Die Neue Zeit
4th June 2011, 04:25
I don't remember where exactly Paul Cockshott and I had this discussion, but the context was putting some sort of "Duhring-ist" restrictions on the circulation of money during the transition to non-circulable labour credits:
1) Disabling of the circulation of money at every point where legitimate intermediate transactions (most notably those of intermediate products like raw materials and assets used in or arising from the production of the means of production) are not involved, such as the end-consumer point. This necessarily means replacing modern money with a purely electronic and personally identifiable currency.
The very idea of cash is then left to criminals and black markets, and all the costs associated with counterfeiting prevention and even money laundering (circulation that conceals the identity, source, or destination of illegally obtained money, and which is related to capital flight in the common usage of tax havens and shell or dummy companies) can be diverted towards computer crime prevention and easier crackdowns on any form of black market currency. Furthermore, this measure prevents investment strikes and even monetary capital flight through short selling or derivatives trading (while asset stripping, without the ability of employees to elect the majority of at least the board of any company, could hypothetically still be done through illegal barter).
However, until there is a societal planning apparatus that can allocate even intermediate products on an in-kind basis, this currency in the sphere of legitimate intermediate transactions should be allowed to circulate by means of transfer. Consider this example, which contrasts the end consumer with transactions between public enterprises:
John Smith works at Public Enterprise A, which produces various kinds of machinery. Credits in the form of non-circulable (at least on his end), personally identifiable electronic currency are created for his work and credited to his account. According to Engels, this is where one Weitling replaces anonymous cash “by a ‘ledger’, in which the labour-hours worked are entered on one side and means of subsistence taken as compensation on the other.” After keeping the currency for a week, he then goes to Public Enterprise B to purchase consumer goods, thus redeeming his electronic currency. Whether these credits remain with Public Enterprise B or are eliminated, in the meanwhile that enterprise purchases new machinery from Public Enterprise A. While the form of purchase could be different, the substance remains the same; at a minimum, double-entry recordings and the related price calculations are made by both parties to account for this transaction. Both machinery and something else of value are exchanged between the two parties.
2) Disabling this currency’s ability to generate interest (going beyond prohibitions on civil courts from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments, or severe criminal penalties being imposed on those who use threats of harm to extort interest, thus possibly making them redundant) would prevent any prospects of profitable gains through idle savings, and would go a long way towards turning it purely into a means of exchange.
3) Tying this currency or an earlier, pre-transitional one like modern money to labour-hours or some other unit of labour-time, by means of a widely publicized labour-time-to-money ratio, would be an enormous step forward in exposing bourgeois and petit-bourgeois exploitation while addressing the anti-inflationary grievances against fiat currencies (under which, according to Chartalist views on money, government money is created only by persistent government deficit spending, and under which governments must spend first before collecting taxes) made by those with nevertheless bogus fetishes for gold and other physical commodities (hence the discarded gold standard).
4) Making this currency expirable like cheques and money orders would prevent currency hoarding.
My question is on the first point, since state enterprises would still need some form of working capital credit. Didn't the early Stalin regime in finance prohibit commercial credit by one enterprise to another?
http://books.google.ca/books?id=TT4jrxORoXIC
This reform centralized the granting of credit in the State Bank and a few other large government banks, and eliminated the granting of commercial credit by one enterprise to another. At first there were some difficulties, because the State Bank granted credit too freely. Soon, however, the system was regularized into one where money was only made available on the basis of documents showing that it was to be used for planned purposes, e.g., in accordance with a plan for construction, or in payment for goods produced and shipped under a planned contract.
1) Disabling of the circulation of money at every point where legitimate intermediate transactions (most notably those of intermediate products like raw materials and assets used in or arising from the production of the means of production) are not involved, such as the end-consumer point. This necessarily means replacing modern money with a purely electronic and personally identifiable currency.
The very idea of cash is then left to criminals and black markets, and all the costs associated with counterfeiting prevention and even money laundering (circulation that conceals the identity, source, or destination of illegally obtained money, and which is related to capital flight in the common usage of tax havens and shell or dummy companies) can be diverted towards computer crime prevention and easier crackdowns on any form of black market currency. Furthermore, this measure prevents investment strikes and even monetary capital flight through short selling or derivatives trading (while asset stripping, without the ability of employees to elect the majority of at least the board of any company, could hypothetically still be done through illegal barter).
However, until there is a societal planning apparatus that can allocate even intermediate products on an in-kind basis, this currency in the sphere of legitimate intermediate transactions should be allowed to circulate by means of transfer. Consider this example, which contrasts the end consumer with transactions between public enterprises:
John Smith works at Public Enterprise A, which produces various kinds of machinery. Credits in the form of non-circulable (at least on his end), personally identifiable electronic currency are created for his work and credited to his account. According to Engels, this is where one Weitling replaces anonymous cash “by a ‘ledger’, in which the labour-hours worked are entered on one side and means of subsistence taken as compensation on the other.” After keeping the currency for a week, he then goes to Public Enterprise B to purchase consumer goods, thus redeeming his electronic currency. Whether these credits remain with Public Enterprise B or are eliminated, in the meanwhile that enterprise purchases new machinery from Public Enterprise A. While the form of purchase could be different, the substance remains the same; at a minimum, double-entry recordings and the related price calculations are made by both parties to account for this transaction. Both machinery and something else of value are exchanged between the two parties.
2) Disabling this currency’s ability to generate interest (going beyond prohibitions on civil courts from enforcing the collection of the interest portion of debt payments, or severe criminal penalties being imposed on those who use threats of harm to extort interest, thus possibly making them redundant) would prevent any prospects of profitable gains through idle savings, and would go a long way towards turning it purely into a means of exchange.
3) Tying this currency or an earlier, pre-transitional one like modern money to labour-hours or some other unit of labour-time, by means of a widely publicized labour-time-to-money ratio, would be an enormous step forward in exposing bourgeois and petit-bourgeois exploitation while addressing the anti-inflationary grievances against fiat currencies (under which, according to Chartalist views on money, government money is created only by persistent government deficit spending, and under which governments must spend first before collecting taxes) made by those with nevertheless bogus fetishes for gold and other physical commodities (hence the discarded gold standard).
4) Making this currency expirable like cheques and money orders would prevent currency hoarding.
My question is on the first point, since state enterprises would still need some form of working capital credit. Didn't the early Stalin regime in finance prohibit commercial credit by one enterprise to another?
http://books.google.ca/books?id=TT4jrxORoXIC
This reform centralized the granting of credit in the State Bank and a few other large government banks, and eliminated the granting of commercial credit by one enterprise to another. At first there were some difficulties, because the State Bank granted credit too freely. Soon, however, the system was regularized into one where money was only made available on the basis of documents showing that it was to be used for planned purposes, e.g., in accordance with a plan for construction, or in payment for goods produced and shipped under a planned contract.