Cryptocommunism (eBook)

Mark Alizart (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-5095-3859-1 (ISBN)

Infos

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.

Mark Alizart is a writer and philosopher who lives in Paris.

Rezensionen

"A fascinating antidote to reductive takes on cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are more than just cryptolibertarianism and this book makes a provocative and wide-ranging case for just how important they might be."
Nick Srnicek, King's College London

"Alizart's arguments are compelling and replete with insights into what a digital-empowered post-capitalist society might look like."
Red Pepper

"Creative and iconoclastic"
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

Textauszug

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, which Althusser called ‘structural’, is in fact inspired by the feedback and loops of cybernetics. And indeed there is a connection: Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the founders of structuralism, had attended the multidisciplinary Macy Conferences in New York, which during the 1940s and ’50s brought together the leading lights in postwar cybernetics. Jacques Lacan, another structuralist, was also a computer enthusiast. Noam Chomsky used programming languages to develop his work in linguistics on generative grammar.

Did this influence the pioneering information technology projects that the USSR carried out from the 1960s onward? It doesn’t seem likely. But there is no doubt that, after Stalin’s ideological condemnation of computer science as an ‘anti-revolutionary American science’, which for a long time weighed upon socialists, and which even now explains their continuing mistrust of the information society, Khrushchev understood the benefits of cybernetics, especially for planning, in similar terms. Where up until that point economic data had been gathered by hand and transmitted to Gosplan for cross-comparison, the prospect of being able to generalize and automate data collection was sufficiently attractive for the Party to finance a national computer network project, OGAS, based on 20,000 data-harvesting units installed in factories.2 This would have been an interesting rejoinder to Hayek’s criticism, in his 1945 article on ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, that Soviet planning was doomed to fail because of its inability to collect as much information as the market can on the fair price of commodities.3 And although ultimately the project did not come to fruition in a country still too marked by Chekist paranoia, it was operational in Allende’s Chile in the 1970s. Designed by an eccentric cybernetics researcher named Stafford Beer (who drove a limousine and smoked cigars), the Cybersyn (Cybernetic Synchronization) project consisted in collecting data from factories and transmitting it by telex to a command centre where a computer was responsible for automatically ensuring the systemic stability of the economy.4

Certainly, Cybersyn was very rudimentary, and above all it was ultra-centralized, so one wonders what would have happened if, instead of disposing of it following his coup d’état, General Pinochet had made use of it to monitor and silence his opponents. But when in the 1970s advances in the miniaturization of electronic components indicated that a myriad of personal computers could replace the large, unwieldy calculation machines with which Wiener and Beer were familiar, it became possible to conceptualize the first truly decentralized control systems that prefigured Bitcoin.

Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of a collective that assembled itself around the Whole Earth Catalog, a journal aimed at bringing together engineers, biologists, poets and political activists, was one of those to have understood that computers were not just supercalculators but advanced tools for ‘communication’ and therefore potentially ‘communism’ – two words that audibly share an identical root, the ‘common’. By allowing people to talk to each other instantly all over the globe, they were destined to make the world into that ‘global village’ promised by Marshall McLuhan, and ultimately, by relieving humanity of the burden of mechanical work, they would bring about a New Cockaigne; by teaching us to speak the secret language of life itself, the language of DNA, they would make it possible to invent a new nature where, as the poet Richard Brautigan wrote, ‘we are free of our labors / and joined back to nature, / returned to our mammal / brothers and sisters / and all watched over / by machines of loving grace’.5

With these promises, and in a world that was cruelly in need of a bit of optimism – between the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, the beginnings of anguish over climate change, and the crimes of American democracy in Vietnam – the magazine published by this group to disseminate its ideas met with immediate success. The Whole Earth Catalog very quickly began to circulate widely in the countercultural world, but also among engineers and programmers – so much so that, according to the American historian Fred Turner,6 this cybercommunist or ‘cybercommunalist’7 utopia played a significant part in shaping the information society in which we live today. It was there in the background of the invention of the Internet as a ‘web’. It paved the way for social networks and their culture of free access. It motivated open-source projects such as the Linux operating system and the Wikipedia foundation. Above all, it is the reason why Silicon Valley still believes it is entrusted with an almost divine evangelistic mission that brooks no protest.

But of course, in this case too, the dream did not quite deliver. Fifty years after the technohippy dream, we can see quite clearly that the Cybernetic International has done no better than its ancestor, the Socialist International. The Internet has also, more than anything else, ended up enriching banks, multinational telecommunications companies, retail giants, the military-industrial complex, and the antennae of the control society. Unlikely monopolies have developed in commerce and advertising that threaten the very democracy the Internet was supposedly going to foster. The walls between peoples rose back up almost as fast as they had fallen. Intercultural dialogue has deteriorated into identitarian conflict. Social networks have become algorithmic bubbles in which indignant voices speak to themselves as in an echo chamber. According to some, the main achievement of the ‘sharing economy’ consists in delivering free labour to ‘cognitive capitalism’.8 Even genome technologies have denatured the ‘cybernetic ecology’ dreamed of by the poet. In short, decentralization has become recentralized, so that more and more left-wing intellectuals now see computers as a plague and call for the Internet to be dismantled, for the Big Four tech companies to be nationalized, and for Big Data monopolies to be broken up just as the antitrust laws once broke up Big Oil.9

Despite all of this, the informational...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 4.8.2020
• Reihe/Serie: Theory Redux
• Reihe/Serie: Theory Redux
• Reihe/Serie: Theory Redux
• Übersetzer: Robin Mackay
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Allgemeine Soziologie
• Schlagworte: Anti-Utopia • Bitcoin • Blockchain • communism • cryptocommunism • cryptocurrencies • Cultural Studies • Digital Culture • Digital Culture & the Information Age • Digitale Kultur im Informationszeitalter • Digital technologies • Economic Theory • Gesellschaftstheorie • Information Age • Kommunismus • Kryptokommunismus • Kryptowährung • Kulturwissenschaften • Political Philosophy & Theory • Political Science • Politikwissenschaft • Politische Philosophie u. Politiktheorie • Postcommunism • Radikalismus • Social Theory • Sociology • Soziologie • Utopia • Value
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-3859-3 / 1509538593
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3859-1 / 9781509538591