5.

Money and the
estimation of costs

Communism is a world without money. But the disappearance of money doesn’t mean the end of all estimations of cost. Human societies and actions—past, present, and future—are invariably forced to confront this problem whether or not they use monetary symbols. Depending on the underlying nature of a given society, the criteria chosen for these estimations obviously vary.

Money

In developed capitalist society, when the commodity is made the generic form for products, money presents itself to all the world as a necessity, even though not everybody might have the same amount nor make the same use of it. It’s a good almost as necessary for human life and almost as natural as oxygen. Can anyone survive without money? Both rich and poor have to reach for their wallets to meet their most essential needs—or their most frivolous whims.

The objective though limited role occupied by currency corresponds to the subjective and fantastical role it occupies in the social consciousness. All wealth ends up being assimilated to monetary wealth by the servants of the economy. What can’t be paid for seems to lose all value, even when it concerns the goods most vital to life: air, water, sun, spermatozoa, soap bubbles. Paradoxically, this era is coming to an end, albeit in the sense that the triumphant economy is hard at work assigning market values to everything, putting water in bottles and sperm in banks.

Where the common are content to note money’s omnipresence and omnipotence, trying to make the most of favors from this capricious divinity, gentlemen economists take it upon themselves to defend it. Money isn’t only vital in present-day society—a truth based on daily and, unfortunately, indisputable experience—it’s vital to all social life that’s even remotely civilized. Monetary circulation is to the social body what cardiovascular circulation is to the human body. The history of progress is the history of the progress of currency, from the seashell to the credit card. You want to rid society of money? You have to be mentally retarded, an advocate for the return to the barter system. (In passing, we’ll note this about the much-disparaged barter: not only has capital not eliminated it, capital is constantly reinventing it, especially at the level of international trade.)

Currency becomes a veil that ends up obscuring economic reality. There are no more milling machines, no engineers, no spaghetti… only dollars and rubles. The illusion—that the control of currency, its issuance, its circulation, its distribution, corresponds to a comprehensive control over this collection of remaining use values­—is imposed by the economy. Hence the disappointments.

Money’s often pleasant, but what’s responsible for that isn’t so much its existence as it is the stinginess with which it creeps into people’s pockets. The more it’s criticized, the more it’s demanded. If you want to smash the golden calf and root out idolatry, it’s best, for efficiency’s sake, to have a fat wallet; you can choose between the stupefaction of work, the danger of the stick-up, the vagaries of the lottery…

With all due respect to economists, money is a very strange thing. This becomes blindingly obvious as soon as you stop worrying about its undeniable economic usefulness in order to focus on its human usefulness.

Let’s do our best to be naive.

How is it possible—by what infernal magic was it that wealth, the possibility of satisfying needs, came to be embodied in currency? If it had to take a particular form to remain visible to our eyes and remind us of its good offices, it could’ve followed the example of our Lord Jesus Christ and chosen bread and wine, which are good and useful things. But no! It preferred to manifest in the form of gold and sliver, metals that rank among the rarest and least useful. Worse, it no longer shows itself to mere mortals these days except in paper form.

The only need that currency meets is the need for exchange. It’ll disappear with the disappearance of exchange.

It’s monstrous to want to abolish money while preserving exchange or hoping for equal trade at last. At the beginning of the 19th century, “Ricardian socialists” proposed that commodities be directly exchanged in proportion to the amount of labor devoted to their production.1 The Bolsheviks Bukharin and Preobrazhensky propagated similar delusions in 1919:

Thus, from the very outset of the socialist revolution, money begins to lose its significance. All the nationalised undertakings … will have a common counting-house, and will have no need of money for reciprocal purchases and sales. By degrees a moneyless system of account-keeping will come to prevail. Thanks to this, money will no longer have anything to do with one great sphere of the national economy. As far as the peasants are concerned, in their case likewise money will cease by degrees to have any importance, and the direct exchange of commodities will come to the front once more … The gradual disappearance of money will likewise be promoted by the extensive issue of paper money by the State … But the most forcible blow to the monetary system will be delivered by the introduction of budget-books and by the payment of the workers in kind … (The ABC of Communism).2

There have been attempts to demonetize the economy, at least in part. Transactions between enterprises only exist as quantifiable operations. This hasn’t produced anything worth noting nor anything very communist

Compliments

In the communist world, products will circulate without money needing to circulate in the opposite direction. Balance won’t be achieved at the level of the household or the enterprise—what goes out in goods corresponding to what comes in, and vice versa. It’ll be established directly, in a comprehensive way, and measured directly by the satisfaction of needs.

The end of exchange obviously doesn’t mean that children will no longer be able to exchange their marbles and stickers, nor lovers their compliments. Limited bartering will persist on a small scale. Especially at the beginning, it’ll supplement general distribution networks and find solutions for their inflexibilities.

The best indication that the secret of currency doesn’t lie in its material nature is that monetary standards change depending on time and place. Salt and livestock were able to play that role; precious metals, especially gold, were in the end only selected for their very uselessness. In times of scarcity, gold can’t be withdrawn from circulation in order to be eaten. When gold is withdrawn from circulation in order to be hoarded, or to serve as ornamentation, this is in accordance with its economic value. Some of its qualities, especially its distinctive rarity, made it prevail at a certain level of economic development. In the first faltering steps of the mercantile system, salt was able to serve as currency due to its very usefulness, and to the fact that it was concentrated in specific places. It was the ultimate object of circulation.

Today, currency is moving toward dematerialization. It’s no longer guaranteed by the value of its material but by the banks and financial systems that control and manipulate it. It isn’t ceasing to be a medium of exchange, but it is becoming an instrument, principally, at the service of capital. This allows for it to be optimally recouped and utilized to finance investments and extend credit to capital.

Wiping out currency doesn’t mean burning banknotes or dissolving confiscated gold in acid. These measures may be necessary for symbolic and psychological reasons, in order to disrupt the system. They won’t be enough. Currency will resurface in other forms if the need for and possibility of currency persist. Wheat, canned sardines, sugar—these can become means of exchange, and even of wages. “You do this work, you get ten kg of sugar that you can use to get meat, or alcohol, or a straw hat.”

The problem, first of all, is that of the struggle for production, for organization, against shortages. Then there’s the implementation of deterrents and restrictions, with regard to those seeking to exploit the transformative period and establish a black market. Gold and other precious metals will be requisitioned by the revolutionary authorities to eventually be… exchanged… for weapons or food with areas not yet controlled.

Currency is the expression of wealth, but of commodity wealth. It’s not the direct satisfaction of needs, but the means to satisfy them. It’s therefore also the barrier that separates individuals from their own needs.

Men’s aspirations lie in the reflections of the things, the commodities, that face them. In this game, you can only be swindled. Wealth—genuine happiness—cannot be, and must remain an inaccessible mirage as a matter of publicity.

The law of value

Currency is used for exchange. But currency also signifies measurement. What currency measures in an exchange—the price of a commodity—originates outside of the sphere of exchange.

How is equilibrium struck, in the capitalist system, between what’s produced and what’s consumed? Between efforts expended and benefits procured? How is one choice established as more rational than another?

The problem is part and parcel of each specific commodity. They are at once use value and exchange value. Use value is the benefit they’re supposed to provide. The consumer is supposed to appreciate it directly. Exchange value, which is expressed in the price, corresponds to the expense by which this benefit is compensated—for the buyer, monetary expenditure, but expenditure in labor first and foremost.

The price of a good is determined by forces that are exerted at the market level, by supply and demand. But beyond that, it references the costs of production, which are composed of the labor directly expended and the labor implicit in the materials used for production.

Thus is expressed, in each commodity, the need for financial equilibrium between expenditure and social gain, which is reflected in the need for the financial equilibrium of businesses and households—the need for equilibrium, but not the equilibrium itself! The price of a good corresponds only in a distorted way to the amount of real labor actually expended, or even to the amount of socially necessary labor. Equilibrium is achieved, not at the level of the particular commodity, but at that the level of the whole entire system. And there, that equilibrium is in fact a kind of disequilibrium.

Is the price of a commodity determined by the amount of labor it holds? Yes and no. Yes, because the price tends to vary according to gains in productivity, since a product that requires twice as much time as another risks costing twice as much, and since the overall mass of labor determines the overall value of commodities. No, because you can’t establish a simple and imperative link between each commodity and the labor expended. This is due to the vagaries of the market. This is because if the price of a commodity were actually determined by the tangible labor expended, then the more productivity dipped, the more workers would idle, the more the commodity would hike in cost! In reality, those with higher cost-prices are penalized, not rewarded. The winners are those who save on the costs of production and labor. This is because price formation is affected by the profit rate’s tendency to equalize.

What’s become of the labor theory of value, passed down from the classical economists who said that labor determines the value of economic things?3 This law is a general law that determines, through price formation, the general evolution of the system. Capital develops and allocates itself according to how much it can save in labor time. Like a river—even if its path isn’t the shortest, even if it loses its bearings in backwaters, even if it makes detours—ultimately, it blindly conforms to its natural incline by eroding all obstacles along the way. Far from contradicting this tendency, the expected profit that leads the capitalist to invest here or there, to choose this technique or that machinery, is only the tortuous path along which the tendency is imposed on him

In the end, the theory of value demonstrates less the linkage between the commodity and its price on the one hand and creative labor on the other, than it does their dissociation. Labor becoming value means that the endeavor frees itself from labor and worker in order to become a satellite in economic space, where it can move around according to the rules it sees fit to follow. All commodities, having become autonomous and competitive, end up measuring themselves against each other through exchange and by means of currency. The theory of value, whose development is one with exchange and its hold on human activity, will disappear with communism.

What about the overall equilibrium between expenditures and revenues within the system? This equilibrium is a disequilibrium. From the standpoint of value, society produces more than it spends. The surplus builds up. Without this, capital wouldn’t be capital.

Marx has shown that there exists a special commodity which has a knack for producing more value than its production requires. It explains why capital in motion increases itself, instead of staying the same from transaction to transaction. This commodity is labor power; its price, lower than the value it generates, is the wage. The difference is surplus value.

On what’s falsely called the “job market,” the worker sells not his labor but his ability to labor: a portion of his time. Labor isn’t a commodity; it has no value. It’s the foundation of value. Labor itself, says Engels, no more has value than gravity does weight.4

When capital leaves the sphere of circulation in order to enter the lair of the capitalist, it swells with the unpaid labor of the worker—all without the law of value being flouted, without profit arising from any fraud or breach in the rules of exchange. Each capital-commodity can be broken down into constant capital, which corresponds to the amortization of the materials and machines used; variable capital, which corresponds to wages; and surplus value, or added value, which corresponds to unpaid labor.

Money is the bearer of a profound mystification. It conceals the original nature of what expenditures actually generated the product. Behind wealth, even mercantile wealth, there is nature and human effort. Money seems to produce interest, to multiply. The only source of value—if it should be mercantile, and all the better for it—is labor.

Of course, the most servile of economists do accord labor a small role, alongside capital and land, as a source of wealth. This doesn’t do away with the mystification, however, even in part. It isn’t labor as such that’s accorded this favor; it’s labor as the counterpart to the wage. It isn’t money that’s reduced to labor; on the contrary, it’s labor that’s reduced, by way of the wage, to money.

Free distribution5

From the disappearance of money in communist society, people are often tempted to conclude that there will be no more problems of cost to resolve, that it’ll no longer be necessary to estimate the values of things. This is a fundamental error.

That a good or service would be free is one thing. That it would therefore cost nothing is another. The illusion stems directly from the workings of the market system. People are led to conflate cost and payment. They no longer see anything but the payment, the monetary expenditure. They forget the expenditure in effort and materials behind the product.

For capitalism as much as for communism, free distribution doesn’t mean the absence of expenditure. The difference between free communist distribution and free capitalist distribution is that the latter is only free distribution in counterfeit. Payment isn’t non-existent; it’s simply deferred or displaced. The fact that school or advertisements might be free doesn’t mean that they exist outside the market system, or that the consumer doesn’t end up footing the bill. The free commodity is hugely perverse. It signifies compulsory or semi-compulsory consumption­­, the difficulty of opting in or out of what’s “offered.”

In the new society, the costs of things will still need to be ascertained and, if necessary, calculated. Not out of a mania for accounting, nor to prevent fraud, which will have become pointless anyway. It’ll be necessary to account for expenditures incurred in order to determine whether they were justified and to reduce them where possible. There will have to be measures to evaluate the positive or negative impacts that the satisfaction of a need, or the implementation of a project, will have on the built and natural environment.

A needle, a car—do they justify the time and the exertion devoted to their production, or the drawbacks associated with their use? Is it better to establish a production unit here, or there? Does this production justify depleting an already-limited stock of minerals? Matters can’t be left to chance or intuition. It’s easy to grasp that all of this will entail estimation, calculation, and projection.

If we preserve the notion of cost, so loaded with economism, this is because it’s not simply a matter of choice and measurement, of an intellectual process, but of physical expenditure. Whatever technical level attained, there will be activities that cost more than others, tasks that are more grueling. Everything becoming easy and interchangeable would be a sad thing, and more alien to a communist society than to any other.

The commodity presents two faces: use value and exchange value. They appear to come under two irreducible orders:

1. Use value, utility, has to do with the qualitative. Users compare and assess what best suits them, an airplane or an orange. The choice cannot be independent of their situations and their tangible needs.
2. Exchange value has to do with the quantitative. Goods are all evaluated and ordered objectively, in function of a single standard, whether it comes to an airplane or to an orange.

Communism isn’t so much a world where the use value is perpetuated, finally freed from the exchange value that leeches off of it, as it is a world where exchange value is denied and becomes use value once more. Advantage and disadvantage fall within the same order of things, and are no longer lumped together and separated back-to-back. Value ceases to be value in order to reappear as expenditure, tangible and diversified. There’s no longer a single standard allowing for quantitative comparisons between all things, but rather tangible expenditures and labors, varyingly burdensome, which have to be taken into account. In ceasing to be the backbone of value, in ceasing to be unified by the process of exchange, labor ceases to be labor.

The bourgeois economy is double-entry economics. The bourgeois individual is not a man, he is a business. We want to destroy every business. We want to abolish double-entry economics and establish simple-entry economics, which history has known since the time the caveman went out to pick as many coconuts as he had companions in the cave, and he went out with nothing but his own two hands (Bordiga, Property and Capital).6

There will be free distribution because the “gift” will replace the sale. Those who perform one task or another, with either the aim of directly benefiting themselves or of being useful to others as well, will pay directly through their efforts exerted.

Is this really new? No, since even today, it’d never occur to anyone to charge the price of their saliva for a discussion or an argument. In conversation, people don’t trade off specified speaking times or specified quotas of decibels; they strive to say what they have to say because they believe they have to say it. The interlocutor, or listener, owes you nothing in exchange for their attention. The hope of a response, the danger of being met with incomprehension, with silence, with lies—they’re part of the game. They’re neither the expectation of payment nor the risk of the market. In everyday life, speech isn’t a commodity, and speaking isn’t work.

What still holds true today for speech, when it isn’t recorded and broadcast as a commodity, will hold true tomorrow for all of production. The estimation of cost will no longer be distinct from the effort to be made. The prerequisite, the first step in the calculation, will be the impulse that leads to one activity or another. A book or a shoe will be as “free” as words can be today. The gift implies reciprocity to some extent, as speech calls for response, but this is no longer the anonymous and antagonistic process of exchange.

Working time

Since the outset of the 19th century, when the official economist of the English bourgeoisie, Ricardo, proclaimed that the value of a product depends on the amount of work necessary to its production, there has been no shortage of people demanding that the worker receive the full value of his product. Profit was morally condemned as theft. The problem of socialism was that of remuneration, of a fair remuneration.

One American communist, J. F. Bray, rises even higher. He sees equal exchange not as the solution but as a means of preparing the solution—which is the community of goods. A period of transition, where nobody receiving more than the value of his work can become very rich, turns out to be needful. From warehouses, each person will receive the equivalent, in various objects, of what he will have produced in some other form. Equilibrium will be maintained between production and consumption.7

In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx pays homage to Bray but criticizes him, too. Either exchange, even equal exchange, leads back to capitalism…

Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal, which he wishes to apply to the world is itself nothing but the reflection of the existing world, and that it is in consequence quite impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is merely an embellished shadow. In proportion as this shadow becomes substance, it is seen that this substance, far from being the dreamed-of transfiguration, is nothing but the body of existing society.

…or we do away with exchange:

That which is today the result of capital and the competition of workers among themselves, will be tomorrow, if you cut off the relation between labour and capital, the effect of an understanding based on the relation of the sum of the productive forces to the sum of existing wants. But such an understanding is the condemnation of individual exchange…8

Without wanting to resort to exchange, some revolutionaries­—Marx and Engels most of all—understood the society of the future’s pressing need to resolve the problem of costs and their accounting. These revolutionaries sought a standard to estimate and compare expenditures.

Typically, the standard proposed has been the quantity of labor, this quantity being measured by time and sometimes graded by intensity. In this way, all of society’s investments can be reduced to some expenditure of time. The orange and the airplane no longer correspond to a specific quantity of money, but to a given number of hours worked. Despite their differences in character, they can be compared on the same scale.

This approach seems logical. What can there be in common, between different goods, if not the labor that they hold? That’s where Marx set out from, in Capital, to reveal labor as the source of value. What other standard is there?

For our part, we haven’t evoked a “beyond work” in order to then throw ourselves onto the measurement of working time, miserably, as soon as it comes to broaching harsh practical realities.

The theory of the measurement of goods or the projection of investments via the quantity of labor is false. It must be radically rejected. This isn’t a case of a dispute over method, but of a fundamental problem that concerns the very nature of communism.

Measurement by labor remains economistic. It seeks the end of the law of value but doesn’t see all that this implies. Capitalist society tends toward perpetuating itself while being freed of class division and exchange value!

The aim is to solve a problem presenting two sides. The first is that of workers’ remuneration. The second, and more general, concerns the distribution of productive forces in the social sphere.

How to distribute consumer goods without money? How to fairly reward the worker in proportion to effort exerted?

On this subject, Marx returns in The Critique of the Gotha Program to Bray’s point of view. He rids it of its troublesome aspects. In a transitional period where the principle “to each according to need” won’t yet be possible to implement, remuneration will depend on effort exerted. It will depend on it, not be equal to it, because a part of what this work represents will have to go to a social fund, to be devoted to the production of production goods, to aid for invalids… The worker can’t receive the full product of his labor. Moreover, as there won’t be any vouchers circulating to certify the amount of labor the worker has exerted, exchange will be nipped in the bud.

This means—this demands—that accounts be kept. “… Labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement.“9

For Marx, the problem of remuneration is incidental and limited to the lower phase of communism. On the contrary, the question of the distribution productive forces is fundamental and permanent. In a communist society,

… the money-capital would be entirely eliminated, and with it the disguises which it carries into the [economic] transactions. The question is then simply reduced to the problem that society must calculate beforehand how much labor, means of production, and means of subsistence it can utilize without injury for such lines of activity as, for instance, the building of railroads, which do not furnish any means of production or subsistence, or any useful thing for a long time, a year or more, while they require labor, and means of production and subsistence out of the annual social production.10

Calculating the amount of necessary labor, however, doesn’t mean that the law of value should be able to continue while money-capital disappears. In fact, the amount of labor is allocated according to need. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx writes:

In a future society, where the antagonism of classes will have ceased, where there will no longer be classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of social production which will be devoted to the various objects will be determined by their degree of social utility.11

The law of value is only a particular, mercantile expression of a more general rule that is applicable to every society:

Indeed, no form of society can prevent the working time at the disposal of society from regulating production one way or another. So long, however, as this regulation is accomplished not by the direct and conscious control of society over its working time – which is possible only with common ownership – but by the movement of commodity prices, things remain as you have already quite aptly described them in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher …12

That’s what Marx wrote to Engels, 8 Jan. 1868. What was the thesis that the latter had expounded?

As long ago as 1844 I stated that the … balancing of useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production was all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of value. … The scientific justification for this statement, however, as can be seen, was made possible only by Marx’s Capital (Anti-Dühring).13

What Marx and Engels tell us about communist society—and you see that they talk about it!—flows directly from their analysis of capitalist society. Their conceptions are indebted to it for their strong suits, but also their weaknesses.

The strong suits are in showing that the problems of the distribution of consumption, of the remuneration of work, aren’t fundamental. It’s the mode of production that determines the mode of distribution. To assert that the laborer won’t be able to receive the full value of his product, his labor—in opposition to the bleeding hearts—directly extends an analysis of capitalism that shows that the value of a commodity covers constant capital in addition to wages and surplus value. It’s necessary to produce the instruments of production.

Capitalism and communism are tooled societies, unlike previous societies. Capitalism and communism are also changeable societies. You can’t count on experience immemorial. Not everything is settled in advance by past custom, eventually amended by common sense. The estimation of cost isn’t so much a problem of accounting after the fact as it is a problem of projection. There will rather be a regression, on this fundamental point, among the post-Marx communists. Some council communists will reduce the question to that of the truest possible snapshot of reality and economic movements.

The following passage shows how, for Marx, the current society and the society to come must settle the same problem, the first using money-capital—credit—and the second by doing without it:

However, on the basis of capitalist production, extensive operations of a long duration require large advances of money-capital for a long time. Production in such spheres is, therefore, dependent on the limits within which the individual capitalist has money-capital at his disposal. This barrier is broken down by the credit system and associations, connected with it, for instance, stock companies. Disturbances in the money-market, therefore, set such businesses out of action, while they, on the other hand cause disturbances in the money-market themselves …

On the basis of capitalist production, it must be ascertained, on what scale those operations which withdraw labor and means of production from it for a long time without furnishing in return any useful product, can be carried on without injuring those lines of production which do not only withdraw continually, or at several intervals, labor-power and means of production from it, but also supply it with means of subsistence and of production. Under social or capitalist production, the laborers in lines with short working periods will always withdraw products only for a short time without giving any products in return; while lines of business with long working periods withdraw products for a long time without any returns. This circumstance, then, is due to the material conditions of the respective labor process, not to its social form.14

Marx and Engels go too far in situating communism as an extension of capitalism. That’s what their shortcoming is.

They maintain the bourgeois separation between the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption. Already, the Manifesto distinguishes between the collective ownership of the means of production and the personal appropriation of consumer goods. It swears up and down that it only wants to socialize property that’s already social and communal–—the instruments of capitalist production. The Critique of the Gotha Program continues in pitting individual and family consumption, proportional to working time, against productive and social consumption. It doesn’t linger over how to manage the latter..

There’s been confusion around the distribution methods for products and their nature as “consumer goods” or instruments of production. On the one hand, there are individuals, and on the other, society as abstract conception. There are individuals—isolated, in a group, in communities—who face each other and organize.

In reality, when the state, or the head of the company, disappears in its capacity as representative of the “public interest,” the Society as opposed to the Individual disappears. There’s no longer anything but men, isolated, in a group, in communities, who organize this way or that. An individual might be allocated a machining tool, or a neighborhood committee a few tons of potatoes.

The separation between the workforce—separate individuals­—on the one hand, and social and collective capital on the other, disappears. It’s not possible to maintain by invoking the need for remuneration during the transitional period. On the contrary, in Bray or Marx, it’s the defense of this need that reflects the limits of an era, the immaturity of their communism.

Despite his vital and pertinent remarks, Marx remains dominated by the fetishism of time. Either he renders it an instrument of economic measurement or he renders it an instrument of super-economic measurement: “For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.”15

Working time is the basis of free time. The rule of freedom can only be founded on the rule of necessity.

The mistake isn’t in continuing to envisage necessity, sacrifice, and production within the new society. The mistake is in bundling all of this together, slapping it with the label “working time” (to be reduced, if possible) and universally pitting it against free time.

In The Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx says that labor will one day become the first among needs. This formula didn’t fail to be exploited, in a foul way, by Stalinist leaders. In any case, there’s a contradiction there. Does labor, in communist society, become expenditure or gratification? Is it necessary, consequently, to reduce working time to a minimum or, to the contrary, to produce as much labor as possible in order to satisfy those calling for it? It’s only in a capitalist society that work could appear as the first among needs, as the only means of satisfying the others. It’s only there that it can be hated and clamored for at the same time.

Fantastical

It’s a pretty fantastical thing, measurement by working time.

Wanting to measure all productive activities by the time they necessitate is like wanting to measure and compare all liquids by their volume alone. Of course all activities take some amount of time, just like all liquids occupy some amount of volume. That isn’t completely unimportant. A liter water bottle could also contain a liter of wine. But who’d go so far as to deduce that a bottle of water is therefore always equivalent to a bottle of wine, of alcohol, of grenadine syrup, of hydrochloric acid? That could only make sense, in a pinch, from the restricted perspective of someone who warehouses them.

Time is the only language that can express the creative efforts of the serf or the worker from the perspective of the exploiter. This signifies external measurement, surveillance, and antagonism. The duration and intensity of the activity win out against its specific nature and arduousness, which tend to become irrelevant. The subjectivity of experience is sacrificed in favor of the objectivity of measurement. Creation and life are subordinated to production and repetition.

Measurement by time predates the mercantile system. The exploited, in lieu of providing some number or another of some product or another, place a certain portion of their time at the disposal of the exploiter. See the corvée labor of feudal times. The procedure was remarkably developed in the Incan system. That was a great agrarian empire, unified by a bureaucracy, where money was unknown. Services were made in the form of working days spent in this or that domain. It led to meticulous bookkeeping.

In communities of peasants or villagers, you spend a day harvesting at your neighbor’s, and vice versa. The peasant and the blacksmith trade their products on the basis of production time. The activity of a child is reckoned as some portion of that of an adult. You can see, in these practices, the origins of using time as a universal standard, and even of subjugating the planet to the market economy—but only the origins. With these marginal practices, it’s more about mutual aid than exchange. The activities measured are of the same nature, or comparable in concrete terms. Measurement by time isn’t independent of the matter measured.

It’s with the dual development of the market system and the division of labor that measurement by time has begun to take on its fantastical character. It detaches itself gradually from the matter of activity as the latter is diversified.

This process escalates when exchange infiltrates the sphere of production. Measurement by time develops in conjunction with the tendency to economize working time. The greatest possible amount has to be produced in the shortest possible time. This prospect, measurement by time, isn’t independent of human activity’s compression into the smallest possible temporal volume. Not only does labor produce the commodity, the commodity produces labor through the intermediary of factory despotism.

In doing so, measurement by time no longer appears in its innocence; it’s veiled behind money and justified by financial necessities.

Bourgeois ideologues, especially those who align themselves with Saint Marx, project this fetishism for time and production onto all of human history. It’s no longer anything but a constant struggle to free up time. If savages have remained savages it’s because, restrained by their feeble productivity, they never found the time necessary for the accumulation of a surplus. Time is scarce; it has to be packed, as densely as possible, with activity.

But far from thinking exclusively about how to save time, savages are rather concerned with the most effective means of squandering it. They’re often of a nonchalant nature. Other than a few hunting implements, they’re little concerned with accumulating goods.

In the 18th century, Adam Smith gave up on basing value on working time, as far as modern times are concerned. But he did see this labor-value at work in primitive societies where things haven’t yet gotten so complicated.

He imagines hunters wanting to exchange their assorted game. What basis can they do it on, if not on the basis of working time, depending on the time needed to catch the animals? This presupposes an economist and mercantile mentality in an environment where rules of sharing and bonds of reciprocity prevail.

Let’s assume, however, that trade already exists, or that our savages have decided to expend their energy rationally so as acquire meat at the lowest cost. Will they establish their system on necessary labor time?

There are pleasures and risks with hunting, about which the time spent on it divulges nothing. Where’s the value in a comparison based on the length of the hunt, regardless of the difference in risk, between lion and antelope? Some hunting methods may be less swift but more certain, less exhausting, less dangerous, more or less cruel.

If they nevertheless wanted to continue practicing this method of measurement, could they do so? It’s very difficult to assess the time it takes to overcome this game or that with any precision. By systematically hunting the most profitable meat, from this narrow point of view, you’d quickly risk changing the conditions and the time required for the hunt. In any case, people very often go hunting deer and bring back rabbit. Useless to plan for what can’t be planned.

Are we going to be told that this no longer holds true for our civilized and enlightened era, that the hunt is a very specific productive activity? Let’s set the record straight. It’s the ubiquity of exchange that conceals the truth from us. Measurement by working time doesn’t transcend hazards, human risks, the depletion of resources. These problems don’t belong only to savages but to all society. Repressed by the logic of capital, they return with a vengeance.

Measurement by time only indirectly accounts for the onerousness of the activity and its repercussions on the environment. With communism, could it be used in translating the modification or destruction of a landscape—the depletion of a mine, the oxygen production of a forest—into a communist language? A production’s incidental advantages and disadvantages might be assessed in terms of working time potentially saved or potentially spent. This would be outstripping capitalism in absurdity, by openly and consciously seeking to reduce use values and occupations to labor-values. How to evaluate the value of a landscape? Do you have to consider the expense required to meticulously reconstruct it? At that price, not much would be profitable.

In assessing the different values of two equal durations of work, in which the risks and onerousness were different, would it be right to compare them on the same scale? An hour of masonry might cost the same as an hour and a half of carpentry. You’d either assess that the difference corresponds to the expenditure in time necessary to tend to the mason, to wash his clothes… or you’d give up on reducing everything to an expenditure of labor time. But then how to determine the coefficients quantifying the differences of value and onerousness that lie between tasks? For that matter, why seek to determine objective coefficients when these differences depend on conditions, and on the pace of the activity, and on the tastes of the participants?

Let the workers unshackle themselves, and the proponents of measurement by time, or remuneration according to hours worked, run the risk of being left behind. As soon as activity ceases to be compressed, it’ll change nature and expand. The quantity and character of a production will no longer be possible to evaluate in terms of some duration of labor consumed. Someone who only sticks around for a short time might still produce enough; another might spend their entire day there doing hardly anything. If remuneration is meant to be based on time in attendance, it’ll call for tireless prison guards or it’ll quickly become an invitation to laziness.

Whether workers reach an agreement in order to ensure a specific output, or to devote a specific number of hours per day to productive tasks—that’s a question of practical organization, not directly linked to determining the costs of what they produce. One factory could spend twice as much time as another to fabricate objects of identical cost.

You can certainly talk about the social distribution of the working time that a community has at its disposal. But you can’t forget that time isn’t some substance that can be slopped out with a ladle. It’s men who will go to this place or that, who will take care of this task or that. From the moment that free time stops being exceptionally scarce and reserved for meeting absolutely necessary needs, there will be some tasks more urgent than others, some men more rushed than others.

With capital, it’s necessary to dissociate price, the expenditure of labor power, and what it brings about: labor that has no value. With communism, this dissociation loses its meaning. It’s no longer possible to partition the labor power from the labor, the man from his activity.

This means that surplus value no longer exists, first of all, even monopolized for the community or in some new form of social surplus. People can no longer talk about accumulation nor about growth, except regarding physical size. To talk about socialist accumulation is an absurdity, even if at some point people produce more steel or bananas than before, even if people devote more social time to production. These moves no longer translate into value, or even into time expended.

This then means that labor, which has no value within capitalism, takes on value within communism. This value that it takes on is neither moral nor mercantile. It doesn’t mean eulogizing labor but expressing, on the contrary, its transcendence.

Labor, the source of value, is a constant. It can be economized, but its identity is never in question. With communism, a given activity will no longer be distinguishable from the trouble of the people who do it. Not all undertakings bear the same human cost. It’s a matter of cultivating the least costly ones.

Labor also has a cost in capitalist society, if you abandon the perspective of capital for that of the worker. Some jobs are preferable to such or such other jobs. In the evening, you feel your fatigue and your annoyance. But ultimately, the differences are faint, work always being considered as time more or less wasted. People don’t bother to calculate boredom, or the degradation of health. For the worker, the price of all this shit is his wages. People know that it’s all a hoax, and that wages aren’t determined by effort expended or boredom experienced.

The superiority of communism is that it doesn’t satisfy itself with satisfying the needs of “consumption.” It tackles the transformation of productive activities—the conditions of labor, if you prefer. Investment decisions aren’t made primarily as a function of working time saved, even if the speed of execution made possible could play a part in reducing it.

It’s a matter of privileging the activities that are most pleasant by producing the conditions under which activities take place. Determining the conditions of activities doesn’t mean determining the activities or the behavior of the producers themselves. The producer stays in control of his actions, but he acts within specific conditions, according to specific constraints within which he can act.

The production of instruments and of the plans of production, by men, allow for this transformation of human activity. The development of technology can be oriented in a direction more or less favorable to the producers. This or that type of machine, or ensemble of machines, allow those who use them to wear themselves out less, to be less at the mercy of production speed. It’s possible to systematically develop the conditions that allow men to be as free as possible within the production process.

Let no one tell us that personal tastes or subjectivity inhibit objective thinking about all choices. There exist general constants. We aren’t then claiming that criteria must be of universal scale. They vary according to time and according to situation. Men will organize themselves to determine what’s best. Differences in taste and a willingness to experiment can lead to them to develop differing approaches toward the same goals.

The estimation of costs can’t be reduced to the necessity of bringing “revenues and expenses” into equilibrium. The equilibrium has to be conceived of as a dynamic equilibrium. Starting from the conditions left behind by capitalism, it becomes a question of guiding a certain kind of development. Does the agreed-upon cost for constructing some productive outfit, some living environment, justify itself? Does the automation of some unit of production justify the efforts necessary to the manufacture of automated machinery? The logic of economizing working time, which in the capitalist world organizes the development of circumstances, cedes its place to a different logic—a logic that’s no longer external to the men who put it in practice. Humanity organizes and controls the structure of circumstances according to its needs. In this sense, it becomes situationist.

Elevator or stairs?

Behind the economic notion of cost, we have to track down the most ordinary and banal reality that it ends up concealing.

Everybody asks themselves the question of whether or not what they’re doing is worth the trouble. Does the expected result justify the expense and the risk? Are there less costly, which is to say more agreeable, ways to obtain a similar or sufficiently satisfactory result?

If this genre of question fell under the jurisdiction of economics, the world would be nothing but economists and managers. In reality, these are economic and financial problems that are a specific and rather bizarre case of a more general problematic.

Spontaneous and naive evaluations of cost long preceded the advent of capitalism. It persists, marginal to the economic sphere, even though our choices must constantly account for financial necessities. What characterizes it is that it’s done without monetary detours, and that it isn’t reduced to criteria of time.

At its outer limits, the evaluation of costs isn’t the preserve of humankind. The pigeon that hesitates to come peck at the seeds you offer it is, in its own way, giving the thing a try. The fact that it misjudges the risks and ends up in a stew changes nothing about the business. Estimation doesn’t necessarily rule out error.

The bird’s choice has more to do with instinct and habituation than anything else. With human beings, it moves to a different level.

The individual who finds himself at the foot of a building—who has to get to a certain floor, who has the choice between elevator and stairs—finds himself confronted with a problem of cost. Maybe he’ll hang around pondering for an hour, maybe he’ll make his choice automatically without even considering it.

The problem is simple, if reduced to the three solutions on offer: elevator, stairs, or leaving altogether. It becomes complicated if you take into consideration the elements that take part, consciously or not, in the decision-making. What floor does he need to get to? Does he even know? Our man, is he in good health? Old? Tired? Legless? What’s the height of the steps? The steepness of the stairs? The speed and the frequency of the elevator? The urgency of his gait?

The decision made will not be economic. It’ll be subjective, direct, and bound to a tangible situation. It isn’t monetary. It’s not a matter of knowing which solution will cost the most, provided that the elevator doesn’t cost money like they sometimes do, and given that someone’s already paid for its operation anyway. Speed of execution might take part in the choice—it could maybe become decisive—but that’s not relevant to the situation. Time savings will prevail if, by some misfortune, we’ve come across a firefighter. Maybe he’d prefer to use his truck ladder anyway.

How to apply to the economy that which is rightly external to the economic sphere? This is a fake problem. The real problem is precisely whether or not it’s possible to go beyond the economy, to dissolve it in its capacity as a separate sphere.

It’s a question of doing away with the economy. This didn’t become possible because we suddenly discovered that you can replace current methods with processes that are simpler and more direct. Paradoxically, it’s the development of the economy—the socialization of production, the astounding interdependence of businesses, the development of economic forecasting and calculation methods—that make this rupture possible.

Going forward, the principles that guide our choices will be as simple and transparent as the ones we live by all the time. It’ll be a matter of reducing effort, trouble, expenses. That won’t be the goal for social life in and of itself, but it’ll be a tendency at the heart of, and in accordance with, all projects implemented. Maybe people will set themselves very difficult and very perilous tasks, but they’ll do their best to make them easier. A team of mountaineers can set out to conquer a tough summit without agreeing to do it with their bare hands.

Simple principles don’t always mean easy methods and solutions. Difficulties will arise from the complexity and the very nature of the problems to be solved. Maybe they’ll also spring from a calculation method’s inadequacy to the object of calculation, or from the difficulty of determining selection criteria. The risk of error, the necessity of being content with approximations—these condemn nothing. In any case, it wouldn’t constitute a step backward with regard to the present stage.

What today applies to the use of stairs versus elevators will tomorrow apply to their production and their installation. The objective constraints within which the user navigates will no longer be determined economically.

Is it better to build a stairway, an elevator, both, or nothing at all? These questions imply a whole series of others. Is this need so important and so frequent that it justifies the expense necessary to creating the stairway, the elevator, the rope, or the kick in the ass that lets you to get to the desired floor? The perspective can be reversed. Should tall buildings be constructed, given the cost of elevators? On the contrary, given the pleasure provided by this manufacture of elevators, should we build more skyscrapers?

The list of questions to be posed is practically infinite. That seems daunting. In reality, only a limited number will ever be posed. Many are ruled out by simple common sense. Our mountaineers won’t be able to demand an elevator for their expedition. Every decision is made within a tangible situation where a whole host of questions have been settled, a priori, by the facts. Force of habit plays tricks on us, but it also spares us trouble. There’s every chance that the man who was at the foot of the building based his decision on it. The estimation of costs assumes its full importance when people find themselves faced with a new situation, when people initiate a new production process. The problem of manufacturing and installing the elevator or the stairway is likely to be a widespread problem, carried out according to known elements. Any case that’s a bit particular or a bit new will be treated as a modification of a more classic situation.

There exists a hierarchization of solutions. When you decide to start construction on a building, the cost of a means of ascent—approximately known—will probably be secondary. Once the general decision is made, it’ll become necessary to construct the stairway, the elevator, or both. The choices that remain will concern the nature and quality of the materials. These choices still won’t be made in absolute terms but according to the products and the techniques actually favored and developed in that field. Every choice aims to draw out the optimal solution, but every choice is made in accordance with some number of constraints. The optimum itself is likely to be a compromise between the interests of the different groups concerned.

Ending the division of the economy into competing enterprises doesn’t mean that all social production will form into nothing more than a single coordinated body, where all activity would be immediately subjugated by another, where there would only be one sole common interest, and where the estimation of costs would be made at a global level. For reasons human and technical, producers will divide themselves into groups whose opinions may diverge but whose interests will no longer be at odds. Even if individuals move from one occupation to another, one workshop or construction site to another, even if groups aren’t permanent, division in time and space will persist.

The construction of a building entails the mobilization of varying trades. You can imagine that, under communism, the architect would become a laborer, mason or painter. This won’t preclude the division of men into distinct teams and work into separate phases, especially if it’s a major construction. Builders will have no choice but to call on outside input. They may need to get assistance or advice. Above all, they’ll need to procure themselves machines and materials.

The products sourced from without—how to figure out and account for their costs? Builders can try to make the task easier for themselves, when it comes to the distribution and employment of their own resources and abilities. But when they have to draw on stocks they haven’t amassed themselves, this is no longer the case. A material that’s easier to use, or that’ll bring more satisfaction to the building’s users, might nevertheless be rejected given its manufacturing cost. In each situation, in order to avoid waste, the benefit gained must justify the expense.

Products, and even implementation processes, need to have an objectively known cost. It’s on the basis of this cost that users will make rational choices.

Does this mean that each product will bear a label on which its “price” will be written? Will a housewife doing her “shopping” find herself faced with cabbages or carrots accompanied by a quantitative index?

That would be a sad replication of the current situation. As a general rule, each person will take what he needs the moment it becomes available, as long as he isn’t aware of any need more urgent than his own. The calculation of costs is first and foremost a projection, and it’s directly manifest in the nature and quantity of goods offered. No need for a quantitative label to exert pressure, if not on the wallet, then at least on the intentions of the user.

There are various types of cement that presently have, and will certainly continue to have, varying costs of production. It’d be stupid to use a cement that’s twice as expensive as another one that would work. Generally, the visible nature of a product, or the accompanying user manual, suffices to determine its proper use. It’ll suffice to specify in the user manual, when there’s a risk of confusion, the differences in cost between different products.

Currently, dead labor weighs on living labor, the past on the present. With communism, the cost of a product isn’t the expression of value to be realized, of equipment to be amortized. This means that an object’s cost won’t necessarily represent the expenditure it required—or even an average of the expenditure required for all products of its variety.

A product will be allocated by the cost at which it can currently be replaced. A hike or a drop in productivity wouldn’t have any reason to translate into a difference between production costs and selling price. It would immediately be recorded as such, including for already-manufactured objects. This variation may result in the expansion of the production concerned if it becomes more profitable. The augmentation of investments won’t have surplus profit as its basis.

There might be cost differences in the production of the same product or of two similar products. These differences might arise from the continued use of some manufacturing processes more outdated than others. Often, they’d be determined by natural conditions. Agricultural yields are highly variable; not all mines are equally easy to exploit. Does this mean that similar products will be affected by different costs, or that an average price will materialize, applicable to everything, the way that average market prices tend to materialize today?

It’ll be very important that differences in cost be known, but this won’t impact the users of these products. There will be no advantages for some and disadvantages for others. It’s simply a matter of developing the most advantageous manufacturing processes.

If an escalation in some production signifies a drop in profitability, this doesn’t mean that it should necessarily be ruled out. First, because this drop in profitability might be a brief and passing phenomenon. Next, because it’s necessary to judge the importance of the needs to be met. As with regard to the production of food, an escalation often means diminishing returns: people cultivate less-fertile lands. This is no reason for refusing to feed some portion of the population and launching into activities whose profitability is on the rise.

Returns might only diminish in the short term, anyway. Sowing in a desert isn’t very promising, but very significant investments—implementations of irrigation processes and new cultivation methods—could change a lot of things. Some sun-baked desert once irrigated, some marine farm, could very well win out over traditionally fertile lands.

What seems impracticable today will be possible tomorrow. Modern technologies, instead of fueling the arms race, will serve to fertilize the deserts.

From the moment that the demand for a good increases, it’s likely to lead to a drop or a hike in the cost of producing new units. A drop will tend to increase demand for that product. If there’s a hike, on the other hand, it’ll be a matter of knowing when costs start becoming prohibitive. In this case, it’d be necessary to determine whether it’s the latest demand that should be diverted or, on the contrary, if it should be satisfied by abandoning or reducing other demands.

Calculation

From the moment of tackling the implementation of complex productions or projects, when some decisions determine a succession of other decisions, it becomes necessary to be able to forecast and calculate in order to select the least costly processes. Cost must often be estimated based on the long term. A momentary gain, or a lack of research, could have costly consequences for future prospects.

In choosing one or another track gauge for a railway, you’re committing in a way that can only be reversed with some difficulty. In this case, as in many others, a lack of foresight at the outset can lead to much less rational operating conditions down the road.

It’s a matter, also, of determining the technical coefficients that interconnect the productions of different products. The production of some material or some object necessarily involves the production and expenses of other goods, following some defined ratio.

It’s a matter of anticipating possible expenses, of simulating a project’s culmination. These forecasts can pertain to projects that are significant for the resources they mobilize, for the duration of their roll-out, for the hazards they entail.

Let’s assume that some men have the ambition to reach, explore, and eventually settle on a virgin planet. Such an operation can’t be launched into on the spur of the moment. It’s necessary to evaluate the possibilities and anticipate costs.

The first evaluation of the affair’s soundness will be presented by the number of individuals who agree to support or participate in it. This number will be itself determined by the impression of seriousness conveyed by the project and its advocates.

Once the project’s initiated, it’ll be necessary to make choices, and make these choices compatible with each other. Should exploration be focused on automated vehicles or on manned vessels? Should these vessels opt for an atmosphere of air or of oxygen?

Today, these are technical questions freighted by financial and political constraints. With communism, there’s no longer anything but technical questions that are also human questions. The debate over automated vehicles, manned or mannable, bears on the level of science, on the comfort meant to be provided to the cosmonauts, on the construction effort, on the prospects of each project…

The options chosen influence each other. However, not everything needs to be decided and planned for in advance. The first decisions guide what’s to follow, though without defining everything in detail. What matters is that at each stage, the best option possible is chosen, and that it doesn’t lead to a dead end. The number of decisions to be settled is enormous, but they wouldn’t all be settled at once, and corrections can be made.

Why further complicate life with all these issues? With capitalism, all of that’s resolved automatically.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because costs become monetary prices, and the market sanctions the behavior of businesses, doesn’t mean that everything is automated. Planning and projection exist on a general level, and this also applies to businesses of even the slightest consequence.

Not all operations are immediately sanctioned by the market. Such sanctions represent the final step in a system of expenditures and decisions.

If possible, it’s important to anticipate the market’s decisions. Powerful businesses no longer base their prices on market fluctuations, but aim to calculate then impose an optimal price. This price isn’t necessarily the one that will allow them to move the most goods, or even to maximize short-term fiscal returns. It can be set according to an overall strategy. In the Eastern European countries, prices are beginning to be determined by mathematical means.

In the East, as in the West, businesses are tending to cut themselves loose from the market in order to impose their strategies through their prices. It’s not an entirely new tendency. It’s intensifying, today, through the power of corporate groups, through the technical possibilities of individualizing products, through the development of the methods of economic calculation. Competition and the market haven’t been abolished. Their effects have simply been deferred, and the struggle between monopolies isn’t directly and solely fought out on the level of prices.

The important thing is that, at the very heart of capitalist society and businesses, methods of assessment and projection are being developed that can be used in a more systematic way with communism. The development of computers has been accompanied by a whole body of mathematical research aimed at representing and theorizing reality in order to address problems of choice, of simulation, of economic strategy. Even when it stops being a matter of best appraising and meeting financial criteria, it’ll be possible to use and expand on this research.

By current custom, businesses don’t count on the market to organize the production of goods as rationally as possible. The market presents one sanction for behavior, but not a precise and technical guide for that behavior.

Thus, let us imagine an industrialist who would like to manufacture, using sheet metal, the maximum number of cylindrical cans. If he’s partnered with an engineer, he will be able to immediately calculate the height/diameter ratio that ensures the best use of the metal; this ratio is equal to 1.103. If not, our industrialist will adopt values “at random.” But if some competition arises between several enterprises, those that have chosen the poorest values will be ruined. And so, through purely experimental means, manufacturers will be driven to retain—without knowing why—coefficients ever closer to 1.103 (The Book of Life, A. Ducrocq).16

“Scientific” rationalization extends to the very organization of production and distribution. Operations research supplements custom and common sense.

As early as 1776, the mathematician Monge undertook to systematically study the least costly methods of excavation and backfill.17 This also led to purely mathematical discoveries. Applied to military operations during the Second World War, operations research has continued to develop thanks to the power of electronic calculators. It’s used on problems of competition and reaction between adversaries; the phenomena of waiting; inventory management; projections of wear and replacement for equipment; simulation; etc. It’s no longer a simple matter of accounting, but of deduction on the basis of the analysis of past and present, of what may come about and what would be most desirable.

Comparisons

With communism, just as with capitalism, it’s important to be able to compare in order to estimate costs and choose the best solutions. But how to compare?

It’s all simple so long as there’s currency, which is to say a universal equivalent, since any good is supposed to be possible to evaluate according to this single standard. There’s a quantitative ratio between all products. But when people decide to do without currency, or even measurement by quantity of labor, what can comparison be based on? What else can be found that’s common to all goods, that can facilitate comparison between them?

There’s no other single, universally applicable standard. We’ll therefore do without one. This won’t prevent comparison. These comparisons will be qualitative, and founded on varying and variable criteria. They’ll no longer be carried out in reference to some abstract and universal model. They’ll stay connected to their concrete circumstances and objectives.

The fantastical thing is that different goods can be made equivalent to each other, regardless of their particular natures. It’s understandable that foodstuffs can be compared according to their protein content, their weight, their freshness. But these varying criteria don’t allow for the denotation of some general equivalence.

The need for a general equivalence can’t be dissociated from the need for exchange. All things must be possible to compare, from a universal perspective, because they’ve become tradable goods, economic values. This is precisely what needs to disappear, and what the dream—or the nightmare—of measurement by labor time would seek to disguise in order to save.

Even under the reign of capital, not all comparisons can be reduced to comparisons of value. Goods are still use values. The buyer’s judgment focuses on price, but also on the product’s usefulness and quality.

When a housewife does her shopping and chooses between a head of lettuce or a bunch of radishes, she does so according to the tastes of her son-in-law, the previous day’s meal, the look of the produce, the space remaining in her basket… Price is really only the deciding factor when two identical products have different values.

The multiplicity of criteria that come into play don’t prevent the housewife from making comparisons or choices. Her judgment is subjective. It isn’t universally valid. This doesn’t mean that it’s irrational, relative to the situation at hand.

When it comes to choosing between several manufacturing processes, it of course becomes necessary to reach a more general consensus. The choice will be less subjective, in the sense that it must be disentangled from momentary dispositions, and in the sense that it’ll have longer-term consequences.

Currently, purely monetary evaluations are occasionally inconclusive or overridden by other evaluations. Political necessities, and the dangers of significant fluctuations in certain prices over time, thwart financial prospects.

Let’s take up the issue of nuclear power plants. Besides the economic arguments, there are opposing viewpoints on the ecological, social, and political costs. There’s talk, often in bad faith, of energy efficiency, of the problems of transporting and storing waste, of national sovereignty, of the creation or destruction of jobs.

In communist society, it’s no longer necessary to render all comparisons on a universal scale. It’s sufficient to be able to determine the possibilities actually present, and to promote those that give the fastest results, those that are the surest, the least dangerous…

The important thing is to determine a set of pertinent criteria as you go along, and, in accordance with these criteria, to directly compare the conceivable solutions against each other. It’s not so much a question of quantifying as of sorting and ordering criteria and solutions. It’s the relative, qualitative meaning that predominates.

We aren’t counting on calculators to sort everything out. But they’ll be necessary and utilizable:

Initially designed for accounting operations and a posteriori management, employed also for scientific calculations, they have long been considered (ten years, maybe…) as tools intended to furnish quantitative results. How this characteristic is changing. Thanks to the methods of operations research, and more specifically to those of simulation, the accumulation of figures have brought about a qualitative result: one is no longer interested in exact numbers but in their relative meanings, on which the orientation of choice depends. Thus do calculators become means of forward-looking management (Operations Research, Faure, Boss, and Le Garff).18

What needs to be simplified and universalized aren’t so much the decision-making factors at play as they are procedures for resolution, the programs that will allow whole sets of data to be processed. In a certain sense, the more important the number of criteria, the more precise the representation of reality tends to be.

You can imagine what would come of a debate on the priority to be accorded to different sources of energy. A significant number of data would come into play. You couldn’t go off of just one criterion without admitting some perversion of reality. Choices need to be made in a comprehensive way, in accordance with broad factors, but also in a localized way, in accordance with the resources and needs of varying regions.

Communism doesn’t rule out choices and comparisons that are purely quantitative. These remain valid when a single criterion for selection suffices, depending on the nature of the products at play. This is the case when it comes to increasing or reducing a given production. This is the case when a savings in expenditures corresponds to a quantitative savings in the use of a material devoted to the same use, as in the case of canned foods. But even here, this savings must not be considered as a savings in working time, but simply in the amount of materials. That it should translate into a reduction in the duration of productive activity—this is simply one possible consequence.

Shouldn’t we be concerned about this communist frenzy for rationalization? Doesn’t it run the risk of catching up to the capitalist frenzy for exploitation?

Today, rationalization and exploitation are conflated. Man tends to be considered an object that needs to be squeezed for as much as possible. Inhumane methods, having nothing to do with technical constraints, are developed: hellish production rates, double and triple working shifts. Capitalist rationalizations, whether brutal or gentle, are more or less always carried out against men. That’s why it always stays fundamentally irrational.

Communist rationalization doesn’t aim to impose a pace on work. By nature, it will tend toward augmenting the liberty and the satisfaction of human beings. Decision-making and implementation won’t be made externally from the tastes and habits of the people involved. There will be technical constraints, production needs that will influence the speed and duration of activities. But this will no longer have anything to do with rendering human capital profitable.