Currency war vs. Venezuela continues

That "anarcho-nihilist" shitposter is a known market fag and likes to post ancap .pdfs to justify his economic beliefs. I don't think he understands the difference b/w labor vouchers and money, to begin with.

Anyway, regarding this:
I came to similar conclusions, but the main problem is trade with capitalist countries.

I don't think there is a meaningful difference between labour vouchers and money. They are both forms of currency, government issued IOUs. Please explain the difference because as far as I'm aware there literally is none.

Labour vouchers can't be transferred between person to person, only to and from the government/distribution system. So all private economic activity is eliminated, furthermore they can't be spent abroad, invested, and so on, so all the chicanery that you get with current money won't be an issue. It's possible that it will have a limited shelf life too to discourage hoarding but that's kind of an open question.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_voucher

I can exchange a labour voucher for goods with other people as they can exchange it again with the government

you can't exchange something further that is destroyed upon "use"

"Hi lady, I want this gallon of milk."
"1 voucher plz"
*beep*
"lal salam, milk lady"
"lal salam, comrade!"

I just said they would all be electronic earlier

b-but muh exchange value

It could be far more primitive than that. Reliability in electronic payment systems is like reliability in electronic voting systems. You only need weird math and brainfuck cryptography schemes if you want any privacy to go along with that.

Stabilizing the price level is not the same as directly micro-managing prices.

Labor vouchers cannot be exchanged directly between people and can't be used to obtain means of production.

Surely I'm not the only one who remembers the sabotage of Allende's Chile's economy.

In 10 years FOIA requests for alphabet soup agencies will reveal this was a concerted effort to ruin Venezuela, and all the porkies who are now tut-tutting about muh socialism won't have to answer to anyone because they'll be living in orbital stations in order to escape cataclysmic climate change and the ensuing world war.

You fucking retard

But the goods labour vouchers are exchanged for can be transfered from person to person you fucking dumbass

That is to say you prefer indirect price control to direct price control. How progressive of you.

Behold the most retarded poster currently on leftypol:

okay fambo

what do you mean by setup.exe?

Amazing

If you made all money electronic and then prevented people from passing money between each other would that no longer be money?And you can't spend your currency abroad without exchanging it first already. So neither of these are really significant differences. The point is that labour vouchers are just another form of currency. Adding on extra rules to this currency like not being able to invest it in privately owned capital doesn't stop it from being currency. It just means that the economic system in which the currency is used is different. This is why labour vouchers are pointless. Everything you can do with labour vouchers you can do with any currency.

You guys should really learn modern monetary theory.

Dude… with the previous example:

"Hey, do you want a gallon of milk for 2 labor vouchers?
"No, because I can get it fresh, for 1 labor voucher from the collective."
"Hey, do you want a gallon of milk for 1 labor voucher?
"Uhm, ok."

What is the incentive?

...

It seems to me that a lot of socialists are irrationally opposed to markets. All the idiot right wing market Vicks have lead them to believe that there's no situation in which they can be beneficial - increasing people's economic freedom, prosperity and so on, whilst providing useful and powerful incentives.

Markets =/= private property

You could impose these arbitrary rules on any currency you dumb fuck. Those are issues pertaining to the rules of your economic system, not the nature of how your currency behaves as a medium of exchange.

That's supposed to say market cucks. Not market Vicks.

Au contraire. Socialists oppose them because markets' inherent irrationality as a system of distribution. Production for exchange value instead of use value is ridiculously wasteful, results in commodity fetishism, and the creation of false needs, inequality, etc.

Understanding capital has lead them to believe that markets aren't beneficial.

Right, like putting profits before everything else.

Then it would cease to be a currency, you dumb fuck.

Yes, and that way black-market activity can still develop. Example: Suppose the labour-voucher system is in place and prostitution is illegal. Instead of directly paying cash the costumer asks the prostitute what (s)he wants to get bought. But this black-market doesn't have the power of a black market that works with cash. It's more clumsy. Some things are really hard to transport or transfer between people. Suppose the prostitute doesn't want a particular thing, but a service (a legal service by somebody who obeys the law). So, in the world with cash, the prostitute would get cash and would use that cash to obtain the service. In the labor voucher world, you can't directly translate your black-market activity to receive and consume in person something from those who obey laws (e.g. using the bus). You can use the illegal activity to get other people to get you tangible movable things that you otherwise would have bought yourself, so you have more in your official account left to obtain the legal service. Because of the voucher system getting stuff through the black market has become more indirect and weaker. And that's not even mentioning the biggest difference: That you can't legally obtain means of production.

So, the black market will continue to exist, but it will be a tiny fraction of what it is in the capitalist world.

I make no such statement in that post, which is my first post in this thread, my dear INTJ aspie.

If a labour voucher was called a shmollar it would still be a labour voucher if it behaves the same way. And yes as the other guy said, a black market in labour vouchers is very clumsy. Don't bring up some other shit when you haven't addressed any of the points brought up, clearly labour vouchers and bourg money aren't the same thing

nice, but in an economy you do not only have milk. What are you going to do about people whose labour is more intensive or requires more skill? It is easy to understand how, if a surgeon or an architect can demand more goods in the collective, he will be able to hoarde goods, unless you have equal pay for all, in that case, what is the incentive to do labour intensive activities? not because humans are only motivated by wealth, but because there is no extra benefit

now let's imagine the following situation, everyone has equal pay, this still doesn't stop hoarding, as it is easy to see how the elderly will have a bigger aggregate acquistive power, they have worked for more time so they have been able to demand more goods over time, same with bigger families, if the labour of me and my wife is enough to feed my family of 10, as that is according to my needs, then the labour of my 10 kids can be used to hoarde goods

If we understand that not everyone will have the same acquisitive power as I previously explained, then it is easy how they can use this acquisitive power to exchange the goods they already used, let's say a family of 10 wants new beds, all they have to do is exchange the beds they already have for 9/10 of the labour a new bed commands, and just get new ones for 1/10 the price, as the rest was already paid by the older beds, the person acquiring this bed can go to the collective, demand 9/10 the labour he needs to acquire the new bed, and exchange these commodities for the older beds

it doesn't stop the commodity form

follow your flag and read a book about market anarchism

You get labor vouchers based on the hour, not the type of labor. One hour of a doctor's work = one hour of a janitor's work. I see this hurts your right-wing anti-egalitarian sentiments, which begs the questions: 1) the fuck are you doing on a commie board? 2) the fuck are you doing with an anarcho-nihilist flag?

...

Why would anyone do all the work and study of becoming a doctor if they could just become a janitor and get paid the same?

so like cuba? why is cuba a failed state then?

you stupid ancom, what is the incentive of becoming a surgeon then? or to become a construction worker?

I don't want the state forcing me to do labour intensive work while their families are doing accounting, neopotism is a thing you know?

That's not how 'each according to his needs' works, you can't just claim for ten working age kids. I would be tempted to say you shouldn't be able to claim for kids at all but I guess that could be figured out.

If a new bed costs 1000 vouchers then why would anyone 'pay' 900 for a broken ass second hand one, even if we disregard that trade is not really feasible.

As for pay there's plenty of evidence that effort isn't only based on money, plenty of people do stuff not for the money, but to me it would be easy to make the system so that people doing more difficult work are paid more per hour for less hours so that is their reward, effectively.

Because they are interested in it? I mean if you ask a 9 year old kid who wants to be a doctor or a farmer and then ask him why, will he say that because >muh incentives?

Then ask a 15 year old kid the same question and he'll answer according to what courses he liked in school.

SUDDENLY
Ask a 21 year old college student what carrier will he take and says that although he wanted to be a train driver the military offers more lucrative jobs if he studies logistics.

Is this rocker science to figure out?
also see:

because it is cheaper? how is he going to know they are old to begin with?

so they can spend the rest of the day manufacturing new commodities that can be exchanged in the black market? and then we are right were we started

now tell the 9 year old kid he will have to study for 9 years for 14 hours a day to get the same pay as a janitor and ask if he still wants to be a doctor

Make those vouchers non-accumulative over time, tho. Virtual account drops good boy points gained after 3 months or so.

...

And that's what people do, and you can see that people still prefer to be doctors.

DUDE

OK that is one similarity, but you need a unit of account. It's still different from money for all the reasons he listed
If you and I lived in a little micro society , and we used shells to vote, you wouldn't say the shells are money. Even though it kind of looks on the surface that we are each given one shell and then we pay the state a shell in exchange for listening to it opinion on a decision
Is voting money?

meant for

So fucking what? People have passion, and this is exactly what the current system punishes by putting markets over everything. Also, you paint this post-rev society as mirroring that of the pre-rev society. What makes you think that education wouldn't be completely restructured on egalitarian basis?

You are so cucked it's unbelievable.

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Yeah Doctors make less than waiters for extended periods of time.
I think most of us here would agree that different jobs would still be "paid" different levels of compensation for a period in the transition to communism

Clearly you don't understand the point I'm making. Labour vouchers are just another type of currency. They are a currency that operates with a different set of rules to Borg money, but they are still a currency. You would not have to change currency from the dollar in order to make them "labour vouchers". All you would have to do is to change the rules that the dollar operates upon. The unit of account stays the same. The question is; why the system of currency you are proposing is beneficial in comparison to the current one. If a socialist society could operate just fine with normal money, what is the point of adopting labour vouchers?

dang

What because the vouchers lose value over time if not consumed?
Cry me a river, what a huge injustice

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What if I told you that I also support full employment? Is that against the NAP too? :^)

lel

another fantastic meme by the planners

bad meme

Not if robots have anything to say about it. Also market socialism is best until then. There are medical co-ops as a blueprint, mentioned in the latest Global Capitalism BTW.

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Actually I would say that is essentially a form of money. It's like today - in order to vote you have to be a citizen, which means you have to pay taxes in the currency that the state issues. Your scenario is essentially the same thing.

I made a point for both situations here

Sure, but not to incentive them. Apparently doctors in America are billionaires who don't give a shit about human life. That, or the retards making the retarded argument that people just go to the easiest job are too alienated to understand what passion and empathy mean.

He will post his "Markets, Not Capitalism" book in 3… 2… 1…

wtf I love imperialism now
youtube.com/watch?v=Id--ZFtjR5c

How would he not know they were second hand if he's intentionally subverting the economic system to get them from someone else?

I'm not sure I agree that vouchers should degrade but even if they did why would you starve, you get more from your job or some from welfare if you quit.

If you changed the dollar to have the same rules of labour vouchers it would share almost no characteristics of the old dollar, what is the point in keeping the name and making people think their old dollars should be worth something when the whole system is being rebuilt?

By that logic your car keys are a form of money that you have to pay your car to get it to move and then buy back when it stops. Not everything you use to get something else is money.

Vouchers don't lose value over time. That's what currency does by default, ie. inflation. Vouchers increase in purchasing power over time because technology increases over time mean that one hour of work ten years from now is going to have greater levels of production than one hour today.

Assume today a car requires 300 effective labor hours to produce, after handling all the little things. In the next ten years, a similar car only requires 250 hours to produce. If you've stashed away your vouchers now, you'll be able to redeem fewer vouchers to get a car.

nice, feel free to explain how central planning won't be corrupted and victim of neopotism like in every soviet or soviet allied state pls

and apparently doctors are the only job that requires incentives
how could I forgot the miners, the industrial scuba divers, the lumberjacks, the welders, construction workers etc

silly me, how could I forgot the miners love extracting coal!! or that plumbers love working in black waters!!

so people do not buy second hand objects that are in good quality? wow i didnt know that! there is another scenario where i could buy a second hand good fo 5/10 of the labour it commands just to later sell them for 9/10

black markets son

I don't see why a labour voucher should be strictly tied to an hour of work, some work is harder than others.

...

Actually they do, and they're proud to be miners and plumbers. What they dislike, as with any worker ever, are the unnecessarily harsh work conditions imposed by the need to accumulate capital.

Don't move the goalposts you dishonest fuck, that's not what the argument was, you said how would they know it was old. And even today when buying something secondhand doesn't require some complex act of deception, a TV or furniture loses like 50% of its value the second you take it out of the box.

So is this anarchists VS communists thread #101290313980714?

It doesn't need to be strictly tried to one hour = one voucher. You can solve problems of things like asking who's going to do shitty jobs by compiling things like including the cost of getting people to do the job as part of the payment. Unpleasant and skilled jobs will require more societal effort to get people to do them and this is reflected in compensation.

kekkity kek kek
that's not how they work.

Besides, that would be true for literally fucking everyone. The actual vouchers don't have any increase in value. It's the fact that the entire rest of the market came down in effective cost of production over the time interval. The end result is just close to that of currency deflation.

This is how he operates in every thread, btw:

No. This is communists vs. everybody else thread #345324625362

and the harsh working conditions wont change because, surprise surprise, neopotists and the planners will end up hoarding all wealth, like in every soviet or soviet allied regime

it is exactly what the argument was dummy, the existance of black markets, see
keep on controlling damage

I shouldn't say compensation. That's not the right term for that. The proper term would be conversion. Labor vouchers aren't being compensated for work, that's how money is. Labor vouchers are representative of your work being valid as having contributed as so much productive time value towards society and you are being allowed to convert this given value into your preferred form of received value.

just another day on leftypol

Would you?

No that isn't the logic.

Money is essentially a tax credit. A $1.00 note is a promise to pay the owner of that dollar a dollar in coins or another dollar note, or you can redeem it to reduce your tax liability by $1.00.

Any currency has an issuer, usually the state or in the shell scenario the chieftain of the tribe, and users of the currency, the citizens that the state or chieftain preside over. The value of that currency is produced by some form of tax imposed upon the citizens. The purpose of taxes is to create unemployment By creating a demand for your currency. If you want to vote and don't want to be thrown in prison, you have to pay taxes, so you either have to work or counterfeit, and we know that the state won't allow counterfeiting.

Labour vouchers are basically the same exact thing but the "tax" is replaced by the prevention of consumption of any and all consumers goods and services that are deemed unnecessary for survival, unless you acquire and redeem labour vouchers.

It's just another form of currency.

me not doing it wouldn't stop everyone from doing it, your question is moot

This is becoming DENSE

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That's not how inflation works. Currency doesn't just automatically devalue. It only does that if the issuer of said currency allows it to do so. That's why labour vouchers could also devalue of the state allowed them to.

So you think you're different than everyone and that you're the only person who wouldn't do it?

No user, that is precisely my point, it doesnt maqtter if i dont hoarde wealth or corrupt the plan, because someone will and did in the past

i am the unique one

Nice rebuttal.

This thread is filled with people who do nit understand what a currency is.

Also, I read this earlier, and I had to come to remind you that this is a terrible, horrible fucking idea.

This means that any value not consumed within this three month timeframe after being produced becomes literally unpurchasable. As time goes on, you'd end up with a potential consumer base that has, cumulatively, 3,000 Labor Vouchers's with a total inventory stock of 50,000 Labor Hours in value. The vast majority of the societal inventory would be beyond what the entire society could afford to consume.

That's not how vouchers work. Labor vouchers HAVE NO VALUE. They're tied to societal production rate rather than having some level of valued based against the commodity market. Saying that labor vouchers were devalued means that overall societal production has decreased, not that the vouchers themselves actually lost value.

So, here's a question. there are files I want. How do you make me pay for them without 1. artificial scarcity, or 2. using some kind of force? Protip: you can't.

This would mean you overproduced because you didn't care to measure effective needs.

It also means that any level of surplus is equally wasted, which is pointless. Throwing out one LV is equivalent to throwing out one LH worth of product.

Some level of overproduction and surplus is an effective buffer against sudden losses of physical goods due to any which thing. Producing only exactly as much as you consume is asking for a drought to turn into mass starvation.

Currencies, like labour vouchers, do not derive their value from the commodity marke. They derive value from their issuer. The issuer of any currency determines its value.

Supply push inflation is caused by productive capacity falling whilst the same amount of currency stays in circulation. This is true for all currencies including labour vouchers.

PLEASE LEARN MMT GUYS THIS THREAD IS RETARDED.

Artists and so on could potentially be paid through the difference between labour and labour vouchers, all art, music, games etc are free, if you liked it you just click 'i liked it', and more like that will be produced if people agree (IE the creator of a popular indie game can lead a team of people whose last games didn't take off)

You're a fucking dumbass, especially if you think LV's are a currency. They are very specifically NOT a currency because they are independent of the market and are instead a reflection of the amount of unclaimed stuff that has been produced, measured by labor and time.

Opinion discarded.
.

Wow your understanding of money and currencies is extremely fucking poor. No wonder people think us socialists don't understand economics.

Yes Labour Vouchers are a fucking currency. They are a medium of exchange. Just because they are independent of the market it does not mean they are not a currency. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, clearly.

And no money isn't a commodity in the way that other things are. It has no use value.

MONEY HAS NO USE VALUE. It's not like other commodities.

Please just learn MMT.

Economics is a fucking theology, it doesn't mean shit.

If you understood modern monetary theory you wouldn't be saying that. Please just take some time to learn it and you will have a much better grasp of how to achieve a socialist society rather than autistic screeching about labour vouchers.

youtube.com/watch?v=-KRi9nF8BiA&t=4428s just watch this. Please, do yourself a favour.

but it is tho

Money is not like other commodities. At all. If the US changed currency tomorrow, all the US dollars in circulation would become WORTHLESS. They have absolutely no inherent use value, and their exchange value is driven by the government's willingness to accept them in the form of tax credits. Please wrap your fucking head around this because it's VERY important.

Oh woah they found 1.265374 dollars worth of money.

This proves that Venezuela is COMPLETELY INNOCENT!

Limiting LV accumulation doesn't rule out surpluss being produced.

False. They are one time acquisition tickets, not something that can circulate.

There is no market, ya doofus.

They don't circulate. But they don't have to circulate to be considered currency. They are a MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE.

One labour voucher = One consumer product that is worth the equivalent of one hour's labour.

You EXCHANGE your labour vouchers for GOODS. They have no inherent use value. That makes them a currency.

Nobody said that V. was "innocent." of what, ya mang?

OP is just one of the well documented series of sabotage and cointel done with US backing. You are either ignorant of them or deny these facts.

only if no other society decides to use it as their exchange medium

the value given to money is due to the demand for it

kys

Wrong already. LV's don't get exchanged. They don't contain any level of exchange value. They are a stand-in for unclaimed labor result. They don't have floating arbitrary value.

Literally anything can be a currency. Nothing at all says that you can't still keep using dollars as value holders even if the government says that they only accept baguettes as tax credits.

One time acquisition. Exchange requires a medium that can be reused.

Why would another country that isn't already using the dollar, adopt the dollar? A completely worthless piece of paper that nobody wants because the US no longer demands taxes denominated in them.

an act of giving one thing and receiving another (especially of the same kind) in return

In what sense are you not exchanging LVs for goods? Just because the LVs are not being reused by the government (the issuer of the currency) it doesn't mean that they aren't being used as a medium of exchange. This is just semantics, though.

their inherent use value is that they serve as a medium for accounting, this is why planners need to check how much demand there is for a good using the number of vauchers exchanged and change supply accordingly

what these reds don't get is that, while the inherent exchange value is destroyed, its use value to continue the commodity form administered by the planners isn't, you destroy its physical form, but not it's logistical one

central planning doesn't eliminate neither markets nor the commodity form, as production is still ruled by the demand and the demand is ruled by the supply, but dumb planners here have trouble understanding this

That's barter, you humongous mindleper

because everything can serve as a medium of exchange, people would adopt the dollar under the same reason people created new currencies, accounting

barter is a system of exchange

without a reusable medium, ya infantile tart

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Please try harder.

No, they don't have inherent use value. Dollars are worth nothing in the middle of the sahara desert. They are worth nothing on mars. They have exchange value, that's all

An argument could be made that interest is a currencies use value, but really the natural rate of interest is zero: if you leave a dollar on the windowsill it doesn't generate interest.

wrong, I can barter with you any surplus of commodity in return of another one, the second one having no use value for me, simply for the reason that the 3rd party, owner of the commodity i want, demands the one i originally bartered with you

the commodity you gave me only has exchange value to me

thats not what I say, try reading again
the exchange value of a labour voucher is its inherent use value, labour vouchers do not eliminate the commodity form, for example a hooker would demand bread in exchange of her services, so I would exchange labour vouchers for bread, and then exchange this bread for sex

labour vouchers do not eliminate markets nor the commodity form

Yes, everything serves as a medium of exchange, but this is a red herring. Why is the dollar the only widely accepted medium of exchange in the US? Because the US denominates its taxes in dollars.

All currency is a form of tax credit.

their use value is the fact that they are a medium of exchange

This is a corruption of use value. They have no use. Their only use in their acceptance for exchange of goods and as tax credits.

You've been using a theory on money on a practical, physical level to try to disprove people who are talking about money on a theoretical level. It's extremely intellectually dishonest. Stop posting any time.

What definition requires currency to be in circulation. Currency is a widely accepted medium of exchange. Nothing else. If the only place you can exchange goods and services at is the state's central planning authority, whatever they accept in exchange for goods and services is automatically widely accepted, and is automatically a currency. Labour vouchers are a form of currency

This really isn't hard to understand, guys.

ok but let's pretend there is no US government, would dollars still have an inherent use value? only insofar as society decides to use it, therefore the use value of the dollar is that it can be used as a medium of exchange, this depends on society

yes, but this is insofar as the society wants to, while they don't have use value aside from the use value paper has, wich is why they have inherent use value when the society demands them, it is ruled by supply and demand, even if the deman comes from the US government

this is what makes them a commodity

there are people who claim fiat money proves Marx's theory of money commodity and LTV wrong, but i am not so sure it really does, the excess of money doesn't generate more value, simply demands less as the acquisitive power of each dollar decreases

Please explain why this is intellectually dishonest. All I am trying to point out is that labour vouchers are a form of currency, which is pretty fucking obvious if you think about it for even two seconds.

THIS IS WHAT A SEVERE CASE OF COMMODITY FETISHISM LOOKS LIKE

Get vaccinated, kids!

also I would like to add, its use value is not only those of a piece of paper, as a method for exchange, but also as a method for accounting

yes, the reason money exist is because of commodity fetishim, glad you understand

Because talking about money on a theoretical level and talking about money in a current real world sense is two different subjects.

Labor vouchers are still not a form of currency. Labor vouchers tell you that if you had done each part in a productive process yourself to produce some product or service, you'd be entitled to the end product. You are allowed to then do this amount of effort somewhere else in society so that you don't need to do a million jobs, and are then allowed to claim the productive end result in a different form.

Currencies do not do that. At all. They are still based on exchanging values between different commodities. And yes, that can include serving as a tax credit. If you really wanted, you could still use dollars as your medium of value exchange and your new Government Tax Credit Bills could have prices also levied in dollars by a market system.

so are labour vouchers tho, the exchange values are simply decided by the planners

But why would society agree to accept dollars if there was nothing to give those dollars any value? They are just pieces of paper after all. And who would create the dollars? All dollars in circulation have to have been issued by someone or they wouldn't exist.

That's the point. The government is the price setter for the dollar - it is the monopoly issuer of the dollar. It decides how much exchange value each dollar has by adjusting taxes and spending.

I don't really care weather fiat does or doesn't prove LTV wrong. It just is. This is always how money has been given value. Look into the history of money, it is always issued by a central authority in order to be used later as a tax credit.

I doubt it has very much at all to do with LTV in the first place.

It can't.

Labor vouchers literally are unvalued. They are markers for production levels in society and nothing more.

Under a labor voucher market, assuming constant expansion of automation, either production levels will increase or the labor hours to produce any particular good will drop. Assuming we continue production at the same value as per need, the amount of labor vouchers issued will necessarily decrease. However, the amount of product that can be redeemed for will necessarily stay the same. That is not at all true for currency, there's no necessity of pegging currency issuance to production.

Wrong again. A currency's value is determined by the issuer. The monopoly issuer of a currency is the price setter for that currency.

Money still does exactly what you say labour vouchers do, but due to market forces people are paid different amounts. The value of the currency itself however is not due to these market forces, it is up to the monopoly issuer of said currency to decide its value. This is the same for labour vouchers. The issuer of them decides how many are worth exchanging for particular consumer goods. The government just has more direct control over the value of the currency in this system, but its still a currency.

All that's saying is that currency is backed by violence. That's not new.

Nothing about money pegs it to production. You yourself have just been making the claim that the value of money is effectively backed by the violence inherent in the tax collection system. That's an entirely different process from tying it to the process of production. Stop contradicting yourself.

Why are morons still defending the idea of labour vouchers?
What kind of inbred, drooling moron supports the idea of abolishing money?
Oh, that's right, stupid, edgy teenage communists/anarchists.

what give them their use value is that their are used for exchange

you don't really need to create any more dollars if you want to use them as a medium for exchange in the short term, longer terms is another story

indeed, by the US government, but they decided to drop it, the dollar wouldn't have any exchange value because they dropped it, but it can still be used as a medium of exchange, it didn't lose their use value, weather people will accept them or not is another story

this is why money is a commodity

yes, technically speaking, but again, let's consider this scenario, the US gov drops the dollar, but society doesn't, and society still decides to use the dollar, its exchange value would persist, at least in the short term, as a medium of exchange, the specific number of labour hours it can demand would be different, but still has exchange value, as I could demand X amount of dollars when offering a commodity in the market, its use value here exists because it is used as a note for accounting

If both the US gov and its citizens drop it, then it would have no exchange value whatsoever, but its suse value, as a note for accounting economic trades ina market economy, still persist

this idea that currency is an accounting note is why labour vouchers are still a currency, you need to analyze your argument deeper

labour vouchers have an exchange value, dictated by the artificial market created by the central planners, however,since they are destroyed upon use, their exchange value appears to be destroyed, in reality, the commodity I exchanged it for has acquired the capability of acquiring this exchange value as I can trade 1 jug of milk for anything offered in the black market, and its use value as an accounting note to calculate aggregate demand still exist, as the information it provides the planners has been transformed into data

wrong, their inherent use valuye is a method for accounting

only if labour vouchers are issued according to the labour-time of each commodity, but this is the philosophy of poverty, no reason to arguee this

wrong! market anarchists support currencies, just not centralized ones

fixed that

This.

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm

But it doesn't matter. Ayncrap nihilist has been called out several times ITT as a dishonest turd, so it's not like he is here for genuine discussion. He just repeats the same shit again and again, not just here, but in every thread.

Well actually if your goal is full employment and price stability then that is entirely necessary. You can't just print money to infinity or the increase in money supply will outpace the increase in productive capacity leading to inflation.

You are using terms incorrectly. Repeating your errors doesn't correct them.

if money doesn't have any use value it couldn't be a commodity, and Marx says Money is a commodity, so which one is it, Saint Marx can't be wrong after all

ernestmandel.org/en/works/txt/1990/karlmarx/6.htm

keep being this obsessed

see

stay wrong

You're getting it now. Yes, the threat of violence to get people to pay taxes is what gives currency its value. The only difference for LVs is that the threat is not one of violence, but of "you literally can't purchase anything unless you work for us, and we get to determine how much that work is worth". It's really not so different. One is threat of violence, the other is threat of living a life without any superfluous consumer goods whatsoever.

I think we're talking across purposes here.

A currency will not be the widely accepted unit of exchange unless a central authority imposes a tax of some form on the people that create a demand for that currency. One way you can say it is that "taxes create unemployment". There is no incentive for people to use dollars if their is nothing to impose exchange value upon them.

Look into Modern Monetary Theory. It's fascinating and I think you will agree with its basic premises if you give it a chance. You seem to be the only one in this thread that has a clue what money actually is, so maybe you'll actually be able to understand it.

not really, some years ago people in the northwest of mexico decided to use their own currency, there was no central authority, as they all decided to back up their money on the economic transactions, while this was under the quanity theory of money, you can see how you don't need a centralized figure for currencies to exist

not necessarily true, while this is necessary to mantain a currency as otherwise counterfitters would inflate it to oblivion

trey, but this something isn't necessarily a central authority engaging in taxation

stay BTFO

How long did that last? I get that you don't need a central authority to use a medium of exchange in the short term, but unless you want that currency to be worthless after a short period of time, you need some for of tax to create demand for it.

Am I missing something? Is trading in dollars somehow bad for the US too?

This is a real problem. Venezuelan gas was practically free not too long ago (it's still super cheap). Which may seem great at first, but that creates a black market, Colombians get gas in Venezuela for instance. Which wouldn't be a big deal if the price wasn't below market: Venezuela loses cash with every sale. They should cut their losses and get rid of the controls (which would create a huge revolt if not done very carefully), these work in the short-term but keeping them long-term never works, you either get smugglers or "empty" stores who actually have stock if you give them a "tip".

Don't forget that in a digital world, we don't need to have people ruling over us to have a central tax collecting authority. We could easily have a democratically alterable supercomputer conduct all currency creation and destruction, which would eliminate the possibility of tyranny.

like 6 months or so, it turned into shit and the government interviened

thats the point, think about the following, Mrax law of value citates that prices are proportional to the amount of human labour

if we eliminate the ability of the bourgeise to have a stable money supply, the capitalist cycle will be difficult to engage in

this is why illegalism considers counterfitting as a method of destroying capitalism

The problem with that is it will cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. Why not use our current currency to reach full employment and price stability and work on dismantling capitalism piece by piece, one worker co-op at a time. Remember, at full employment, capitalists have much less disciplinary power over their workers. Its easy for workers to unionise and demand higher wages because their bosses can't easily find people to replace them.

The article you cite doesn't prove your point (money's use value = it's exchange value) or disprove the fact that you are using these terms incorrectly.

Notice the following:
the apostrophes around 'intrinsic' are there exactly because it's a fetishized thing, and beyond that, nothing more.

With Marx (from above cited source):
>The particular commodity which thus represents the exchange-value of all commodities, that is to say, the exchange-value of commodities regarded as a particular, exclusive commodity, constitutes money. It is a crystallization of the exchange-value of commodities and is formed in the exchange process. Thus, while in the exchange process commodities become use-values for one another by discarding all determinate forms and confronting one another in their immediate physical aspect, they must assume a new determinate form they must evolve money, so as to be able to confront one another as exchange-values. Money is not a symbol, just as the existence of a use-value in the form of a commodity is no symbol. A social relation of production appears as something existing apart from individual human beings, and the distinctive relations into which they enter in the course of production in society appear as the specific properties of a thing – it is this perverted appearance, this prosaically real, and by no means imaginary, mystification that is characteristic of all social forms of labour positing exchange-value. This perverted appearance manifests itself merely in a more striking manner in money than it does in commodities.

I actually took the time to read what you posted and responded accordingly.

But isn't marx sort of saying that whilst money may be under some definition a commodity, it is fundamentally different to other commodities. He even use the phrase "than it does in commodities" as if money isn't really a commodity.
If it has no inherent use value how is it really a commodity at all? It's simply a medium of exchange. A unit of account. Just put into commodity form by making paper notes and metal coins.

I don't think it will, again, the reason they failed was, internally, they based their money on the quantity theory, and externally, the government counterfitted as lot of money

If we understand that labour, both living and dead and the natural supply of resources, then these are the ones that should be used to generate whatever exchange method we have to use

you can counterfit anything used as a method for exchange, but we can't counterfeit labour

I agree that on the short term we could use some form of coop and credit unions, work on dismantling capitalism piece by piece is indeed the best route, but we shouldn't forget the power of destabilizing bourgeoisie markets

you fucking retard, a use value cannot be its exchange value, how do you quantify the use value of milk with dollars? you only quantify its exchange, you can only measure use value

the use value of a commodity is that it SERVES as a method of exchange and accounting, read again

the intrinsic value comes from the fact that it can be used for exchange and accounting, it's not only a fetishized thing, but the fact that accounting and exchangin is need it in a market economy

in a planned economy, labour vouchers take the form of method of exchange and accounting, which why planned economies do not eliminate the commodity form

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm#S3c

Dear 9 year old kid,

if you want to become a doctor, consider that you won't get paid more than a janitor. You will get a lot of respect and admiration though. You have to study for several years to be a doctor. You won't have to worry about getting into debt as a student. Like in other fields, during your studies you will also receive an income on par with that of a janitor and get paid expenses that are directly related to that education. You won't have to work on the side, in our society you can concentrate on your studies as we recognize and respect that training for getting useful abilities itself is a useful activity. You will encounter other people who have the same interest in becoming a doctor, and probably some of them will become close friends with you. You will study together. A few people, and maybe you, will find a partner to marry at that point. After becoming a doctor, you won't stop learning, you will have to keep up to date with new developments. You won't make more than a janitor, so if this is your calling, you will be surrounded by people who do what they do because it is their calling as well.

Your training will involve looking at gruesome pictures and even dissecting corpses of one billion people killed by this guy, Vladimir Libertarian Janitor.

Still think socialism is cool?

and as a janitor you wont?, kek, and you claim that all workers are equal and that you exist outside commodity fetishism

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

It's all for the sake of our beloved workers party after all!! :v)

Which is why I would advocate for a job guarantee, which would peg your currency's value to labour.

Seriously you should check out the MMT guys. They might come across as evil statists to an anarchist, but they have a lot of interesting ideas for progressive economic policies. I think understanding MMT is the best chance we have at achieving communism.

…
I now remember you. You were the guy with the opinion that anything involving people and numbers is a market, right?

I am right now

why can't everyone become a doctor? are some animals more equal than others?

But that's bullshit. If a product requires 40 LH of work after accounting for modifiers, that is it's LV cost. If a person puts in so much labor hours into some production process, and produces an amount relative to what would be expected of average production, then you can't arbitrarily decide to give them more or less. You're saying that LV's are a currency because you're applying the rules of currency wages to them, which completely destroys the entire point of vouchers in the first place.

You can't say chess is the same thing as checkers by just applying the rules of checkers to chess and then coming to the conclusion that they're the same.

The threat of not being able to steal society's resources for your own arbitrary personal gain, but organizing production rationally instead, yeah that's Socialism.

@MMT spammer: I know MMT, and I agree with it. I can't make sense of commodity money. I believe money evolving out of barter is a self-serving myth of the capitalism-is-human-nature shills, and it is damaging for the left to take that story at face value. That said, I don't see how any of MMT leads to an argument against labor vouchers.

Also, there's nothing stopping you from producing surplus consumer goods to be stockpiled. You'd just end up with floating value to be redeemed at some point.

I'm saying that LVs are a currency because they are medium of exchange issued by a central authority that controls their value.

They are not exactly the same as money we have now, but they are still a currency in pretty much every relative way. The question is why are they preferable to money and why we can't just modify the rules of our current currency to achieve the functional equivalent a LV without actually calling it a LV?

Why bother with labour vouchers if you can sustain full employment and price stability with normal money?

I'm not against LVs per se, I just want people to realise that it's not essential to socialism in any way shape or form. I'm happy to hear the benefits of LVs in comparison to normal currency, I just don't see the necessity.

LVs can't circulate. It's not currency.

Money never did evolve out of barter because barter as a primary form of exchange was proven to be a total myth. Markets and money were put in place by governments for the primary sake of raising taxes to supply large standing armies and other state projects. And yes, it is primarily backed by government violence for the purposes of extracting value from the populace through taxation.

Commodity money still fits in there because money is the commodity that is used to create a market of other commodities and commodifies other goods

You're basically asking why can't we modify currency into LV without calling them LV. You want to modify the rules of checkers until you're playing chess, you just hate the word chess.

I sincerely hope you're just trolling at this point. You are literally saying that there are functional differences in how LVs and money operate because you admit they operate under different rules, while ignoring important differences in what happens as a result of those rules, and then just wanting to keep calling it money because the word LV triggers you and you don't want to abandon MMT even though changing the rules of currency to operate on fundamentally different principles would make MMT invalid as a practical theory.

I believe one of them is trolling and the other is just retarded.

It's not that I hate the word labour vouchers, I'm just saying that the rules of MMT still apply to labour vouchers because it is a form of currency. The difference between money and LVs is simply down to self imposed constraints on the way the currency is used, so it's a misnomer to declare that this is fundamentally different to any other currency.

What are the actual benefits of these self imposed constraints? That is my question.

Th-thanks -_-

I don't know. Why would somebody be against that. MAYBE WE WILL NEVER KNOW!?!

Doctors get more ass than janitors. That's all the inspiration you need.

I think you're ignoring why many people become doctor's even now. Doctors that I have met have overwhelmingly been proud people. This is anecdotal, clearly, but I have also met many who dropped out of med school, and they basically said they wanted to be doctors because of prestige and an interest/passion for medicine, but eventually the fear of residency and lack of a social life led them to dropping it. But point is, all of these people were in it for social and ego points, not so much the money. Money is a great bonus, clearly, but a part of the pride is how difficult the work is. Contrary to money assuaging possible doubts due to misery from hard labor, hard labor is a part of the appeal of being a doctor. It is difficult, it is necessary, and it is literally life and death in many cases, and so it becomes a position that affords much social value.

Also, most doctors don't sit around talking about their money, or how miserable the job is but the money makes it all worth while! They can frequently be quite excited to tell you about their specialty, or interesting research, or whatever. It's clear that they value their knowledge.

Really, as it is in capitalism even now, people have pride in their work. I think low level service people feel as though their work is mostly worthless, but if you do anything sort of specialized, or you do something well, or something that society has deemed to be prestigious, people get a lot of pride from their work. More often than not they get mad at their companies for not allowing them to do their work more effectively. That seems extremely common, even my low level service jobs have always had people who grunted about how the system made by corporate or whatever was hampering good work.

I'm not sure what the problem between commodity money and MMT is then. Obviously money is a special thing but why does it become hard to understand its commodity role?

How does one consume money?

cocaine does the trick

Roll it into a tube and use it to snort coke off a hooker's ass.

It's not being used for its exchange value anymore.

Ancom posters analogy with the chess & checkers was accurate. You are trying to understand chess from the POV of checkers, while these two are fundamentally two different games (systems of rules).

This is why your analogy of a "self-imposed constraint" is inaccurate: you don't get checkers by "self-imposing constraints" on chess, because the two are fundamentally different (sets of rules).

(Probably an analogy of poker and chess would have been more to the point because the differences are more fundamental than familiar.)

The benefit of a system of distribution based on labor vouchers is that it's basis is not a market 'entity,' such as money, since it's not a stand-in between different commodities expressing their exchange-values, but a voucher representing the hours of labor you have done entitling you to a product or number of products that required the same amount of time to produce. It's egalitarian in principle, because it doesn't let an exclusive commodity (money) develop an unbridled life of its own, disrupting the society.

If you worked 1 hour to produce a toy, you get 1 labor voucher, and can acquire with it a batch of muffins that required the same time to produce. Notice the word acquire. The voucher is not received, nor was it exchanged, because the voucher is then destroyed. In other words you contributed to society the same amount as you got back from it.

With money, as you must know, this is not the case. Money can beget more money, without reflecting any socially useful activity of yours. You can use money to acquire capital (factories, land) and continue the vicious cycles of a wage-based economy.

The fundamental difficulty of discussing Marx's political economy (vs. pretty much all other types) is that picking out one element of a complex, overdetermined, and interconnected machine is an abstract endeavor, and totally goes against the very method (dialectical materialism) employed by Marx. But it should be said that you seem to be unable to think out of the box of markets and capitalism, to put it bluntly. For you, it would seem, non-markets are markets (or deviations thereof), non-exchange is exchange, and so on. For us labor vouchers make sense over the money form because it counteracts several interconnected problems of capitalism on a more fundamental level, that couldn't be done directly with the use of currencies. I don't know where you got the idea that LVs require a state (and ancom should have brought this up).

Maybe an easier or more self-evident level of discussion could be the psychological impact of money.
vimeo.com/43703770
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work

You actually think that LVs would prevent the black market? People would just trade in some other commodity.

Like what? Nosegoblins? On whose authority? Certainly not the collective's. The products to be exchanged created how? Private ownership is not possible.

Neoliberal thought collectives aren't the best places to research the psychology of money unperturbed by neoliberal perversion.
Anyone can make money, or labor vouchers, for that matter; the hard part is getting it accepted. Who's vouching what to whom, exactly? And on penalty of what, exactly?

A black market doesn't thrive on money alone. It also needs goods at a price that can't be obtained through normal channels. In what goods would a black market trade that wouldn't eventually be found missing?

Barter of personal property, perhaps.

Can you see why this might end up being a problem? This doesn't work.

Even if you make it so that you have to produce a certain number of muffins to get one labour voucher, that still negates the whole point of a labour voucher.

Any way they wanted.

why & why?

There will be a massive shortage of consumer goods and services because there isn't any reason to work any harder than the bare minimum. You might think this is fine, because we over consume way too much right now, but it doesn't do anything to curb the demand for consumer goods. You end up in a situation where labour vouchers are practically worthless because you can't buy anything with them; there simply aren't enough goods to go around. This creates a downward spiral of shortages and despondency in the proles because their work doesn't even earn anything valuable. It also creates tensions between workers because those who do put the effort in will grow bitter towards those who do not.

And if you make it based on the number of muffins instead of the time taken to produce, you're no longer tying the value of the labour voucher to the amount of labour required to produce a good, but rather the value of the good in comparison to other goods. That's just a wage.

The person who makes 80 muffins in 8 hours earns twice as much as the person who earns 40 muffins in 8 hours. In order to work out how many labour vouchers each muffin is worth, we would have to compare the value of each muffin in comparison to some other commodity, at which point the labour voucher is just another form of money. It acts as a measure of exchange value between commodities.

Labor vouchers are average production. You can't have a system that's based on mean production (ie, there are 6,000 mean LH's worth of product but 7,000 LV's floating around as a result of their production)

If one person produces more than average, then the percentage difference is indeed reflected in their LV's, and the same for producing less. If everyone produces more, then the average goes up and the LV redemption cost goes down.

Meant to say that you can't have it based on mean production and then dissociate it from that production process.

...

I specially don't trust Venezuelan media, but here is my two cents:

The currency war is real in Venezuela. Because Venezuelans can't into producing basic goods so they have to import every thing, when oil prices were high this wasn't an issue but now it's real problem.

These importers get the special "official" dollar rate, but sell stuff with the "non official" rate, this is possible because South America is a really corrupt place so oversight is almost impossible.

This is possible because the government just turns a blind eye to it, same with many other things. How do you smuggle 30 tons of cash out of any country?

And official importers are less common now, I see more food packaging that says "Industria Colombiana" without any importing information on it every day.

Nobody smuggles food out of the country anymore, reselling regulated food at a higher price is a million times easier.

What do you mean? Petrocaribe was created by Chávez. Creating that alliance was his decision, and he knew how it would work.

Hoarding of currency is ironically good for Venezuela. If they dumped it into the market, Venezuela would collapse… even more.

Removing money from circulation (say, by hoarding it and smuggling out of the country) causes deflation, not inflation. That Venezuela is nonetheless experiencing strong inflation just means that their currency is just that worthless.

Why would anyone hoard a currency that is rapidly losing it's value due to inflation?

Why do Cubans become doctors

Cuba is not a fail state. They have held for decades against embargo. That is strategy.

Why is Leftypol still so defensive over the failed state that is Venezuela?

And Marxist-Leninism isn't a form of theology?
I'm convinced most of Leftypol are religious morons that think labour vouchers, an extremely shitty substitute for money, are a replacement, only because morons here cannot ever admit that capitalism does many good things.

People here would rather live in a failed, collapsed, impoverished shithole like the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela than admit capitalism has great ideas.

Hahaha
Even Zizek admitted that Cuba is a failed state, with it's collapsing buildings, extreme poverty, and blind fidelity to Castro.

I made a r/drama thread about this.

Cuba and Mexico have similar per-capita. But, while Mexico sucked neoliberal tit, Cuba was embargoed by murrika. Do you see the difference?

This

How is this different from the US?

For the same reason we're defensive about North Korea, the right-wing slanders them with the intention of hurting Socialism as a whole, we defend them in order to be able to concisely point out their flaws.

Hahahaha
You are actually defending North Korea?
It's the true definition of hell on Earth, it's a shithole run by a delusional dictator, whose state ideology claims that the current ruler's father is a god, and is still the head of state, while the son is the head of the armed forces.

Plus it's an extremely famished state, and a racist one. And you are that fucking stupid to defend a dictatorship, because it's "Anti American"?

How hard is that to understand?
Do you support blatant lies being told and double standards applied to the country? I'm not even a tankie and it's worth defending against that so that we can accurately criticize the way the country is run.
What you've said is mostly true but mainstream imperialist media still insist on publishing fabrication after sensationalist fabrication.