CHAPTER I

Marx also very clearly indicates the labour-hour as the unit of computation. In his well-known discussion of "Robinson on his Island" he says of this island inhabitant:

We see here that Marx, in his "Association of Freely Associating Producers", conceives in exactly the same way of a computation of labour-time, and indeed on the selfsame basis of the labour-hour. Where, however, Marx has set his freely associating producers in place of Robinson, we now see that we can just as readily place the system of social book-keeping which communism places at society's disposal, to arrive at the following paraphrase of Marx's text:

"Its stock-book contains a catalogue of the useful objects it possesses, of the various operations necessary for their production, and finally, of the labour-time that specific quantities of these products have on average cost it. All the relations between the members of society and the objects that form their self-created wealth are here so simple and transparent that anyone could understand them."

Marx assumes this system of social book-keeping to be in general applicable to a production process in which labour is social; that is to say, it is equally applicable whether communism is still at an early stage of its development, or whether the principle "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" (the higher stage of communism) has already been achieved. In other words: the organisation of economic life may in the course of the various periods of development move through various stages, but the stable basis for all of them nevertheless remains the unit of average social labour-time.

That Marx did indeed understand the matter thus is for instance apparent from the fact that he is at pains to demonstrate with special emphasis that distribution can assume various forms. Neurath infers from this that Marx has posed the question in such a way as to suggest that we have a free choice as to how the products are to be distributed. A strange error indeed for such a "Marx expert" who surely must know that Marx knows nothing of freedom in this matter, but only of functionally derived organic necessity. Freedom of choice in respect of a system of distribution is circumscribed within the limits set by the structure imposed through the system of production. Nevertheless, this is subject to certain modifications which will be discussed later.

If, taking this as his basis, Marx was very well able to provide the fundamental category determining, in a communist society, the method of economic regulation and accounting control applicable in the sphere of production, in the case of the sphere of distribution he demonstrates this purely by way of example. Thus he writes further:

Marx also reveals elsewhere in his text that he conceives labour-time to be the basic category of the communist economy :

If it is individual labour-time which is to serve as the measure for the product to be individually consumed, then the mass of products must also be measured according to the same yardstick. In other words, the products must have impressed upon them how much human labour-power, measured in time, how many average social hours of labour, they contain. This assumes, however, that the other categories of production (means of production, raw and auxilary materials, etc.) have been measured according to the same scale, so that the entire system of accounting control for production in the seperate industrial establishments must be based upon the average social hour of labour. Then one can with all justice declare: "The social relations of human beings towards one another, both as regards their labour and the products of their labour, remain here simple and clearly understood, in production as well as in distribution."

Thus we can see that Neurath is in error when he assumes that production and distribution have so little connection with one another that we can have "free choice". Quite the contrary! If Marx adopts individual labour-time as the measure determining the individual's share in the product, then by this means he simultaneously lays the basis for the relationship between producer and product, according to which the foundations of production are also determined.

Let us now return to the question as to whether or not a system of planned use-value production, such as would be expressed in an organically integrated economic apparatus, of necessity must lead to a system which raises itself as an alien force over the producers. We say: No! In a society in which the relation of the producers to the social product is directly expressed, this danger does not exist. In every other social formation in which this principle does not pertain, the system of production must finally and inevitably develop into an apparatus of oppression.