The reasons for the goal are :
1. As labour productivity rises, a Euro fi xed in terms of hours of labour will
be able to buy more each year, cheapening the cost of living.
2. Once the value of the Euro has been stabilised in terms of labour value
the labour value of Euro notes should be printed on them in hours and
minutes. This step would be an act of revolutionary pedagogy. It would
reveal clearly to employees just how the existing system cheats them.
Suppose a worker puts in a working week of 45 hours and gets back Euros
and sees that the hours printed on them amount to only 20 hours, then
she will become aware that she is being cheated out of 25 hours each
week. This will act to raise socialist consciousness, and create favourable
public opinion for other socialist measures.
3. As a final stage the Euro would be renamed and redefined in terms of
work time, and would cease to be a transferable physical currency. People
would have electronic credits measured in, say, European Standard
Hours, which would be redeemable against goods containing the same
number of hours of work, but which could not be used for private
speculative transactions.
Instead of just having a committee of economists charged with regulating the
value of the Euro, the principle of participative democracy implies that the
Value Policy Committee should be made up both of economists and members
of the European public selected on a jury basis.
The Value Policy Committee would have to commission surveys of how
much work was being done in different industries, and how much monetary
value added there was in these industries, in order to guide its stabilisation
policy. The definition of monetary value added would be the same as that
currently used to compute Value Added Tax.
3.2 Reform of accounting and pressure for fair prices
All firms currently have to prepare money accounts, The state should make it
a condition of their accounts being approved, that they also produce labourtime accounts and that they mark on all products their labour content.
Initially firms need not be legally obliged to sell their commodities at
their true values. They could attempt to sell them for a price that is higher
or lower than the true value. But since consumers can now see when they
Transition to 21st Century Socialism in the European Union
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