Under a socialist system that issues labor vouchers, does this mean that a house that took a 1000 labor hours to construct would be able to be purchased by a guy that has a 1000 hour labor vouchers? Wouldn't the economy slow to crawl? Does it differentiate between a 1000 hours of coal mining and a 1000 hours of computer programming?
Discuss.
IMO labour vouchers aren't linked only to work hours, people who do harder jobs would get the same amount even though they work less hours. And prices wouldn't be linked only to them either, you have to take into account the material costs.
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I don't know why it's so hard to understand non accumulative currency.
The LTV does account for difficulty/effort etc, not just time. Not to mention scarcity and use-value would be considered.
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kek
the value-form as a whole is a fucked up concept and I don't think anyone knows how to fully articulate plausible alternatives to it without the mediation of a state.
In most cases labor vouchers as a serious economic system are based on your output relative to an average.
It again depends on intensity and output averages.
No. Since there's still reason to improve the technology of production which increases the rate of production per hour, it means that the economy will grow at the rate of improvement and spread of reproductive technology. A house that costs 1000 hours of production now, will cost 950 as technology improves, then 910, and so on.
Marxists advocate for labour vouchers. There's nothing new here.
While I'm suspicious of the need for labor vouchers as a distributive mechanism that regulates production (they are not an ethical category like the productivists seem to think), they aren't money in the sense that: 1) they are absolutely tied to one person (hence, not a universal, exchangeable form of wealth); and 2) they don't provide the same function of money is it's distinctly capitalist form (the formation of a capital horde that can then be utilized to expand or intensify capitalist production relations).
Labor vouchers ain't money.
a. they don't accumulate
b. they must be earned through labor, you cannot gain interest on them
c. you cannot make profit off them in production
d. they are redeemed rather than exchanged, they have no value past redemption
Won't a labor voucher system punish workers who are more efficient than average?
didn't you know communism will bring forth NEET uprising?
No. It's measured relative to average. IE. SNLT per product.
Being more efficient than average would get you paid more than average.
No shit. How do you think socially necessary labor time is calculated? For a given commodity, presumably, computational methods are used to record the amount of labor time required and then an average is taken. The SNLT must be allowed to change with time, or we will have a suboptimal economy. In order to accumulate as many labor vouchers as possible, the workers have an incentive to work as slowly as possible in order to drive up the SNLT and accumulate more vouchers. It is the path of least resistance, compared to trying to work as hard as possible to increase commodity output, which will drive down the SNLT of the commodity you produce and give you less value for your vouchers.
I forgot to write that you basically have to not allow the SNLT to rise for a given commodity in order to avoid this sort of thing.
Workers being more or less efficient doesn't make any difference in a modern economy. This characteristic, extremely developed in capitalism, is at the core of the development of productive forces throughout history.
This is an inherent flaw in any wage system, even if it is one of vouchers rather than money.
This is why a gift economy is the only answer, although I believe sydicalism and a voucher wage system would be a necessary in between step
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Why don't we have enough steel for more zippers? the jeans factory is sending passive aggressive emails about our gifts
I don't know, after we complained about the glut last year we haven't been getting shit from the foundry.
So… can we just ask to be gifted a certain amount every year of something?
Not really, we've been gifting jeans left, right and centre so we haven't the slightest clue how much we would need.
Fuck, maybe we could ask for vouchers or something, it would be nice to have a fucking clue about consumption rates and perhaps a method controlling demand to ensure equitable distribution…
oh well. Anarchist high five!