"Money is the information index of this system"

Mark Alizart, the strangest and most entertaining philosopher in France, opens his text Cryptocommunism by hurling a Molotov cocktail at common sense: Bitcoin will not be the currency of libertarians, but will give rise to an upgraded version of communism: cryptocommunism.

In this fertile essay, everything seems to be a condition of possibility for something else. Unlike other philosophical texts, where the central goal is to prove a certain thesis, Alizart does philosophy to think, to spark questions and to find the crevices where meaning explodes. He is a concept-synthesizing machine, raising a thesis per chapter, and sometimes per page. He writes with the vertigo and speed of someone who believes they have found something new. And perhaps they have.

Bitcoin and anarcho-capitalism

The most famous cryptocurrency in the world, created by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto at the dawn of the 2009 economic crisis, quickly became a libertarian paradise, or rather, an anarcho-capitalist one.

For those coming from the left, the idea of anarchy combined with capitalism may seem far-fetched, but it suffices to make the following distinction: while for classical anarchists the political goal was to abolish the State and private property, for anarcho-capitalists it is enough to abolish the State while keeping private property. A kind of feat between Kropotkin and Locke.

Bitcoin, in that sense, would be the perfect technology, as it fulfills both conditions: it eliminates the State as an intermediary in the creation of currencies, while also establishing itself as a tool that guarantees private property, given the characteristics of the network on which it operates.

But for Alizart, contrary to what its followers believe, Bitcoin is a machine for bringing people together around a goal: generating consensus. In this sense, it would be an institution far more political than its followers are willing to acknowledge.

Alizart argues that Bitcoin is a technology whose impact must be traced back to two prior revolutions: the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Bitcoin brings with it a new theological-political order, since it is a new institution whose main function is to provide an algorithm of "faith". Bitcoin, like all money, derives its value from a community believing it has value.

Alizart maintains that while bitcoiners seek to be "free" from any institution, Bitcoin is actually an institution of freedom, a social order. It seems that politics is an inescapable curse: Bitcoin is, in a sense, a consensus system, a small "organized community".

The Left and technology

"The left cannot continue looking at technology as if it were something alien or evil. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams wrote about this a few years ago in The Accelerationist Manifesto, calling on progressives to reclaim the idea of the future instead of leaving it to neoliberalism," Alizart responds by email.

If one had to summarize what his book is about in just a couple of lines, one could say that for the author, Bitcoin is the tool that the free market was missing to become communism. Which would seem to be an absolute contradiction: how can the free market be the gateway to communism?

"Obviously it is debatable, but it was Marx's original idea, and it comes from the anarchist tradition that fed early socialism. Contrary to most beliefs, communism is not statism. It is the idea that the state must be destroyed, but it is also the idea that the state cannot be naively destroyed."

The French philosopher recalls that Marx believed that the liberal conception of free markets was an illusion, or worse, a scheme to conceal the fact that the State we think of as a public servant is actually only serving private interests. "So Marxism struggles to find a way to destroy the State in a majestic way. And to be fair, it never succeeded," Alizart considers.

The author of Cryptocommunism is deeply interested in cybernetics, the science of distributed systems, and particularly in blockchains. "Therefore, I believe that Marx would have been very interested in all of this and probably would have embraced cryptocurrencies in the same way he embraced Darwinism or statistics."

Is the economy a way of moving energy?

--Yes, to a large extent, that is what the economy is about. The economy is the way a system (living or social) collects and distributes energy to its moving parts. But one must immediately add: energy and information. This is the part missing from Marxism, which understood well the thermodynamic nature of the economy.

What would that look like?

--It is not just about labor power, it is also about information allocation. Money is, in a way, that index of information in the system. That is why money is not just a "veil over the economy": it has intrinsic properties and a special role to play.

Cryptocurrencies for liberation

For Alizart, with reasoning analogous to thermodynamics, any economic system can be understood as a system that moves energy, but also information. Money would be, in this case, that extra information. And Bitcoin is a new way (more agile, efficient, and useful) of moving information.

Furthermore, since Bitcoin is not dominated by any particular company or state, it has the capacity to return the means of monetary production to the hands of those who need it most: ordinary people, the workers of the planet with no privileged access to capital whatsoever.

In this way, for the author, the endogamy between markets, banks, and the State would be broken, which permanently keeps people away from access to money (aka information) and thus perpetuates the power relations of the current order. Cryptocurrencies and blockchains would then be a new weapon in the service of the communist international. Cryptoproletarians of the world... unite!

This article was originally published in Pagina/12. It is reproduced here with the author's permission.