This is a piece of a larger project to present the Community Reserve Exchange as an autonomous economic initiative. Feedback is generally welcomed, Tadit.
Often the best way to create a new approach to a set of problems is to review systems that at a smaller scale seem to work. Scaling up the model is then more likely to preserve the values necessary for the growth of sovereign and communal wealth. Through a friend who is a long time resident at the Twin Oaks Community, I discovered that their community had adopted a community wide labor credit system that was developed and implemented with no obvious economic expertise. Even so, it resembles a currency model described by the post-Keynesian discourse of modern monetary economics. The values that have caused these different efforts to produce similar results are the desire for an economic process that supports a higher level of equality and that they both begin from the assumption that the applied economics needs to be functional toward a higher level of socialization and democratic outcomes. Both assume that people and communities can manage themselves according to their capacities, rather than according to conformity to a dysfunction paradigm.
My primary references for the Twin Oaks's labor credit system has been correspondence with my friend, Dianne Grandstrom and the chapter "Shaping Equality" in the book A Walden Two Experiment by Kathleen Kinkade copyright 1973, which is about the first five years of the Twin Oaks Community. The labor credit system and the external accounting process that Kate described operates to distribute the labor assignments to the residents and pay the expenses of the community in it's exchanges with the external economic context.
Read it at Re-Imagining Economics
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