An idea for a better labor voucher

Or actually, a labor card.
The basic idea: Money ought to be abolished completely.
People are instead given electronic ID cards which have different "tiers" according to their work, situation, special needs, etc.

The lowest unemployed, single person card could be, for example, tier A. They can receive a predetermined number of basic goods from "socialist stores". They could enter into queues for larger goods, for example, computers. The lowest tier would obviously get the lowest priority in queues etc. The amount and quality of basic goods would also increase with the tier.

Other urls found in this thread:

amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R18RF5EQUXARX3/
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch20_01.htm)
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm)
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm)
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
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By working, you could get a higher tier, according to what your job is, how demanding it is, etc. If one has special needs, the information is loaded on the card and they get what they need for it. There would obviously be a separate tier for disabled people who can't work, etc, so they won't be punished for their situation. There could be a separate tier for families, so they can get a larger amount of goods at a time.

Due to the cards being electronic, hoarding should be easily detectable. If someone gets a suspiciously large amount of items, they can be interrogated about it (to prevent a black market from forming).
This tracking would also make it easier to know what the demand for each type of things generally is.

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why not just give everything away for free.

unemployed people are not working class and should not be protected under socialism. in socialism, such as the ussr, having a job is a guarantee and therefore anyone whos unemployed is simply a leech who deserves no help from their community.

I guess it depends on the current situation, really
if its a really developed economy and a lot of the work available isn't particularly crucial to the wellbeing society, it should be fine to merely encourage working
(besides, people would surely want to work anyway to get themselves into a higher tier)

There are definitely unemployed who society should provide for

If a worker worked extra long or extra hard or extra good, they could be given "good worker points". These points could be used to get special niceties, such as sex in a brothel or a nice dinner.

employment is pretty vague
what if i'm thinking about something, studying something, and I can't be arsed to 'get a job' because I'm doing my own shit? then i would need everyone to hop off my dick and 'pay my bills'. that's not a leech it's being to smart to toil for someone else. I think many of us are unemployable NEETs because we're too smart for the socalled jobs and education that are provided to us by the socalled free market.

The infantile logic at the heart of it all.

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the individual should produce something for the community, and give back by being a functioning member of society, not necessarily a factory worker. studying, or training count as giving back. if they dont work, but are an artist or something of the sort that produces something that the people take in, they deserve protection. someone who gives nothing, literal leeches, deserves the bullet.

can it buy me love?

fuck off Holla Forums

It's called /commun/ism not hyper-individualism. Were you looking for the liberal board and came here accidentally? Maybe /liberty/?

Fuck off communism is for the abolishment of work

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ayayay we have a brainlet on our hands.

im not pol, i just think that people who are given workers cards should be workers.

the point of the proposed worker's card is precisely this: you don't work? you only get basic goods (what these are depends on what/how much the society is producing). volunteer to do some work? you'll be given tasks and you'll get upgraded and given more or better stuff according to your work (amount, how hard it is, etc).

I don't think there's any reason to deny basic necessities from people who don't have work. what if they're actually unemployed because of a mental condition or something and they just haven't been diagnosed.

like sure there can be a situation where everyone should be forced to work, but I don't think that is a situation a developed economy is very likely to meet (maybe in war or during some big big crisis)

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That's not an idea for better labour vouchers; that's the original marxist idea for labour vouchers.

I thought those were supposed to be exchanged for goods? So kinda different, with these, the idea would be that there's really 0 exchange, no saving vouchers up etc, but I suppose partly 'cause you didn't exactly have digital technology back then.

This is "kill the homeless people because they are useless"-tier of logic. You're going to depopulate most of the industrialized world in the future using this logic, as technology advances more and more products are being automated and less human input is required.
End goal is to abolish the class, not glorify it.

You forgot your porky flag

This "idea", if it can be even called that, sounds pretty arbitrary. What sort of computation do you have in mind, and if you don't have any idea about that, then you don't have anything at all here. That people with kids should get more consumption points (or whatever you want to call that) if they work more hours or have kids is already part of the vanilla proposal.

How about we just let the communities produce whatever they need and distribute the goods they produce as they see fit?

It bothers me that there are supposed leftists here that parrot the same idealist non sense from liberals. They also like to add an authoritarian edge, as if a socialist society would have to deal with capitalist unemployment "problems".

If you people just read Cockshott this autistic thread wouldn't exist.

that would obviously need some information about the consumption, production and other acquisition of goods inside this socialist systsem

once you know how many people you have and how much you can usually produce/distribute, just allocate an amount of everything to every tier (taking into account the approximate amount of people in said tiers)
bigger things can have queues (like, maybe you can distribute 10 computers a month inside a certain region - just make a queue of the people who need it and prioritize the higher tiers if necessary)

if there's a huge amount of, lets say, potatoes and t-shirts, there doesn't need to be a real "limit" to how much each person can acquire those (unless some people start hoarding them)

And what happens when a group in one tier has an over-supply of something and an under-supply of something else, and it's the other way around in another tier? (You don't solve this by saying that one group has more allocated of everything than another, as the differences in demand can still work out like that.) How about loops: Group A has what group B wants and group B has what group C wants and group C has what group A wants. You haven't thought about any of that. You have no formula, no criterion, nothing.

No, those weren't.

Or how about you just provide a standard rate of vouchers for working, plus bonuses based on the difficulty or danger of the work?

Summarize, please?

Could I take these labor vouchers as line of credit. My projects take many months to complete.

What project?

Explain the meaning of the word "money", please.

What will happen if people will attempt to barter their goods?

Soviet Union never happened: the post

If society recognizes your occupation as useful, then it doesn't bother you. However, if your "something" is some nonsense nobody take seriously, then you get persuaded (with labour camps, if necessary) to get a real job.

Seriously?

They won't.

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amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R18RF5EQUXARX3/

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Tankies confirmed for not being Marxists.

I'm sorry, is this not what socialism seeks to eliminate? Are transfers of ownership not inherently reactionary?

Yes, and this is what Marx stresses out: in communism, every transfer of ownership goes hand in hand with the destruction of its object, aka consumption.

> >Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products;
This means that you do not automatically own whatever you produce. Products go to society, and then it distributes whatever was produced.

And here we have said distributed products. In the ownership.

So why exactly can't individuals start exchanging those products?

Quote, please.

Because they "own" those products only insofar as they consume them:
As a consequence, they have no product left to exchange.

The bit you quoted does not suggest that.

This means that private property - means of production - cannot be owned by individuals (or social means of consumption - whatever meaning you attribute to it). Marx is arguing against Lassallean "co-ops are Socialism" here, pointing out that only means of consumption can be personal property.

He is not suggesting that the chair you've got somehow bursts into flames the second you get it - and you are unable to exchange it for a potted plant your neighbour has at some later point.

Why can't we use the smartphone? In country we can use them to buy the things with the smartphone now.

Read Marx, moron. Critique of the Gotha Program: "In communism, prostitution will be legal and hookers will explode after sex." Guess you feel pretty silly now, huh?

Indeed: he is suggesting that you won't own that chair.

And yet this is exactly what he is suggesting. Marx never made a private/personal property distinction.

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Because this ( ) is not shitposting?

How can anybody read this:
and conclude from it that Marx didn't make the private/personal property distinction is beyond me. If you think "means of consumption" has another meaning than consumer products, you are wrong. It's Konsumtionsmittel in German, same word as in Kapital when Marx talked about industry producing means of production, Produktionsmittel, on the one hand, and stuff to be directly consumed by people, Konsumtionsmittel, on the other. The word direct, like the words short, fast, dark, etc. has a relative meaning of course, depending on the context it appears in. The utility of Konsumtionsmittel to people is direct in comparison to the utility of means of production, so Konsumtionsmittel aren't just things to be instantly used up like a quickly expiring salad, but also durable consumer products.

Kill yourself

Complete total horseshit.

Obviously. As I explained earlier, what matters here is the fact that "ownership" only applies to these products that are destined to be consumed, and only insofar as they are destined to be consumed. This is true for individual means of consumption (of which Marx speaks here) as well as for means of production, which are "owned" by workers only insofar as they use them. There's no distinction here.

It's a distinction which amounts to exactly the same as the private/personal distinction, you just play a fruity word game. Great contribution, m8.

Its almost like you read nazi germany's economic policy but renamed the money?

Absolutely not. The means of production are consumed just as much as the individual means of consumption. There's no distinction here. In fact, there is no distinction between this and that category of products (the kind of which a distinction between "personal" and "private" property belongs to), but instead, a social relation that gradually acquires the distinctive traits of property only insofar as its object is consumed, ie only insofar as this social relation dissolves itself. In the communist society, there will be no ownership (other than that of society as a whole) in any meaningful sense of the word: this is what Marx is stressing out here.

False. Consumer products are acquired on an individual basis via labour vouchers. There is no analogy for obtaining means of production.
Yeah, the famous philosopher Rafiq Marx. Let go.

Wait, you are saying that Marx made a distinction between "personal" and "private" property along the line of: "if it's acquired via labour vouchers then it's personal, otherwise it's private"? That's what you mean?

?

You wish.

You cannot obtain means of production via LVs. I have no idea how you come to the conclusions, if they can be called that even, that you present here. Would you mind telling me what of Marx you actually read and how you got yourself into this trainwreck of an argument? Is there some leftcome circlejerk where you got your ideas from, perhaps? Given that it's kinda offtopic, feel free to make a new thread about it. (You have to understand though that you are completely wrong in what you present here.)

I cannot get a computer via labour vouchers?

Anyway, why don't you tell me exactly where, according to you, Marx drew the line between "personal" and "private" property?

This is just facism with labour vouchers. You're not removing class you're glorifying it.

I think mutual credit is better than labour vouchers.

So you don't know what people usually mean when they talk about the means of production. May I ask you how old you are, and what made you interested in communism? (I'm assuming for the sake of my own sanity that you aren't an adult and this is very new for you) Well, of course you are right that there are many things people can individually own in this society, people who we don't refer to as capitalists for owning these things, things that are affordable and used to make things or repair things, for example a screwdriver. This is not what people usually mean when they talk about the means of production. They almost always have in mind tools and machinery that are out of reach for the majority of individuals, financially speaking. In Capital Volume 2, Marx makes the distinction between two types of industry along the following lines:
>II. Articles of Consumption, commodities having a form in which they pass into the individual consumption of the capitalist and the working-class.
(emphasis mine, marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch20_01.htm)
Marx didn't write a detailed plan about the communist future, but a sketch of this future (featuring labour vouchers) can be pieced together from various passages, most well-known is his letter with the critique of the SPD's Gotha Program. But there are also places in Capital V1 and V2:
(marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm)
(marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm)
Do you need help with anything else?

Yes, a fucking answer to the question you keep avoiding:

isnt this just money with less freedom?
what if you mow someones lawn, how do you bump their labor card for this service?

And the relevant part of Critique of the Gotha Program is here:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
>>2303030 >>2303214
Would you mind giving an actual example of production and consumption under communism that is both 1. in line with the quotations of Marx in C1 & C2 & CotGP shown to you in this thread and 2. divergent from the meaning of the usage of labour vouchers as Daniel De Leon, the Group of International Communists of Holland, Allin Cottrell, etc. (and I guess everybody in this thread aside from you) have understood it? Do you think Marx meant groups will rent factories with their individual labour vouchers or what? Did you read that in some super-secret text by Marx that only you know of? Or do you think that I will individually obtain things in a store with my voucher points, and upon leaving, a gang of masked thugs will beat me up and rip the stuff out of my hands and the leader will take off his mask and it will be Karl Marx and he'll shout: "There is no personal property in communism, you Crypto-Proudhonian shitheel! Read Rafiq." You know, all that reckoning about stuff in labour time sounds like a lot of needless overhead if in the end nobody will care about it.

If I can individualy only obtain things made in work-time in proportion to the work-time I give (and there are deductions, even), it follows by simple math that I as an individual cannot obtain things that require more human time to produce than an individual could possible give in an entire life. Do you understand that? Do you think such things, for instance a nuclear power plant, will entirely cease to exist? These things will continue to exist, and you won't be able to obtain them with your individual consumption budget. There are edge cases, where it comes to things that aren't cheap tools, but one can imagine that a few people living an acetic life without kids and working long hours could afford those things if costed in work-time, where society might still have to interfere to prevent the formation of something resembling the M-C-M' cycle of capitalism.

Now tell me: Where did you get your, to put it diplomatically, creative point of view from when it comes to these matters? It was via Rafiq memery, wasn't it?

Or an ascetic life, even.

1) I've been asking you one simple question several times now: exactly where, according to you, did Marx drew the line between "personal" and "private" property? You wrote yet another 30-lines post and still managed no to answer it I the slightest.
2) Where did you get that stupid idea that "groups will rent factories with their individual labour vouchers"?
3) You confuse merely obtaining things with getting property. No later than last week, I obtained a new computer for my office; I have the exclusive right to use its I please, and yet I do not own it: it belongs to my boss.
4) Marx makes the labour vouchers certify the "amount of labour", not solely the labour time.
5) Who the fuck is this "Rafiq"? Is that some e-celeb you have a feud with?

Where did he not? Given that Marx was for labour vouchers, and given that it doesn't make sense to have labour vouchers if anybody can just take a consumer item you obtained that way from you without repercussions for them, which was the point of the rhetorical question repeated below, it follows.
It's a rheorical question, a concept immediately discarded, like the idea that anybody can just take your personal stuff from you, while you are getting non-rhetorically asked what your conception of labour vouchers is, narrowing down the possible set of answers. This time, have a question without sarcasm: Do you unironically have Asperger's?
>You confuse merely obtaining things with getting property. No later than last week, I obtained a new computer for my office
Child labour!
The one confused here is you, kid. You certainly do not have an exclusive right to use it if it belongs to the boss at your hypothetical job, by definition.
Yes, this may include some notion of intensity and stress, and so what? (If you believe this amounts to distinguishing different kinds of labour so that what you contribute has to correspond to the different kinds of labour going into what you consume, you are mistaken.)
A deranged person who thinks he's a Marx expert peddling the same idea you are peddling ITT. (He's also getting reposted on this board by shitposters) I haven't seen the idea espoused anywhere else, aside from right-wingers who want to make communism look bad (part three of the generic package: 1. Marx believed in the mudpie theory of prices, 2. commies killed one billion people, and 3. they will kill another billion just to take your toothbrush).

marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm
>The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
>In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
The ten measures to be taken listed in the document include abolition of private ownership of land, but do not speak of abolishing all forms of ownership.

These are measured to be taken immediately by a proletarian regime in Germany in 1848, not a roadmap to communism.

By the way, please read very carefully what is written between the two bold sentences.

*measures

You should learn how to answer a post properly.

My bad, I formulated it poorly: my question wasn't "in what text did he talk about it?" (although I've never seen anyone produce a quote about it), but "where is the line?".

Except no one said such a thing, and thus your rhetorical question falls flat. Hence my question: where did you get that stupid idea from?

It is as exclusive as I need it to be, which is exactly the point: one doesn't need to own something to use it. There are lots of other examples: a hotel room, a book from the library, etc.

The ten points are somewhat specific to what was going on in Germany at the time and what seemed sensible then, but the general outline of communism given there is less bound by a very specific time and place.

Is English your second language? It was an argument by contradiction: The point was exactly to hammer down what labour vouchers cannot be. You may have a very specific idea how labour vouchers should work, but you have been extremely evasive throughout the thread, while calling everybody else evasive, which makes that procedure of elimination necessary if there is to be any progress here. You are extremely reluctant to specify what you mean and you talk as if nobody disproving you means you win, as if innocent until proven guilty were a principle generally agreed upon to apply in such a discussion, and which is an easy winning condition you don't apply to others, of course.

Make your case. Feel free to think that labour vouchers shouldn't be used to obtain durable things or rather, only to rent them, but you will not find that recommendation in the writings of Marx.

Would this necessarily happen at the scale that it would be a problem?

I guarantee you people will create normal credit relationships under a low socialist system of labor vouchers. Somebody will ask their neighbor, coworker, friend or whatever to borrow something. That person will have started an informal credit relationship with the other, where they start evaluating what they can rely on them for. People exchange goods in the abstract in this way, etc.

But I don't think this would result in massive wealth hording, its a normal function of how people build relationships with each other that is pre-capitalist. Wealth hording comes when money can be used to buy stuff, so that getting a lot of stuff means you can exchange it for money. What I do think might happen is low level "monetary" exchanges for profit by proxy, as in people will try to use barter to get marginally more out of their vouchers by saying "hey man, I really like your juicer and I can't buy one until later this week. How much was it? 5 vouchers? Ok, what if I give you 6 vouchers worth of canned food. So you made an extra hour the next time you go food shopping!" This can result in people building accounts to assess their wealth in labor values by saying "so I exchanged this with Henry, and this with Rosa for such and such hours, and I earned this much hours, so I'm +/- 10 hours right now"

But in order for this kind of exchange to be profitable, it would be apparent to all that one person is "winning" here and another is paying above the labor market rate for a good. I also don't think it could result in significant wealth hording.

Which is pretty pointless, since no one here believes labour vouchers mean "anyone can take your stuff lol". Or, to "hammer it down": the absence of property doesn't mean anyone can take your stuff.

Here:
Or here:

You do realise this is how money appeared in the first place?

I don't think it is 1 to 1, no. I mean money arises in different ways. There are tribes that seemed to have just made money for odd reasons even though they had small populations (some tribes would even consider large objects like a religious statue to be the money, but then they'd abstractly partition the statue into bits and exchange them verbally for goods), and then you have stuff like Mesopotamian grain banking where the clergy was in charge of storing all of the grain and they had accounts with people who were depositing it, the accounts basically resembling bank accounts, and then people would trade rights to these grain accounts in exchanges, essentially making the accounts and the grain another virtual money. This is overwhelmingly what early money was, virtual money, from what I understand.

The difference though, is that the virtual money coincided with what could be an anarchic approach to the ownership of productive land or debt. Somebody who had nothing could become your debt slave by having you give them stuff in advance of them doing anything to compensate you for it, in return for their work or whatever it may be. In a labor voucher system, the thing that is strictly off limits is the means of production, which is the largest source of growth which could be traded for equity or debt. Furthermore, if you have a system in which the vouchers really are rigorously associated with a person's identity, then it is hard to trade the rights to someone's vouchers, especially if the vouchers are also associated with some limitations on what you can buy anyways. That means that everybody would be looking at a similar class of consumer goods to even build credit relationships on. You can't get enough labor voucher profits to buy a yacht, for instance, or a pool.

Just to add to this, you'd basically be doing arbitrage on people's time preference. If we assume that in a labor voucher based, socialist economy most of the goods produced are targeted for the uses of most of the people (since the new general level of purchasing power is probably going to be much more horizontal than the capitalist economy, the goods produced don't seem likely to be aimed at some theoretical labor voucher top 1%) then we could assume most stores are going to be supplying things that people could buy within a couple of months at most. That is, if you can even horde labor vouchers at all, since I've heard some suggestions that labor vouchers literally reset during every "production cycle" (however long that is). So what would be your market opportunity here? For one thing, you have to consider the fact that if you are selling expensive items to people with a high time preference, they're going to have to either be able to buy it outright with other items, or they will need very good credit. In the former case, we run into the issue of crunching people's time preference lower because they may have to give you their couch or a shit load of their food in order to buy something really nice, and that means not having a couch or most of their food. In the latter case, which is more likely, they'll treat you like a bank and say "I'll buy you stuff at the store until we are square". But, if you behave like a loan shark and do this to an exploitative degree, people have no obligation to pay you back. They can just ignore you and say they think you're abusing them, and you don't have legal recourse because you'd probably be doing something illegal at this point. These kinds of people will exist as gangsters though, and that's probably inevitable, but they have the core weakness that their wealth relies on creating predatory debt with a multitude of people, and these people can defect for their own self-interest to the law at any time and tell them that this person is racketeering. Furthermore, their predatory debt is STILL LIMITED to a smaller market of consumer goods than was available in capitalism. El Chapo can buy a mansion and attack helicopters. Socialist loan sharks can wear track suits and have 4k TVs in every room.

Marx didn't really spell this out in Critique of the Gotha Program, but my understanding is that the key difference between labor vouchers and money is that labor vouchers don't circulate. If I get some paper labor vouchers for a certain number of hours of work, and I go to the communal "store" to exchange my vouchers for some goods, you can imagine the cashier just puts my labor vouchers in the shredder after I spend them, they're for one-time use only. When I spend them they don't go to any individual or institution that can re-spend them later, including whatever state-like institution that's responsible for issuing them in the first place (remember that Marx is just talking about the first stage of communism here, not the later stage where the state is completely gone and labor vouchers are also abolished and everyone organically obeys the maxim 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need'). This would make it very difficult for anyone to amass some disproportionately huge number of labor vouchers, even if individual hoarding is permitted.

10 million hamburgers please

Means of consumption is just another word for consumer products, which includes durable products. There is no specification there or in any other quote by Marx about it that labour vouchers can only be used to things instantly consumed like a salad or to rent the durable things. You are reading something into it that isn't there.

Yes, that they do not circulate is literally said in Capital Volume Two:

It's not a question of "problem" (imo there is no problem if money are limited to consumer goods - at which point we call it labour vouchers).

Money exist to facilitate exchange. Consequently, once you get some need for exchange to happen (which is inevitable in scarcity economies), a demand for some sort of money (even as bottle-caps) will appear. While money as such might not appear, I don't see OP's attempt at abolishing consumer-"money" working as intended until after the post-scarcity.

Not really. Need for exchange creates demand for some quantifiable standard of "worth". That's all there is. Of course, exact form of exchange might differ, but don't think this warrants any attention (not for current discussion).

*twitch*

Yes. They just did things for no reason whatsoever. It's a shame it took someone barely familiar with their realities to realize that. [/SARCASM]

Probably. Which is why ways to "monetize" identity-based vouchers will develop.

Consequently, there is both a reason to avoid identity-based vouchers (which will lead to buyable pools and yachts), so as to reduce impetus on creation of uncontrolled money - just like there is a reason to go hardcore with identity-based vouchers (and have no extra-luxurious products), so as to avoid desire to acquire vouchers by extra-legal means.

Personally, I'm in favour of the former (the default stance: the less regulations is forced upon the state, the better it is), but I don't have strong opinion on the subject.

I think this means they do not circulate within Capitalist mode of production. This doesn't mean that labour vouchers don't circulate at all.

I disagree. That's a component of money, a very important one obviously, but I think money is also consciously an element of control, which is also important to the political motivation for creating it. Historically money has both had an issuer, and somebody who guarantees they will accept it as redeemable for debts (usually the issuer). I think that initially money as a virtual unit of account was more a product of necessity or efficiency, but it became a conscious political tool. Kings and other religious groups realized that control of the issuance of money meant control of an entire political-economy. If you were the issuer of the money, you could control its supply and therefore buy whatever you wanted from anybody who you forced to use the money. You could force use of the money through tax obligations or debt. The only importance I give to that is that governments can create widely circulating currencies through political power, and banks can also do so through financial power (maybe having their contractual claims to debt enforced by the law, but being below the state). Not having what is owed to you enforced by law is potentially crippling to your currency issuance, which is important for any would be virtual currency issued by a loan shark of labor vouchers.

No need to be snarky, that was a rhetorical device to say that they were odd because most tribes didn't have money. They had informal credit relationships in which they simply gave each other things, and also expected things in return. None of this was typically quantified or accounted rigorously. It was just a matter of interpersonal relationships.

They are now. See below.

I do agree that money can be used as an element of control, but such political quality is not inherent to them. It is only through actions of sufficiently developed political entity that they may acquire it - in direct measure of political power the entity wields.

Neither implies political quality.

Money had "issuer" in the sense that someone found/created the material form of exchange unit, and there was someone who would recognize some value of "money" - as a jewelry, for example (note that this happens even today: cheap gold/silver jewelry often emerges and functions as "money" in a nation that goes through hyperinflation).

Gold/silver (even more exotic units of "worth" - as cowri shells) had emerged as a nigh universal exchange method long before proper "politicially controlled money" appeared. No political entity made a decision to "create" and make it work like this. Moreover, gold/silver became this standard in no small measure because there was no way for it to be easily influenced or used as a leverage.

See example of bitcoin that proved through practice that only two things are necessary for money: scarcity and ease of use.

Consequently, I maintain that money always arise in one way only: through demand to facilitate exchange. Other functions money may have are extraneous to money as such. Even if political entity attempts to "create" money, it can't do it in any other way. It must maintain scarcity element (or hyperinflation will make issued money meaningless), and it must make issued money the "easiest to use" (usually, through creating artificial barriers that restrict use of other means of exchange).

Why would you want them to circulate though? I think the main reason Marx saw the labor voucher system as different from capitalism is that people's purchasing power is based only on their own work, not on their skill at making good deals in buying and selling commodities to others (getting rich by anticipating fluctuations in prices to buy low and sell high). I think the idea in Critique of the Gotha Program was that all goods produced would go into a communal pool (Marx calls it the 'social stock') rather than being sold by the individual workers that made them, and everyone could draw goods from the communal pool using labor vouchers issued by some central government (I assume some kind of government is the one responsible for the 'deductions' from each worker's labor vouchers that Marx talks about, with the deductions being used to pay other workers for goods and services that aren't being purchased by individuals, like replacement to worn-out means of production and public education). Note this line of Marx's in particular:

Want? It's too much of a hassle to prevent and not much of a point.

No. You are missing the crucial bit: Marxism is about abolition of Capitalism. Consequently, non-Capitalist problems are considered secondary. And exchange of consumer goods is not Capitalism.

First and foremost, you seem to be confusing minor trade between individuals and full-scale trade, that involves tons of cargo.
Secondly, that's what we (ML) call non-labour income and speculation. Train for Siberia leaves in two hours.

All goods produced via Capitalist mode of production - yes.

Or cooperatives of workers - yes.

Yes (for a given value of "government").

fix

Okay rephrasing again (i really need to sleep more): all goods produced socially.

OK, but leaving aside the question of whether the system Marx outlined in Critique of the Gotha Program would actually work well or create too many hassles, do you think he was imagining that the labor certificates would circulate? Wouldn't the ability to increase one's wealth through trade, even "minor trade between individuals", contradict his comment that "Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it"?

Are you labeling the system Marx described as still being made by "Capitalist mode of production"? If not I don't really understand how this makes sense as a response to my comment about goods going into a communal pool. And if that is what you meant, are you saying it's a wholly capitalist system, or are you saying it's some kind of hybrid with a capitalist mode of production but some other aspect being non-capitalist?

FFS, I corrected this bit twice: >>2308438

What I meant is that the production that society distributes is the one that is made via social production (i.e. industry).

OK, I didn't look past your response to me before replying. But what about my other question about whether you think Marx was imagining labor certificates circulating or not?

Apologies, but coffee-deficient posting requires careful re-reading of what was written - otherwise the horrors of Capitalist mode of production might be unleashed once more.

Just so that we are clear: the "hassle" I was talking about has no relevance to the system Marx was describing. In my opinion, the system Marx outlined in CotGP describes only things that related to social production. I.e. everything else is extraneous and not included.

No idea. Marx was never talking about things he imagined. He was very hardcore on putting only objective facts.

It is a fact that circulation of certificates within social production (i.e. exchange of labour vouchers on MoP) would mean restoration of private property (on MoP). Consequently - no circulation within social production.

However, nothing prevents circulation of labour vouchers outside of social production.

My opinion is that this is a question of tactics - it does not affect abolition of private property; consequently, the option that should be implemented is the one that will be more efficient at the time - and that Marx also treated this as such.

Nah. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch03.htm
A ticket to the theatre is destroyed when you use it. I agree with the trip poster that it's a much more important change that factories and land won't be owned by individuals than the question whether people should be stopped or restricted in directly transferring parts of their consumption budget to others, but I think it's better if that is restricted, as that makes black-market activity much more of a hassle to engage in (not impossible, forget about impossible) and the re-institution of capitalism will be less likely then. (I'm also pretty sure Marx preferred the non-circulating type of pseudo-currency for that reason.)

Rafiq is some asshole poster on revleft who roleplays as an intellectual. Holla Forums users like him because he's what they aspire to be like.

i think labor voucher idea is a good step in the right direction, though i imagine we could do something much better. we should be looking at labor vouchers(will refer to as labor$ for now on) not going towards consumer goods, but towards production. with basic multipliers for labor$ rates, people could then take these labor$'s and use them to 'fund' production projects, whether this be a small limited production line intended for a small amount of people, or more people coming together on a mass scale to distribute these labor$'s towards projects the community is passionate about. this would leave consumer goods distribution to be free access, with workers on the specific project getting first dibs(also whatever else the package could include for taking on this labor project). this takes out the wage labor likeness from labor$'s and gives workers direct control over the means of production and how and what they produce. obviously there is more nuance to the idea but i do think it is a better direction to go in.

Just. No.

This is a terrible idea, it reproduces some of the worst elements of capitalism. Amusingly, some sperg on revleft used to shill the exact same nonsense, usually along side a bunch of incomprehensible diagrams and graphs full of overlapping text that obscured whatever actual information might be contained therein (not that I think there was any).

how does it reproduce the worst elements of capitalism? there is no bourgeoisie nor a bureaucracy controlling the MOP. The stains of wage labor are also removed.

What is revleft?

The idea sounds really half-baked.
It's not a given how much you produce. If me and my colleagues can get first dibs and the rest goes to people we don't care about, what interest do we have in producing a quantity exceeding what we want for ourselves and giving that excess to others, working longer than we have to for meeting our own wants? And of course we might want a bigger amount than what we strictly need for ourselves, so we can barter with that, so who would decide and by which method would they decide whether what we ask to get for ourselves exceeds the amount we can reasonably want for ourselves? What would be a reasonable excess amount for others to take, a fixed general ratio to what we get for ourselves, irrespective of whether it's a highly wanted thing or a very much the interest of a tiny niche?

That was ckaihatsu, and you can't really know whether it's the same because you didn't comprehend it. Nobody else on revleft comprehend it (that includes ckaihatsu).

t. rafiq

it is a given how much you produce, its specified the labor hours that would be needed, the amount of product to be made. two people could certainly come together and do a limited run of a specific item, and it would likely happen in the case of niche products with only few interested. more common products would be far more likely to be done on a larger scale(community scale, combinations of communities, whole nations etc.) a. because its a far more efficient use of labor$ (smaller runs will always be less efficient in terms of labor time), b. everybody agrees these things should exist, and if there labor$ is not directed towards these things they won't exist. with regards to excess distribution, these would probably be decided on by the people 'funding' the project and would likely be different depending on the nature of the product.

Go away ckaihatsu

not ckaihatsu. fuck off.

You're both replacing the dynamism of the market with rigid product tiers, and at the same time maintaining a wealth based hierarchy, the whole reason for abolishing markets in the first place. You've made things worse!
The real practical solution for lower stage communism is communization, where those goods and services for which it is practicable and desirable are universally provided for use - things like housing, health care, an amount of electricity, water, gas, internet, most food, and a basked of basic consumer goods. No labour vouchers needed, everyone receives for these what they need. On top of that you can overlay a system with vouchers for superfluous goods, where every hour of socially necessary labour time is rewarded equally, and where a deduction is made for providing the above.
Nobody who doesn't want to work has to, and the work that is done is rewarded without discrimination based purely on what it contributes.

The only problem here might be a lack of incentivization to contribute social labour, if the communized part of your economy becomes too large in relation to the amount of labour being done.

What does funding a project mean? If people do something as a group that doesn't require any input aside from their own time, what funding do they need? If a project requires equipment and natural resources and electricity and these things are owned by society at large, shouldn't society at large be represented in the group making decisions about day-to-day operations, with the society reps in the group having a voting weight related to the proportions of how much stuff is required for the project relative to the fresh labor?