"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Apr 3, 2010

Accumulation

A question, and a gnat of a problem:

Assume an economic community wherein each person starts from a baseline, some agreed to fundamental minimum beneath which no one person or group of person can theoretically fall.

Assume also a "free labor market" where a person (or persons) can do whatever available work she pleases, remunerated according to the direct value produced by labor.

How would people store/record these personal receipts?

Labor banks?

And how would a community forestall the accumulation (and trade in) of un-expended labor credits, and perhaps the development of a monetary commodity of un-used labor value?

I know, I think, what the Soviets would do (and disagree). And in labor transactions mediated through capital, accumulation provides an engine, as an essential element.  Wrapping my head around the discouragement of accumulation, in even the most mutualist society, presents perhaps an insoluble problem, at least for now.

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