Feel free to continue the discussion here.
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I’ll be the first to post, and say the IDA app is a good step forward when it comes to software related to DEP. I hope it’s expanded upon further by contributors and comrades into a more multifaceted tool for economic planning. Labor-time accounting and in-kind accounting would allow for a far more holistic picture of the economy within a worker collective, and even further within a worker federation.
Definitely hope y’all will work with Tomas to expand the applications and capabilities of your app.
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If you want to revisit the presentation (or certain parts) from yesterday, the recording has been uploaded now. You can find it here.
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Several event participants asked whether we are taking in-kind planning into account.
In fact, at IDA and in the app development so far, we have mainly focused on the abstract measure of labor time, because it makes all types of products and services comparable and thus offers many advantages. In our view, these advantages are not sufficiently acknowledged.
However, I would like to point out that in the labor time accounting of the Group of International Communists (GIC), precise in-kind (physical) data is indeed present. This is because every company plan must specify which product or service is being produced. In the current implementation of plan creation in our app, the product name is a free-text field without any predefined options. However, one could imagine that firms might have to choose from a predefined list of standardized products or product categories. Alternatively, there could be industry associations (guilds/planning associations) that define products and product classes. Firms must also specify how many units of which delivery format they are producing.
So, society knows how many units of each product are planned to exist (and of course, how much time is required to produce them).
Furthermore, when firms consume products from other firms, they must specify which product from which firm they are consuming and in what quantity. This means that society also knows the supply chains and the demand of individual firms and entire sectors.
Workers also don’t consume abstract labor time but concrete products – and society knows what is consumed and in what quantities.
Thus, labor time accounting is not only about labor time, but also serves as an inventory of concrete products, raw materials, etc. We are convinced that society will use this knowledge of the material side of the economy for its planning. Our app is, so to speak, the database or general ledger of the society’s economy.
What insights the societal institutions will draw from this data, and what scientific, economic, and political conclusions will be derived, is still quite unclear to us at this point – and perhaps it would be premature to discuss this in detail already. However, we are always happy to talk about these aspects as well.
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I would like to second @Sebastian_L’s reply. In addition, our simulation modeling project (a distinct project, not formally linked to IDA) is trying to address this issue in a cybernetic manner. We are currently exploring a notion of an overall social budget of work hours that usually adjusts itself according to supply and demand signals arising from production and consumption. Similarly, we can structure in-kind accounting as a mostly-automatically-controlled allocation of a global budget. The initial global budget is subject to a political process, but can also organize itself based upon known external constraints, such as the known availability of various scarce inputs and established limits on undesiirable side-effects such as CO2 emissions.
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