Commodity Stamps

[RNK]

During WW2, Britain and the United States instituted a "food stamp" program in which families and inviduals were restricted to being able to purchase a set amount of valuable food and other commodities per week (or month).

Would this system be applicable to a non-rationing society? Would it be feasible for society (in the form of community councils, etc) to set the amount of commodities each person or family should be allowed per time period, based on an assessment of local and national economic conditions? How flexible and/or constrained would this sort of system be?

[Taboo Tongue]

I don't think Food\Commodity Stamps will be necessary.
I would think at first there we simply be a "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their need" feel to the economy, nothing in stone simply being giving what they can.
Then if there was a problem with leechers, or over-consumers then there might be put in place something else to curb that. I would think as (assuming) more countries would become worker controlled things would get better with less leechers, and being able to support the one that did exist. I believe the WHO (World Health Organization (Part of the UN)) said the earth had 3 times as much food as it needed in the 1980's. 20 years ago yes, but I don't think our population has grown that much, and our productivity fallen that much.

[rouchambeau]

Commodities can only exist in capitalism. Marx explains this in one of the first chapters of Das Kapital.

[LSD]

During WW2, Britain and the United States instituted a "food stamp" program in which families and inviduals were restricted to being able to purchase a set amount of valuable food and other commodities per week (or month).

I think the key phrase there is "during World War II". the only time that rationing programs are set up is when there really isn't enough food to go around. Or I suppose in those times and the government needs to make it seem that there isn't enough food to go around.

Neither of those conditions apply however to a post revolutionary society in which not only will the revolutionary victors be in possession of a massive postcapitalist industrial machine, but also an active and involved citizenry willing to rebuild that machinery from the bottom up.

I really don't think that food rationing is going to be an issue

You really need to stop living in the 1930s. It's not going to be Trotsky and biplanes it's going to be Internet connections and WiFi broadband direct voting systems with rapid transit connection systems that we can even imagine yet.

There is an emerging and rather disturbing tendency among certain elements on the left to associate post-capitalism with anti-industrialism and I think that's a very grave mistake.

We're not agitating for the destruction of modern society were agitating for the destruction of unequal society and those are two very different things. And while inequality is certainly possible without modernity; modernity is pretty much a prerequisite for any degree of equality.

not to mention of course, in any kind of food stand paying or food rationing is implicitly a return to a propertied economy. Even if it's not overt or even intentional once you make food or any other essential or even voluntary item a commodity, you create an open market.

And so what you're doing, effectively, is re-creating capitalism.

It's a nicer capitalism, to be sure, with nicer masters in a fresh new coat of paint. But it's capitalism all the same.

Working for a wage and working for a food ration is the same thing to the person doing the work. Doesn't matter what fancy agitprop title you put on it, a wage is a wage is a wage.

aAnd last I checked, were not big fans of wages around here. ;)