It sounds like an interesting idea, but it has a few drawbacks I think.
A quick example: If you wanted to move to another city, you may not want to keep every piece of furniture and instead “sell” it. You could just gift them to your neighbors or the next person moving in but you paid for it with vouchers and you don’t want to waste the hours worked after all. How would you get rid of the furniture while still keeping its value? With a currency it’s trivial - just sell it. But you can’t really do this with vouchers, since they can’t be transfered by design. You could perhaps trade it, but what if no one has anything you need?
And that’s ignoring the glaring privacy issues of a centralised, personalised labor voucher system. Sure, it prevents fraud but it also allows the government a lot of insight into your life.
I don’t know, just because you don’t struggle doesn’t mean you don’t want to keep the value of something you worked for. And the value of the furniture (or any product) would be determined by the voucher cost. Something costing a lot of vouchers will be seen as valuable because it takes a lot of time and effort to acquire it.
And I would say there’s quite a lot of privacy you’re able to achieve, it’s just not the default. I live in a country where cash is still the default, often times you’re unable to pay with card at all. Plus, there are a few ways to pay anonymously online using certain crypto currencies - although this has a ton of drawbacks and is mostly used for illegal purposes.
If you go by the definition of money : “The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.” (Wikipedia, but it’s a workable definition).
It’s a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It’s a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It’s a store of value too, because people don’t have to spend it at a particular time. And the “standard of deferred payment” part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.
I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.
Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that’s what communists think of. And a strict “non-transferability” would beg the question of why would the “productive forces” (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can’t accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).
Even worse : if vouchers don’t fulfill the roles people want, you’re still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc… as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.
That being said, I never had much respect for Marx’ political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.
In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you’re going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I’m mistaken, they still had money.
As for Marx… It’s more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don’t have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.
And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don’t make the mistake of believing that all critics don’t know what they’re talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).
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It sounds like an interesting idea, but it has a few drawbacks I think. A quick example: If you wanted to move to another city, you may not want to keep every piece of furniture and instead “sell” it. You could just gift them to your neighbors or the next person moving in but you paid for it with vouchers and you don’t want to waste the hours worked after all. How would you get rid of the furniture while still keeping its value? With a currency it’s trivial - just sell it. But you can’t really do this with vouchers, since they can’t be transfered by design. You could perhaps trade it, but what if no one has anything you need?
And that’s ignoring the glaring privacy issues of a centralised, personalised labor voucher system. Sure, it prevents fraud but it also allows the government a lot of insight into your life.
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I don’t know, just because you don’t struggle doesn’t mean you don’t want to keep the value of something you worked for. And the value of the furniture (or any product) would be determined by the voucher cost. Something costing a lot of vouchers will be seen as valuable because it takes a lot of time and effort to acquire it.
And I would say there’s quite a lot of privacy you’re able to achieve, it’s just not the default. I live in a country where cash is still the default, often times you’re unable to pay with card at all. Plus, there are a few ways to pay anonymously online using certain crypto currencies - although this has a ton of drawbacks and is mostly used for illegal purposes.
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That’s money too.
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If you go by the definition of money : “The primary functions which distinguish money are as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.” (Wikipedia, but it’s a workable definition).
It’s a medium of exchange, because people can use them to buy things. It’s a unit of account, because it will be used as a metric for economic calculation (ie accounting). It’s a store of value too, because people don’t have to spend it at a particular time. And the “standard of deferred payment” part is also fulfilled, as it quantify the work-time debt society (or simply a company) owe to a worker.
I honestly fail to see what difference you are trying to make.
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Meh, this distinction seems largely artificial to me. Modern fiat money is already created and destroyed through use of debt, and I hardly think that’s what communists think of. And a strict “non-transferability” would beg the question of why would the “productive forces” (companies, cooperatives, or whatever) try to do produce things if they can’t accumulate value based on consumers spending preferences (which is an issue which happened in the USSR).
Even worse : if vouchers don’t fulfill the roles people want, you’re still going to have a kind of informal money (gasoline, tobacco, seashells, etc… as said above), just with vouchers in parallel.
That being said, I never had much respect for Marx’ political theories, so I would totally understand if you wanted to drop the point.
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In that case, that means that the only workable economic system for Marx is a centrally planned economy (which, from what I know, is not the position of the majority of communists). Otherwise, you’re going to have severe information transfer/cooperation issues at the system boundaries. Which is already historically what happened in the USSR and most strict application of central planning. And unless I’m mistaken, they still had money.
As for Marx… It’s more that I read a subset of Marx works, found too many issues within the theories themselves, and honestly don’t have unlimited time to see if he corrects it in some other works. And despite looking a bit for it in other forms (including discussion with some very left-leaning friends), I never found any answer I found really satisfactory.
And to be honest, I understand why you assume this is a propaganda issue : communist/socialist/anarchist theories are largely misrepresented in common discourse. That being said, don’t make the mistake of believing that all critics don’t know what they’re talking about. Or even that mainstream theories are immune to this type of misrepresentation (because they most certainly are not).
deleted by creator