Labour Accounts as Money in a Commons Economy

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Paul Cockshott:

"The essential difference between Marx’s proposed labour accounts and bank notes is that the labour accounts do not circulate. They are credited to people for work done and cancelled out when a worker purchases something from public shops. If you read Bellamy’s utopian socialist book Looking Backward (Bellamy 2003) you can find an account of how this was seen as working using 19th century technology. Bellamy imagined a Socialist America in 2000. People had social credit cards, like the punched cards that had recently been invented by Hollerith for data processing. At the start of each month you got a new card with your credits marked on it. You went to public stores to buy stuff and the till physically punched the credits out from your card as it read them. The goods were then dispatched to your house by pneumatic tubes.

The very idea of the credit card actually derives from this utopian socialist literature. But unlike the capitalist credit cards of the actual year 2000 in the USA, there would be no way to carry out private trading with Bellamy’s system. Your credits are non transferable since, the moment you use them they become useless little paper chads in the refuse shoot of the till. No private black market activity is possible without some form of circulating money.

A socialist economy in 2030 would not have to revert to paper credit cards. All that is necessary, once the banks, the means of production and distribution are publicly owned is to alter the software that the banks use. Instead of Euros or Pounds being transfered from your account to Tesco’s account the software would simply cancel your labour credit. The shop, being publicly run would not be a business running for profit, so it would not need to be credited with money. The shop would not buy in goods from a wholesaler because the warehouses and factories that the goods came from would also be publicly run. In consequence there would be no transfer of ownership between factory, warehouse and supermarket, and thus no need for a chain of payments.

Statistics would still have to be collected to see how many hours of labour people were spending on cornflakes or wheat biscuits etc, to make sure that the public factories allocated corresponding amounts of resources to making these products. The same records, in conjunction with stock control would be used to detect pilfering." (https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/bitcoin-is-not-what-socialism-needs/)