On labour vouchers

probably more than to fuck yo mama

labor vouchers abolish the commodity form, dunno why leftcoms dont like them

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rood

no they don't, production for exchange still exist under labour vouchers.
in fact, labour vouchers couldn't work at all since transferability will spontaneously emerge if automation of work isn't high enough to abolish law of value, and if it is, no market would be needed at all.

labour vouchers are just utopian memes.

bump

in order to be a commodity a thing needs to have an exchange value, i.e. the ratio at which you exchange it with other goods. Under a labor voucher system theres no interchangeability since you cant exchange commodities for other commodities, or commodities for vouchers. only vouchers -> commodities. Therefore LVs do abolish the commodity form.
citation needed. If everybody's labor voucher is tied to them as a person, how can transferability 'emerge'? I mean, someone can steal my account information just like my credit card can be stolen under capitalism, but that wont be the norm. Every labor voucher account/card will have security measures obviously like 2 factor authentication and minimum 12 character alphanumeric PINs.
Labour voucher scheme is not a market because it has no circuit of capital M-C-M', read marx. Labour voucher 'market' is a 'simulacrum' market or artificial market, it is not technically a market in the Marxist sense, nor are labor vouchers currency because you cant invest or reinvest them into a circuit of capital and extract surplus value. They are only directly convertible (one way) into goods and services, they are simply a method of allocating each person a share of the social surplus.

in order to get the vouchers in the first place you need to work, and since work is what makes commodities, commodities, you can tell it's indistinguishable from capitalism in that way (commodities are still exchanged by commodities).

it's all about automation; transferability will emerge simply because to accumulate labour vouchers will simply increase the wealth of the ones who accumulate them.
this will eventually create a ruling class, and a working class which sees the benefits of licking the boots of the ruling class. obviously there will be workers who won't be beneficiated from this. but it doesn't matter because the bootlickers will be spreaded homogeneously enough to keep the masses subjugated.

now you could argue that this scenario couldn't happen because people will simply lynch the parasites who accumulate labour vouchers.

but that would only be the case if people didn't see more revenueable to lick the ruling class boots as to prevent the labour voucher system from decaying, that's why a labour voucher system will only be possible once we got levels of automation of work high enough……………or wouldn't it?

the answer to the second question is probably not, because if we get rid of scarcity, it will mean that there wouldnt be necessary to have market systems (i argumented why labour vouchers are markets above) at all.

you could force people to use labour vouchers as well as to force them not to accumulate them (this can be currently achieved, with cripto currency-like mechanisms), in a totalitarian, barracks-war-communism, not caring if the automation of work is high enough to abolish law of value, but it would only mean inefficiences.
who knows, maybe this kind of scenario really IS better than current capitalism, but im not sure.

In order for humanity to consume stuff, humans need to produce, therefor any social order where humans produce things is capitalism.

Obv. the labour vouchers will have an expiry date, you can't just horde them forever, long after the date that the commodities you produced with that labor have rotted away or been consumed. So there will be a natural cap on saving.

To quote marx from Critique of the Gotha programme:
Human beings work under any system, by that logic the only true communism is FALC, if humans do any work its by definition capitalism!
By saying work you are being somewhat disingenous, first of all you do not necessarily have to 'work' to get the labor vouchers as there we be some level of redistribution for people who cant or wont work, the non producing part of the population such as the elderly, students, disabled etc. As well as public services like health, etc. Conceivably this could include even things like housing, etc. What portion of labor would be devoted to social spending and what to private consumption is a matter to be decided democratically.

Its not labor which is the commodity, but labor POWER, the ability to perform work, the idea that under capitalism, labors use-value is its ability to produce more value than it costs to hire it, ie. exploitation where surplus value comes from. Under an LV system the price of each commodity will be exactly equal to the labor time needed to produce it. Labor is therefore not treated as a commodity in the same way it is under capitalism.