Alternative currency

What "automated productivity system"?

And the way you evaluate work doesn't matter to what a labour voucher is anyway.

Well when it comes to manufacturing or shelf stocking or something it's quite possible to measure automatically.

Ok.

See, people will still have debates in communism and this is typically one of these.

Still though none of this explains how mutual credit and labour vouchers differ. I mean I know they are different but they seem to work almost exactly the same from what I know of it.

Isn't mutual credit a form of trade?

It's kind of like a communal IOU system. Instead of having to pay back a specific person you can pay back to anyone to set your credit back to 0 again for balance.

What happens if my credit is not 0 then?

I should have been a bit more clear you trade goods and services and it's kept track of on an account

It starts at 0 and can go up or down including negative numbers. If your debt owed is too high I assume people dont trust doing things for you as much.

Yeah so it's trade, plain and simple.

There is no trade with central planning and labour vouchers.

But you do work you get paid with a labour voucher / mutual credit and then you spend that labour voucher / mutual credit and no longer have it till you do more work. See what I mean on it being similar? They function almost the same. The only difference seems to be what happens after it is spent but it seems minor.

Lel!!

What made you think I implied that? Dont both labour vouchers and mutual credit both work with a pricing system?

Ididnt precisely quoted OP, but rather the idea that some people think labour vouchers are not money

Oh okay. But labour vouchers do function different from money in that they can not be accumulated.

So basically labour vouchers make it so you can only profit from work you did not from the selling of a product. In the case of selling a service I suppose work and product overlap though which is about where my knowledge stops at. I dont know who provides or regulates these vouchers. .

Money, apart from a method of determining prices when exchanging commodities, serves as a method for accounting, this is part of its use value, as it is a commodity

Then it is easy to understand how a firm would still use labour vouchers as a method for accounting, perhaps not the physical voucher, but the information it can provide, to later on demand a resupply of goods, in exactly the same way a capitalist firm would use money to demand new goods

I dont see why because there is no profit in selling of goods only the labours value. Without profit from selling goods you cant have supply and demand run pricing, wouldn't you? I see labour vouchers as basically something that just is a proof of work. It's not perfect but what else could you do if you're not in a world of total post-scarcity? I dont see anything that would suggest one cant price control through central planning with labour vouchers

What is your definition of profit? How and where is it applied? Surplus value? Growth? Capability to invest and expand?

I would arguee all of these can exist under a labour voucher economy, even the idea of a politburo keeping your surplus value

If a firm uses profits to expand, then there is no difference, using the data they could demand to the authority for expansion, same to invest in new tech to reduce the SNLT, if the surplus goes to the buro, then you are getting exploited.

You still have supply and demand, what if no one exchanges labour vouchers in your store?, What if you overproduce and dont want it to go stale?

Proof of work are the commodities, you manufactured them, otherwise they would still be raw materials, i feel that a better solution would be to put them on an ebay-like site, where you engage in barter, there would be no money, as its up to both of the parties involved to come up with a deal, and it would end commodity fetishism, because I couldmexchange with people I have positive feelings with or with someone I want to meet, or even to better a relationship,instead of focusing solely on the commodity and its price

Lets say the person you want to trade with doesnt want what you manufactured, next day you could then manfacture something else, eliminating alienation

Surplus value i guess

How is expansion and innovation exploitation when you make your fair share and if prices are kept at proper amounts?

I didnt consider overproduction but cant production be controlled by the resources managed?

But if you have some hmm lets call it "Barterbay" wouldnt the winner always be whoever has the most resources or products to trade with of highest labour value or highest subjective value? This means people with the most resources and personal property benefit most. How is that not like capitalism?

No you do not get paid a labour voucher and you do not spend it. No one deprived, not even society as a whole, deprived himself from a labour voucher to give you yours, and no one else will use it after you.

Imagine you are entitled to 1L of milk / day / child. You have 3 children, so you will get a "children voucher" certifying you are entitled to 3L of milk / day. You won't be paid this children voucher every day, nor will you spend it. There is no trade happening here.

not him
So it's like the rationing books we had in Britain in ww2? where you got a little book and you gave in a stamp thing that was only redeemable for the good on the thing. And you couldn't trade books or stamps with other people.
Do you think a black market would popup for people who don't use a certain resource alocated to them and trade it with another person who also has a allocated resource they don't use? Like say I had 2L of milk I redeem, but I don't like milk, whoever my neighbour who has 5kg of potatoes he doesn't want wants my 2L of milk offers to swap them. I know with know money to act as a value and no mediator we couldn't have a market of x kg of potatoes = x L of milk but you couldn't stop people swapping goods.And then what about if peole horded goods until the supply of them dropped for some reason of another and them started swapping them for more than they could have gotten before. What if I horde say tins of peaches but then a bad harvest one year mean that everybody has less allocated tins of peaches so before where I could swap a single tin of peaches for 500g of potatoes, who's supply hasn't gone down , I now can get 700g for a tin. And what about a good as a mediator, like how in prisons they use cigarettes was a form of currency to trade?

I see little difference here. You are given something in reward for you working and you can get things from it. That is still trading something. What if you dont want milk? You sound like you're just describing food stamps.

Something like this already goes on. In some areas (i think it was Chicago) people are buying or stealing Tide detergent and using it to buy drugs with.

Well if no one keeps surplus value then i dont see how it would be exploitation, some orthodox marxists arguee that the law of value is an exploitative entity, but unless we have an alternative, i dont see it happening, also

Production could be controlled, but again you are controlling along the lines of supply and demand

Its not capitalism because there is no private ownership of the MoP, or rent, or interest, or a state and so on

Yes, thats why rationing and labour vouchers are a dumb idea, they dont do away with the law of value

Why is supply and demand necisarily bad in a non capitalist system? Until we have a way to measure all resource availability globally there isnt much choice. It's either supply and demand or central planning but central planning only makes viable sense for staple foods and resources s there are far too many things to centrally plan for to put a price and supply on these days.

Then why in few past posts you compared labour vouchers function to money and say it would work same as capitalism?

No, what I am saying that precisely because we cannot work outside supply and demand, there is no reason to have central planning or labour vouchers

Labour vouchers have the same use values as money, just because theynare dstroyed in physicql form doesnt mean you destroy the data they provide

I suppose so which is why after I found out about mutual credit i found it a bit better. although labour vouchers have the advantage to not have a debt based value so they arent subject to inflation I would think.

Yes.

Well you couldn't indeed. But more importantly you wouldn't.

No.

Except potatoes and milk are not scarce. You have all the potatoes you need, and he has all the milk he needs.

I won't need to stop people swapping goods, because themselves won't need to swap goods in the first place. People don't wanna trade for the sake of trading.

Again: people don't hoard for the sake of hoarding.

Society itself will hoard tins of peaches so that everyone has enough every year, even when there is a bad harvest.

Except you already have potatoes for free anyway. And no one needs your peaches.

No it's not. Look at the example I gave you. Do you trade your children?

No. Central planning is a way to make supply meet demand. "Supply and demand" isn't a synonym for "market".

but they have value because people want them. If a guy really likes peaches but can't get any because he's used all his allocated ones why wouldn't he want to swap something he has lots of, potatoes, for the peaches. You can't just say there are infinite peaches. His need for peaches come from himself valuing them highly and having none of them. The same with potatoes, what if I really like potatoes and have used all mine up so want his.

You're basically exchanging work for food with a voucher as a mid way is what it seems like to me.

I suppose so.

This isn't what value is.

Neither can you eat an infinity of peaches. I repeat: peaches are not scarce.

You haven't answered my question : in the example I gave you, do you exchange your children for milk?

they have a value due to the demand, while there is no mediator like money to give a fixed value. Peaches could be scares though, what if ,like is happening with bananas, a fungus spreads that leads to massive crop failure of peach trees and suddenly nobody can get peaches but I have a few tins I saved. There is a supply, my small stockpile, there is a demand, this guy who really wants peaches, and he has offered an exchange of goods I have a demand for because I ran out and used all my vouchers, potatoes, so how is this trade impossible?

Oh yeah? When was the last time you ran into a store and didn't find any?

that doesn't mean it can't happen. Like I said there are types of fungus that kill trees, this could cause a fuck load of peach trees to die, if this fell under the current demand then we would have a shortage

No (aside from me not having children) but some people do that sort of thing

Indeed.

A fungus can kill almost all the peach trees so that almost no peaches are produced. And you can happen to have hoard a whole lot of tins of peaches (although no more that you could physically consume during this period). And another fungus can happen to kill all the potatoes. And potatoes can happen to be the exact thing you crave for. And you can happen to know someone who also hoarded potatoes for no reason (why the fuck didn't you hoard potatoes yourself in the first place, by the way?).

And feudal aliens can invade the Earth and become our landlords tomorrow, making this discussion pointless.

In 2016 there was a peach shortage for the north east.

A good thing you hoarded some before in order to sell them then. Oh wait, you didn't?

Why are we not at post scarcity already?
I mean for fuck sake people this is the final stretch, let's just organize a regime and finish this shit off.

There is enough food to feed the planet but the supply moves from poor countries to more prosperous countries from being bought up.

Bump.

Still havent had anyone directly answer. It seems not many are as familiar with mutual credit as labour vouchers here.

Yes, labour vouchers are currency. The insane mental gymnastics in this thread of those advocating they aren't should be all the proof you need.