A post-capitalist political economy using labor credits
To clarify and simplify, the labor credits system is like a cash-only economy that only works for *services* (labor), while the world of material implements, resources, and products is open-access and non-abstractable. (No financial valuations.) Given the world's current capacity for an abundance of productivity for the most essential items, there should be no doubt about producing a ready surplus of anything that's important, to satisfy every single person's basic humane needs.
[I]t would only be fair that those who put in the actual (liberated) labor to produce anything should also be able to get 'first dibs' of anything they produce.
In practice [...] everything would be pre-planned, so the workers would just factor in their own personal requirements as part of the project or production run. (Nothing would be done on a speculative or open-ended basis, the way it's done now, so all recipients and orders would be pre-determined -- it would make for minimal waste.)
We can do better than the market system, obviously, since it is zombie-like and continuously, automatically, calls for endless profit-making -- even past the point of primitive accumulation, through to overproduction and world wars, not to mention its intrinsic exploitation and oppression.
Labor vouchers imply a political economy that *consciously* determines valuations, but there's nothing to guarantee that such oversight -- regardless of its composition -- would properly take material realities into account. Such a system would be open to the systemic problems of groupthink and elitism.
What's called-for is a system that can match liberated-labor organizing ability, over mass-collectivized assets and resources, to the mass demand from below for collective production. If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.
If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.
And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.
I'll contend that I have developed a model that addresses all of these concerns in an even-handed way, and uses a system of *circulating* labor credits that are *not* exchangeable for material items of any kind. 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.
This method would both *empower* and *limit* the position of liberated labor since a snapshot of labor performed -- more-or-less the same quantity of labor-power available continuously, going forward -- would be certain, known, and *finite*, and not subject to any kinds of abstraction- (financial-) based extrapolations or stretching. Since all resources would be in the public domain no one would be at a loss for the basics of life, or at least for free access to providing for the basics of life for themselves. And, no political power or status, other than that represented by possession of actual labor credits, could be enjoyed by liberated labor. It would be free to represent itself on an individual basis or could associate and organize on its own political terms, within the confines of its empowerment by the sum of pooled labor credits in possession.
Mass demand, then as now, would be a matter of public discourse, but in a societal context of open access to all means of mass communication for all, with collectivized implements of mass production at its disposal. It would have no special claim over any liberated labor and would have no means by which to coerce it.
The administration of all of this would be dependent on the conscious political mass struggle, on a continuous, ongoing basis, to keep it running smoothly and accountably.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?bt=14673
Compensation for effort and sacrifice in Parecon
