Cryptocommunism

Mark Alizart, Robin Mackay

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781509538584
  9781509538577
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781509538591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cryptocurrencies are often associated with right-wing political movements, or even with the alt-right. They are the preserve of libertarians and fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. With their promotion of anonymity and individualism, there's no doubt that they seamlessly slot into the prevailing anti-State ideology. But in this book Mark Alizart argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us 'to appropriate collectively the means of monetary production', to paraphrase Marx, and to replace 'the government of persons by the administration of things', as Engels advocated, they form the basis for a political regime that begins to look like a communism which has at last come to fruition – a cryptocommunism.

Part I
Government of People, Administration of Things

1
A State without Statism

In crypto circles, communism often figures as everything crypto is not: statist, centralizing, planned and totalitarian, where crypto sees itself as decentralized, liberal and emancipatory. But who was the first person to ask how one could do without the state and its representatives, before Satoshi Nakamoto, Ayn Rand or Friedrich Hayek? None other than Karl Marx.

Marx was a lover of freedom, and his ambition as a philosopher and politician was precisely to find a way to safeguard freedom. After all, he belonged to a generation that had witnessed the heist pulled off by the business bourgeoisie so as to benefit from the French Revolution. He had seen upstarts reclaiming all their privileges off the backs of the populace that had brought them to power. He hated these fake aristocrats who had hijacked public wealth with the alibi of advancing the people’s cause. He wanted to prevent these new masters from putting the genie of the Enlightenment ideal of emancipation back into the bottle. Marx was, in essence, the first to seek to radicalize revolution, and even reformation. A great admirer of Luther, he thought that just as Luther had demolished the clergy, so it was his responsibility to demolish the state. What he had in mind under the name of communism was essentially that ‘public power’ would lose its ‘political character’, as he wrote in the Communist Party Manifesto,¹ the aim being to ensure that ‘the government of men gives way to the administration of things’, to paraphrase his sidekick Friedrich Engels² – upon which, ‘[i]n place of the old bourgeois society … we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.³

These are words that could have been penned by the author of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. And that’s no coincidence. At first, the socialist movement was almost indistinguishable from the anarchist movement led by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin and Louis Blanc. It really only differed on one point, albeit a crucial one, and one that interests us particularly in that it allows us to understand the link between communism and the blockchain: Marx believed that the destatization of society had to be accompanied by some other kind of organization or protocol, otherwise the same causes would generate the same effects all over again: private forces would take advantage of public weakness to confiscate common property and the state would rise up again, even stronger, from the ashes, as the crushing of the Commune in 1870–1 had proved.

It’s not so much that Marx didn’t trust the market to replace the state (all indications are that it’s quite capable of doing so); he did not trust the market’s ability to remain a market if left to itself. Marx’s very original thesis is that, the market would turn once more into a state. Indeed, the state doesn’t ‘oppress’ entrepreneurs, as is their usual complaint. Quite the contrary: it is something they create. It is invented by capitalists in order to protect their private property, to advance their interests and to deter the growth of competition. In other words, the state is never just a dominant private interest disguising itself as the public interest.⁴ It is a fully fledged actor in the market.

Paradoxically, this point makes Marx much more closely affiliated with the libertarians than we usually think. For libertarians also believe that the markets are manipulated by politicians and that therefore they must be liberated from this political control so that they can become efficient again. Destroying the state means preventing the mechanism whereby the market secretes the state like an oyster secretes a pearl. So libertarians don’t simply want to suppress the state, any more than Marx does. On the contrary: since politics tends always to rise again from its ashes, Hayek, for example, advocated that governments be placed under the supervision of higher structures, capable of imposing rules of free competition that must apply to all without distinction.

The only difference between Marx and libertarians is the structure that is to be responsible for regulating the market. For Hayek, it was to be an unelected ‘council of wise men’ presiding over executive and legislative power and which, in addition to being responsible for regulating the market, would also take pride in giving its opinion on moral issues (since the people must be ‘educated’ to freedom, according to the Austrian thinker, who never hid his sympathy for fascism despite his proclaimed love of freedom – or more paradoxically, because of it). For Marx, it was to be ‘popular councils’ endowed with the same powers (what would become the ‘Soviets’ in Lenin’s era). But even this doesn’t provide much ground for differentiating between Marxists and libertarians – or, at least, they failed equally: councils of elders and popular councils alike failed to do their job.

Bakunin had predicted that Marx’s passion for political organization would lead him to replace the bourgeois state with a ‘red bureaucracy’ that would be just as bad, and ultimately he was proved right. Under the yoke of Lenin and then Stalin, the fearsome fantasy of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ morphed into the infamous ‘Party’, a real state within the state that betrayed the trust of the proletarians it was supposed to serve; a tool of ‘democratic centralism’ in which centralism always trumped democracy.

But it is no unfair exaggeration to say that libertarianism has scarcely been more successful than Marxism in convincing people of the effectiveness of its system. Hayek’s recommendations have been followed around the world as, in what is known as ‘neoliberalism’, technocratic institutions everywhere have supplanted the general will: what are called ‘central banks’ (institutions against which libertarians are constantly railing, not realizing that they themselves invented them!), but also the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (all the presidents and governors of which are unelected).⁵ Not to mention ‘Supreme Courts’ (whose judges are also unelected) and various ‘Central Intelligence Agencies’ (whose leaders, once more, are unelected). The problem with all these institutions is that the personalities who head them up, without any popular supervision, must therefore be appointed by the most loyal and devoted representatives of the oligarchy. In the end, Hayek and his buddies in the neoliberal cadre of the Mont Pelerin Society will have served as nothing but useful idiots for big business (that is, unless they were in cahoots from the very start).

But then, if neither popular councils nor unelected technocrats can overcome the dysfunctions of the market, who on earth can? That’s where Bitcoin comes in, precisely because it seems to provide a solution to this impasse. It seems to be the missing piece that communism needed in order to carry out its ‘organized destruction’ of the state.

Notes

1. 1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso, 2010), 61.
2. 2. In his 1878 book Anti-Duhring.
3. 3. Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 62.
4. 4. See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ [1843], translated by Annette John and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
5. 5. The Fed was created in 1913, but did not achieve real independence until 1978, notably under the influence of the work of Milton Friedman, who was close to Hayek. The independence of the US Supreme Court is quite obviously of a different order, as an institution that precedes neoliberalism by two centuries. Marx, however, always held that the doctrine of the separation of powers that justified its existence represented the very birth of the bourgeois state.

2
Cybernetics and Governmentality

Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, was one of the first to have understood, as early as the 1950s, that information technology offered a solution to the problem of democratic governance. Indeed, the very word ‘cybernetics’ harbours a reference to the ‘science of good government’ (kubernetes, the Greek word from which cybernetics is derived, means ‘steersman’). According to Wiener, a society could be described just like any other system that seeks equilibrium (‘homeostasis’) through positive feedback loops – so it had to be optimally controlled by automated and decentralized algorithms, just as a body’s vital functions are controlled by the nervous system without any conscious intervention on our part.¹

A certain persistent rumour has it that cybernetics was right wing, with cyberneticians so fulsome in their praise of both an antidemocratic form of control and a liberal system of self-regulation. But no such stance appears in the work of Wiener, who rejected both Stalinism and hyperliberalism (indeed, he was forced to remove his comparison of the two from the second edition of his book in order to appease McCarthyist communist-hunters). In fact, like the entire generation of scientists who were part of the ‘Manhattan Project’, Wiener was haunted by anxiety that the public good might fall into the hands of some Doctor Strangelove, whether communist or capitalist. In this sense, his insistence on automation and decentralization is akin to Marx’s obsession with a state protected from human greed and folly.

Not by chance, it was perhaps the great communist intellectual Louis Althusser who best understood the benefits that Marxists could derive from cybernetics. Althusser had a very particular understanding of the impasse into which communism had stumbled under first Lenin and then Stalin. For him, it was not that socialism had been taken hostage by autocratic and sociopathic leaders who had to be eliminated so that a ‘socialism with a human face’ could emerge, as Jean-Paul Sartre thought; he insisted that, on the contrary, it had remained the prisoner of a still too ‘humanistic’ vision of politics. Althusser did not mean that Mao or Stalin had been oversentimental leaders, but that by giving in to the cult of personality, they had betrayed Marx’s fundamental idea that communism must emancipate itself from all masters. According to Althusser, the only way to save communism was to entirely reject the ‘metaphysics of the subject’ by embracing the idea that history administers itself without any help from humans, that it is a ‘subjectless process’.

The communism he developed is presented as a ‘structure’: a system with several ways in, with no centre and no overall command, endowed with multiple subsystems articulated to one another in an ‘overdetermined’ way, meaning that they are not determined ‘unilaterally’ but by means of loops that ensure their consistency. This Marxism, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: The Institution of Liberty
• Part I Government of People, Administration of Things
• Part II Collective Appropriation of the Means of Monetary Production
• Part III A New International
• Conclusion: Cryptoletarians of All Countries
• End User License Agreement