Money in Communism - A marginalist approach - a possible critique to Marx

syndicalistcat - i see that you replied to agent of the fifth revolution, and i hope you'll also reply to my last post previous to this one, when you get the chance. i'm not trying to smear you and don't think i've said anything to do so. i'm not asking you questions to try to make you look bad, and am trying to have an honest discussion.

what you say here basically agrees that there's no problem with consumption entitlements, as far as I can see.

the budgets of the production organizations are of course public. so how likely is it that people are going to steal things and not have this known? if stuff disappears & they can't account for it, and this becomes a real problem, it means their organization would be subject to having its assignment of means of production revoked & the org dissolved.

you'd have the same problem under "free access"...if a worker group are not using the socially owned means of production to produce what people expect of them, which was the basis of the agreement to assign them those means of production to begin with.

i think it would be pretty easy to get away with stealing. you can sell 100 widgets in a week but only turn in the currency for 70 and claim you only sold 70. how would it be known you were lying?

and then there's the organization responsible for collecting and redistributing the currency for the community. how could lying and theft be prevented here?

the only way i can think of is if there was an organization in each community whose job it was to inspect the books of every workplace in that community where goods/services are purchased, as well as their suppliers (to verify the accuracy), and also the organizations responsible for collecting/redistributing currency. all this oversight would be a huge labor cost. i can't think of any other way to prevent lying and currency theft without this huge labor cost, can you?

another issue is there is the potential for corruption within these oversight / watchdog organizations, they might let theft slide if they can get a piece of the action.

i'm open to hearing any alternative suggestion that avoids these problems, but i'm pessimistic that there is any. if none can be thought of, then any region that uses consumption entitlement will either have to face these problems or will need to implement a way of somehow making currency non-transferable.

Syndicalistcat,

Whats the parecon argument against simply using statistical analysis to determine production rates? Access points for free goods then just keep track of what exits the door sending figures back down the line. Set production at +1 standard deviation for "luxuries" and +1.5-2 s.d.'s for basics. Assures, for the most part, abundance. Though the paper dragon of "working more then we need" (not as big of a concern if you know, we abolish work) well be flying around burning stuff down undoubtedly, this still sounds better then going through the trouble of organizing a revolution only to be back to clocking in and budgeting my vouchers.