Cryptocommunism. Mark Alizart

wind of change, spreading freedom across the world; but there are reasons to believe this will happen not in the way dreamt of by the eager children of the Tea Party, but by subjecting our lives to a new church and a new state yet more ascetic than Luther’s Reformation, more rigorous than Rousseau’s Republic. The theological-political regime of crypto will not be ‘cryptoanarchism’; quite the contrary, it will be a regime that will impose a new law on us, a new common law, more austere than liberal laws, thus more like a regime that too deemed itself to be revolutionary in its time, even if it didn’t succeed in bringing about the revolution its believers had hoped for: namely, communism – or, more precisely, cryptocommunism.

Notes

      1 1. Jean-Louis Schefer, L’Hostie profanée (Paris: P.O.L, 2007).

      2 2. See Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution II, The Impact of the Protestant Reformations on the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). In particular, Berman remarks upon the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and the Venetian banking models in this respect.

      3 3. Needless to say, it didn’t go down too well with the Catholic establishment. The king having taken a liking to the printing of paper money, inflation bankrupted France within five years.

      4 4. Even more than it is a ‘truth machine’. See Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).

      5 5. A belief that has fuelled the numerous reformations and revolutions that have continued to break out since the original Reformation and the French Revolution, on the basis there is always a ‘purer’ way of doing things.

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