Tomas Härdin responds to Robin Hahnel on Labor Time Accounting

In a recent post on his blog, Tomas Härdin replies to a post on the Participatory Economy Project’s website by Robin Hahnel entitled: Labor Time Accounting: A Postmortem. Härdin agrees with some points raised by Hahnel, while disagreeing on others. His post focuses mainly on two questions: labour costs and environmental costs.

Here’s an excerpt of the conclusion that gives a good idea of the main argument of the post:

What Hahnel calls “costs” seems to correspond to what is called “slackness” in linear programming. When we extract things from nature we reduce the slackness on what can be extracted from nature (modulo investments in new machinery). If the last few years of the planning debate has shown anything, it’s that much “disagreement” is just differences in language. It is therefore important that we are very precise with our language, that we use unambiguous words when we talk about things. Else confusion can occur.

To read the full post: https://www.xn--hrdin-gra.se/blog/2025/07/04/agreement-and-disagreement-with-robin-hahnel/