of faith, Bitcoin is an algorithm of faith. Because it allows mathematical emancipation from ‘trusted third parties’, it is a machine for producing faith and liberty.4
This having been said, revolutions are also plagued by misconceptions, and the cryptorevolution is no exception; Cryptocurrency ‘fanatics’ – we use the word advisedly, since it is indeed a new religion and a new party – may be in for a disappointment regarding their beliefs. The cryptorevolution might spell the end of the international financial system as we know it, but it won’t end all misery and injustice, neither will it give birth to a brave new world of empowered individuals freed from paying taxes and obeying the law – the story that a great many libertarian prophets, alt-right bitcoiners and cryptocultists like to tell. If revolutions of the past teach us something, it is that emancipation, freedom and liberty have a very special way of coming up with new obligations and even, sometimes, woes.
Certainly, during the Middle Ages peasants gathered around Reformation gurus such as Thomas Müntzer, who had deduced from Luther’s theses that it was now possible to live free of all moral and clerical authority. And there were revolutionary enragés who believed that their newly gained freedom gave them the right to cut off as many heads as they wanted, especially those raised above their own. Eventually though, all of them would discover sooner rather than later that they were mistaken about the deeper meaning of the Reformation and the Revolution. Protestantism was to introduce even more rigour into religion than Catholicism, to the point where Protestants would end up being known as ‘Puritans’. Priests were abolished, cathedrals, altars, incense and Church Latin destroyed, replaced by a religious practice that did away with all visible signs only to become all the more ascetic, demanding to be observed at all times and in every aspect of secular life. Similarly, democracy would prove to be even more complex and convoluted than the ancien régime. The princes were cast out, only for bureaucracy to run rampant, with swarms of civil servants and lawbooks thicker than the dictionary and telephone book combined.
Now, it might be argued that the return of Church and State following the Reformation, and the liberal revolutions that had attempted to destroy them, means that they failed at what they set out to do and that the real, proper revolution is yet to come.5 But the truth is that this return was a feature, not a bug. Luther didn’t want to overthrow the law of God, he wanted to fulfil it; Rousseau didn’t want the rule of nature to replace the rule of men, he wanted to ensure that the rule of men would be duly observed and carried out. In fact, they had both understood that liberty is paradoxically the best way to enforce the word of God and the rule of men, because ultimately it consists not in being free from all laws, but in freely imposing laws upon oneself, as the word ‘autonomy’ clearly suggests: a ‘law’ (nomos) imposed upon ‘oneself’ (auto).
Liberty is not a whim. It is an institution. It relies on institutions and it creates institutions. The same can be said about Satoshi’s project. Bitcoin seeks to restore trust, not to destroy it. It seeks to restore institutions we can believe in, not burn them to the ground. It wants to make this society liveable. And in a very compelling sense, it does so in the same way as the Reformation and the revolutions did: by replacing old institutions with new ones, which are more robust only because they are chosen institutions. Bitcoin frees us by allowing us to impose chains upon ourselves, as the appropriately named blockchain clearly indicates.
Thus, there is no doubt that cryptocurrencies will bring with them a new 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.
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
