Labour vouchers were first proposed in the 1820s by
Josiah Warren and
Robert Owen. Two early attempts at implementing labour vouchers (called labour notes at the time by their proponents) were made by both following their experiences attempting to establish a utopian community in
New Harmony, Indiana in which currency was prohibited. In 1827, Warren established the
Cincinnati Time Store where goods could be purchased with labor vouchers representing an agreement to perform labor. However, he folded the store in 1830 in order to devote his effort to establishing communities that implemented his principles of labour-based prices. Beginning in 1832, Owen and his followers attempted to implement labour notes in London and Glasgow by establishing marketplaces and banks that accepted them. The followers of Owen stood for a society of co-operative communities. Each community would own its own means of production and each member of a community would work to produce what had been agreed was needed and in return would be issued with a labour voucher certifying for how much time he or she had worked. A person could then use this labour voucher to obtain from the community's stock of consumer goods any product or products which had taken the same amount of time to produce. Owen believed that this co-operative commonwealth could begin to be introduced under capitalism and in the first half of the 1830s some of his followers established labour bazaars on a similar principle in which workers brought the products of their labour to the bazaar and received in exchange a labour voucher that entitled them to take from the bazaar any item or items which had taken the same time to produce after taking into account the costs of the raw materials. These bazaars were ultimately failures, but the idea of labour vouchers appeared in substantially similar forms in France in the writings of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Marx initially refused the idea in the
Poverty of Philosophy, especially within capitalism (I. chapter, 2. §). Marx stated that time in itself separated from other people's time is not suitable to measure the value of work. Value "is constituted, not by the time needed to produce it by itself, but in relation to the quota of each and every other product which can be created at the same time" (3.§. A.). According to Marx, the introduction of labour vouchers would create a lazy society and economy as there would not be concurrency between employers and employees, so nobody would be able to tell what the optimal (minimal) time needed to produce anything would be. For example, what if "Peter" works 12 hours per day, while "Paul" works only 6 hours. This means that "Peter" worked 6 unnecessary hours and his labour vouchers are not worth anything as this is regarded +6 hours, not to mention other factors of the work. To summarize Marx's opinion in the
Poverty of Philosophy, the labour voucher is not suitable to create a new socialist society, and the theory of Proudhon and others is nothing more than a
utopian apology of the
existing capitalist system. By
Friedrich Engels, Proudhon himself tried to introduce the labour voucher system in 1849, but his attempt collapsed soon. Marx was adamant in saying that labour vouchers were not a form of money as they could not circulate — a problem he pointed out in Owen's system of labour-time notes. However, they were later advocated by
Karl Marx, despite disagreeing with the manner in which they were implemented by Owen, as a way of dealing with immediate and temporary shortages upon the establishment of socialism. Marx explained that this would be necessary since socialism emerges from capitalism and would be "stamped with its birthmarks". In Marx's proposal, an early socialist society would reward its citizens according to
the amount of labour they contribute to society. In the
Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx said: [T]he individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another. In 1930, the German-Dutch council communist group,
Group of International Communists, published their main work,
Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution.
Jan Appel was an important contributor to this book, in which the group described in detail—based on the theory of Marx and Engels—how a communist society could use labour-time accounting to operate a planned economy without the need for a central planning authority. Workers would receive labour vouchers corresponding to their time worked. Self-managed companies, organized as worker collectives, would operate with labour-time accounts using the then state-of-the-art accounting techniques. In this system, labour time would play the role that money plays in a capitalist society. Since everyone would receive the same amount of labour vouchers per unit time worked, exploitation would be prevented. During the
Great Depression, European communities implemented local currencies with varying success. The aptly-named economist Sir
Leo Chiozza Money advocated for a similar monetary scheme in his 1934 book
Product Money (Methuen) with notes or certificates being issued for productive work and destroyed once exchanged for consumption goods. In
Nazi Germany,
Hjalmar Schacht (
Adolf Hitlers finance-minister and banker) applied a kind of labour-voucher named MEFO-bond, whose aim was to hide the rearmament program's expenditures before the Western world as the big trusts did not pay by money-transfer to each other, but bought MEFO bonds from the state and changed these bonds in closed circuit. More modern implementations as
time-based currencies were implemented in the United States starting in the 1970s. == Systems that advocate labour vouchers ==