Basically the title. If you’re unfamiliar with CES it’s
The Community Exchange System (CES) is a community-based trading and exchange network that enables people and groups to trade their goods and services, both locally and across the world. It can be described as a global complementary economy that operates without money in the conventional sense.
It’s also known as time bank and mutual credit system. There are slight variations in the systems (as in, they can be set up however the users decide) but it’s basically like I fix your bike and you give me a Time Dollar (that you generated via my work to give to me) and then Alice is offering piano lessons for 1/2 Time Dollar for half hour lessons so I take my Time Dollar and get 2 piano lessons from Alice, and Alice needs a sweater and Bob knits sweaters so she goes to Bob with the Time Dollar and…
It’s like that but multiplied by many people and can be distributed further than local area if you find someone to trade with, say like translation services online (e.g. 1 document translation via email exchanges for 2 Time Dollars).
The CES system is getting a complete overhaul btw with open source software and a shiny new UI, so excited for that.
I’m very interested in how others do it so please share if you’ve got something.
We kinda toyed around with the idea of it a couple years ago. Just to get it going, you’d need a lot of people adopting it at once. You need to get people to log in to check it on a reasonable time frame. There would need to be an incentive to work for time dollars instead of legal tender, you’d want a way of keeping them in circulation, a way for them to be transferred without creating class dynamics, and a way for infirm or disabled people to access them in a way that everyone can agree to.
Interestingly enough, it’s easier to run a commune with gift economics than to try to pull off the intermediary step of grassroots labor vouchers.
To add on to the previous thoughts:
One potentially viable use case for a community exchange system is that it cannot be taxed or requisitioned by federal authorities, as it does not meet the requirements to be a currency; yet, it can still serve as a mode of exchange.
If you had a restaurant that operated as a worker’s co-op, and it sourced produce from a farm that was a worker’s co-op, and they made exchanges in time dollars, and more amd more of their transactions were in time dollars, they would be paying less money to Uncle Sam.
