Richard D. Wolff

A few of the potential strategies I have been considering to create passive social-positive incentives (economic soft power), would be to create a form of currency (or several) to combine Social value with Economic value. This certainly must exist already, possibly in the form of virtual tokens, and definitely in the form of percentile contributions to social causes. What I am wondering about is the potential of weaponizing this as a deliberate socialist strategy, possibly to devalue the capitalist currency by overvaluing this "cause specific socially engaged currency" within a voluntarily associated group or community. I've heard about Bristol Pounds, for example, which is pretty much the same thing but only carries a localized economic bias (which is also important). When used in conjunction with credit cooperatives, which could either add "bonus miles" to the consumption of "cooperative based" products and services or may simply help to convert a portion of a coop worker's salary into a community-specific currency (or currencies), which would then have a greater value when acquiring goods from associated coops and similar institutions. The concern I have, however, is that parallel economies have a tendency to create shadow markets. Some individuals could perhaps game the system by acquiring goods at a lower cost and then selling them at a greater cost for capitalist currency. Is this a worthwhile strategy or is it doomed to fail?