“Karl Marx Will See Bitcoin as a Revolutionary Tool to Raise Capitalism”
See: Karl Marx, bitcoin and capitalism: Crypto Mile episode 7
What would Karl Marx think about crypto?
Yahoo Finance’s The Crypto Mile talks to leading Marxist academic Professor Richard D Wolff about blockchain’s potential to democratize the workplace and lead to less work and more leisure unless it is “subjugated by the current capitalist economic structure”.
In episode seven of The Crypto Mile, Professor Wolff discussed how Marx would see bitcoin (USD-BTC) and blockchain technology as a revolutionary tool to abolish capitalism.
“When it comes to crypto, Marx would say it’s a distraction, but it also carries the seeds of something beyond the mind-numbing state that capitalism has brought us,” Professor Wolff told Yahoo Finance.
“Bitcoin can be part of a revolutionary agenda.
“But it had to be fought for, because there are powerful forces that want it to be nothing of the same, and that want it to be another servant of the same system.”
Professor Wolff described the latest rush to own cryptoassets as “correlated with record lottery ticket sales”.
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He said that the economic atmosphere in the United States leaves the impression on the American people that the American economy is out of control.
“The American economy is reeling from one disaster to another and is sending a very powerful message to people that if there’s something you can cling to, do it.”
The economist described the volatility of the “crypto-casino” as becoming more alluring to American citizens.
“A very large part of the interest in crypto has been driven by the idea that you can achieve life-changing wealth quickly,” he said.
But he described another aspect of blockchain technology, one that has the potential to see a major breakthrough in how society works.
“Blockchain could provide a breakthrough that could achieve a real radical reorganization of how we spend our time, with much less time spent on work and more on leisure.”
However, he warned that this is something “that people have been promised many times before”.
He explained that how cryptocurrency will evolve, and the role it will play in society, will mostly be shaped by the dynamics of capitalism, its criticism and opposition.
“The arrival of blockchain technology and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) could be a way to achieve a true democratic control over the means of production.”
However, Professor Wolff said any attempt to change the status quo will face a real challenge from those who govern the economic system, who will decide in what form cryptocurrency is brought into the production process along with its decentralized allocations.
“My guess is that blockchain technology will be subordinated and the parts that fit the capitalist structure will be retained, but the parts that challenge, such as the interests of leisure and less work, will be discarded.”
He provided some context to current labor conditions, particularly in the United States.
“We do more hours of paid work per person in this country today than at any other time in our history.
“I am convinced that our descendants will look back in horror at the years and years of technical opportunities that we never exploited, but instead maintained the profit system of capitalism.”
He observed that the crypto industry is not getting the attention it deserves from the academic community.
“The vast majority of economists in the United States pay little or no attention to the surrounding issues in the cryptocurrency sector and tend to follow government officials and especially the big banks in dismissing, devaluing, and marginalizing crypto.”
He added: “There are very large and fundamental interests that are strong in the American population that crypto speaks to, but they don’t get the kind of attention from academia that I think it deserves.”
The ideology of crypto
Cryptocurrency has its roots in libertarian free market ideals, originating in the distrust of government and central banks following the bailout of institutional finance following the 2008 sub-prime crash.
Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious founder of bitcoin, even encoded into the first block ‘genesis block’ of the bitcoin blockchain a message articulating the reasons behind its invention.
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Genesis Block’s coded message read: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bank bailout.”
The cryptocurrency ecosystem, which began with Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of bitcoin, has witnessed a Cambrian explosion of variations, some idealistic in origin, most unapologetically commercial ventures.
The blockchain promises to abolish centralized bureaucracies that tend towards inefficiency and corruption, which is what Marxist regimes specialize in.
But in the bleak thralls of the Victorian Industrial Revolution, Marx envisioned a future in which new technologies would emerge that could mimic all types of human labor, whether mental or physical.
An idealistic future where government would disappear and unfettered, fully automated production processes would satisfy the needs of everyone.
This aligns with the great ideals of crypto communities, from the decentralization development of the Ethereum Foundation (ETH-USD) to the privacy and individuality of bitcoin maximalists.
Marx’s posthumously published ‘Fragment on Machines’ was written in Britain in the 19th century, in the midst of the large-scale replacement of workers by industrial machinery. The study has parallels with the rise of blockchain technology, which promises to automate away centralized administrators, and the Internet of Things which has the potential to automate away workers who produce goods and services.
As Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s said: “While most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery performing simple tasks, blockchain automates the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work directly with the customer.”
DAOs as a way of organizing the workplace
One of the ways blockchain can reorganize the workplace is through decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs.
Yahoo Finance asked Professor Wolff his views on DAOs, and he said he was “grateful that there are people in the crypto community who are thinking of ways to liberate the workplace and achieve democratic control, I appreciate these DAOs”.
But he had a word of caution for anyone getting too optimistic, stating that “DAOs would face pressure to subordinate themselves to the existing capitalist employee/employer structure”.
“My fear is that the parts that challenge the existing structure, that strive for more democracy and more leisure, will have to face the opponent of the capitalist structure.”
Last year’s crypto flus Li Jin asked the crypto community how society can harness the power of collective action to ensure the workers’ voice is represented.
VC co-founder of Variant fundsaid that this must be achieved in a way that avoids the pitfalls of the past, where “centralized structures can lead to a perversion of values”.
She tweeted that DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, “represent the next step forward in the labor movement.”
A DAO is characterized by its ability to operate with high levels of efficiency, leveraging the automation of administration provided by the blockchain.
They also work without the need for a centralized location, they are native to the online world, and many participants contribute anonymously.
DAOs may have the potential to be crypto’s answer to the traditional corporation or to be a worker cooperative, it all depends on how their governance tokens (like a traditional share) are dispensed.
They can create the basis for non-hierarchical workplaces, where a company develops based on collective decision-making, this is achieved via non-transferable governance symbols.
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But if governance tokens, which act like shares, can be transferred, aggressive takeovers can happen as easily as in the traditional corporate world, with one individual netting over 51% of the tokens, becoming a defacto CEO.
In his Twitter thread (TWTR), Jin added: “New developments in decentralized coordination promise a renewed pro-worker movement.
“DAOs – internet communities with shared ownership – can function similarly to trade unions, representing the collective interest of their members to drive beneficial policies and mechanisms.”
See: What are NFTs?
Late-stage capitalism “a crisis of work-related loneliness”
Professor Wolff said that the liberation of labor is not happening at the present time. Focusing on the situation in America, he said “we have a crisis in the United States of work-related loneliness”.
“People have no sense of connection to anyone else, the overwhelming majority of the work we do is unnecessary and has no meaning.
“But the idea that we can break away from that is very difficult to achieve.
“The employers make the decisions, and the mass of people have been trained to think of it as somehow normal, natural and necessary.”
But if DAOs create more democratic workplaces, where everyone involved is financially incentivized and given equal decision-making powers, will we see more productive, creative and happier ways of working, or will they be suffocated by “death by committee”?
Also, if advances in machine learning create a globally connected Internet of Things, will automation of manufacturing processes provide more free time for workers, or lead to mass unemployment?
According to Professor Wolff, the extent to which blockchain technology and the IOT will be utilized for the good of all will depend on the outcome of the battle between the capital owners and the majority wage workers who drive our taxis, manufacture our semiconductors. , my coltan for our cell phones, and write our news stories.
