Labor vouchers seem like a good idea, but I can't really judge them without some idea of how much shit would cost...

Labor vouchers seem like a good idea, but I can't really judge them without some idea of how much shit would cost. I think of wanting to get a gaming console or something, and I would assume that lots of hours of labor go into producing one. If you still want people to be able to buy things worth many hours of labor, but you also don't want labor vouchers to accumulate too much, you have a problem depending on what you decide "too much" is.
Has anyone calculated or estimated the hours of labor necessary to make some basic commodities that we have now?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_benefit_transfer
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Why the fuck would we produce intentionally dumbed down and proprietary PCs under communism?

I was trying to think of a good that takes a long time to produce, and it was the first thing that came to mind. Fuck off
You can only engage in sexual activities with your state assigned gf in communism

You are correct about this, this is why labor vouchers are an outdated concept. In the days of Marx, buying luxury items someone needed to save up for wasn't a thing for most people, but since the establishment of the consumer culture after World War II, people actually save up for specific items, make saving plans, etc. - labor vouchers would expire so you can never save up over a longer amount of time for something that's rather scarce.

There are tons of other reasons to be against labor vouchers in 2017, mostly because of the rise of qualitative work over quantitative work, the problematic of the complete dominance of the breadwinner of the family over his relatives, or the bureaucratic monster that would be required to manage the voucher system.

Reported

So free or equitable distribution of PCs?

Are there any widely discussed alternatives to labor vouchers?

Winging it?

How do you distribute something equitable when there is not enough for everybody? The reason there is still money in Marxist-Leninist states is so people can actually save up for a car, if they choose to do so.

For what purpose? In the digital age of blockchain there's no reason why they'd have to as we'd always be able to link the voucher with that person's labor. If a bank can keep track of my debt, and even sell it and I can never ever get rid of it without paying it off I'm sure we can come up with a way to bind vouchers to someone's account.

I don't know, and I think it's not a relevant discussion anyway. When you have production for use money basically becomes labor vouchers anyway, just with no expiration and no transferability.


Well that's what Marx suggested. I agree, this is outdated.

'WITH transferability

Webm related.
I wanna see some alternatives to vouchers people.

why don't we use boipussy as currency? I'm sure they will be more than willing to be used in such a way

Maybe instead of labor vouches being like money where you have an amount that is spendable, they'd function more like military or retirement benefits. In the US if you work X years in the military, you become entitled to X number of benefits and discounts for life. Just by working you'd be entitled to a game system or whatever form of entertainment you wanted. Not everyone will want the same things, and I think it's an exercise in futility to try to quantify every object with an exact worth and make sure everyone gets exactly equally valuable things. In a true Marxist society it wouldn't really matter, I'd be satisfied so I wouldn't have to worry about some dude who has an xbox and I don't, because I didn't want one and could have one if I did. I think some on the left get too caught up in being mad that porkies have a lot of stuff over being mad that they have that stuff at the expense of others.

Boipuci is invaluable

There's no reason to have this.

It's to try and avoid this effect

Couldn't we make Labor vouchers in to cards like we do with food stamps in the US?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_benefit_transfer

Well duh, everything would be electronic. Perhaps there would be something like a cheque also for remote areas/traveling services (ie. It's redeemed by the holder once they're back on the network to withdraw the amount from the givers vouchers)

Then what's the point? You can as well just keep money then. The whole point of labor vouchers is to have no accumulation.

No interpersonal trade is also the point though

Mutual credit is only thing I'm aware of. It's tricky to explain but for the labour you do you get credit and with that credit you purchase goods or services. You can go into debt but the debt doesn't have to be paid back to anyone specific just society in general.

0.

The primary feature of labor vouchers isn't anything to do with a 1:1 correspondence between labor time and compensation.


Time expiration isn't a defining characteristic either

Labor vouchers are distinguished solely by the fact that they can only be spent once, and are then immediately destroyed.

labor vouchers are just money and should be burned because they are just as useless

You realize that money accumulation happens in a lot more ways than you scraping your wages together and most of the time, the massive amounts of monetary accumulation are money begetting money rather than labor begetting money.

Not to mention that the fact that vouchers are redeemed rather than exchanged like money has massive consequences on the economy.


Except that this means that there can be nothing produced and claimed that costs more than however long your labor voucher expiration date lasts, and in a more practical sense, however much you can save after the costs of living

The whole point of labour vouchers is so it doesn't circulate in the economy and grow back even bigger, like a blood-sucking vampire.


Dumb liberal.

what a surprise

I kind of like the idea of 'energy credits.' It'd take a lot of work to translate the 'value' of every form of labor, but it'd also provide a means to take into account the expenditure of energy resources like oil or coal within the productive process. Goods that are the most energy- or labor-intensive would be priced higher, incentivizing efficiency and disincentiving waste.

...

I think you will find that there is less labor in things than you think, and there would be less under socialism due to automation. Think of how many units a factory puts out in a day. As for an alternative, I think this idea of 'labor credits' is interesting, although I don't understand it completely. revleft.space/vb/threads/200014-Labor-credits-Frequently-Asked-Questions
The idea works on consumer goods being free use while labor credits given for labor would be able to put towards use of MOP for projects you are interested in. Don't count on my explanation though. Oh and, none of the pictures in there make sense at all so don't even look a them.

Energy value is a generalization of Labour value because it includes work done by machines and also, when it comes to labour it can include the energy expended to train that labourer (university studies and the like).

So when it comes to hard-to-quantify things, like the work of an artist or a game programmer, when evaluating their work-hour you can sum the expenses of their education in the field as a rough approximation (Of course you'd also need to take into account the quality of their product, which would probably come from demand of the public).


By having the vouchers expire, you can find out how much the whole population consumes in a year and then plan production accordingly in the next one. If there were vouchers left which weren't used, you print less of them next year and tone down production of goods; if the total supply of vouchers ran out before the end of the year, you print more vouchers and increase production of goods where needed (you don't just print more or less vouchers, that would be the same shit that we have now and causes financial crashes. The total quantity of vouchers should reflect the total amount of consumption at any time as closely as possible).

Wouldn't it be much easier to simply track unspent voucher`s once per year? Assuming digital vouchers.

Well I shott my cock to OP's pic lmfao

What do you mean by tracking? Tracking individual people's transactions isn't really to my taste, I like privacy. It also seems more complicated. What I suggested (or what Technocracy Inc. devised a century ago) is to simply count all the vouchers that have been turned in at a year's end. You subtract that from the total amount of vouchers that were printed/emitted (ofc in our age they would be digital) and you get the amount of unspent vouchers.

Accounting in labour cost already does cover labour that goes into machines producing a product (you estimate the amount of products the machine helps making over its life-time and divide the machine cost by that number and add that to the per-unit price of the product). What it doesn't cover is natural resources. They are either treated as free (aside from the labour needed to extract them, of course) or get a fixed value by administrative decision. The amount to be used can be also fixed in physical terms by an administrative decision.

….. is this come kind of elaborate false flag? If so I can't see the angle you are taking Holla Forumsyp 7.5/10

You are right, my bad. Beside extraction, the energy cost of natural resources should include externalities: the environmental damage they cause, the displacement of people or the disturbance of the peace of their towns and villages (things that capitalism doesn't give a shit about currently).

What exactly is so bad about saving labor vouchers?

Well obviously there would have have to be some kind of system in place for larger purchases but it would be easy to just pay for say a car in installments rather than as a lump sum. I'm not even claiming that expiring vouchers is the only way to do things but I can see for reasons behind it (in addition to this it's potentially problematic to allow a huge wealth disparity to exist where some people are living hand to mouth and others are saving huge amounts). I do see it as an issue that it could spur pointless consumption but culture could be changed perhaps to the point where it's considered noble to give your remaining vouchers to whatever public projects when you don't need them rather than a waste.

That makes no sense. Labour vouchers are not something you trade for products.

But they are? Only way they differ from money is they are time labour based value and when you buy a product with them the people that receive it cant reuse it so it can't be accumulated in huge mass.

Value is always labour time based. And money is an expression of time labour.

As for labour vouchers, they're closer to an ID card than from money. Every worker has just one labour voucher (per week, month, year, whatever) and does not trade it.

Money has it's value from debt. That's why population growth is constantly pushed because the economy will collapse without it even though it's just going to anyway.

It's more comparable to food stamps.

That's just stupid if you were only allowed to keep one at a time because it means they can't save up for something big they want and have to pick between eating and getting clothes. Do you want to make people poorer ? It's better as a system with an account.

What don't you understand in "labour vouchers are not traded"? Not for food, not for clothes, not for anything.

It shouldn't be. That basically means people would be stuck with set hours though. What about people that want to work odd jobs all the time?

What do you mean?

Because of surplus, you dummy. You don't want people saving up all their labour vouchers and becoming labour capitalists, or imagine a bunch of people living like kings and then conspiring to obtain a whole year's worth of whatever necessary commodity (or a big chunk) and then doing black market shit.

Like let's say I and ten of my mates hoard ten years of labour each and then go and buy all the booze or Playstations or whatever in my governmental region and then anyone who wants that stuff has to pay us in sexual favour s or give us labour vouchers at twice the cost.

The amount of work you do has to equal the value of the voucher. To reach that value you always have to do a constant set amount of work. If you go under maybe you don't get the voucher or you get it late or maybe you do get it but are being compensated for work you didn't do. If you go over you dont get compensated for the extra hours. If it's just a card that basically says "I work so give me stuff" with a fixed value that cant exceed a certain amount is nonsense because that has no way to account for individual variances of working habits.

Another problem is you can't do things like give some of your voucher to some kid to buy some candy. You can't have some friend buy groceries for you with your voucher when you're busy with something else. If they do it with their own they dont have enough for themselves and you can't pay him vouchers back you would have to buy groceries for him but still don't have time to.

Self-sufficient communities using emerging technologies, clean energy and recycling. Not every community will be equally wealthy. But everyone is better off in the long run.
If additional materials are necessary they can be distributed using a quota system. Perhaps with every community having "shares" in specific enterprise.
If people still want to trade antiquities and (non-digital) art, they should just go for it. I think it's silly to hoard them outside of museums and exhibitions, but it doesn't affect me negatively if people exchange things like that.

I'm not confident though that commodity production can be rooted out completely without turning over control to non-human entities. But it can be dialed back a lot.


You can still accumulate goods and materials, and then trade them through non-official channels. It's not a solution.

I don't think a single worker could ever save up enough credits to buy the means of production, offer people wages, and advertise (propaganda). This worker would have to compete with products being produced by corporate sized international co-ops who don't have profits in mind. Maybe the capitalist could pull it off if he saved every single credit he's ever earned, but at best his low-scale business wouldn't be sustainable and wouldn't last very long. And that's assuming people would want to work underneath him in a class-conscious socialist society. This worker would literally have to some be some sort of alien creature who has the ability to make a device with very little materials, that can somehow can produce more energy than what he puts into it.

More concerned with black markets and market gaming than mere accumulation.

Nope. The reason modern writers sometimes use the singular form instead of labour notes when talking about an individual is that they think of it as something similar to a credit card. Different individuals can have different budgets on their cards from working different amounts of hours per month.

You don't understand: there's no "value of the voucher".

I was just going by what seemed to be implied since I noticed there isnt a total agreement on how labour vouchers should work. I don't see a reason not to make it a system like a credit card where you have an account aside from maybe privacy concerns and what I brought up about other people using it with your person wouldn't be possible it seems from what some people describe.


You're still using it as a form of exchange basically. .

Go back to the 19th century and stay there.

paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/real-problems-of-socialism-and-some-answers/

Absolutely not.

If you do work, you are awarded a voucher you can present to others for a limited amount of time. Said voucher entitles you to the entirety of the produced goods, provided the community collectively agrees that it's a good idea.
This is the only way labor vouches make sense as not "totally not money with another name, guys".

No. You can't transfer between people and you can't obtain MOP with them, so you can't become a capitalist. Pretty big dif.