as a whole. This information could be important – at least if one assumes that time is an essential factor.

This therefore means: individual enterprises draw up plans by determining physical quantities and the corresponding labor expenditures, because only they possess reliable information about them. From the many individual plans a data-based overview can then be compiled, which also provides information about the share the various branches of production take up in total labor. In order to make clear that such information about the proportional distribution of activities across total labor is relevant, we return to Meretz’s housing-project example.

Housing projects, or: how making claims without rendering contributions turns into a nightmare

That Meretz, of all things, cites housing projects as an example of successful needs-oriented commoning is downright provocative. It is only too well known that in such contexts (much as in collectively run enterprises) nothing is fought over as much as the unequal distribution of work tasks. All residents have needs – individual as well as shared – but only a few turn up for the work sessions; it is always the same people who feel responsible for tasks such as bookkeeping, building services, gardening, cleaning and so on, while others complain about the pressure exerted on them because they have contributed nothing to the shared housing project. The whole thing shot through vertically by the conflict of the genders. In order to keep the domestic peace, entire areas of responsibility are – insofar as sufficient capital is available – externalized and handed over to trade firms, so that everyone still has enough time to pursue their leisure pleasures. In short: housing projects are often a good example of a failed economy of time, and even the most rudimentary form of labor-time accounting would do every housing project good – which is de facto what happens, for is not every flat-share cleaning rota already a primitive, self-organized form of egalitarian distribution of work?

In this sense Hermann Lueer’s statement is to be taken up again: reliable information about labor expenditures is needed in order to be able to weigh which needs can realistically be accommodated. Take the housing project: suppose it had to reproduce itself solely through the labor of its residents. Now some residents have the need to have their own toilets. Because one wishes to do justice to their needs, a six-month construction phase is scheduled, requiring everyone’s labor. It then turns out that the whole thing takes longer than expected and one is occupied with it for an entire year. In the process the garden has been completely neglected, there are no vegetables, the housemates are starving… and besides, the roof is leaking.

The example is of course entirely absurd, if only because such an association fortunately does not have to reproduce itself through its own labor alone. Society as a whole, however, does. Every need, however legitimate, requires the labor of third parties as well as their willingness actually to perform that labor. Apart from that, one needs information about which resources are required in order to satisfy the needs, how great the labor expenditure (in hours) is to produce these resources, and roughly what share this expenditure takes up in the total labor (in hours) available to society. After all, it might turn out that certain undertakings claim so large a share of total labor that shortages arise in other areas.

Labor-time accounting in planning is indispensable for the simple reason that only thus is a full-fledged reproduction of society as a whole possible at all, with a proportional and needs-appropriate distribution of labor across the various sectors of the economy. What under capitalism takes place chaotically – that is, through competition and the heteronomous mechanism of profit rates – is, under communism, supposed to take place consciously and according to plan.

The return of the repressed

We by no means wish to impute to Meretz that he disregards the factor of labor time entirely. On the contrary, it reappears at the end of his essay. With a view to gender relations he does at least come out in favor of some form of „time-based documentation“ for a transitional phase. With regard to the organization of production chains, too, planning is supposed to proceed along „real variables such as labor, materials, and energy“. That materials and energy are likewise labor, only in transformed form, has already been said. Far more striking, however, is that planning autonomy – contrary to all assertions – undergoes an enormous restriction through „specialized meta-commons“ to which planning tasks can be delegated. The connection with actual needs and their consequences for the economy as a whole is in turn supposed to be established through the simulation of scenarios, for which again particular meta-commons are responsible. But how does one propose to escape the vicious circle that every simulation already has effects on every other simulation? What is the relation between simulations and actual decisions, given that every decision in turn influences every simulation variable dependent on it? Is there such a thing as a »world meta-simulation« that takes all local simulations into account? Meretz says this approach „does not require a complete model of the world“. Shortly before that, however, he proposes by way of example the following AI-simulated scenario: „What would it mean for the individual sectors if we globally adhere to the 1.5-degree target? Suggest five scenarios.“ Is that not a global scenario?

Such models threaten to tear apart the bond between self-management and planning. That expert commons simulate while producer commons execute bears more resemblance to the cyber-centralist planning model of Cockshott and Cottrell than the representatives of commonism are likely to find comfortable. At the very least the danger of a dominance of mental over manual labor ought to be called by its name. For what do the decisions of the producers or the needs of the people still count for if the experts, who have science on their side, always already know better? Or is one perhaps opposed to labor-time accounting precisely because it would make visible to the producers that they have been feeding the professional mediators and simulation experts the whole time?

Be that as it may, we wish to record that labor-time accounting responds to decisive economic as well as political problems. For one thing, it mediates production and need. For social bookkeeping makes sense only if, at the other end, the input of labor corresponds to some form of registration of withdrawals (above all with regard to material goods). This would not even have to be regulated by coupling labor certificates to the contributions of the respective workers. It would also be theoretically conceivable simply to distribute the total quantity of labor certificates – corresponding to the quantity of labor hours expended overall – evenly (or according to acute need) across all sections of the population, or for the withdrawal of products to be registered by information technology alone. The latter, however, presupposes the societal maturity for people to take only what they actually need. Anything else endangers social reproduction.

This brings us to a further important point: it could be in people’s interest that a certain »justice according to performance« prevails. One may turn up one’s nose as much as one likes at the „narrow bourgeois horizon“ (Marx) of such a way of thinking. Whoever does not acknowledge that this is a need of empirical human beings will never manage to make their radically needs-oriented approach intelligible. For we are dealing with people as they come out of capitalism, and ultimately what matters first of all is to put a stop to the machinery of appropriation created by capitalism – out of questionable wage differentials, profits, interest, rents and taxes – and in doing so to recognize the various kinds of work, irrespective of age, gender, origin and occupational field, as a full and equal contribution to society – and to recognize it visibly.

As long as the advocates of a commonism do not grant labor time the place due to it, the fact that all economy is an economy of time will assert itself behind their backs. This is also why they have to rack their brains over how a superstructure of meta-commons can be inserted between the enterprises as well as between production and needs. It would be easier if the enterprises stood in direct exchange with one another and with the consumer cooperatives, regulated according to a procedure of public bookkeeping. A decentralized mechanism of goods distribution – regulated via certificates – would also not be confronted with the problem of having to record all possible needs in advance. Needs, after all, are not simply something given – they come along with the products and services that are on offer.

Concluding replies

Finally, we would like to address Meretz’s argument that labor time, too, as an abstract-general measure produces a mechanism of societal heteronomy which entails corresponding phenomena of alienation (compulsion to work, gendered separation of spheres, externalizations) – even if there is little hope that this favorite philosopheme of Meretz and company might one day be dissolved, since they always proceed from the formal analogy that a general measure equals a money economy.

Labor certificates are neither wage nor money: they do not represent the value expression of the reproduction costs of labor power, since instead they remunerate labor immediately performed; nor can they be used for anything other than obtaining individual means of consumption. Marx compared them to theater tickets: they are destroyed once redeemed and serve merely to register the withdrawal. Labor certificates are therefore also not accumulated by the enterprises. For their approved production plans, enterprises receive credits in hours in order to redeem their production promise. Once the products have been handed over, the enterprises’ accounts return to zero. This signals to society that the enterprise has produced useful – because demanded – consumer goods. Assets are neither amassed nor transferred.

Undoubtedly, in our conception labor certificates form a distribution mechanism which initially ties the level of consumption to individually performed labor. But this does not mean that we are dealing here with a form of societal heteronomy. Rather, what is at stake is an attempt to transform economy and society over the long term under the guiding principle of political equality, and in doing so to bring them under the conscious control of those who produce social wealth. In criticizing labor-time accounting it is readily overlooked that the enterprises are on the one hand self-managed, hence commons, but on the other hand subject to public control, whereby the interests of all affected members of society, including those who do not work, can be taken into account.

That the working population would decide against an expansion of the public sector is an imputation on Meretz’s part. In making it he invokes a critique by Hermann Lueer of our considerations about remunerating private reproductive labor as a contribution to the public sector. In our reply to Lueer we pointed out that, in our view, labor-time accounting would be precisely the ideal „objective basis“ for taking reproductive labor – including in the private sphere – into account, because it would also disclose what consequences this would have for society: namely a new regulation of labor and consumption. The producers of the so-called productive sector would have to work more in order to maintain the same level of consumption, while people who perform care work in the private sphere, for example, would have to work less, since this labor is remunerated – the famous double burden on women would thereby be deprived of its material basis.⁴ This is precisely the confrontation that has to be conducted if reproduction is to be included as labor of equal value. The „time-based documentation“ invoked by Meretz would thereby also be given a real content. For what use is mere documentation, or rather: what consequences would it have?

Equally untenable is the claim that planning on the basis of labor time would necessarily lead to an externalization of costs. Meretz seems implicitly to presuppose that enterprises are still something like private-law associations that can do as they please. But precisely that is not the case. Enterprise self-management is at the same time subject to public control – there are no more trade secrets. The producers are thereby subject to a twofold responsibility. In assuming responsibility for society, they assume responsibility for their own decisions. The constant comparison that the value critics draw in this context with enterprise life in the GDR is simply absurd, because in the GDR there was no enterprise self-management whatsoever. The state held complete power of disposal over production, which led to a total alienation and indifference of wage laborers towards their work. To pin the latter simply on the fact that in the GDR planning was carried out with a general unit of account, without taking the concrete relations of production into account, is truly abstract thinking in the worst sense.

Moreover, in our view a society in the midst of the gigantic ecological transformation process that is absolutely necessary in order to prevent the catastrophe, or at least to mitigate it, will rather have an interest in finding out what the »repair« of the ecosystem and the retooling towards sustainable production techniques will cost it in labor.

Instead of dreaming of an „overcoming of all spheres“ (private–public, workplace–home, work–leisure) – of which it is not even clear how it is to be politically brought about if people do not decide in favor of it – the theory of commonism would do well to place its considerations on an economic footing first. The expropriation and socialization of capitalist enterprises is one thing (as, in the broadest sense, a political act of force); getting people to stop forming nuclear families and to live in collectives is another. Commonism has, to be sure, rightly taken the needs side within the debate about a post-capitalist society as seriously as few other theories have – after all, our own focus admittedly lies rather on the producers’ side. But a genuine mediation of both sides can succeed only if labor time, as the objective standard, is its medium.

(This text has been translated from the German version with help of AI.)

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