Ferdia O’Driscoll has written an article published on the Participatory Economy Project website on the governance and allocation of income in socialism entitled “Explaining Communal Income and Why it is Essential to Socialism”. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
Communal Income refers to the governance and accounting of income received by individuals for formal work. Namely, Communal Income means that (1) income to work is decided politically through democratic processes wider than the individual enterprise, and that (2) worker income is not allocated from the Income Statement of the enterprise but from the accounts of the Commune2. This article will introduce Communal Income in the context of a PE and explain why it matters so crucially to a postcapitalist society. We will focus on contrasting Communal Income and Private Income, explaining how the former is a basic requirement of postcapitalism and the latter is constitutive of capitalism itself. Specifically, we will see how Private Income acts to assimilate workers into the cycle of capital, with intra-enterprise competition for jobs and higher pay, inter-enterprise competition for market power, society-wide income disparities, and disruption of autonomous motivation for work.
To read more, visit https://participatoryeconomy.org/explaining-communal-income-and-why-it-is-essential-to-socialism/
Ferdia O’Driscoll is an independent researcher focusing on the details of postcapitalist civilisation. You can follow his work at Bright Age Beyond.