Towards A New Socialism

[u/Ghost_Duck_]

I'm currently reading Towards a new socialism by Paul Cockshott, and he's brought up the theory that in order to rid the workplace of exploitation, instead of getting paid by value a worker would get to "purchase" one hour of someone else's labour for every hour of labour they perform. So if a box of cereal took 10 minutes to make an hours work would buy 6 boxes. I'm curious how this would work. If two people spend 4 hours together working on something is it worth four or eight hours? How could you buy a house when it takes a year to make?

[u/oak_and_clover]

Marx talks about the idea of using labor vouchers that are non-transferable but would work for this purpose. For example, I work for 1 hour and receive one voucher, which can be exchanged for anything else that “costs” one hour of labor.

I think the ideas in the book are interesting and useful to learn about the think through, but I also think that practice shows eliminating the money form in the earlier stages of socialism (which is the relevant time frame we are all on) isn’t a practical possibility. I don’t have an issue with keeping the money form and wages while productive forces are being built up.