What Would Marx think about Cryptocurrency? feat. Mark Alizart, author of Cryptocommunism
This week I spoke with Mark Alizart, a philosopher and the author of The Climate Coup, Dogs, and most recently Cryptocommunism which has recently been translated into English from French and published by Polity Books. In the book, Mark 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 admini...
Top Keywords
No salient keywords identified yet for this episode.
Transcript
Hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Sources podcast, and I have another guest today. His name is Mark Alazart. He is a philosopher and the author of a couple of different books including The Climate Coup, Dogs, and most recently Crypto Communism, which has recently been translated into English and published by Polity Books. So this book is really interesting because Mark argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies go well beyond crypto anarchism insofar 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. And so they form the basis of a political regime that begins to look like communism, which is, sort of like a crypto communism, she argues in the book. But hey, Mark. How are you doing? Hi. Good. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So I thought to start the interview would be really interesting because this is, I mean, the first book I think that's come out on, this particular connection of different things, cryptocurrency and communism. And so I was interested to hear what is the story a bit of what inspired you to write the book Since for a lot of people, it can be a bit difficult to make this connection between cryptocurrencies and communism. So I was wondering how how you sort of came to that connection.
I think that the the way the way this this link came about to me is, is linked to a book I wrote just before. It was on, information theory. And, the fact that, well, information, computers, the Internet, have basically eaten the world. And, but the the revolution they were they were supposed to to to make and implement, didn't happen. The political revolution, the the idea that the Internet would decentralized power and decentralized the economy and give power to the people, which was really very, very strong in the seventies, pre Internet, thought. This hadn't this didn't happen. And when I discovered Bitcoin, I was pretty fascinated by the fact that one of the answers, one of the missing links in this Internet revolution, was the question of value, or in a Marxist way of speaking, materialistic Internet. Internet and the information revolution is really about transmitting ideas, information as it's called. I mean, communication. Marx has always, you know, stressed that, the the the the need to to for thinkers, for revolutionary thinkers, to think about the fact that world is not made of ideas only. And, it's mostly made of things. It's mostly made of, of, power grabs and and struggles and, and production of of of of things and and and and appropriation of the means of production. And and and there and there this this this this this thing, this this invention was just appeared and was saying, you know, we can transfer more than information on the network, we can transfer value. And I thought, wow, this is maybe some kind of turning point, well certainly a turning point for, for, for our information network. We can transport more than information on the network. If the network itself, I mean, we can transport already money on networks through banks, digital, digitalized cash and everything. But what's really interesting in in in in Bitcoin is the fact that, the network is is itself producing its own reality. It's, it's not relying on realities that exist outside of the network. It it it actually actually makes the information, which is, transferred, it gives it the the the the the aspect of energy. It gives the the aspect of something of a of a of a of a material thing. And, and that in a philosophical sense, probably I think Marxist turn that is given to, the internet. And this is probably why I got into, into this, this, writing, this new writing where I thought that Marx had to be confronted the news to understand what was happening to us.
Yeah. I think, it's interesting, that yeah. I mean, exactly the the internet really hasn't played off or it hasn't kept its promises from the very beginning or like what the original sort of founders wanted it to become and I mean the Internet is largely an idealistic sort of vision or like this you know Internet sort of philosophy at the time. I think it was very idealistic and didn't really have any sort of material basis on what it wanted to achieve or didn't really it didn't really come to terms with, like, the material question. So you mentioned that Marx talks about the means of monetary production. So it's, of course, if you've if you've read Marx or communist theory, then you know you're supposed to seize the means of production as a way to create, socialism or communism. But I was curious what your, you know, what does Marx mean by the means of monetary production? And is it something that, you know, if you want to create communism, are we supposed to seize it?
He does. He doesn't really talk about the means of monetary production. That's that's, that's this kind of an invention I, I, I, I made. Yeah. Based on this idea of the seizing of the means production. But he does say that, communist should seize the banks. And this has not been well understood, especially in the Bitcoin community, because basically what they're saying, what what how how you can understand this is that everything is nationalized and and and put on the state rule and, and Bitcoin is basically the opposite. Right? But what Mark says is that, well, the people have to seize the banks, not the state, the people. Because if you don't do that, you just leave the banks and central banks to, the bourgeoisie, to private interests. The big idea behind Marx, and that's the point I stressed at the opening of the book and something which needs to be said immediately is that Marxism is not about statism. It's pretty much the Marx thought the French had to be accomplished, was was had to be was, only halfway through because the state had come back in force. The idea of the French revolution was that the people should should replace the king. Right? And, what Marx could see in 18 in the 1840s, fifty years after the revolution is that, that revolution had not happened because the bourgeoisie, some people, rich people had actually seized the state for their own interest. Marx, is is Marxism and socialism at large is is has to be understood the, on the same thing as anarchism. It's it's a very, it's a very, that they had very intense discussions until very late, as, as to how that bourgeois state could be destroyed. And what is the particular to Marx is the idea that the state cannot be destroyed, but just be, suppressed. If you just suppress the state, it comes back. It comes back all the time, as a function of the of of of capitalism. Capitalism produces state. And in in a certain sense, anarchism produces states, like, oysters produce pearls. It's just goes back to the fact that a state is only a kind of lobby which grows bigger and takes over the the disorganized state of affairs, which is, improper to capitalism. So Marx thought that the only way to destroy the state was to invent some kind of process, that would, make sure that nobody could privatize the state, and and pull it to his own interests. And this is where the people come in. So and this is where Marx is probably a bit abstract because he had no precise idea of how understand people would not become once again, just, a private lobby, acting in its own interest. This is where Marx gets very philosophical saying, yeah, but the proletariat is not a lobby because the proletariat has nothing. So it has nothing. It's it's it's only dedicated to the universal. So the proletariat has the banks. It will only serve the, the common good of the society. And, of course, this this is this is just an abstract idea. And I'm I'm particularly interested in, in Bitcoin because it gives a a a mechanism for decentralization to be implemented, without, any obstruction or naivety linked to the fact that the people are going to decide, for the poor, for the best interest of the people. This this has been proven wrong and especially especially in communism, if I'm if I'm if we can I mean, we have to obviously learn lessons of, the failures of communism? And one of them is precisely that, when the people were given power under the form of the proletariat, they became a clique of, politicians, who created the Soviet state, which was even worse than the the state, the state, which, they had, they had vowed to overthrow. Is probably, one of is maybe one of the answers to the idea.
This quote from angles about replacing a government of person by the administration of things, that was a really nice quote and was really glad to hear that Engels actually said something like that. I don't know. I mean, do you do you think that Marx and Engels could have really imagined something like digital platforms to replace certain elements of the state at least. I mean, it's something that's I think a lot of people who are interested in socialism and cryptocurrency and blocking in general sort of have this vague idea as well. They don't really know how that fits within the greater, I guess, discourse of, of socialism.
I mean, Satoshi could have written that that phrase, that on on replacing the, government of people by the administration of things. I mean, this this is precisely what Bitcoin is. It's a trust machine. It's it's, it's a machine that creates trust between people. But it's a machine. So it, it, it, it is, it is a kind of, an administration, which, which, doesn't need, doesn't need administrators. That's that's I mean, it comes back to what I was saying. I mean, this this sentence of Engels just says we don't need the state. We need to get rid of the state. Why? Because the state all at some point is always a point of failure. The state has power, and at one point, it just emancipates from the people and just becomes the the the the the the the proprietor the propriety of, of of, of the people who have money. And and I mean, this is what we see absolutely everywhere in the world, in America, especially, with which have kind of kleptocracy in the fifty fifty years that have just of this century. And, and Marx was very, very conscious of that and Engels too. So this is the meaning of that, of that idea, that everywhere it's possible, we should try and not do anything related to the state. But once again, without being naive and without be without thinking that if we just leave things to people in a liberal market, the state is just going to disappear. This is another lesson we can learn from the century which has passed is that whenever you leave the market to itself, well, you find the state. You find bureaucracy. This is what David Greber explained about liberalism. We live we we live. We haven't had as as much bureaucracy since the capitalism has taken over the world. So this opposition in the state and capitalism has absolutely be, understood as a false opposition. There is no opposition between, big government and capitalism. It's the same thing. And when capitalists capitalists say, we want small government, they lie. In fact Yeah. They just put government everywhere. So, so what what how this was implemented in the first years of socialism is interesting. It was, it was through Soviets, which is a kind of idea of decentralization, proto idea. The the Leninists, thought that the best way to administrate the economy, was to let the people on local communities, administrate the economy through assemblies, of we should take all the Soviets. This unfortunately, the experience didn't didn't last long, and, for many reasons. But, but there again, we have that kind of core Bitcoin that that already is present in socialist decentralization, so it gets people's assemblies. And and, and and the the search for a way of not centralizing decisions relating to, to the way people are to live and administrate their economies. So, so yeah, definitely this is, this is another very important point that makes the link between, Marxism and, and, and, and Bitcoin.
I think it's it's it's interesting that you said that. I think I think something that's I don't know if someone is listening and they're, like, a libertarian or or something. To think that the market and a state as hand in hand is sort of it's important it it goes against sort of what we're told about the market and it kinda like we're sort of we're given this vision as if the state and the market are at odds with each other. But in in reality, I think the the the true sort of view would be that these things are interlinked and you can't really take them apart and they sort of have to be tackled together. Is that sort of
how you see it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. The Marx wrote about it. I mean, the state is only the biggest market player. The state is a monopoly inside a market, but markets tend to produce monopolies. And we see it all the time. So what the state should be doing is breaking up monopolies, which it does every so often. But most often, it just, it it it hasn't has it hasn't got the strength to do it. And it and it's succumb to to regulatory capture. We saw this with, lately with Boeing, and and the story which broke out on the fact that the regulators were actually owned by the company which was supposed to be regulated. We saw that with Volkswagen and the diesel story where we discovered that the regulators of the diesel cars were actually owned by, people working in the car industry. This is what this is about in a capitalist market. It's just about implementing, rules to fit the biggest player there. And and and that's why the state has to be broken up because it just doesn't it just doesn't work. And you're talking of libertarians. We could I mean, the the the, who's often summoned to to explain what true capitalism is, is is also very, very much not understood because Friedrich Hayek's idea was also that the state had to be, weakened, but it had to be replaced in his idea by councils of of of unelected officials who were supposed to, make the rules for us. I mean, the supreme court, which we're talking about a lot right now, is a high achieving idea. The independence of the central bank of the federal reserve board is a high achieving idea. This idea that unelected people should be deciding for us what is good for us because people are not educated enough to be able to decide for themselves. This is typically a neoliberal idea. This is typically something which comes from the libertarian side of of politics. So, yeah, there is a big lie about how the markets and state and unelected people have been, working together against the people. There's a big lie on what Marx wanted. He was always presented as a status and a bureaucrat who just wanted you to to suppress democracy and replace it by, unelected to take decisions from people. I agree this is in effect what happened in real communist communism, after Stalin, but it has pretty pretty much nothing to do with with Marxist striking.
Yeah. The the the whole, that hiking idea of, like, council of wise old men just sounds like that sounds like the most bureaucratic thing. I mean, it sounds very, that is very anti democratic.
Yeah. I thought, you know, people have to be educated to democracy because they, they couldn't handle it by themselves. So I mean, the guy is definitely interesting and his life is interesting and how he fought both communism and fascism is interesting, but he had very anti democratic views.
Must never forget that. So getting back to your, the things that you're speaking about, mentioning in the Soviet Union, you make this really interesting comparison between blockchain consensus and democratic centralism, which maybe I can let you explain a bit what democratic centralism was, in during the Soviet Union times and sort of what are its similarities with consensus on a blockchain?
Well, democratic centralism was just a procedure to, to, to make sure that democracy was respected. It's, it's, it was a way of coming to a consensus through, democratic decentralized viewpoints. Did it work or was it just, kind of, masquerade to justify the decisions of the party? I guess the latter is true. At the end, democratic centralism was just, you know, some kind of shade, was a, an empty word. But there was this idea at first that some kind of new procedures, voting procedures, bureaucratic procedures have to be, have to respect, a pure democracy. This is something you find also also in in in occupy movements and how they have had to reinvent the way of voting, the way of of of talking, of of of who is, who, you know, how do you how do you respect the the the will of of the assemblies, that you you gather? It's very interesting all the experiences, and and realizing that all this the the way we're taught at a democracy works, by you just choose one one guy on a paper. And the guy who has the most votes by 01% is your president was maybe, you know, fell short of what democracy is about. So so this is what central democratic centralism is is, was meant to to fix. And I'm I'm struck by the by the fact that when we talk about in the in the crypto community of that, decentralized, consensus, well, we we we we actually activating the same words in another way, where which we're saying, how do you create consensus, which is basically centralism, through decentralized organization. And the the very big difference the only difference between the two, it is a big difference. It's a difference that makes a difference is that Bitcoin actually works. So the protocol actually enables to create consensus through the census. And that's amazing. I mean, that's that's that's the business sign mathematical problem that she, resolved. And, yeah, I'd say fascinating to to see these two things, which are very separated on the paper to be actually the same thing. And and I just wanna stress something on on this topic is that in in the the crypto community, the the it's these two words, I mean, one of them is always separated from the other. Decentralization is like the keyword, for the crypto community. And and in fact, I think it's consensus, which is important. And actually, it's the two words together. I mean, these two were the opposite words, decentralization on one side, consensus on the other. And that that this this great gathering every year for the for for for for the crypto community called consensus. I think it's everything is great. That's the name they chose, consensus. Consensus is what we're making, and that's why also I separate myself from pure crypto anarchism. I mean, anarchism is one component of crypto. Definitely very important, and there's no question about that. But the other one is consensus. And consensus is something you're gonna find also in communism. How do you make something in common? We should never, you know, we should never forget and lose sight of the fact that what we are producing in fact at the end, in a sense.
I wonder a bit if it's related to like the fact that there are so many Austrian sort of fans and like these libertarians, they sort of shy away from consensus and move towards decentralization because of the sort of anti democratic tendencies of that that type of thinking. It's pretty interesting, but I guess they can't they can't really call, yeah, the giant conference decentralized.
It's not,
you know, it's not about coming together or anything. Hello, everyone. You know what time it is. If you're enjoying this interview so far and you want to be sure that more content can be made like this interview then you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theboxingsocialist you can donate starting at $3 a month or more to help me out. And you can join other patrons like Andrew, Sam, Paul, Matthew, Kendra, JB, and the newest patron, Howard, in helping me do all this stuff. So at the moment, I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned, due to the amounts in hosting costs and equipment So any amount of course really helps And in the future, I'm hoping to do more complex bits of content so that we can help spread the message that Blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Also, admittedly, this interview didn't have the best audio quality due to some connection issues and the fact that my microphone is not the best either. So if you would like to have better audio quality, you may like to know that I use the Patron money to purchase better equipment and provide higher quality audio So hopefully I can do that in the future If you can't help out financially, I understand One thing that you can do instead is to subscribe to the podcast on whatever preferred platform that you like. Or even go to the Blockchain Socialists YouTube channel if you prefer listening there and leave a positive rating. So give it a five stars if you think it deserves it. Another thing that you can do is become an active member in the Crypto Leftist subreddit, so rcrypto leftists, and as well in the Crypto Leftist Discord group. But that's all I got, so here's the rest of the interview with Mark Alazar, who is the author of Crypto Communism, which is out from Polity Books. But so in in the book, you mentioned that the Internet has largely failed its sort of socialistic goals of being a common resource that would free humanity from the chains of corporations through information. And but this is something that the Cypherpunks sort of saw coming, and the Cypherpunks were sort of a very eclectic group of different people, of technologists. Some of them very far right wing, and not too many of them very left wing, to be honest. But I'm curious why you think the left sort of missed this, almost ignore, this type of movement?
Well, the the the answer you you gave in your question, I mean, the cultural journey struggle was lost just stuff with the creators were right wing. There's no question about that. Sometimes outright, I mean, extreme right wing. And they decided that and I mean, rightly because the creators because they were the creators that, that that Bitcoin and would be a libertarian idea of opposed to statism, which they identified to Marxism. So in return, I guess, Marxists and socialists said, oh, okay. So this is their thing. We're gonna leave it to them. It's just about you know, it's just a it's a device to evade taxes, evade the state, not free the individual, and it is it is not linked to what we have as ideals as socialists. I think they just they lost the plot. They they got caught by the by the the the red herrings of decentralization and and and liberty. And, and there's another thing also, and that's quite paradoxical in this sense, but it's linked to the fact that Bitcoin is money, and money is not is is is not central to Marxism. I mean, the means of production are, and I as I was saying when we started the conversation, the the material aspect of things is typically a Marxist thing to consider and to and and to be interested in. But, money, no, is not. Money is not. Money is it's just a veil in Marxism. It has no efficiency. It's even more than a veil. It's it's an illusion. It's, it's something we should, be, you know, very, caution cautious about. And Marx was very critical of any new monies invented by socialists because inventing money is is not something new to the twentieth century. Many socialists at the time of Marx tried to invent new kind of money that would be people's money. And Marx always, you know, laughed about that saying, this is not gonna change society or, the class struggle or the means of the production. So just leave that side and concentrate on the serious stuff. But for many reasons, for these two reasons basically that both, it was too virtual, too abstract, too linked to the Internet and to the to the failures of the Internet and to the information theory, too much money, too much right wing people in there, made it very difficult for a socialist to be interested in in all that. And I think, yeah, I think it's I think it's wrong, but I see it's changing. I mean, your blog is is a sign of this change, but that many writings have been produced lately. And my book is is one of them, but the I meet lots of scholars around the world who are working and who are now reappropriating them that that that that cryptocurrency and understanding that there is something for them to be to be to be, to be worked on and and and understood and and and on their side. I mean, principally, just to to be very basic, this idea that Bitcoin has the capacity, maybe maybe it's mythical capacity, but it's written in the status of Bitcoin to disrupt central banking. Just that should arouse an interest socialist. I mean, if if our common goal is to start with, to disrupt the financial system and to break the jump the monopoly of central banking, of kleptocracy, are definitely socialists. I mean, or at least socialists would definitely be interested in Bitcoin.
Like I mean, do you have any thoughts on the Internet at its beginning and, like, the move the cypherpunk movement on, like, why that was more of a because it seems just, like, from the beginning, even before Bitcoin, it was really something that the cypherpunks who were largely right leaning. I mean, I think there was, like, Julian Assange, you can maybe argue is a little bit to the left, but he's not, you know, that's a different case. If the Internet was created by, in the very beginning, I guess, the US military, I don't know if that has something to do with it, and that's why it it attracted more, right wingers. I don't know. Is it just the maybe the nature of new technologies in general? I think sort of, you know, it's easier if you're privileged in life to be able to work with emerging technologies and to play in that type of space, I think. And that just if you're privileged in life, generally, you can say maybe you're more right leaning. I don't know if you have if you have thoughts on on that.
I think I I I we need to make through a few distinctions between, cyberpunk, cyberpunk, and, founders of the internet as such. The the founders of the Internet, the Internet spirit before the Internet. The Internet before the Internet is is being told by Fred Turner in a in a beautiful book on the, how how utopian hippies, invented the Internet before before micro computing, you know, personal computers even existed. That's the story of Stuart Brown and the whole earth Magna catalog and and all that. And it's a, it's an amazing story, which, I mean, came to an end very quickly. And, and, and I think, cyberpunks, understood this pretty, pretty well in the nineties, that this decentralized ethos, was, was, was a failure and invented, I mean, all these these, anarchist, not with these, like, tool or, you know, encrypted messages and and and hacking and all this cyber cyber fantasy kind of ideas around what the real Internet should be. And what I was interested in is that the the cyberpunks actually broke with cyberpunk ideology. Cyberpunk was, in a sense, I think they understood the same thing as Marx understood, for about anarchism. Cyberpunks were just, you know, breaking breaking off society. They were the decentralized part of of of, of, decentralized consensus. They were the ones saying, we don't need to be connected to this big thing. We need torrents. We need peer to peer. We need to reinvent the Internet. We need to break break the centralized aspect of the Internet and just be individuals, surfing, on our own, just like lone cowboys or or atoms, living freely in the in in the cyberspace. And Cypherpunks Cypherpunks, I think, had this idea that that would not be enough. I mean, that that was a requ a prerequisite. But until you build another Internet, the foundations, the protocol of a new architecture, you would never be only the parasite of capitalism and centralization. And this is why cypherpunks the cypherpunks are so much I'm, to me, much more interested than cyberpunks because they created Satoshi created a new internet I mean, a new infrastructure for nation. And this is so much more radical and so much more revolutionary, and so much more interesting in as much as it makes us think about what we've been talking about, how you create centralization, how you create consensus, how you create all these things we need to be, to live in common, to be a community without breaking the need to be decentralized and anonymous individuals. I mean, it's a feat. It's it's it's probably one of the most remarkable, successes of of human thought when you come to think about it. That that breakthrough that Satoshi made. I mean, how connect connect the two most opposite things in the world, consensus, decentralization, and network together. I mean, it's it's no it's no coincidence that it was a very difficult mathematical problem that had been unresolved for so many years. It is not only a mathematical problem. It's a philosophical problem. It's a problem that's been which we've been running through the whole of political theory since Plato and Aristotle. Nobody had found the way of making these two things come together. We could say the multiple and the one. We wanted to use the the most radical philosophy words to to to, describe what Satoshi managed to do. So yeah. Yeah. The the the what what he did to the Internet was was in that sense really go to the end of what the promise of the Internet that had been failed, you know, he he he made it come true.
So do you think that Marx and Engels themselves would have been interested in cryptocurrency?
I I think they wouldn't have been interested in cryptocurrency per se, especially not Bitcoin because of the scarcity of Bitcoin and the the the the the the the analogy with gold and the deflatory nature of Bitcoin. I mean, Yannis, very fact, he's talked about that, talked about that a lot. And I think he's right. I mean, there's nothing there's nothing particularly socialist in what Bitcoin is as a mean, exchange as a as a monetary unit. The protocol is socialist, but the but the the token itself is not. It's the way it and it's and it's pretty simplistic in a sense. And, I mean, this is what a straight Austrian gold bug is like about Bitcoin, and that's what probably I like. It's not what really I'm interested in. There's many things you can do with program. I've got programmable money, that Bitcoin is, you know, only, not even I mean, it doesn't even get close to it. I'm I'm much more obviously interested in Ethereum. And I think if Marks and Engels have to have been interested in something, it probably would have been gas. The idea that it's not actually money, but it's gas, to make apps, function. That is a really interesting that's a really interesting idea, I think. That's what you're actually dealing with and and, and accumulating is is is some kind of gas, some kind of energy, in a sense. I mean, gas is is is an interesting analogy, to to to what Marx could have could have understood because, Marx definitely understood energy and the the intro the importance of energy, in in the in the production system and and, and and if you Ethereum in a sense, I mean, it duplicates this this idea that you need energy to make computer function,
the world computer function. So then you think, the arts and angles would have been, they would be waiting for the the flippening of, you had a couple of, interesting things in the book, a couple of interesting criticisms of Marx, especially one of them being that Marx, largely ignores information as a sort of agent, in his writings, especially in regards to its relation with currency. So, I was wondering if you could explain a bit that sort of, criticism of Marx on how he doesn't really think too much about information and then, you know, Hayek, famously does in in the that one thing that he wrote, claimed that socialism would fail because, you need markets to be able to parse information, and socialism can't do that because you're planning everything. So I was curious if you can talk about the relationship of information, something I know that you've studied quite a bit, and with Marx's writing.
The debate between Hayek and Marx is interesting in in the sense that Marx is both in advance, and retrograde, and, and, and the same goes with Hayek. Marx is in advance on his time because he understands that the economy does not work as the neoclassic economists explain. And that is, it does not work the Newtonian, universe of action and reaction and it does not reach, an equilibrium. Marx was a contemporary of the discovery of the steam engine and the science of thermodynamics. And he thought the economy worked like the steam engine. So how does it work through dynamical equilibrium or or or in stable equilibrium? And, and that is why he was so interested in energy. So he thought of of this other society as a as a steam engine and and revolutions in a sense as the way that a society has a liberating steam and producing power. And this brought him to, to, to lots of insights, but also wrong insights, in so far as, the thermodynamics he was familiar with was very was very early in the very early years and not have a clear understanding of the role of information in, in the in in in in in thermic in energy exchanges. So yeah, it is lacking. Information lacking in Marx. And precisely what information is in economics is money. Money is information. Prices are information. Capital is information. So I I I argue that a full Marxist theory, theory of Marx, which would not be faulty and maybe a communist regime that would be inspired by full theory of Marx would be a theory of Marx adding energy and information. And, so that's one thing. The other about, what you said about Hayek is is that so, yeah, Hayek understood this this this importance of, of information. But what is so weird about him is that he's a neoclassic. He didn't understand, or didn't didn't, wasn't interested in thermodynamics and and thought again of equilibrium. He thought that that society has reached equilibrium in a Newton Newton Newtonian way. So so I guess I'm still a Marxist in that regard, in that respect. I think understanding that, society's work as steam engines is still, something which is, in front of us, and and, and the neo classic regime. And this is, once again, a reason I'm interested in Bitcoin is that there is a thermodynamics in Bitcoin, which is fascinating. I mean, in essence, what Bitcoin does is convert energy and information into information, which is something we're all used to doing. I mean, this is what we do as human beings. We we convert energy. We we convert the food we eat into into thoughts, intelligence, ideas. We organize our space. So we convert energy into information, and basically all living living beings in the world do that. But it also converts information into energy, or at least it gives to information the qualities of energy. If, I mean, just to explain this, if like we're talking, so we're sharing information and this is a property of information is that when you share it, when you pass it on to somebody, you don't lose it. You multiply it. Bitcoin has the protocol, the way of inventing a way of when you share information, you lose it. It's a non duplicable information. And that is, that is, that was never heard of, And I'm I'm generally, convinced that it has applications to the physical world. I I wouldn't be surprised if someone said that in the quantum world, well, this is what happens, that information gets gets, transformed into energy like properties. And this is how the world is actually built. I'm I'm fascinated as a philosopher also, and and as someone interested in the history of science by habit when related to deep, discussions in the scientific community on on the nature of being itself. I mean, is being information. And if being is information, how does it build a world of energy? And this is basically what quantum physicists are all about. I mean, they they they now understand that what they're dealing with is information, and they have to understand the divide between the quantum world and the classical world, which is the divide between an an information ruled world and an edge and and and an energy ruled world. And maybe Bitcoin is the missing link. Maybe someone will come up with a Bitcoin theory of everything, which I'd be glad to embrace. But, yeah. So just just to just to finish with your question, I mean, the the, it it it it's fascinating that that Bitcoin, forces us to understand economy, economics, in a way that even Marx, and the best economy economists hadn't understood.
Since you wrote the book, The Climate Coup, which is about, of course, climate change, and I was curious to hear about your thoughts on the very common criticism that, that you get about crypto and blockchain, how it shouldn't be used by the left because of its high energy use and sort of, wasteful energy use. So I was curious, like, how do you think the left should, should think about this question? Like how should we handle it?
Well, I think there are two things in your question. The first one is, is energy mentally bad? Is consumption of energy fundamentally bad? The answer is no. If energy is clean, then there's no reason why we should say that a high energy consumption is bad. Obviously, what's bad is is burning fossil fuel, but, using the whole energy of the sun to make thing poses absolutely no problem to me. So that's one thing. I think left has to stop being afraid of energy. Life forms, the universe, rocks, plants consume energy, combust energy. That's what life is about. And it's unless you wanna stop life from happening, then, you know, just, you should consume energy. You just should consume the right kind of energy. And then the second topic is how much energy, does Bitcoin consume and does it consume too much energy? I don't know if there's a limit to this. I don't know how much energy it will be consuming in twenty years. What I know is it the the figures I have that I could find around me are far away from, what's, usually, said about in the media. I mean, a guy, an engineer in France calculated that Bitcoin used 15 terawatts an hour of energy in 2019, which is a lot of energy. There's no no question about that, but it has to be compared to the fact that air conditioning uses 2,000 terawatts an hour, which is, 100 times more. So I guess we're gonna die of air conditioning, much sooner than we're gonna die of Bitcoin consumption. And maybe there's a third things, the third layer in this question, which is, does Bitcoin use too much energy in regards to its social utility? And there, I guess I would say, yes, definitely. I mean, if you relate the the number of transactions to the energy used, there's something wrong about Bitcoin. But, I mean, it's just a question of having more transactions going on chain and and just leaving it live its life. I guess we'll see if, this discrepancy stays around or not.
So the this criticism is, I mean, it's usually played out by people who may have done a little bit of research solely on Bitcoin, and the proof of work, sort of consensus mechanism without really maybe not knowing or not maybe not wanting to acknowledge and really know, other types of consensus mechanisms that are that are out there and that are being tried that do use a whole lot less energy. But I I mean, I agree that sometimes, I think this is associated with the sort of anti tech sentiment on the left a bit as well. This sort of fear of energy. Yeah. I I mean, it just it sort of leaves a whole space, a whole sort of, I mean, like, battleground, I think, for the left is really technology and, like, putting forth an alternative vision for technology rather than sort of what's being put out right now, which is, you know, build a start up, cash out, and then bro down. I mean, it's it's really like or, you know, all these different start ups that are for, I mean, some of the most dystopian, reasons. Like, I think, you know, the left is sort of this fear of energy is gonna bite itself, you know, because it's gonna bite you in the butt. But, yeah, I think this this whole energy thing, you can criticize blockchain or crypto for being and high energy use, but then you have to look at so many other things in our in our everyday lives and in our society that are using so much energy that we can't it's sort of like nitpicking one thing that you don't like for being high energy use, and then there's, like, a thousand other things you can probably, compare it to. And this is also ignoring, you know, the fact that a 100 companies cause 70% of, of greenhouse gas emissions or something like that. But Absolutely.
And I'll I'll end my rant there. But,
to sort of, finish off maybe, I was curious to hear your thoughts on how do you think the left should think about or even use cryptocurrencies moving forward? I mean, should we should the left be thinking about it, I guess, the average crypto investor of, you know, putting in your money to try and maximize return, or should there be what what should be, like, the the goal in mind if you're going to think about using cryptocurrencies as a as a tool?
I think the ecosystem itself is gonna speak for itself, that what's being built is gonna be bigger than us and that the the there's there's no there's no left or right wing use of cryptocurrencies. I mean, the the protocol itself has its own ideology and its own way of developing, which is, which is going to transform society as, as a whole. So I don't know if there's a, an individual use, which would be good versus a bad one. Obviously, spec left people are gonna do. But, but that's part of the ecosystem. It's it's, you know, you have to think about it like an ecosystem with with lots of of species sharing the same space and and some and and it's the whole world coming out of this, which is gonna be interesting. But, but yeah. I mean, you can see apps like, and things coming out of Ethereum right now at DeFi and and and all these these ways of decentralizing finance and the way that these apps are, progressively go, disrupt the banking system as something which is fundamentally socialist. And and, so I guess people should be, yeah, getting interested in that and develop more apps and and and work on that. Debate should be open about the capped, number of Bitcoins, debates about governance, debates which are interesting also. And the, and the, and the, the role that the state has to play in cryptocurrency also should be pushed, on the agenda of the left. I, I imagine in the book, a world where states mine Bitcoin, and, the fees, which are, which are, which the miners get on every transactions become the equivalent of a of a tax, which is, shared by the people. Sometime I I like the I like the idea of tax evasion in Bitcoin or or people who use Bitcoin and say, Bitcoin is gonna break about the state because we're not gonna be we're not gonna be paying taxes anymore. That is so stupid. I mean, you take you pay tax to minors. Right? You don't pay taxes. You pay taxes on Bitcoin. You pay taxes on every transaction. And this is actually quite new and very interesting, because if the state, instead of imposing taxes on work and and and, and salaries imposed taxes on transactions, if if if the state even 00% every credit card transaction, happening, on its, territory, it would be infinitely richer, than, if it by by continuing raise taxes in traditional way. So so cryptos is also transitioned to another kind of tax system, which will be, I think, much more democratic and and and much more, in favor of of of of of, of having prosperous states. And and and and prosperous states are important because it means it means more investment in infrastructure and, and more investment in the wealth of the people of society. So this is, this is another way. I mean, the left could use, as you were saying, cryptocurrencies just to, to, to just as an invitation to think about how we're going to, how, how, how our future economic societies, tax systems, like energy bills and how they can benefit the people more. The the sole idea of an existence of multiple different types of money with different velocities, with different users, I mean the the the consensus, general consensus is usually that we're going to one kind of monoculture of money. The dollar is gonna be the only money in the whole world, and there's something progressive about having only one type of money. And I'm pretty convinced of the opposite. I think, I think having different kind of monies, and I'm not talking of different currencies because basically today all the currencies are indexed on the dollar and are emitted in the same way by credit. And I'm more I'm saying I think Bitcoin has a role to play besides complimentary monies, regional money, local monies. This this whole idea that it it we need a public culture of money because financial crisis and and and debt crisis, which which affects the people once again and and the, the less favored countries and, and the, and the, and the, and the low classes of, of societies, are engineered by this monoculture of money. And I think this is another important topic that has to embrace is is how do we save how do we be how do we become favored? How do we encourage the creation of multiple monies?
I think sometimes we underestimate the I mean, how The US has sort of exerted its hegemonic power and imperialism through the US dollar and, like, through, the domination of the US dollar, how it is able to influence economies around the world and bend it to its its will in a certain sense.
Absolutely.
I was thinking because I I've heard this before about, but usually it's it's it's it's put into the context of, like, in a libertarian way. I mean, it's put into, like, we need a free market of money. You know, free market money is the best type of money I hear I hear from, sort of the crypto libertarians. But one of the things that I fear then is if we have this sort of system of, different types of money is sort of like it would end up being like any other type of market, which in my view tends to, I mean, tends to be, manipulable, and sort of, like, you know, would it then create a situation where the people who just so happen to have more of this type of money are now a whole lot richer than everyone else because of some swings? Or does it actually protect you from, you know does it diversify your risk enough to protect you from, from swings in the market? I don't really know. Yeah. I understand. I understand.
I guess we're we're we're it's so early. We're in such a we're in the early years of of all this happening. I mean, it's only been ten years and it's already changed a lot. And it's very difficult to say what's become of all this. I mean, it could be a new it could be a new nightmare. It could be a new failure. The crypto like the Internet did. We could be heading to cyber feudalism. I mean, that's I mean, every option is open. I I agree. It's it's difficult to say that this is a good answer to a universal problem. There's probably no good answer or universal answer to, to, to, to the problems we're facing. But at least, I mean, this experimentation and just the, the sole fact that we're talking about it, that people like us are interested in, in money creation, in, in, in economy. I mean, this is, this is something which has come out, come about with this space. I would never have been interested in objects in these topics, but for Bitcoin and, and for what everything was happening, this education, this popular education, which is how money, how in effect it may be the core, the the the the nuclear reactive capitalism is I think, immensely valuable in it. This is just to finish probably what I have to say. This is where the left, again, has to get interested in these subjects is because it just educates you. The left is undereducated towards the question of money. So, this is Marx again, but, just getting educated in these mechanisms is, is, is, is really, is really valuable and, and, and makes, I think, a better person and a much better prepared person to fight the good fights.
I think then that's a it's a good transition to my last question because if you are on the left and you also want to learn a bit more about money, where can people purchase your book, Crypto Communism? And where can people follow you,
learn more about your work? Well, like, yeah, it's pretty well, distributed in America and England and Australia. So I guess any bookshop would have it. And if it doesn't, it's not cool and you should tell them to have it.
If if worst comes to worst, they can at least look at like, I mean, I think it's on Amazon for sure.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It's all it's all that's it it it's all the platforms now, obviously. But but, you know, just go to your book to your local bookshop. And and where is there a place that people should follow you or do you have Oh, I I have a Twitter account. I have a handle. I I I rarely tweet, really. I I I am I'm more interested in in reading everything I can find on on on crypto on, like, on the crypto Twitter, which I actually I love following, which is really a crazy place. But, but, so sometimes I I tweet some nonsense. So if you wanna read
nonsense, yeah, follow my handle. Cool. It's it's just you. It's just, Mark Alazar. Right?
Yeah. So see you on the other side.
See you on this on the other side. Alright. Well, thanks a lot for, for taking the time. I highly recommend people to check out the book. It's, it's a pretty, it's a good read and it's one of the first books to really tackle this type of combination of two things. And of course, I think if you're listening to this podcast and you'd be interested in that particular combination of of two things, so definitely check it out. It's called Crypto Communism. But, yeah, thanks a lot for coming on, and let's continue the conversation as we can.
Thanks again.