In theory, on paper, a "labour certificate" system, as a system where everybody would be given "credits" corresponding to the number of hours they had worked to "spend" on goods and services that would be "priced" according to the amount of time taken to produce them, could conceivably work, at least for a while. But the question that should be asked first is: what would be the point? For such a scheme to function would require a huge bureaucracy to measure how much time everybody had worked (not just in hours, but to the nearest minute) and how much time it took to produce every single good or service (again to the nearest minute). Even if the certificates were cancelled after use (and even if we used electronic cards instead of paper notes) and even if (a refinement introduced by the Dutch/German Left) they lost their "value" if they weren't used within a given time (and so couldn't be accumulated) the question still remains: what would be the point? Supporters of the scheme--which wasn't Marx's own idea at all but one that was already circulating within the German Social Democratic party at the time, which Marx only used as an example of one possiblity--have put forward three reasons for it: (a) as a means of ensuring that the producers get "the full product of their labour" (that's the point of measuring the number of hours and minutes everybody works); (b) as an incentive to work (if you don't work you don't get any certificates to use to acquire food, etc); (c) as a way of dealing with the fact in the first years of communism that goods and services might not be able to be produced in sufficient quantities to go over to free distribution (Marx's reason). Marx himself refuted (a) by pointing out that there would still be some people (the young, the sick, the old) who would not be able to work and so would have to be supported out of the work of those who did (a first deduction from their "full product", then); then there would have to be a deduction to maintain public services (including, it might be added, the huge bureaucracy required to administer the scheme); and then a further deduction would be required to renew and expand the means of production. In any event, production now being a joint effort of the whole "collective producer", it's not possible to measure an individsual's contribution in any meaningful way. It is rather strange that in 1875 (admittedly, only in private notes not intended for publication) Marx should have given credibility, however lukewarmedly, to a proposal which in 1847 (Poverty of Philosophy) and in 1859 (A Contribution to A Critique of Political Economy) he had so thoroughly demolished as ill-conceived and impractical. In these works (and also in the Grundrisse), Marx demonstrated how it was impossible to measure the amount of socially necessary labour required to produce something independently of this being fixed on the market and that therefore the "labour-money" schemes of Proudhon, Gray and the others were unworkable. It is true that these reformers envisaged a labour-money that circulated in the same way that ordinary money does whereas the scheme mentioned by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme envisaged non-circulating certificates that were cancelled on use. However, the same criticism he made of the impossibility of directly measuring the socially necessary labour content of some item would apply even if the certificates did not circulate since this concerns the other side of the equation: how the "prices" of the goods and services the certificates can be used to acquire are fixed. All that could be measured would be either actual labour time or some more or less arbitrary average calculated by the scheme's bureaucracy. However, unless actual labour time were used (which wouldn't make sense since there would then be much less incentive to produce more efficiently, ie in less time) the total face-value of the certificates issued to those who had worked would not correspond to the total face-value of the goods and services which they could be used to acquire. But if this happened there would be "inflation"--too many certificates chasing not enough goods--leading to the "depreciation" of each certificate. It's all beginning to sound all too depressingly familiar, isn't it? This is a thorny problem which led the Dutch/German Left to work out all sorts of convoluted technical answers. See: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6579/ Their solution was to let the certificates circulate after all, from productive unit to productive unit and from productive unit to producers. So the labour certificates would become "labour-money"--which is precisely what John Crump's 1976 article said would tend to happen anyway (and the idea of which Marx had brilliantly demolished in the 1840s and 1850s). In other words, exchange, buying and selling, and all that this implies would continue. "All that this implies" means, for instance, that each productive unit would be under pressure to minimise its costs. This would be the priority, not working conditions nor the environment nor even the number of producers working in the productive unit. We'd still be under pressure to work faster and faster, just like under the capitalism we know today. Coupled with (b) above--which would exert the same pressure on people to work as now by the wages system--it is clear that we would not be talking about genuine socialism/communism. Other undesirable things would tend to happen too. Some people would be tempted to forge or steal certificates; and the bureaucracy would have to be extended to include people whose job it would be to track down--and punish--those who did this. Others would try to lend or borrow certificates, so re-introducing interest. Clearly then such a society would not merit even the description "lower stage of communism" (unless of course like Lenin you assimilate this to "state capitalism" and label it "socialism" as something different from "communism"). What we would be faced with would be something that might indeed accurately be described, as was by John Crump, as a "form of capitalism". In any event, an exchange economy with money, prices, wages if not, initially, profits. Which is why the Dutch/German Left have been (rightly) accused of standing for workers self-management of their own exploitation, workers self-exploitation. Actually, I think what they advocated was a completely unworkable scheme that is better described as a variety currency crankism, a funny money scheme in the same league as Social Credit and other such proposals for monetary reform. If--as could well be the case, at least for some goods and services, right at the beginning of communism--there were to be shortages of some goods, the best way way to deal with this would be direct rationing, even equal sharing. This was pointed out at the time by the anarcho-communist Kropotkin in his article "The Wages System" (see: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/conquest/ch13.htmlwh ich )remains one of the best refutations of the "labour certificate" scheme, all the more powerful since it was written at the time. This would be simpler to manage (it would not require even a tenth of the bureaucracy of the labour certificate scheme) and needn't apply to all goods; only to those in short supply and only as long as they were in short supply (which needn't be too long; after all, the productive forces have been immensely developed since 1875 when Marx might have had a case for thinking this could last for a decade or two). Some goods and services could be free from the start: housing, gas, electricity, water, telephones, public transport, launderettes, restaurants serving basic meals, etc. Once, after a few years, communism had been established as a stable society on a world basis after the mess left by capitalism had been cleared up (especially world hunger and lack of basic amenities, but food production could be immensely increased from year 1), then society could rapidly move towards free access and free distribution, the full implentation of the communist principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", in which people's contribution to production would not be measured, nor their consumption rationed neither by money nor by labour certificates. Adam