Debit Cards Under Socialism: A Proposition

[ckaihatsu]

The points system is better described as 'market socialism', and a direct implication of that is the direct exchangeability of points for material goods, *without* the pre-planning that you've mentioned above. Market socialism is inherently contradictory because of this, because you can't have both a planned economy *and* an unplanned, pay-as-you-go points system.

I take this point but I would suggest that it is both, a decentralised planned economy

(I'll never understand why 'decentralized' is always touted a *selling point*....) (Economically / materially speaking it's more human-labor-intensive, since there's necessarily more duplication-of-effort, from a greater number of smaller constituent units ('communes') operating in parallel -- since their collective / ground-in-common was not generalized and centralized to cover broader terrain.

which begins from a direct democratic process of setting and then maintaining production targets (with things like the environment and 'social good' in mind etc)

Agreed on this part.

and then, yes, some limited allowance for 'free trade' among producers and providers of goods and services but only without the possibility of profit

And I'd like Santa Claus to live in the neighborhood, but it's *not* gonna happen -- (!)

You can open the box just a crack and hope the genie doesn't get out, but it's not that kind of thing -- the genie, in this case being profit's degree of social hegemony, can't be 'disallowed', or 'ruled null and void', even with an otherwise egalitarian worker-run economy, because where's there's commodification, in any form, there's *profit* as an objective economic motivator. And profits currently drive social reproduction in our bourgeois age.

I'll take a moment here to brazenly plug my own creation:

I'll contend that I have developed a model that [...] uses a system of *circulating* labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for material items of any kind.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673

and with only an amount of credits that backs what they have produced in the recent past.

Yeah, that rolls off the tongue real easy, but how does a collective political economy actually *make* the criteria to be used to assign formal valuations to real work contributed -- ?

And what might those criteria be?

Here's again from the intro:

In accordance with communism being synonymous with 'free-access', all material implements, resources, and products would be freely available and *not* quantifiable according to any abstract valuations. The labor credits would represent past labor hours completed, multiplied by the difficulty or hazard of the work role performed. The difficulty/hazard multiplier would be determined by a mass survey of all work roles, compiled into an index.

In this way all concerns for labor, large and small, could be reduced to the ready transfer of labor-hour credits. The fulfillment of work roles would bring labor credits into the liberated-laborer's possession, and would empower them with a labor-organizing and labor-utilizing ability directly proportionate to the labor credits from past work completed.

In other words if you and your colleagues have produced 50,000 kg or oranges in an orange harvest you are recompensed the appropriate amount of credits.

This form of 'credits' *are* exchangeable for goods (the oranges) and that means they're no different from today's currency. You'd need a state to issue it if it's to remain monolithic, and any restrictions to its free-flow would be *regulations* from the state, merely *mitigating* certain *parts* of capital, but that's about it, at best. Welcome to Stalinism and/or bourgeois social democracy.

They are now yours to use how and when you wish. You have fulfilled your end of the 'from each' principle. You have a form of social proof of this and now you are easily and conveniently able to enact your rights to the 'to each' principle of socialism.

Fetishize much -- ?

So material realities of how things are produced yields this statement to be based in *idealism* and *moralism*:

In Gotha, Marx says "The same amount of labor he has contributed to society will be returned in proportion."

In other words such a calculation would be impossible to arrive-at in the first place, for the same reasons that it's impossible to determine what fraction of a dollar today is labor-based (as opposed to exchange-value-based).

A simple argument against the conventional conception would be to ask how to handle the benefits of labor on an *inter-generational* basis -- should younger, incoming generations be obligated to rebuild the world anew, from scratch -- ? If not then they're obviously benefitting from *past labor*, which is disproportionate to the limited years of labor they could have possibly put in at such a young age.

---

This non-fiat (because it's backed by labour), non money (because it can't facilitate profit) type of digital medium is convenient because every harvest, every production of a commodity and every provision of a service will not align so perfectly on a single day every month or year or whatever so that everyone can be seen to be making a perfectly even or just close to perfectly even trade of labour at a local communal store.

How is it exactly that this form of money -- essentially -- would not be able to facilitate profit -- ?

And how is this screed any different from that of anarcho-capitalism -- !

It would make the problem of non contributors potentially problematic, those who might be inclined to take advantage of everyone else's labour without exerting any or much of their own (in a sense they'd be the 'tiny capitalists' of socialism taking what they didn't earn).

Isn't this just the *spitting image* of moralism -- your concern here is for the *abstract principle* of some ultra-meticulous conception of labor-for-material-exchange *justice*. According to this, EoLE, if materials somehow got into the hands of those who weren't really ever contributing labor, would that be something to be punished -- ? Would there have to be a state apparatus of some sort that would be impactful enough to establish the enforcement of a set of laws -- ?

(Not that I'm defending 'tiny capitalists' or any other kind.)

This was always one of the potential problems with 'from each- to each' in a large socialist society, just keeping track of things to making sure the value was being upheld.

My point exactly.

What is to be done with the lazy person? Forget that!

Oh, okay -- that clears that up.

In my mind the real problem is, in a commune of thousands or a wider region of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people how do you even identify them in order to deal with them in the first place?.

This is your only unresolved question -- a logistical one -- ? You're going to be sleeping very soundly tonight...! (grin)

Again:

I have developed a model that [...] uses a system of *circulating* labor credits

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673

So I mean to indicate that day-to-day *economic* activity could very well be on the basis of free-floating, liberated-labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for materials of any kind -- materials would be free-access anyway, per communism. These labor-hour-based labor credits would address the domain of liberated-labor *services* only, since all material production (as for tangible objects) would be defined in terms of (liberated) labor, anyway, per communism.

All *social* ('political') activity would "surround" any given point of production, informing it.


communist economy diagram UPDATE

With such a medium of exchange the entire public could have access to the public records.

Transparency is vital. But just its existence as an issue also shows the presence of a fundamental schism, or duality -- that of us-vs.-them, the people versus the state. As long as a conventional, commodity-production-based 'medium of exchange' exists, so will the state, and so will the schism of 'public-vs.-the-state', as around the issue of state records, or the existence of the state itself.

This transparency would incentivise honesty while making it possible to interview people who are falling behind or not working at all.

Again, you should be hearing yourself. This is Stalinism in a capsule.

Where once people might have talked of banishment or punishment these days we realise some people can be so chemically depressed they struggle to get out of bed in the morning. Or maybe they're bravely working through an injury or illness trying to keep up appearances and social status and need to be stopped working and given treatment and whatever form of 'welfare' this society will have until they're better.

How magnanimous of you, bureaucrat.

[EoLE]

Hey ckaihatsu,
So I think I left a huuuuuge amount of detail out in the post you responded to that caused most of your questions/critiques. Hopefully I can clear some things up but on the definition of 'money' I think you'll remain skeptical towards my notion of credits over yours which are not exchangeable for goods.

First of when I say decentralised I don't mean lots of individual communes/collectives/regions being totally independent of each other. Each local population could vote on their desired wants and needs then put that altogether and divide the labour among each other. It could be that one group is much larger and so all the smaller communes are having to produce a bit more but they'll still be recompensed for it. And no economic system I can imagine will be able to get around the 'country feeds the city' necessity without completely rethinking what a city is (which could also be a good thing, vast green spaces breaking up a metropolis, enough to grow crops for large populations). So I disagree that this would be more labour intensive. It could literally be done as one big vote on a national/subnational level I guess but just keep track of where votes came from in terms of demand so you knew what goods were to go where. The point is to use direct democracy, not a central bureau telling people what they will eat and use. The first part you agreed with is all I meant so maybe I didn't say it right. Maybe I'm still not saying it right haha.

Your contention that profit would be inevitable... I don't see how this is so if the credits are limited in their function (this is the most important part I left out) and if x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b. Now for perhaps the most important part I left out. And maybe the easiest way of demonstrating this is with a hypothetical walk through.

Let's say rather than waiting for revolution you and 9 others buy some land and begin producing 10 commodities to exchange with each other equally (yes for this to work you have to have solved the 'what is a credit worth in labour?' problem but it's a hypothetical so bear with me).

1. There's you, person A, producing commodity A and nine others. Person B who makes commodity B and so on through to person J who makes commodity J.

2. All ten of you, for simplicity's sake, finish a production run at the same time. You take your goods to the communal store. There you have, in place of any kind of central authority, a simple electronic funds transfer system you all know how to work. Based on how much labour credits are worth (and how much each of your different types of jobs earn you) you are each assigned the appropriate amount of credits into a debit card. The correct amount of credits are made there and then. Now let me make this clear. The credits have not been exchanged for your labour. They are your labour by proxy, because no one should have to carry around 10 tonnes of wheat to prove they're allowed some milk, honey, eggs and new shoes. But let's use the word exchange anyway and call that labour for credit the 'First Exchange'.

3. Now all ten of you are able to take as much from each other's goods as you need. Again, you are not 'spending money' you are exchanging labour for the equal amount of products of someone else's labour. The credits are like lubricant in a machine to facilitate the ease with which this exchange takes place. To imagine the necessity of this consider the unlikelihood that all ten of you are producing something that is completed at the exact same time. Production runs would be finishing at different times all over the place. This would be a way of keeping track of who still hasn't been recompensed for their labour from, say, two weeks earlier because they were living off what they already had while waiting for the new tomatoes and strawberry jam to come in. The credits go back into system they were created from and get deleted upon this, the Second Exchange (I don't know why I didn't say this last time. I remember meaning to). By deleting the credits after two such exchanges they have served the limited purpose of taking from each according to their means and redistributing to each according to their needs. This is what I mean when I say it isn't money because it isn't simply in circulation. As I understand it Marx would have agreed (though I really need to do some more reading on all of this).

And, again, with such a limited 'life span' I don't see how these credits could be turned to profit if the problem of parity was solved, ie x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b.
If you received your credits for your x amount of commodity A then tried to convince person G to give you x amount of commodity G + 3 so that you could sell the surplus 3 to person C, yes this would net you profit but everyone would see what you were trying to do and quickly shut it down.

Yeah, that rolls off the tongue real easy, but how does a collective political economy actually *make* the criteria to be used to assign formal valuations to real work contributed -- ?

And what might those criteria be?

I've looked over your blog a few times now. I really like it. And along with the problem you raise above, yes the other big one is... what the hell is a credit!?!? It isn't enough to rest an entire system on such an arbitrary notion in the way capitalism now does its economic units. I mean, what the hell is a 'dollar' or 'yen' or 'euro' except whatever you can get for it today based on the utter chaos and circular reason that is marginal utility which can go and change tomorrow? At least money used to be 'worth' something, even if I'm dejected by humanity's obsession with shiny mental in the ground. Maybe a better example is when money in Europe was closely tied to corn.

This form of 'credits' *are* exchangeable for goods (the oranges) and that means they're no different from today's currency.

I hope you would agree now, based on the two exchange life span of each credit, that it is not an exchangeable currency. Not even for your oranges or the labour which produced them. The credits are your labour, so long as you need them to be until your needs and wants are met. Then the credit 'effigy' is burned because it is no longer required.

You'd need a state to issue it if it's to remain monolithic, and any restrictions to its free-flow would be *regulations* from the state, merely *mitigating* certain *parts* of capital, but that's about it, at best. Welcome to Stalinism and/or bourgeois social democracy.

Hopefully this is cleared up too. From a small commune or collective of 10 people right up to 10,000 people this could literally be done on computers, swipe card machines and one debit card each. The higher the population the more devices/cards you would need (and maybe some people would need to work at the markets as clerks, paid by the group as a whole as a public servant) but if the programming was coded properly and the machines were always running and/or backed up it would not require top down government of any kind so far as I can see. Run by locals, for locals.

Next, I'm not sure I understand your concerns regarding the 'moralising' of people giving and taking fairly. I thought that was the whole point of socialism. Is it 'moralising' to complain about the exploitation of labour by capital? If not then how is it different from complaining about loafers that don't contribute to the communal store but take what they want? (like I said, 'tiny capitalists').

Again, you should be hearing yourself. This is Stalinism in a capsule.

How magnanimous of you, bureaucrat.

When I say interview I don't really mean 'interview'. There wouldn't be a car battery involved. Will mental illness still be recognised in your paradigm? What about hairline fractures? I mean geez, even in an individualist capitalist society someone still comes and knocks on your door to see if you're okay if you haven't come to work for two days lol. Not everyone will perform at an optimal level, hell just adjust that into production from the get go for all I care, make everyone else work a little harder to pick up the slack. I guess I used a poor choice of words with too little elaboration but conflating checking on co-workers with Stalinism is a bit much. Maybe I haven't been clear enough on something else too, that I wouldn't advocate for a state. This could all be done, as I say, by co workers at a local community level. Or if you worked alone there'd still be people who noticed you haven't been going to work or dropping off your produce at the store, such as friends, neighbours, whoever. If nothing else you could also vote on a condition in the beginning that if anyone consistently under produces compared to the average for their industry their recompense per hour could be capped at a lower rate so they're not getting the same credits for less work. There's multiple non tyrannical solutions that all begin with a limited or non existent state bureaucracy. But this is all predicated on being able to identify such drops in productivity or non contributors in an eventually large workforce. Data collation of outgoing and incoming credits would allow this.

[ckaihatsu]

Hey ckaihatsu,
So I think I left a huuuuuge amount of detail out in the post you responded to that caused most of your questions/critiques. Hopefully I can clear some things up but on the definition of 'money' I think you'll remain skeptical towards my notion of credits over yours which are not exchangeable for goods.

Okay....

First of when I say decentralised I don't mean lots of individual communes/collectives/regions being totally independent of each other. Each local population could vote on their desired wants and needs then put that altogether and divide the labour among each other.

Okay, with this kind of arrangement there'd be the issues of federalism -- whether one local population's vote (to produce and consume what they want) would be able to stand up against the overall, *multi*-communal plan, or not.

If things *could* happen the way you're describing it, with a fully equitable pooling of liberated labor, resources, assets, and consumption, then great -- I'll just remind that, whatever the scale, the 'Pies Must Line Up' condition would have to be satisfied (from post #37) as a matter of material reality.

It could be that one group is much larger and so all the smaller communes are having to produce a bit more but they'll still be recompensed for it.

'Recompensed for it' -- ??

This is why I'm so critical of decentralization -- because it just immediately brings back commodification into the whole mix, because of a lack of political centralization. How else could these disparate 'communes' interact economically, if not with some kind of medium-of-exchange, or commodification, in other words.

And no economic system I can imagine will be able to get around the 'country feeds the city' necessity without completely rethinking what a city is (which could also be a good thing, vast green spaces breaking up a metropolis, enough to grow crops for large populations).

Okay, good point.

So I disagree that this would be more labour intensive. It could literally be done as one big vote on a national/subnational level I guess but just keep track of where votes came from in terms of demand so you knew what goods were to go where. The point is to use direct democracy, not a central bureau telling people what they will eat and use.

I don't think *anyone* is suggesting a substitutionist 'central bureau' -- what centralization *means* is more like your 'one big vote', which would have to be over some kind of all-encompassing blueprint-like plan, I'd assume.

(A greater agreement and cohesion in the post-capitalist political economy would lessen reliance on strictly economic-exchange instruments, like money -- which is supposed to be the whole point, anyway.)

The first part you agreed with is all I meant so maybe I didn't say it right. Maybe I'm still not saying it right haha.

Your contention that profit would be inevitable... I don't see how this is so if the credits are limited in their function (this is the most important part I left out) and if x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b. Now for perhaps the most important part I left out. And maybe the easiest way of demonstrating this is with a hypothetical walk through.

Let's say rather than waiting for revolution you and 9 others buy some land and begin producing 10 commodities to exchange with each other equally (yes for this to work you have to have solved the 'what is a credit worth in labour?' problem but it's a hypothetical so bear with me).

1. There's you, person A, producing commodity A and nine others. Person B who makes commodity B and so on through to person J who makes commodity J.

2. All ten of you, for simplicity's sake, finish a production run at the same time. You take your goods to the communal store. There you have, in place of any kind of central authority, a simple electronic funds transfer system you all know how to work. Based on how much labour credits are worth (and how much each of your different types of jobs earn you) you are each assigned the appropriate amount of credits into a debit card. The correct amount of credits are made there and then. Now let me make this clear. The credits have not been exchanged for your labour. They are your labour by proxy, because no one should have to carry around 10 tonnes of wheat to prove they're allowed some milk, honey, eggs and new shoes. But let's use the word exchange anyway and call that labour for credit the 'First Exchange'.

3. Now all ten of you are able to take as much from each other's goods as you need. Again, you are not 'spending money' you are exchanging labour for the equal amount of products of someone else's labour. The credits are like lubricant in a machine to facilitate the ease with which this exchange takes place. To imagine the necessity of this consider the unlikelihood that all ten of you are producing something that is completed at the exact same time. Production runs would be finishing at different times all over the place. This would be a way of keeping track of who still hasn't been recompensed for their labour from, say, two weeks earlier because they were living off what they already had while waiting for the new tomatoes and strawberry jam to come in. The credits go back into system they were created from and get deleted upon this, the Second Exchange (I don't know why I didn't say this last time. I remember meaning to). By deleting the credits after two such exchanges they have served the limited purpose of taking from each according to their means and redistributing to each according to their needs. This is what I mean when I say it isn't money because it isn't simply in circulation. As I understand it Marx would have agreed (though I really need to do some more reading on all of this).

And, again, with such a limited 'life span' I don't see how these credits could be turned to profit if the problem of parity was solved, ie x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b.
If you received your credits for your x amount of commodity A then tried to convince person G to give you x amount of commodity G + 3 so that you could sell the surplus 3 to person C, yes this would net you profit but everyone would see what you were trying to do and quickly shut it down.

The issue regarding a decentralized approach isn't even with whether profit-making could be regulated out of existence, or not -- it's about whether the economics used would really match-up to material realities or not. So while the multi-communal plan could very well work out on a *social* level, the question is what happens to the multi-currency (essentially) plan if real-world *material* conditions fluctuate somewhat away from initial collective *social* expectations.

I've looked over your blog a few times now. I really like it. And along with the problem you raise above, yes the other big one is... what the hell is a credit!?!?

Thank you.

It isn't enough to rest an entire system on such an arbitrary notion in the way capitalism now does its economic units. I mean, what the hell is a 'dollar' or 'yen' or 'euro' except whatever you can get for it today based on the utter chaos and circular reason that is marginal utility which can go and change tomorrow?

Yup.

At least money used to be 'worth' something, even if I'm dejected by humanity's obsession with shiny mental in the ground. Maybe a better example is when money in Europe was closely tied to corn.

You're now starting down the path of arguing for stronger currency valuations, which is in effect arguing for monetarism -- which is what the state's imperialism upholds.

I hope you would agree now, based on the two exchange life span of each credit, that it is not an exchangeable currency.

Your conception *does* function on the basis of exchanges, even if the tokens themselves don't circulate -- it's more like a multi-currency model done with bookkeeping.

Not even for your oranges or the labour which produced them. The credits are your labour, so long as you need them to be until your needs and wants are met. Then the credit 'effigy' is burned because it is no longer required.

You're just describing and relying on the technique of bookkeeping, in the place of freely-circulating currencies.

Hopefully this is cleared up too. From a small commune or collective of 10 people right up to 10,000 people this could literally be done on computers, swipe card machines and one debit card each. The higher the population the more devices/cards you would need (and maybe some people would need to work at the markets as clerks, paid by the group as a whole as a public servant) but if the programming was coded properly and the machines were always running and/or backed up it would not require top down government of any kind so far as I can see. Run by locals, for locals.

I have no concern over the potential *logistics* for such -- again, the real question is what happens when material realities diverge from economic expectations and planning.

Next, I'm not sure I understand your concerns regarding the 'moralising' of people giving and taking fairly. I thought that was the whole point of socialism. Is it 'moralising' to complain about the exploitation of labour by capital?

It's not abstract moralizing to struggle against capitalism's inherent exploitation and oppression of the working class, because everyone who works for the means of life and living has an *objective interest* to do so, and to not be exploited or oppressed.

If not then how is it different from complaining about loafers that don't contribute to the communal store but take what they want? (like I said, 'tiny capitalists').

The difference is that once the working class has full control of society's productive implements it could no longer be exploited or oppressed, since classes would no longer exist. 'Loafers' would not be detrimental because individual 'loafers' could not detract from collective production -- and/or the means to it -- in the least. They *wouldn't* be 'tiny capitalists' because they wouldn't have private property rights to own any means of production or to employ / exploit labor.

When I say interview I don't really mean 'interview'. There wouldn't be a car battery involved. Will mental illness still be recognised in your paradigm? What about hairline fractures? I mean geez, even in an individualist capitalist society someone still comes and knocks on your door to see if you're okay if you haven't come to work for two days lol. Not everyone will perform at an optimal level, hell just adjust that into production from the get go for all I care, make everyone else work a little harder to pick up the slack. I guess I used a poor choice of words with too little elaboration but conflating checking on co-workers with Stalinism is a bit much. Maybe I haven't been clear enough on something else too, that I wouldn't advocate for a state. This could all be done, as I say, by co workers at a local community level. Or if you worked alone there'd still be people who noticed you haven't been going to work or dropping off your produce at the store, such as friends, neighbours, whoever.

Okay.

If nothing else you could also vote on a condition in the beginning that if anyone consistently under produces compared to the average for their industry their recompense per hour could be capped at a lower rate so they're not getting the same credits for less work.

Note that you're now having to give your attention to the matter of upholding currency valuations -- this is how an economics gets 'separated' from the underlying labor that produced its valuations, and becomes a thing unto itself. Those who consistently concern themselves with the realities of economic / financial valuations have interests that differ from those who make their living from their own wage-income.

There's multiple non tyrannical solutions that all begin with a limited or non existent state bureaucracy. But this is all predicated on being able to identify such drops in productivity or non contributors in an eventually large workforce. Data collation of outgoing and incoming credits would allow this.

Again, decentralization necessitates exchanges, which necessitates commodification.


---


Pies Must Line Up

Nice visual. Very helpful. I guess one way of at least trying to keep on top of what you're talking about would be to have a simple, visual representation (something like what you have there) which initially would start off with the pies showing resources to which people would match the next level, their desired production, using resources available as a guide. Then as things like production and consumption etc are undertaken the database could be given live updates each day at the close of business at factories or in food markets etc showing, in real time, whether the pies are lining up as you say. This is one of the things that excites me most, how new technologies like the internet might alleviate some of the problems that socialist and communist experiments had in the past. Imagine how many deadly famines or wasteful surpluses could have been avoided in countries even as large as China and Russia if people from one end to the next could see supply emergencies in their infancy and start focusing more the very next day on production of things that were falling behind by taking excess labour from things that were being overproduced.
Eventually such a real time database could avoid the need for any mass gatherings of citizens to vote on production for the coming year. Even if you had to 'meet' online initially to get things running smoothly I bet once it was up and running the pies could eventually be made to line up. But as you say there is still the necessity of objectively defining some operational definitions for very important concepts like effort and credit.

Sorry, I overlooked this post of yours from before. Thanks for the contribution of vision here, and I agree with your conception of administrative possibilities through the use of data technologies.

I have to note, though, that the 'Pies' illustration is also a *critique*, on any conceivable use of 'labor vouchers', which would include your commodity-based 'credits'.

[EoLE]

ckaihatsu,
One problem I am having with your blog is what the credits are for exactly. The language is a bit technical and I'm not sure exactly what your labor credits can be used for. Are they turned in in exchange for the ability to play a role in commanding production? Sorry if I'm missing something really obvious to people who are more familiar with Marxism but the language isn't all that clear to me.

[ckaihatsu]

ckaihatsu,
One problem I am having with your blog is what the credits are for exactly. The language is a bit technical and I'm not sure exactly what your labor credits can be used for. Are they turned in in exchange for the ability to play a role in commanding production? Sorry if I'm missing something really obvious to people who are more familiar with Marxism but the language isn't all that clear to me.

No prob -- here's the basic idea:

[D]ay-to-day *economic* activity could very well be on the basis of free-floating, liberated-labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for materials of any kind -- materials would be free-access anyway, per communism. These labor-hour-based labor credits would address the domain of liberated-labor *services* only, since all material production (as for tangible objects) would be defined in terms of (liberated) labor, anyway, per communism.

Let me put it this way: These days labor produces what? -- goods and services. Both goods as well as services are commodities. But without commodification any more, a *post*-capitalist, communist-type *planned* economy would no longer have 'goods' in the sense of 'commodities' or 'products'. All materials, including what we know today as goods, commodities, and products, would basically just be 'free stuff', or 'common-use materials', under communism.

So without 'materials' ('products') to attach exchange-values to, (since they're free-use in communism), the only real *variable* left would be liberated-labor.

According to the premise of free-use people could not be *coerced* into providing work effort (liberated labor), but they would have free use of whatever implements and materials they could find available, for their own efforts and ends.

So an implication of this brings us to the question of whether or not humanity could readily satisfy its common humane needs from the materials of the earth if the corporation-spawning profit-accumulation system was no more. If you think there *would* be a sufficiency, even if it required individuals' own efforts for themselves, mostly, then the question after that becomes *how much* cooperation would be called-for, for how-much "extra" production that was more-discretionary than food and shelter (etc.).

Whatever this 'extra' production is -- to advance civilization, etc. -- could realistically be seen in terms of labor roles and actual-work liberated-labor work hours.

Get it -- ? The whole realm of 'commodity products' would then be:

communist administration -- Assets and resources have no quantifiable value -- are considered as attachments to the production process

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174

And, so:

Propagation

labor [supply] -- Workers with past accumulated labor credits are the funders of new work positions and incoming laborers -- labor credits are handed over at the completion of work hours [...]

[EoLE]

So if I'm understanding you correctly people who earn these credits they've earned can give them to others in exchange for services in the form of socially necessary labour? And then the people who earn those credits through socially necessary labour can then commission others to do likewise so that services are provided alongside common use goods?
That sounds fine but your system too would need to discern some sort of parity of exchange among different forms of labour to ensure that x amount labour performed by someone in the field of a is equal to x amount of labour performed by someone in the field of b (let's say a and b are agriculture and education). Otherwise if done poorly it could lead to people feeling as though they are subjectively profiting or being cheated by unequal exchanges of labour. And so this leads back to the need for an objective medium of exchange which can ensure parity (that is to say 'labour', 'labour hours', 'credits' and 'effort' etc all need to be more than just hollow words).

So if, as you say, services are exchanged for credit in this way doesn't that commodify labour as a good as well which would be subject to subjective theory of value if not quantified right? If you were going to commodify anything wouldn't it be better to do it to goods rather than labour or risk the return of exploitation and unequal exchange? My system of exchange would commodify both I guess but with profit taken out of the equation (as I've asserted by removing exploitation from labour in production and maintaining the equal zero sum game of market exchange that even capitalism has) wouldn't it go back to just a larger scale version of ancient barter? What would be the threat or implication of commodification of labour in your system or my system if there is no more exploitation of labour or profit? (ie if words like labour and credit were defined properly to avoid subjective theory of value being used to cheat each other). And extending this reasoning what threat would be posed in my system if x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b (all rooted in the labour theory of value rather than subjective theory of value which creates an indecipherable mess of commodities all given their value in relation to each other).

I really need to get into some actual Marx but I've got my school reading to do at the moment as well as stuff I've already started in my free time reading (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and introductory economics stuff). When I'm done with those I might move on to Ricardo and Das Kapital, which is pretty intimidating!

[ckaihatsu]

So if I'm understanding you correctly people who earn these credits they've earned can give them to others in exchange for services in the form of socially necessary labour? And then the people who earn those credits through socially necessary labour can then commission others to do likewise so that services are provided alongside common use goods?

Yes, correct -- the labor-hour-based labor credits would be able to operate at any scale, large or small.

That sounds fine but your system too would need to discern some sort of parity of exchange among different forms of labour to ensure that x amount labour performed by someone in the field of a is equal to x amount of labour performed by someone in the field of b (let's say a and b are agriculture and education). Otherwise if done poorly it could lead to people feeling as though they are subjectively profiting or being cheated by unequal exchanges of labour. And so this leads back to the need for an objective medium of exchange which can ensure parity (that is to say 'labour', 'labour hours', 'credits' and 'effort' etc all need to be more than just hollow words).

Yes, exactly, and this part addresses that:

labor [supply] -- Labor credits are paid per hour of work at a multiplier rate based on difficulty or hazard -- multipliers are survey-derived

http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1174

The whole idea behind these circulating labor-hour credits is to provide 'parity', by acknowledging and factoring-in the objectively differing nature of various work roles, which vary by hazard and difficulty.

So if, as you say, services are exchanged for credit in this way doesn't that commodify labour as a good as well which would be subject to subjective theory of value if not quantified right?

I'm arguing that liberated labor *wouldn't* be commodified as a result because it would all be *discretionary*, with enough of a 'base' of a gift economy to provide for everyone's basic humane needs, as a foundation. Without the existence of any social coercion to force labor, labor could not be exploited, and so could not be commodified.

One's own provision of one's own liberated labor would be based on knowing that someone / others have already put in a proportional amount of liberated-labor effort themselves, for the production of non-commodity goods.

You're arguing that if all of this is small-scale enough -- say one-to-one -- that it would in effect *be* commodification, since the production of goods from Person 'A' empowers Person 'A' to request a certain amount of goods from Person 'B's efforts.

But I'm arguing that this would *not* be commodification, since the goods from Person 'A' would never be valued *in terms of* any other goods, as from the goods that Person 'B' produced. I won't bicker over semantics -- if you would like to think of this as some kind of closed-universe set of linkages of liberated-labor that is all "commodified" in relation to each other, go right ahead and think that -- the objective difference, though, is that each provision of liberated-labor is *ephemeral* and is in no way a *persistent* formal value the way capital is, since one *forfeits* their credits as soon as appropriate liberated labor is supplied in return.

If you were going to commodify anything wouldn't it be better to do it to goods rather than labour or risk the return of exploitation and unequal exchange?

I think *precluding* commodification is the overall point here, and it would be impossible to commodify 'only' goods while "not-commodifying" labor, since the two would be inextricably linked through the existence of exchange values inherent to the production of commodities.

So in other words, if someone wanted jewelry, the only way to procure it -- aside from my model of labor-hour credits -- would be to go through the markets, and in doing so the prospective acquirer would be examining abstracted *exchange values* (prices) as a matter of course. What would yield a lower *price* than the increased exploitation of the labor that went into its creation -- ?

On the other hand, labor-hour-backed labor credits would confer a *non*-monetary equivalence of labor effort, *without* commodification. Someone who wanted jewelry would have to either find some that's not being actively claimed for personal usage, would have to make it themselves from available free-access resources, or would have to show to someone that they have already put in comparable work effort for the common good, through labor credits in-hand that they would be willing to hand over for the sake of someone's willing attention to jewelry-production, on a limited basis.

(I'll add / note that the backdrop to all of this is the free-access availability of the means of life and living to all, so that no one is under any *coercion* to work for their biological and social existence.)

My system of exchange would commodify both I guess but with profit taken out of the equation (as I've asserted by removing exploitation from labour in production and maintaining the equal zero sum game of market exchange that even capitalism has) wouldn't it go back to just a larger scale version of ancient barter?

I see where you're coming from with this, but my concern is that as long as exchange values exist, so will commodification, too -- as you've acknowledged here. (Also, market exchange is *not* a 'zero-sum game', because of the existence of finance.)

While those of your position -- 'market socialism' -- would *like* for profit to be socially ruled-out, I'm maintaining that the line between a "no-profit" 'grand barter system', and the manifested practice of profit-accumulation, would be too thin for it to be practical and realistic. (Consider that exchange values don't even need the instrument of money -- bartering activities could be done in such a way as to incrementally increase one's value of holdings, known as arbitrage.)


One red paperclip

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclip

What would be the threat or implication of commodification of labour in your system or my system if there is no more exploitation of labour or profit?

If there's exchange values, either explicit or implicit, then there's commodification. My labor credits system doesn't allow for exchangeability between liberated labor and materials, so there's no commodification.

(ie if words like labour and credit were defined properly to avoid subjective theory of value being used to cheat each other).

I don't understand what you're saying here.

And extending this reasoning what threat would be posed in my system if x amount of commodity a = 1 credit = x amount of commodity b (all rooted in the labour theory of value rather than subjective theory of value which creates an indecipherable mess of commodities all given their value in relation to each other).

I think you're *meaning* to say that all labor should be 'socially necessary labor', as under market socialism -- and this is the glass-half-full, or *positive* aspect to market socialism, that the worker-based *political* economy would be mostly deterministic over social production.

But I remain dismissive of the contention that the worker-democratic aspect of this would be able to hold up to the universe of implicit exchange values contained within all goods in such a social order. Depending on actual circumstances people might find it easier to just manipulate the implicit exchange values, through the practice of barter / exchanges, than to contribute to efforts for a common-minded planned production -- as is the case today.

I really need to get into some actual Marx but I've got my school reading to do at the moment as well as stuff I've already started in my free time reading (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and introductory economics stuff). When I'm done with those I might move on to Ricardo and Das Kapital, which is pretty intimidating!