Communism by definition is classless, stateless, and moneyless. However, this isn't merely a nominal distinction, any effort to create an egalitarian without abolishing money will only reproduce misery. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm
In my mind, once a society has reached the point of actual communism, money won’t be necessary. Goods produced, jobs worked, and resources allocated would all be done because it's necessary or people want to. People would have housing, transportation, leisure time, healthcare, and education readily available at no cost. What you do beyond that would be completely left up to you. Want to open a bakery to provide your own specialty muffins and shit to your community? Go for it, there’s nothing stopping you. The drive isn’t profit, it’s because you like baking and having people eat your cookies makes you feel good. Want to spend your days traveling around the country smoking weed and hanging out with your dog? Go do that shit, because you don’t have to worry about bills or whatever.
I think to manage consumption and stock, there would need to be a voucher system or maximum quantities to how much you can take per day/month/year. This isn’t based on theory, it just makes sense to me. I’d like to hear critiques or whatevs.
What makes sense to me is posting them online, and it would be first come, first serve. One ticket per person, or you could grab them up for a small group of friends.
Edit: I mean, that’s kind of how it is right now anyway, except the prices are exorbitantly high and scalpers buy hundreds of seats to sell at a premium.
Also, I don’t think vip sections would be a thing, so you just need to be early for grabbing the seats you want.
Want to open a bakery to provide your own specialty muffins and shit to your community? Go for it, there’s nothing stopping you.
How would you get a storefront and the materials necessary to open your bakery?
This is one thing I’m not 100% sure about, tbh. I’m not familiar enough with the concept of a stateless society, yet. The solution I can imagine is having some type of community-run zoning board that has the authority to allocate certain sections of cities to commerce or industrial zones. The baker could apply for a type of space ideal for a bakery and storefront, and if there’s a space available, they can take a few steps to acquire it and open up shop. I’m not certain on the specifics.
If existing space isn’t available, maybe an alternate solution would be to contact a contractor directly to see about building a storefront. Or maybe if enough citizens are interested in opening businesses in a close proximity, they could appeal to the said zoning board to have a strip of stores constructed.
Under communism? No. In early socialism, yeah probably. Later on in socialism, I think socially-necessary labor vouchers make sense.
As a Marxist it's a principle belief of mine that commodity production must disappear to realize communism. So that will mean all production will be shared as required and produced as required, democratically and without the production of goods for the purpose of exchange.
What does "commodity production" mean the way you're using it? What are some examples of what would or wouldn't be commodities?
Commodities are, as Marx defines them (by my understanding), anything with an exchange-value. In everyday terms, we would refer to this as something's price or value. That means that commodities are things that you can put a price on, and for something to have a price one must be able to buy or sell it. Some examples in our capitalist system are things like grain, oil, electricity, books, or labor. All of these things you can put a price on and buy or sell them in a market. It's a bit tricky to come up with examples of things that aren't commodities that we encounter in our everyday life, but maybe healthcare is a good example. In a privatized system, like in the US, if you get sick or injured, you effectively buy some amount of healthcare from a hospital in order to remedy that (ignoring insurance, for the sake of simplicity). But in a socialized healthcare system, you wouldn't be able to buy or sell healthcare; hospitals are given funding by the government, which is not strictly determined by the amount of healthcare they provide to patients. The amount of resources allocated to a hospital would be determined by, ideally, a democratic process, rather than by the profit motive or the whims of a private individual. And when a person is sick or injured, they can go to the hospital and receive healthcare for free, rather than having to purchase it.
I think it doesn't make a lot of sense trying to imagine what communism will look like, as we don't even have a universal conception or implementation of socialism yet. But under socialism I don't think money will exist; labor will be validated through a labor voucher/token system to make sure that production/consumption can be balanced and rationalized, but these tokens won't be money since they cannot be exchanged, they can only be redeemed once.
Would these tokens effectively be currency that is consumed once it's spent?
For example, after a hard, four-hour day at the socialism factory I get my Marxbux. I can use them to buy things I want -- say, some nice furniture -- but the furniture store can't then spend those Marxbux elsewhere (or maybe they can only use them to pay their workers?). Would the furniture store obtain new pieces of furniture through centrally planned distribution, then, or some other way?
Yeah, this would be essentially how it works. You would go to the furniture store, and redeem x labor vouchers for some furniture, and then the furniture store would pass that data on to the planning agency, which would then use the data of how labor vouchers are spent at the furniture store in its allocation of labor units to the store in the form of new stock, utilities expenses, labor vouchers for their workers, etc.
i'd imagine you would recieve tokens on top of guarunteed food, housing, utilities, and transport correct? and the tokens "value" would continue to rise as society reaches post-scarcity FALGC? basically a daily consumer good ration that eventually becomes just a relic as the average person just loses the desire for obsessive consumerism once their needs are fully met
Sure, whether or not all those things are guaranteed of course depends on the specific implementation but ideally the collective production of society would be able to provide those guaranteed rights. In Paul Cockshott's model, labor tokens would expire after, say, several years in order to prevent severe fluctuations in the balance of production and consumption due to saving and then spending all at once. But yes, while one labor voucher would still continue to represent the same amount of labor time, as the general productivity of society increases due to automation, over time one labor voucher would be "worth" more, in that one would be able to redeem it for more stuff.
Yes. It has to a be non-inheritable currency though.
Here's why:
Once everybody's needs are met, there will be opportunity to produce luxury goods. However, not everybody values every good equally, and markets are very effective at solving this sort of problem.
It doesn't make sense to produce a set of camping gear for everybody - not everybody likes camping. Some people would rather their luxury consumption come in the form of eating out regularly. Others would rather produce their food at home but want to go on a vacation every few years. Others would want to save their surplus luxury spending for 20 years to buy a communist Lamborghini. Since it's not reasonable to design a society where everybody can have all of these things all of the time (we're in a climate crisis let's not forget, not to mention we'd all have to work more to make this happen), these items are naturally going to be scarce. If we allow everyone an equal luxury allowance that they can spend in accordance with their desires, people will weigh their relative desires themselves, giving society information on how much of each luxury consumable should be produced.
The central problem with money is that it can be accumulated and passed on through inheritance. A digital currency can prevent this and we can allow markets to exist in a cruelty-free manner where they benefit all of us.
I generally agree, but what if we got away from the idea of owning things and developed library communism where you could borrow a tent or a Lamborghini for the weekend. I could still see markets being used for this, like you get 100 luxury bucks per month and you can spend them on renting the Lamborghini or eating at a fancy restaurant or a camping trip
I mean, I have nothing against an expanded mandate for libraries, but I don't think personal property was ever the problem - private property is the problem and we should be sure not to confuse the two.
There are downsides to not owning my own tent - I only need to learn to assemble it once, I know I'm not going to get to a mountain top only to find there is a crucial missing piece, I can choose to go camping on a whim without first traveling to some centralized tent depository, I can count on my tent being available at any time (I never have to worry about all the tents being checked out), etc.
Yeah, if you really like camping and want to own a tent that's perfectly reasonable, especially if you put in a few shifts at the tent factory. But everyone should be able to borrow a tent for a weekend if they want to try out camping.
Lamborghinis are a lot more rare and valuable than tents, and it doesn't make as much sense for one person to own one exclusively. They're also almost exclusively owned by rich capitalists, so seizing all Lamborghinis and re-distributing them via library socialism seems fair to me.
I think we'll have something resembling money for a long time, but it might not be exactly what people call money today
Like the concept of exchanging tokens for certain goods and services might exist in an otherwise completely communist society, but the tokens wouldn't necessarily be "earned" by working
I say we evoke the concept of Good Boy Points but change it to just Good Points. Like under communism all our needs will be taken care of but luxuries need to be earned with said points. This will help promote good or productive behavior just configure it in a way so everyone can earn them regardless of whatever limitations they might have. I was memeing at first but now I'm not sure no more.
I don't see money as a key philosophical problem. The danger is in money being used to further excess accumulation of resources, and in money being used as a tool of exploitation. I can see plenty of ways to eliminate those more fundamental problems that don't involve eliminating money, and eliminating money by itself wouldn't eliminate those problems. Besides, money has a fair amount of utility. It's fungible, it's easily transferrable, and it's not a bad way of getting people what they want within reasonable constraints.
As for what a society that uses money in this way would look like:
- Big, basic needs (housing, food, healthcare, education, employment) are guaranteed
- Big wants (a weekend at a vacation house, other forms of expensive recreation) are available to all via a queue system, maybe with some prioritization for people who work crucial/difficult jobs (e.g., doctors)
- Small wants (think personal items or less-expensive recreation) cost money
- Jobs pay money, but also how crucial/difficult one's job is gives them a leg up in getting nicer versions of those big needs and wants
- There are strict rules about accumulation of money/giving significant amounts of it to others
I don't know where to draw the line between "people who work crucial/difficult jobs should be rewarded" and "we don't want to just recreate class stratification." Barring large generational wealth transfers and guaranteeing everyone the means of decent living would be a good start, though.
