What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

That passage right before your one on higher communism. I still really don't see how that's so different. It's ambiguous enough with the labor voucher thing that it could be interpreted as currency backed by labor value and not oil/gold. Which is not totally incompatible with the idea of a centralized bank in the first stage of communism (who distributes and mediates the exchange of vouchers for social product?).

I'm not under any impression that the goal of socializing production is meant to stop at the first phase, but I'm also aware that tools such as a central banking system and post office (even better if they're combined) and public transport are indespesible in the fight to reach a higher stage of development. The people won't accept a complete devaluation of their currency immediately and it will take time to supplant the existing financial systems, better to retool then to serve as more equitable versions of themselves and phase them out immediately.

Once again, at no point does either Marx or Lenin say anything about how long any of these phases will take, there seems to be some people who assume that the first phase is meant to be short, but it could very well be a 200 year struggle as capitalism's was from the mercantilism of the 1600s.