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It is an unwritten law for capitalist concerns that they must promote productivity to the maximum, since otherwise they will be pushed out of the market. For this reason they must strive to keep the wages of the workers as low as possible and to employ always the most productive machinery. Thus it often occurs that machines still capable of useful productive employment are scrapped. This, of course, represents a colossal waste of productive resources, and is characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. Seen from a strictly economic point of view, such an occurrence would mean that, in the case of a productive establishment equipped with obsolete means of production, production time would lie above the social average; or that, conversely, since the founding of the particular capitalist establishment in question, average social production time in that particular sector of the industrial economy had fallen due to rising average social productivity, and so had led to a relative increase in the production time applicable to the above obsolete establishment.
It is of course a conscious aim of the communist mode of production to reduce Average Social Production Time continuously. This has as its consequence a general fall in reproduction times. Expressed in capitalist terms, this is as much as to say that, at any given moment, means of production in the separate productive establishments have become obsolete. We must, therefore, now examine how this tendency expresses itself in a communist economy.
Let us take, for example, an industrial establishment in which the fixed means of production have been calculated at 100,000 labour-hours; let us assume further that these instruments of production are depreciated over a period of 10 years. In such a case 10,000 labour-hours per annum must be estimated as having to be taken into account in the product. However, should the average social reproduction time (asrt) of the means of production fall, the result of this would be that the establishment would be able, in its reproduction, to procure either the same quantity of machines of a better quality or a greater quantity of machines of the same quality - that is to say, the productivity of the establishment would have been raised. Expressed in other terms, this would mean that accumulation, or an extension of the production apparatus, would have taken place without the deployment of an extra outlay of labour.
For this establishment, a fall in the ASRT applicable to its means of production leads to a change in its production time and thereby also to its Productivity Factor. The is so for the simple reason that, in the final analysis, the ASRT must be included in the total calculation. The Average Social Production Time (ASPT) of the entire production group thus remains identical with the ASRT, for the simple reason that the means of production, seen as a statistical average, are used up and "flow through" the establishments as an uninterrupted stream. At any one moment this particular establishment will be modernised and renewed, at another moment another one, and so on. The lowest social reproduction times will thus, at any given moment, be continuously taken up by and reflected in the production process.
ASRT is therefore the decisive category for communist production. Just as, in the case of the capitalist economic system, the category Value (necessary and surplus value) stands at the centre of the entire economy, in the economic life of a communist society it is the category Average Social Reproduction Time which is the focal point around which everything revolves.
The foundation of ASRT is the average social hour of labour. It is, of course, true that this category also has some validity under capitalism. Here, however, the separate and peculiar characteristics of individual use-values can find no expression in their form as commodities, since in the market the product is exchanged for money, that is to say changed into that universal commodity which eliminates all individual characteristics. Under communism it is ASRT which subsumes within itself all individual characteristics, those of slower and more relaxed workers, those who are more capable or less capable, those who labour either by hand or by brain. Average Social Reproduction Time is thus a category which, as a thing-in-itself, as a specific parameter, has no material existence and like the laws of nature, which express only the general within which all specific phenomena reside, the Average Social Hour of Labour, which at the concrete level does not exist, expresses the general which is subsumed within the infinite many-sidedness of the social metamorphosis of materials.
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