Workers‘ Councils and Rational Planning
The Economic Foundations of a communist society
The book „From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!“ analyzes the economic foundations of a society without markets, money and private property in a selection of articles by the Group of International Communists (Holland). It shows what structural conditions are necessary to realize an economy based on communal planning.
The central themes of the book are the role of workers‘ councils as an alternative form of organizing production, the importance of the calculation of working hours as a measure of social planning, and the critical demarcation of communism from state-capitalist concepts. The calculation of working hours is treated here not as an instrument of morality in the sense of fair distribution, but as an objective instrument of rational planning that enables the members of society to control and manage their own relations of production. As Friedrich Engels aptly put it: „The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labor required for their production, will, in the end, determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted ‘value’.“