At church today, in our session on Christianity and co-ops, we read a passage from James 5
Come now, you rich, week and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. (James 5:1-4, RSV)
What's fascinating to me in this passage is that it basically describes the way the labor of workers is inscribed in goods and wealth, and that whatever exploitation occurred is fully captured there. It may not be visible--it looks like a pile of gold and silver, but James looks at it and "behold," sees the hours put in, the wages associated with those hours, and the surplus value extracted or held back.
This puts me in mind of alternate accountings. Accounting measures value, and part of value is the effort put into production of the goods or service by people, the residue of the total value they produced less what was paid out to them. Conventional accounting does not show this, but converts everything to dollars and cents which are abstracted from the physical value and physical conditions of the creation of value.
I'm finally reading Tony Tinker's Paper Prophets, considered the origin for emancipatory accounting more fully elaborated by Sonja Gallhofer and Jim Haslam in Accounting and Emancipation. Tinker describes several examples of alternate accountings provided by Ernst Mandel in his Treatise on Marxist Economics: a blacksmith caste in an Indian village which has land holdings and requires outsider who want their services to work the land for a number of hours equivalent to the time required to make the object they need; a Middle Ages Japanese village with a system of cooperative agriculture where villagers balance accounts with each other based on labor time; and a couple of others where the accounting system measures labor time.
Tinker's point is that these aspects of the good or service can be tracked and made visible. Burchell, Clubb and Hopwood's landmark 1985 article discussed a time when conventional accounting moved in that direction by adding statements on value-added to financial reports (a short-lived experiment in Britain wiped out by the arrival of Thatcher). To me, the writer of the epistle was seeing through the surface of the treasure hoard to not just the effort put in, but the trauma and injustice there. That would be go a step further, and I think Tinker does get there, I just haven't gotten that far in the book.
This passage in the Bible would lead you not just to account for the effort put in, but to capture the qualitative, spiritual and moral dimensions of the hour of effort. Was the labor hour one produced by a prisoner, a slave, or someone asked to work at danger to themselves? This seems technically doable. Not sure where you'd get a chance to give it a try and see what it ends up looking like.
Burchell, S., Clubb, C., & Hopwood, A. G. (1985). Accounting in its social context: Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 10(4), 381–413
Gallhofer, S. & Haslam, J. (2003). Accounting and Emancipation: Some Critical Interventions (1st ed., Vol. 3). Routledge
Tony Tinker (1985). Paper Prophets: A Social Critique of Accounting.
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