The Belmarsh Tribunal NYC: Shut down Guantanamo. Free Assange — February 25
Inspired by the Russell-Sartre Tribunals of the late 1960s, which put the US government on trial for its war crimes in Vietnam, the Belmarsh Tribunal will expose the crimes of the so-called War on Terror 20 years after the first prisoners were brought to Guantánamo Bay — and call for Assange’s freedom.
The event — convened in partnership with DiEM25, the Courage Foundation, The People’s Forum, DSA International Committee, The Intercept, People’s Dispatch and the International People’s Assembly — will be chaired by philosopher Srećko Horvat and civil rights attorney Margaret Kunstler. Witnesses will include: Alice Walker, Angela Richter, Austin González, Balthesar Garzón, Chip Gibbons, Chris Hedges, Clare Daly, Claudia De la Cruz, Cornel West, Deborah Hrbek, Golriz Ghahraman, Guillaume Long, Jeremy Scahill, Jodi Dean, Milo Rau, Nancy Hollander, Nathan Fuller, Nick Estes, Noam Chomsky, Renata Avila, Roger Waters, Sevim Dagdalen, Srećko Horvat, Steven Donziger, Vijay Prashad, and Yanis Varoufakis.
The Belmarsh Tribunal coincides with the 20th anniversary of the opening of the concentration camp at occupied Guantánamo Bay on Cuba’s southeastern shore. In January 2002, the first 20 detainees arrived at the site. Since then, 779 Muslim men and boys from 49 countries have been held there. The youngest detainee was just 14 when he arrived. The oldest was 89. Over years and decades, detainees faced torture, ritual humiliation, and the uncertainty of prolonged detention without charges or trial.
Two decades after the facility opened its doors, 39 people continue to languish at Guantánamo, 27 of them without charge — “eternal prisoners” with little hope for release, and no prospects for justice. Many of them remain confined for the simple reason that their release would allow them to testify to the brutal treatment they endured.
Classified documents leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by Wikileaks in 2011 revealed the grim contours of the US regime of detention and torture at Guantánamo. Many prisoners — among them a journalist from Al Jazeera — were held for years despite officially posing no threat to the US. Many developed severe mental health problems as a result of their treatment. Some committed suicide.
But, today, it is not the perpetrators who face persecution, but the whistleblowers. In April this year, Julian Assange will enter his third year of detention at HMP Belmarsh — a maximum-security prison, sometimes referred to as “Britain’s Guantánamo”, that was infamously used to detain terrorist suspects without trial — as he seeks to appeal a court decision to extradite him to the US.
That is why the Progressive International is **bringing the Belmarsh Tribunal to the belly of the beast. On 25 February 2022, at the People’s Forum in New York City, we will convene legal experts, UN representatives, whistleblowers, journalists, and many others to investigate and expose the crimes of the so-called War on Terror, to seek justice for its victims, and to demand the closure of the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay.
Ahead of the Tribunal, one of the most distinguished public intellectuals of our time, DiEM25 Advisory Panel member and Council member of the Progressive International, Noam Chomsky said:
“We just commemorated one of the mechanisms to strangle Cuba – the control of the Guantánamo Bay naval facilities vital for Cuba’s development, which was stolen from Cuba in 1903 as part of the system for mantaining Cuba as a virtual colony after the United States intervened to prevent Cuba’s liberation from Spain. Twenty years ago Bush’s administration moved on turning it into one of the world’s most horrendous torture chambers still holding brutalized victims without charges. Information about all these was provided to the American and the world public by WikiLeaks. Those are the crimes that cannot be forgiven as power begins to evaporate when exposed to sunlight.“
Parties for the 1%, tight rules for the 99% – Boris Johnson and the Tories’ double standards
After a tortuous fortnight, civil servant Sue Gray has finally sort-of published the results of her investigation into the Downing Street festive season. Parties, parties in crowded rooms, ‘business meetings’, BYOB gatherings.
In its current – redacted – form, Gray’s report criticises the Downing Street culture that allowed ‘difficult to justify’ events and ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ that presided over such a culture. It is very true that this government has committed, and continues to commit, far worse crimes against democratic norms and human rights than a few Covid-prohibited Christmas piss-ups. It is also true that, in this particular scandal, the contempt for fundamental obligations which has characterised this government since day one is laid pretty starkly bare.
At the same time as the good times were rolling in Downing Street, the rest of the country was collectively struggling with the day-to-day anxiety of putting a foot out of line. From the weighing potential risks to family and friends to risking a crippling £10,000 fine for misdemeanours, in a country in which a majority are encumbered with personal debt of some kind. Fear, grief, guilt, isolation – this was the general atmosphere in which the country existed during that bleak Covid winter.
It is eyebrow-raising to say the least that those in and around government, endowed with more powers than had been entrusted to them in several generations, paid so little mind to the enormous trust the public were obliged to place in them. It speaks of a level of – perhaps literally – breath-taking disconnect and arrogance on the part of those elites.
The past week has seen the Metropolitan Police put their foot through the process by requesting that Gray redact substantial references to matters which they have suddenly taken the decision to ‘investigate. Such an intervention has already been described by various legal experts and ex-police officials as ‘absolute nonsense’ with ‘no legal standing.’
Met Commissioner Cressida Dick enjoys the solid support of both Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel, in the teeth of widespread and long-lasting calls from both the public and politicians of all parties that she resign – particularly in the wake of the Met’s appalling handling of both Sarah Everard’s murder and the vigil held in her memory. Whether or not we should ascribe the Met’s intervention to malice or incompetence, it will further a public sense that those in possession of power and privilege will continue to strive to find ways to evade objective accountability.
It is a sign of political ill-health when such a large measure of a society’s energies is given over to fascinated speculation as to what one specific, hitherto-obscure civil servant is or is not going to tell us. We saw this with Robert Mueller, an unknown and certainly un-progressive figure in American life up to that point, who became at the same time a liberal safe-word and the outlet for a prolonged anxiety attack on the part of many Americans while he was investigating Donald Trump for ‘Russiagate.’
‘Will Robert Mueller be fired?’ equalled ‘Will the USA’s norms of institutional and presidential accountability be permanently undermined by the actions of this particular President?’ The hope that some ‘sensible’ and ‘objective’ third party, someone, finally, with some disinterested ‘integrity’ might be coming to save us. But the idea of a single individual with the power to save or damn a nation’s future is generally not what democracies are supposed to be about. It amounts to an all-too-sudden reckoning with the slow disintegration of a political system transformed into a ‘will-she-won’t-she’ media spectacle.
Johnson’s reputation as a leader with an unhealthy disregard for the truth had been well established. If, in turn, he helped inculcate a more dishonest and unserious culture in and around his Downing Street office, one which viewed most of the population as rubes and gained a smug satisfaction from deliberately flouting the rules it was imposing on everyone else, this is also unsurprising. Contempt for the governed has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past 11 years of Tory rule, but perhaps, it is true, never quite so literally as in this current scandal.
The phenomenon that propelled Johnson into office – Brexit – was a single-issue imperative force. One that both expanded the Tories’ base of support and legitimised an increasingly contemptuous and combative attitude to the population. One that, historically-speaking, is baked into Tory political culture. Brexit was fabricated from genuine and legitimate feelings of powerlessness and alienation. Alienation from the political sphere and any genuine oversight of the processes or decision affecting ordinary lives. It would be naïve to assume that a pretty wide spectrum of the political class won’t continue to take the populace’s alienation into account when thinking – or not thinking – about the likely effects of their actions.
The general public’s response to this latest crisis is unlikely to take the form of anything so much as an ever-more widespread and apathetic withdrawal from whatever inadequate forms of participation and oversight remain to citizens of a liberal democracy today.
Conspiratorial thinking and distrust of objective truth continue to grow. And all this is good news for the oligarchical powers who continue to rely on just such a subversion of a genuinely democratic agenda. Only a resurgence of demos-directed grassroots politics, relying on interaction and contribution in pursuit of a participatory and democratic vision, will counter the true crisis – an enraged yet disaffected population, paralysed into spectatorship.
Despite reality being daunting, such a resurgence is possible. And it is already happening all around the world despite the limitations imposed by the Covid pandemic. DiEM25 and Unite’s campaign to save the UK’s National Health Service, for example, is one such example in the UK. Find out more about the Your NHS Needs You campaign and get involved.
Photo (c) Jacob King/AFP via Getty Images
Markets are catching up to Facebook‘s demise
The Meta (formerly Facebook) stock value dropped 26% in a single day this week. It looks like the markets are finally realising what any actual Facebook user already knew: that the network is becoming less and less attractive. So many friends have stopped posting. The only reason they are even able to still advertise “billions” of users is because:
a) They keep buying up whatever site the action has moved to or might move to (e.g. Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus VR) and then counting those users towards Facebook users. This will become increasingly difficult due to antitrust attention.
b) They barely ever remove fake/duplicate user profiles, such as the reportedly millions of fake profiles created to give fake Likes to company pages or the pretend-Republicans who influenced the American electoral campaign.
c) A lot of websites have implemented “Facebook Login”, e.g. to read your daily newspaper you enter your Facebook name and password rather than a password specific to the newspaper. Then you count as an active Facebook user even though you haven’t actually spent any time on Facebook itself, nor on a site owned by Facebook. The most important implication is that Facebook cannot display any ads to users who only use Facebook Login, so these people remain outside its reach unless they actively use another Meta product, such as Instagram.
Why are people moving away from Facebook and other Zuckerberg-controlled social networks? Privacy concerns and disgust with reported excesses is certainly one reason. But there is also something more fundamental going on, something which affects ANY successful social network after a while. For that it helps to look at the historic evolution.
Historic evolution
Mark Zuckerberg‘s original idea was a platform to rate female students’ attractiveness. From these inauspicious beginnings, he created a place where people maintained connection to their classmates and friends. And occasionally, very occasionally — Facebook is not Twitter — made new friends through mutual connections or Facebook Groups. This roughly corresponds to Robin Dunbar’s 50-person “good friends” circle. Eventually even parents, uncles and grandparents and neighbours joined the network, so that Facebook fulfilled the purpose of a meeting-place for Dunbar’s 150-person “clan” circle.
After another while, bosses started to use it in order to vet applicants, and all employees of the same company were routinely encouraged to friend each other for social control (Dunbar’s 500-person “acquaintances” circle). This gradual broadening of who is on Facebook / who is your “friend” on Facebook was also the death of it. The kind of things you bond over with fellow frat boys is quite different from what you bond over as family and yet different from what you’re comfortable sharing with a co-worker or a potential future boss. (Even with the too-late introduction of the ability to limit who will see which content, it is too jarring to see both frat boy stuff and your grandma’s cookie recipe on the same website and in the same Feed.)
Dunbar showed that the differently-sized circles of friends/acquaintances around us are expected to provide and receive different social benefits. This is true on Facebook as everywhere else. When Facebook was just for 50-odd “good friends”, we shared authentic content and were vulnerable on it, because that circle thrives on intimacy and mutual aid. When our “clan” joined, Facebook became a place to get affirmation and only occasional support. At the current “acquaintances” stage, the natural use of Facebook would be for exchanging information on limited opportunities and the like. And some people do use it for that, but there are better sites. It also remains a site for bragging, even though affirmation from acquaintances is less valuable than affirmation from our clan.
Somewhere around the transition from being a site for “clan” to a site for “acquaintances”, we discovered that the average person doesn’t do/say all that many Like-worthy things in a day and that people want infinite Likes while only being prepared to spend limited time giving Likes themselves. This prompted the rise of Facebook quizzes, personality tests and games like Farmville, which commercialised the weaker Facebook “friendships” and ensured some level of reciprocity in aid. But at the same time ensured that these actions could no longer make us happy, as they were no longer authentic actions. There are only so many rare game results I’ll Like and only so many times I’ll help an acquaintance who “urgently needs” my help to water their virtual plants in some video game.
The gaming phase led to an exodus from Facebook, which is why Facebook eventually drastically restricted games’ ability to intrude on and commercialise natural friendships/co-workerships. Still, the damage had been done. Between the games and influx of more and more broad acquaintances, there is very little authentic friend-ing happening on Facebook now. Almost anyone still posting on Facebook is doing so for promotion of their projects or self-promotion. Who really wants to read a feed full of acquaintances’ and ex-coworkers’ commercial offers, mixed with disturbingly well-targeted paid ads and a few memes?
Ironically, the only places that may still offer a decent Facebook experience (very different from the original Facebook but in line with Dunbar’s prediction) are the groups dedicated to a particular locality, where you interact with strangers but they provide information on interesting local opportunities and some neighbourly help of the non-virtual kind. Instagram mirrored Facebook, first moving towards being a place for bragging and it’s now on its way to the final, commercial-content-focussed stage.
According to self-determination theory, humans crave autonomy, competency and relatedness. Facebook originally offered relatedness in the form of confessions, plentiful mutual affirmation, photos of nights out and so on. In its gaming phase it offered autonomy and competency along with some relatedness (in as much as you can be happy knowing that Elsa from tech support helped you water your non-existent virtual plants). And currently it offers neither, hence it has lost most of what made people originally crave Facebook.
Introducing the metaverse
Oculus VR, which Mark Zuckerberg bought and intends to base his metaverse on, is currently in the gaming phase (with less of a social focus than the equivalent phase at Facebook), offering chiefly autonomy and competency along with a bit of relatedness. It is also already possible to watch a movie or stroll around some beautiful landscapes in this virtual reality, but few people make use of this. Beaches are no fun without the sea breeze and the sand under our feet and a loved one by our side. And it will be two decades until there is a device, probably space-consuming, heavy, annoying, and affordable to just 1% of the population, that can do a reasonable simulation of the whole experience. It may also turn out to be too annoying to be commercially viable.
What if Zuckerberg really wanted to up the good vibes we get in his metaverse by upping the relatedness, to make it like the early Facebook? My prediction is that it’s impossible. Firstly, Dunbar’s problem hasn’t gone away and secondly, pictures of colleagues having an after-work beer in a virtual space will never be as popular as photos of the real thing, even if (50 years from now) it became possible to become intoxicated on virtual beer and dance shirtless on a virtual table. Content from the same platform (like one’s scores on Facebook games) does not work very well for Likes, at least not on a daily or weekly basis. That is to say, the majority of the content must continue to come from outside the metaverse if we want to get Likes for it. Which in turn means that we will continue to spend more of our time outside the metaverse (or very loosely plugged-in, as with Google Glass) in order to come back later in the day and collect some appreciation for what we post about these activities.
Also, there is a limit to how much the algorithm can amplify this. The first idea — to have an android, a fake user distribute a lot of appreciation to everyone -— won’t work because the Gyges Effect taught us that people are mainly motivated by the ability to reach and affect other people. Next, the Farmville experiment has shown that humans have limited tolerance for artificial relatedness. As soon as the majority of users understands that Elsa doesn’t really like them but was prompted by the platform to express a Like, or Elsa doesn’t really desperately need plant seeds from you but the platform made her request them, those interactions will stop feeling good. Finally, there is some space for an algorithm that shows particularly insecure users’ content to particularly many people, to give them a greater share of Likes or what passes for Likes in the metaverse. But the pie is small and (if it’s like Facebook) it’s getting smaller with longer exposure to the platform. Lying about who liked what is also a quick way to kill this platform.
But Zuckerberg is not in the business of creating a pleasure machine. He only wants to control the device that adults spend most of their life on, in order to get the ad revenue from all those hours. For as long as we don’t live in a Star Trek society, this means that the device cannot be primarily for gaming or entertainment, it must be for work. And indeed Zuckerberg already revealed that his plans are for the Oculus VR to become a co-working device that will allow you to see your colleagues next to you as if you were working at the same office. It is hard to imagine working while wearing an Oculus VR right now. It’s too heavy and bulky and doesn’t allow you to drink or move around the home while wearing it. Glasses may be a better bet, though naturally less immersive, and Google has tried and failed to make them popular since 2013. Will Zuckerberg succeed where Google failed? So far, all his successes after Facebook have been acquired, not achieved.
The final option mentioned in his metaverse talk is that of holograms. Holograms have already been used to deliver lectures remotely. But for as long as they don’t give the hologrammed person the sensation of being present, their use cases are also limited. What is more, animals don’t shit where they eat and humans don’t work where they play, or vice versa. The moment Zuckerberg succeeds in having Oculus VR replace Zoom, people will stop using Oculus VR for gaming, in order to satisfy the need to disconnect from work and to be unavailable to colleagues. In the best case scenario for him, he can control our working hours OR our private hours, he can control our interactions with friends OR with colleagues, but most likely not both at the same time.
This does not mean that our use of connective technologies will stay the same. The amount of hours any person spends online has doubled between 2008 and 2018 and is on course to continue to rise dramatically. The border between the online and offline world will keep eroding, with likely terrible effects for our societies and democracies. This is the techie idea of the “metaverse” in the sense of a point in time, rather than a particular Zuckerberg-owned software. But that is for another day.
Six years of DiEM25: Where did we come from, and where will we go next?
Where did we come from, and where will we go next? In this livestream we talk about the history of our movement up until this moment, with a focus on our mistakes and the lessons we’ve learned from them. In the second part, we talk about the future: DiEM25’s goals now, and how have they changed since 2016, how will we accomplish these goals, and prospectives for the future!
Our panel, including Yanis Varoufakis and the rest of our team, takes on these issues and answers your questions.
Beral Madra on Turkey, the EU and DiEM25’s quest for democracy in the country
We sat down with Turkish art curator Beral Madra to discuss Turkey, the EU and DiEM25’s quest for democracy. You can read the full interview below.
For people who aren’t familiar with the situation in Turkey, how would you describe it today? What are the key issues that people are struggling with?
Today, to understand Turkey’s and Islamic countries’ political, social and cultural climate one must read Iranian thinker Daryush Shayegan’s legendary book ‘Le regard mutilé, Schizophrénie culturelle’, in detail. This mutilated consciousness, or cultural schizophrenia, has three components: the unfinished fall of the Ottoman Empire, Modernism and the Foundation of the Republic and Political Islam combined with Neo-capitalism. These transformations have always been agitating for the masses. For conservatives, in particular, these transitions have been diffcult to get used to.
People of my age have seen the rupture of Modernism and three military coups, in 1960, 1970 and 1980. The generations that came after experienced a split between secular and religious ideologies. This has been a long struggle, and in order to resolve it we must move to a solid democratic order.
Can you tell us a bit more about the ‘mutilated consciousness’ you mention? How is it impacting how people relate to one another in the country?
Shayegans’s book is about the Modernist, colonialist and imperialist interactions between the West and the Islamic world. He proclaims that the Islamic world remains in conflict with the scientific era of the 20th century. As Shayegan puts it: our predicament is that our consciousness still operates at the magical level of symbols, while our ideas have their origins in the epistemic mutations of the new age.
Many Islamic countries have incorporated Modernist systems. And ideas have changed, but the attitudes of the masses have failed to keep pace with Western enlightenment. This is true even for Turkey, which entered into Modernism earlier than many other Islamic countries, with a determined Modernisation program. It’s also worth pointing out that the interventions of the EU, Russia and the US over the last decades have aggravated the split between laic and religious communities. For example, in the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and so on.
What needs to happen for Turkey to move to a solid democratic order? What are the steps that need to be taken?
Since the 1950s many steps have been taken to reach a solid democratic order. During the 1950-2000 democratisation process people learned about democracy. This allowed them to enable it every time it was disrupted by counter-democratic movements.
For the moment, opposition parties should unite and ensure a transparent election as soon as possible. And the people should focus on two goals. First, to understand and internalise the benefits of a 21st century democracy. And, second, to support opposition parties in the election process.
Can you point to any positive developments over the last years?
I will try to be optimistic and say that there are positive developments. For example, there’s the attitude of opposition parties to establish alliances, and also their wish to create a government with democratic goals. Not to mention that the establishment of democracy is on the agenda of at least 50% of the population.
Another positive development has been the continuous information flow between the destructive economic and social realities, despite the various bans. Truth pursues its war against Post-truth. For example, people are aware of femicide and child abuse thanks to the continuous work and declarations of NGOs and social media.
According to the 2019 report of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, 115 of the 474 femicides committed in 2019 were recorded as suspects. The culprits could not be found. According to the 2020 report, 300 women were killed by men in Turkey in 2020. And 171 women were found suspiciously dead. Femicide in Turkey is based on the good-old patriarchal order with its family honour absurdity. It is based on an unacceptable misinterpretation of the Quran. And on the persistent adoption of a male-dominated state-government tradition. Equality is not internalised; men are superior creatures!
Many international associations with local branches operate in Turkey. They constitute the most important capacity of resistance against this fatal misconduct. In my professional domain contemporary artists and art experts, as well as cultural associations, are courageously involved in truth-seeking productions. Women artists in particular are at the forefront of this quest for democracy.
What has been the impact of the ruling power on the country over the last 20 years?
Since the foundation of the Republic in 1923 there has always been a conflict between religious-based conservatism and secularism. However, this conflict always resulted in the supremacy of the latter. During each coup the then frail democracy, founded after World War II, lost ground. Later, with the 1980 coup the religious vein became stronger.
But a new hope for real democracy emerged in the 1990s with Turkey’s accession process to the European Union. This was a kind of post-modern utopia greedily fed by neo-capitalism. I think that the problem in this rapid transition, from the four decades-long military tutelage and state-capitalism, was not to face the political sins and mistakes of the past. And not to settle accounts with all the political killings and bloodshed in the second half of the 20th century. Not confronting the atrocities of the past had a very harmful effect.
Today’s ruling power used this desire to achieve ‘democracy’ as soon as possible. And in 2002 began introducing numerous reforms with regard to the conditions of EU accession, the rule of law and the respect for human rights. This is what I mean with Post-modern utopia.
Gradually, from 2008 on, the real goals and objectives of the government surfaced. Islamic sects and congregations became visible and active in social life. And eventually played a greater role in governmental and bureaucratic affairs. Religious sects reign supreme in the education system. Despite that, scandalous child abuse is an everyday issue in their institutions.
This controversial development towards an Islamic Republic reached a turning point on July 15, 2016. The date that marked the military coup that prepared the ground for the current regime. During the following two years of state-emergency, prisons were filled with over 100,000 so-called Fetö followers. An in June 2018, the constitution was changed with the promise of a new democracy. But instead parliamentary democracy was replaced by a presidential system with extended presidential powers. Today this extension entered a rather unbearable process. So it feels like people have been living a deception!
There is a great separation between the religious and secular populations. Between ruthless mediocrity and the enlightened masses. Between ethnic majorities and minorities. Moreover, racial discrimination towards Kurds, Alewites, Jews and Armenians has grown stronger. This has been aggravated by the depressive economic conditions felt since 2018.
What hope do you see for the future of Turkey and its people?
The future depends on several developments. First, on an honest and unharmed election process with the volition of opposition parties. This is necessary in order to save Turkey from the worst possible fate. I mean that they should not simply seek more votes, but unite around the goal of achieving democracy.
Secondly, the hope that society has learned its lesson from what has happened to it in terms of economy and loss of basic human rights. Even if desired results are gained, the rectification and healing of state ministries and agencies will be a long process.
My hope is for a radical change in the EU’s political approach to Turkey. The EU should give up its irresponsible attitude towards internal developments in Turkey and support the establishment of democracy. If the EU evaluates Turkey’s situation accurately, it will realise that it’s in its own interest for there to be democracy in the country. It could almost be a cheerful future.
How likely do you think the EU is to change its approach to Turkey?
It is in the EU’s interest for Turkey to achieve democracy. Europe is surrounded by restless and threatening countries. Just look what happens. People from war-torn countries have been coming to Europe in large numbers. This has been going on for over ten years. Europe cannot stop it even if the EU pays Turkey millions of Euros to keep people away from the borders. The ugliest part is that the human smugglers who drive these people make millions from this ‘business’. So, again, it is the big business of zombie-capitalism. Within this dystopic movement Turkey is the key territory. A solid democracy is therefore an insurance!
Another critical issue is the length and environmental importance of the Aegean and Mediterranean Turkish sea coasts. This is a crucial reason for the EU to have constructive communication and cooperation with Turkey.
Turkey has huge environmental problems. Two nuclear power plants under construction. The so-called canal from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea. Hydroelectric power plants that drain rivers and lakes, which are also troublesome for Europe. So I hope that the EU will put all these issues on their agenda and finally adopt a political approach of supporting democratic and environmentally-conscious goals.
What needs to happen in order to ensure an honest election process?
In 2021 the Turkish economy suffered a complete collapse and this continues to date. Experts say that the true inflation is 90%! According to the calculations of the Consumer Rights Association, 16 million people in Turkey live in hunger and 50 million in poverty. The number of hungry and poor people amounts to 66 million. I think that as we head towards elections, people will realise this fact and demand their rights. For a couple of months workers have been resisting through various protests. This is a positive sign.
How can movements like DiEM25 succeed in Turkey?
I am a member of DiEM25 with the hope that DiEM25 will be the voice of Turkey in EU politics. Democracy pursuers in Turkey are well trained to establish NGOs or reformative movements. The vast majority work in political parties and NGOs that defend fundamental rights. DiEM25 explains the political, economic, cultural and environmental faultlines of today’s global world order. It invites people to overcome these issues and move towards a more comfortable, healthy, creative and sustainable life. This is what we need today.
What do you think DiEM25 needs to do in order to influence society and politics in Turkey?
During 2019 DiEM25 was quite active in Turkey. It had quite a lot of followers and members in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. However, the pandemic period had inevitable negative effects, even if online communication continued as much as possible. Turkey’s population is 84 million with 50,13% men, % 49,87 women and estimated 5 million refugees or emigrants! This population is not homogenous; religious, ethnic, ideological fissures are immense.
As you can imagine, gaining political visibility within this heterogeneous fabric will not be easy. In order to inform people, gain members and be effective, we need well-planned strategies. Right now the most important strategy is to persuade groups ideologically close to DiEM25.
Are there any progressive movements and/or political parties in Turkey that DiEM25 should be in touch with?
Elections are set to happen rather soon, probably around Autumn 2022. This means that DiEM25 has a serious task at hand. Ideally it should communicate and collaborate with opposition parties, as long as they have democratic goals. And DiEM25’s manifesto should also be presented to them.
However, after this Machiavellian suggestion, the reality is disappointing. Look to Wikipedia. If you look at the chart you’ll see that most parties are right-wing, centre-right or centre-left. Only the Worker’s Party seems radical enough. But I have no idea if this party is aware of DiEM25. In tune with the socio-political-psychological realities in the country, the political party map is full of 20th century Modernist ideologies. The question is: is it easy to guide these parties to the 21st century and explain the forthcoming dangers highlighted in DiEM25’s manifesto?
Beral Madra is an art critic, curator, honorary president of AICA Turkey and member of DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective
Photo by Anna Berdnik on Unsplash
Nuclear is not green
To be clear, nuclear power is not green. And it cannot be. It is not a good end goal, nor a transitioning solution.
There are a number of reasons why we believe progressives around Europe and the world today should organise against nuclear power as a fake and dangerous saviour.
First, the risks are enormous. At any time, especially with the rising levels of climate uncertainties, let alone human errors, damage in nuclear power plants can result in catastrophes such as one in Fukushima or Chernobyl. Nuclear reactors are, in the best case, designed to withstand a single earthquake measuring a maximum of 7.0 magnitude on the Richter scale. But if faced with several minor ones — or damage to surrounding infrastructure — the power plant will be destroyed. Due to man-made climate change, we can only expect rising sea levels, hurricanes, and other climate disasters. We cannot expect the Earth to stand still in these uncertain times.
Secondly, consumed fuel rods from nuclear plants are radioactive waste. And they are often stored at the same site as the reactor. This radioactive waste has to be maintained for at least 200,000 years (!) and the more nuclear waste there is, the higher the chance that leaks will occur. This can damage human, non-human animals and the planet itself.
Can we really trust our governments with this issue? What are the chances that the previously mentioned case of Fukushima, where the authorities decided to dump more than a million ton of radioactive waste water in the Pacific Ocean, won’t be replicated all over the world? And how can future generations — in let’s say 1,000 or 10,000 years — be aware of what dangerous materials we have buried deep in the ground of Planet Earth? Nuclear waste represents a clear case of outsourcing nuclear catastrophe into the future, while the governments and corporations don’t bear any consequences.
Thirdly, new nuclear power costs about 4 times more than wind and solar power per kWh and it’s not renewable at all. In fact, it produces 13 times the emissions per unit of electricity generated compared to windmills. Furthermore, we simply do not have time to make a just transition to carbon-free electricity if we are going to pursue it through nuclear energy.
One nuclear power station takes between 10 to 19 years to build, with most, if not all, falling behind schedule and astronomically over budget. If we were to double the amount of energy from nuclear power stations, the direct cost of construction would be in the region of — US$ 4’410’000’000’000 — or 4.41 × 1012 for short. All of this — likely to be public funds — will be channeled to a select list of global corporations to take the share of global nuclear energy production from 10% to 20%.
We need to keep in mind that — ultimately — fuel for nuclear power requires mining. However, uranium mining is dangerous. And, unlike renewable energy sources (e.g. silver for windmills) it needs continuous mining. Additionally, uranium mining comes with a whole range of mining related diseases, not to mention that it represents a form of neocolonialism (extracting valuable minerals and destroying the planet and local communities).
We should bear in mind that ‘civilian’ nuclear energy programmes supply the necessary plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons and have historically been used to further military goals. The ‘civilian’ nuclear industry is in fact celebrated as the backbone of ‘national security’ in the United States by providing a steady-stream of ‘talent’ and engineering marvels to maintain US hegemony on our planet. In the United Kingdom, researchers at Sussex University uncovered “hidden dependencies of the submarine industry on civil nuclear programmes” and highlighted how the general public is subsidising “military nuclear infrastructure”.
Any desire to close humanity’s chapter on nuclear weapons will necessitate the end of its primary fuel. Expansion of nuclear power stations therefore run contrary to this vision. We cannot simultaneously call for an end to nuclear weapons but support expansion of nuclear energy on our shared planetary home.
Last but not least, nuclear energy cannot be created as part of the commons, due to the high need for expertise, security and complicated ways to obtain licenses. This results in the money being poured right into the hands of oligarchs that cannot be trusted.
Money plus all the surveillance that would be needed in order to keep this under control, in the hands of just a few people who are able to build nuclear power stations. Full surveillance based oligarchy, where could things go wrong?
Should we do anything about lies on the internet?
Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, scams. Whatever their intention, they amount to the same thing: lies. And since anyone can now be a publisher, and everyone has a device in their pocket, the Internet has accelerated their propagation – to warp speed.
COVID isn’t spread by 5G. Our planet is not a single infinite plane. There was no pedophile ring working out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria.
And while we may snigger at some of these conspiracy theories, online lies can harm, too. As the massacre of Myanmar’s Rohingya people has tragically shown.
The Establishment response towards people who share these views is usually to call them out, to shame and cancel them. And if necessary, to shut them down outright.
And it works, doesn’t it? It makes the Wild West of the internet a little less wild.
Uh, no
There are several problems with this picture.
The Establishment is the worst offender
The most dangerous lies come not from conspiracy peddlers, but the Establishment itself. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Afghanistan war was going terribly, even when the invaders said otherwise. The economic crisis in Greece didn’t happen because its people were lazy and corrupt. And the Russian government did not collude with Donald Trump to win the 2016 US election for him (a largely uncorrected story, paving the way for another war in Ukraine as I type).
Or let’s take our present pandemic. Health authorities said in March 2020 that masks were unnecessary – then backtracked and admitted having made the first statement to preserve masks for hospitals. They’ve changed positions on the issues of herd immunity and vaccine side effects like myocarditis, as well as school openings and lockdowns.
And here’s Joe Biden last July on whether vaccines prevent COVID spread, a ‘fact’ that was quickly disproved:
You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.
Perhaps you think pushing people to get vaccinated, sometimes using outright lies, is what a government should do in a pandemic. (I don’t – I think they should level with us, always.) And yes, science is a process and experts get it wrong.
But imagine how many damaging conspiracy theories these turnarounds give oxygen to. Each time authorities get caught fibbing, trust is further shattered. People ask the Very Reasonable Question: if they lied to me about that, what else are they lying about?
The accusation of spreading lies is itself a weapon
There are also powerful incentives for people to label views as ‘harmful’ and call for them to be silenced. When those views just contradict their own. And since we are all publishers today, anyone can wield this weapon. We must always factor this into our calculations of whether to believe them.
This week I’ve seen two examples that illustrate this. A pressure campaign led by legacy media against the Substack platform (which has attracted many heterodox journalists), and one against the world’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, are both in the headlines. Substack and Rogan are major voices challenging Establishment orthodoxy. And in both cases, these campaigns claim that Substackers and Rogan spread ‘disinformation’ by sharing contrarian views on COVID.
Why would legacy media outlets do this? Since, we can’t read people’s minds to understand their motivations, we could of course assume that legacy media is acting in good faith. That they’re trying to protect the public from harm.
But it’s important to consider the context, too. Substack has provided a home, an audience and an income for many journalists. Particularly those who fled legacy media after claiming their views had been stifled or censored. And in the case of Rogan, this chart says it all:
Legacy media’s business models have been decimated by platforms like Facebook and no longer trusted by the public. They are locked in a fight for their lives. They need to stay relevant, and they want their gatekeeper status back. It’s plausible that instead of trying to innovate, they’d rather take out the competition by accusing them of creating online harm.
The lies might not be as dangerous as claimed
The perceived damage caused by lies from ‘bad actors’ is often inflated.
The idea that a given lie can create harm seems to rest on an assumption: that in general, people can’t distinguish online fact from fiction and are suckered into believing untruths. My unscientific view is that this is BS.
OK, in every debate there are people at the extremes with pseudo-religious beliefs that favour their side. They will never be convinced.
But we should focus on what we can influence, and that means the vast middle – those who can be persuaded either way. True, humans today are operating in a polluted information environment, with faulty mental machinery and biases. It’s the Wild West, after all.
But even so, I believe that people are not idiots and can make up their minds for themselves. Tens of millions, and probably many more, saw through the Establishment’s WMD ‘evidence’ (even if it still resulted in war and occupation). And I struggle to accept that millions are taking medical advice from one of Joe Rogan’s guests – especially when he has debated many pro-Establishment voices on the same show.
But what about those times when someone’s misinformation or hate speech can harm? Sure, there are cases where incitement to harm is so obvious that there’s little room for interpretation. And in some of those cases, it could be justified to censor those views. But it is not a call to be made lightly.
Censorship is a blunt and ineffective instrument
The remedial action — censorship — rarely achieves its stated goal. Because outlawing content makes it more attractive. But also because the architecture of the internet makes banning views impossible in practice.
And censors will always be playing catch-up. As technology like Deepfakes evolves, lies that look real become trivial to manufacture. Just wait for the next major election to see.
Of even more concern, though, is this: who decides which views should be banned? The answer is usually some unelected Silicon Valley billionaires. It’s legal for Twitter’s CEO to kick politicians off Twitter. But it’s neither ethical, nor politically helpful.
Censorship breeds monsters
The Establishment’s censoriousness makes a profound mess of our discourse. Humans evolve through the free expression and collision of ideas — especially those we dislike. Science is a process that depends on this.
Censorship threatens the marketplace of ideas and stifles debates we need to have – especially in a pandemic. It narrows the bands of what is permitted to express, while coercing would-be dissidents to self-censor out of fear. It exacerbates divisions. And it sets the scene for demagogues to swoop in and seize power.
All this is the strict-father model in practice. It’s the Establishment fearing loss of control, demanding Compliance At Any Cost as it backfires royally. While pushing its own lies, again and again and again.
So what the hell should we do?
Activists are adept media consumers and we’re in the middle of this mess. Here are some suggestions of how to get through it:
See the landscape clearly
Much of the internet has become a firestorm of competing agendas, tribal warfare, platforms stoking rage and division, and people trying to sell shit to us. So each time you log in to the Wild West, be on your guard. With your hand near your holster.
Stay skeptical, stay sane
Whether you’re reading The Guardian or an obscure Facebook group, balance your reading with arguments from the other side. Follow people you disagree with. See expert views as inputs, not as answers. Be open and curious to have your mind changed.
And get around Twitter’s algorithms by using apps like Tweetbot. Throw other platforms out. (Facebook, in particular, is very hard to out-game.)
Instead of crying to the ref, play better
You’ve seen someone pushing misinformation or hate speech? Push back against the views, not the person. Instead of trying to silence them, meet their ideas head on with a narrative of your own. This is the essence of persuasion. Whether you’re debating on a forum, or battling a coordinated Establishment media campaign as we did with Omikron Project. (Unless, of course, you’re dealing with a direct incitement of violence. But set the bar high for that, because boy is it low these days.)
Don’t join in the firestorm
Comment on what you have a proposal for resolving, or where you think you can add value to the debate. Don’t comment on an article based on the headline, or immediately after reading. Give yourself space, digest, and comment once you have something that can add value to the debate — if at all.
The author is an adviser to DiEM25’s Coordinating Collective. A version of this article first appeared in the activist newsletter, Subvrt.
Portugal elections: fight the oligarchy or nothing will change
Another electoral cycle is approaching. This time against the will of the majority of reigning opinion. The public doesn’t see the point. The election is regarded as the result of cynical political calculations that do not correspond to the aspirations of the nation.
And now these laments have been eclipsed by a media frenzy about political debates between party leaders and candidates. The resurgent far-right was the necessary catalyst to stir political parties out of their most present worries. Concerns about precarity, health, housing, the economy and many other areas.
In this way, the election is framed as a contest of personalities and personal motivations. Decision-making ends up depending on emotional affinities and vague clubistic party loyalties. And so, issues like the mechanisms of domination, exploitation, growing inequality and the loss of sovereignty take a back seat.
It cannot be overemphasised, how damaging the media’s obsession with personalising campaigns is. Boiling down into a panoply of commentators, endless commentary and embracing the jargon of martial arts and warfare.
They thus perpetuate the toxic sebastianist culture of ‘great men’ and politicians, the only ones who hold the key to our shared prosperity. As Trump said during his presidential campaign: ‘Only I can fix the system’.
That said, there is still one theme that stands out from the clashes between the various party leaders. A theme much proclaimed by the candidates of major parties: the political primacy of pragmatism.
Caution and pragmatism are essential tools in politics. All the more so the higher the office one holds. But they tend to be elevated to basic principles by modern social democratic parties. And if moderation is taken as a principle and not as a tool, it becomes an obstacle to the desired goals.
With a little speculation, one might suggest that the poor results achieved by the housing policy of recent Socialist Party governments in Portugal, which have failed in halting the staggering growth in the cost of housing, may not necessarily be the product of cynical, propagandistic calculation.
Promises were made without the intention of fulfilling them. Not for ideological or other more nefarious motivations, but rather in a utilitarian way. In view of the enormity of the task that will fall to the governors who try to confront the hegemonic real estate lobby.
Whether at home or abroad the real estate hydra and its speculative onslaught make even the bravest of politicians stand back. We see how pragmatism has been misused by rulers who make it their cause. The failure to tackle this problem undermines valiant efforts in other areas. One only has to understand how the brutal rise in the cost of living has far outweighed any gain from an increased minimum wage.
It is necessary to confront the real estate oligarchy in order to reap the rewards of a progressive political programme. Since the speculative octopus has polluted everything around it, pragmatism has to go for other policies to be effective.
In this campaign, it is common to hear the argument that without political stability the opportunity of a generation will be wasted. And, that the progressive management of European covid pandemic recovery funds (PRR) will be impeded. But even in the best-case scenario, we cannot forget that we live under the well-known ethical aegis of ‘socialism for the rich and fierce individualism for everyone else’. Given the track record of ‘green investments’ in Portugal, what is really the best we can expect?
It is to be commended that Portugal produces a majority of its energy resources through renewable energies. But at what cost? Having lost hundreds of millions in annual profits through the alienation of REN and EDP from the public purse. And by burdening the Portuguese with the rent from PPP’s to the same oligarchs who observed the implementation of the ‘European funds’.
The process for allocating the funds of the RRP, even the part that concerns ‘green investments’, will continue to be captured by the oligarchic logic that largely manages the energy sector. Like the hundreds of millions that were recently left unpaid, due to laws written by our legislature to grant a generous tax freebie of 110 million to EDP. What certainty do we have that this great European gift will not end up with a much higher bill in the long term, given the infamous results of the deals and PPPs in the energy and road sectors, among others?
If political stability means continuing on the current path, without major changes in the way in which the productive gains are captured by an oligarchic structure, we are faced with a paradox. Because a path that ends in a dead end can only create instability.
The democratic quarantine did not begin yesterday
After each election the nation’s institutional figures make their first statements on abstention. Sometimes more optimistic about the health of the national democratic spirit. Sometimes more pessimistic. But we know that year after year the trend is not encouraging. We still have vast swathes of the population far removed from the electoral process. Disengaged or uninterested. The poorest, the youngest, older and the descendants of immigrants. It is a paradox that nobody seems to want to answer. Why is it that those most affected by the injustices of the system are those who have the least hope for society’s decision-making mechanisms? Is it a feature or a bug?
Against this backdrop, the repeated comments about the health of democracy take on pernicious contours. Is it not precisely the authors of these comments who preside, as the political class, over the slow degradation of democracy?
In the next elections, it is not at all irrelevant which candidate or party conjuncture will have a majority. The relative strength of the different parties may force very different coalitions. On the other hand, the possibility of there being no agreement for a coalition, means that there could be new elections again. Like the elephant in the room that everyone wants to ignore.
The same is true of another ghost that is not being addressed. Possibly the greatest constraint on any future horizon for the country. Namely, the current restrictive consensus of the European elite. The infamous austerity and the regressive dogma that is expected to resurface with renewed intensity in times to come.
That is why only a progressive pan-European grassroots movement can maintain some clarity amidst the confusion of this electoral labyrinth. Only a radical programme like the Green New Deal for Europe can really be called pragmatic.
The photograph captures the moment when the State Budget for 2022 was rejected in the Portuguese Parliament. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Miguel Gomes is a member of the collective of Setúbal of DiEM25.
Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto, the Left, and Techno-Feudalism
“Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman.” — Yanis Varoufakis
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in Yanis Varoufakis, the prominent economist, politician, and public intellectual, who is also former Greek finance minister. Yanis was kind enough to grant us an extensive interview, which provides a panoramic (and, at times, rather critical) view of what is going at the intersection of money, macroeconomics, and the digital.
~ Evgeny Morozov
In the early 2010s, before your stint in the Greek government, you worked as economist-in-residence for Valve, a prominent gaming company. In what ways were your skills as an economics expert in game theory useful for dissecting the economics of virtual worlds? And, in turn, what kinds of insights, if any, on the inner workings of the real economy did you gain through that experience?
Ten years ago, the metaverse was already up and running within gaming communities. Valve’s games had already spawned economies so large that Valve was both excited and spooked. Some digital assets that had previously been distributed for free (via the game’s drops) began to trade for tens of thousands of dollars on eBay, well before anyone had thought of NFTs.
What if the prices of these spontaneously lucrative items and activities were to crash? That was what kept the people at Valve awake at night. You can see this from the email with which I was approached: ‘I have been following your blog for a while… Here at my company we were discussing an issue of linking economies in two virtual environments (creating a shared currency), and wrestling with some of the thornier problems of balance of payments, when it occurred to me “this is Germany and Greece”, a thought that wouldn’t have occurred to me without having followed your blog’.
My reasons for getting involved were many. One was the prospect of studying an economy as an omniscient researcher: Since I would have access to the full data set in real time, I did not need statistics! Another was the lure of playing ‘god’; i.e. being able to do with these digital economies things that no economist can do in the ‘real’ world, e.g. alter rules, prices, and quantities to see what happens. Another objective was to forge empirically supported narratives that transcend the border separating the ‘real’ from the digital economies.
What did I learn back then? The key insight was that observed behaviour utterly demolished some key neoliberal fantasies: Barter does not give way to sound money, in the form of some digital gold simulacrum. (Nb. We established that various goods/items vie for dominance as numeraires, without ever dominating.) Selflessness is always present (evidenced by substantial doubly anonymous gifting). Social relations emerge (even in these faceless digital worlds) which then ‘infect’ prices and quantities in a manner that bears little connection to the neoliberal view of exchange values formed in a political and moral vacuum.
Today, a decade later, it is clear that gaming communities like the one I studied at Valve have been operating as fully-fledged metaverses (to use Zuckerberg’s term). Gamers were drawn to them by the game but, once ‘inside’, they stayed to live out a large part of their life, making friends, producing goods for sale, consuming entertainment, debating, etc. Zuckerberg’s ambition is to insert his billions of Facebook non-gamer users into a Steam-like digital social economy – complete with a top-down platform currency that he controls. How can I resist the parallelism with a digital fiefdom in which Zuckerberg dreams of being the techno-lord?
NFTs are all the rage these days. Their rapid rise can be traced to CryptoKitties, a blockchain-based computer game that took off in 2017. There are now also many gamers who oppose NFTs and the rather problematic ideas of ownership that they embed. Was something like NFTs already on the horizon during your time at Valve? Do you think that NFTs will change our ideas about ownership, scarcity, and remuneration in ways that might be of help to the broader progressive project? This, at any rate, is the belief of some advocating for Web3.
Hats in TF2! Team Fortress 2 (or TF2) players were obsessed with digital hats. Initially part of free drops, some hats that were discontinued later became collectibles. Players began bartering within the game (e.g. I will give you two laser guns for this one hat of yours). Then, when the demand for some hat rose sufficiently, the players would step out of the game, meet up on eBay, trade the hat for (sometimes) thousands of dollars, before, finally, returning to the game where the vendor would hand the hat over to the buyer. Note the unbelievable levels of trust between strangers this transaction involved: the vendor could have walked away with both the money and the hat. Valve decided to reduce the need for so much trust, cut eBay out, and make a neat profit too by creating trading rooms within the game (i.e. create an in-game market for digital items owned and supervised by Valve).
NFTs differ in two respects from digital assets like the hats in TF2: The blockchain cuts out the company (e.g. Valve). And it allows the digital asset to emigrate from the game/realm that spawned it to any other digital realm.
Do I think that NFTs have subversive potential? Let’s see. In a digital environment, NFTs are like all other commodities. They reflect the triumph of exchange value (with which capitalism trounced experiential or use value) within a metaverse (Valve-like or Zuckerberg-style). In that sense, NFTs offer nothing new within digital worlds, except perhaps that they turbocharge the ideology of capitalism (exchange value rules supreme). In the analogue world, NFTs have value only to the extent that bragging rights offer utility to those who care for them. Even though in so doing, they force outfits like Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which used to monopolise the trade in bragging rights) to change their ways, NFTs in no way subverts the structure of property rights creating and underpinning the oligarchy’s exorbitant power over the many.
So, no, I see little radical potential from NFTs. Having said that, a good, future, liberal techno-communist society may find ways of using them as part of a broad network of technologies helping us keep records of our identities, property, etc.
As long as we do not have these mechanical slaves catering for humanity as a whole (and not just producing commodities owned by the 1% of the 1%), the idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living so as to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy.
Much has been made of the fact that in some countries of the Global South (e.g. the Philippines) blockchain-based games like Axie Infinity are creating a parallel economy, allowing players to redeem virtual tokens – their value has recently skyrocketed – in fiat money. The founder of Reddit, for one, has recently argued that all future games will follow this play-to-earn model, adding that ‘90% of people will not play a game unless they are being properly valued for that time’. What are we to make of this? Is it yet another dystopia of global capitalism? Or is it a minor improvement from sweatshop labor, perhaps, the consequence of the global pandemic keeping many people stuck at home playing games?
When I worked with Valve, ten years ago, there were thousands of young people in China, in Kazakhstan, and elsewhere making a mint out of providing services to members of Valve’s gaming communities. Gifted players made good money paid by other players keen to watch them play. So, there is nothing new to the idea of a parallel economy that allows people in poorer countries or regions to earn as they play, or from offering in-game services.
Was that a good or a bad thing? Of course, it was good for a young person in Shenzhen who managed to earn $60k a year designing digital hats on his PC – instead of destroying his body in a sweatshop. The question, however, is: Could all workers in Shenzhen (and beyond) be rescued from sweatshops by migrating to a metaverse? The answer is: Not before we have robots working for all of us so that we can reproduce the material conditions of our lives. As long as we do not have these mechanical slaves catering for humanity as a whole (and not just producing commodities owned by the 1% of the 1%), the idea that people must now play like robots to earn a living so as to be human in their spare time is, indeed, the apotheosis of misanthropy.
One of your critiques of Bitcoin as a currency (which you clearly state it is not and cannot be) is that it limits policy space available, such that, when there is a pandemic, it won’t be possible to increase the money supply. I suppose this also covers ‘printing money’, with all of the perverse consequences of QE that you yourself have documented elsewhere. Wouldn’t the Bitcoin maximalists be at least coherent in arguing that this inability to print money is a feature, not a bug, of the system?
When ‘Bitcoin maximalists’, as you call them, wax lyrical about the inability to print money (and celebrate this inability as Bitcoin’s feature, rather than its bug), they are being terribly unoriginal – banal, I dare say. Capitalism nearly died in 1929, and tens of millions did die in the war that ensued, because of this toxic fallacy that underpinned the Gold Standard then and Bitcoin now. Which fallacy? The fallacy of composition, as John Maynard Keynes called it.
Its essence is a tendency to extrapolate from the personal realm to the macroeconomic one. To say that if something is good for me – if a practice is sound at the level of my family, business, etc. – it must also be good for the state, government, humanity at large. For example, yes, parsimony is a good thing for me, personally. If I can’t make ends meet, I need to tighten my belt; otherwise, I shall sink more and more into debt. However, the exact opposite holds for a macroeconomy: If, in the midst of a recession, the government tries to tighten its belt as a means of eliminating its budget deficit, then public expenditure will decline at a time of falling private expenditure. And since the sum of private and public expenditure equals aggregate income, the government will be – inadvertently – magnifying the recession and, yes, its own deficit (as government revenues fall). This is an example of one thing (belt-tightening) being good at the micro-level and catastrophic at the macro level.
Similarly with gold, Bitcoin, and all other ‘things’ of exchange value: If you have gold, it is good for you if its supply is limited, fixed if possible. Same with Bitcoin, silver, dollars. (Nb. It is why the rich and powerful traditionally opposed expansionary monetary policy, crying ‘hyperinflation’ at the drop of a hat.) So, yes, if you are invested in Bitcoin, or for some reason you are elated every time its dollar exchange rate rises, you have every reason to think that its algorithmically fixed supply is a good thing, a feature. But, there is a price for that: A fixed money supply translates into a deflationary dynamic which, in a system prone to under-employing its people and under-investing in things society needs (i.e. capitalism), is a catastrophe in the making.
The Gold Standard is, indeed, a great source of insight into how dangerously primitive Bitcoin maximalist thinking is. Suppose Bitcoin were to take over from fiat currencies. What would banks do? They would lend in Bitcoin, of course. This means that overdraft facilities would emerge allowing lenders to buy goods and services with Bitcoins that do not yet exist. What would governments do? At moments of stress, they would have to issue units of account linked to Bitcoin (as they did under the Gold Exchange Standard during the interwar period). All this private and public liquidity would cause a boom period before, inevitably, the crash comes. And then, with millions of people wrecked, governments and banks would have to abandon Bitcoin. In short, just like gold, Bitcoin is eminently… abandonable (once it has done enormous damage). Put differently, either Bitcoin will never take over from fiat money or, if it does, it will cause huge unnecessary pain (before being abandoned).
To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated.
What about other crypto-currencies, though, which do allow for very sophisticated operations and incentive structures, including algorithmically programmed demurrage? Would they be closer to being defined as currencies?
No, that will not work either. The problem with Bitcoin is not just its fixed supply. It is the presumption that the rate of change of the money supply can be predicted and foreshadowed within any algorithm. That the money supply can be de-politicised. So, it is not a question of how sophisticated and complex the algorithm is. It is, rather, that a purely political, unknowable, process can never, ever, be captured by an algorithm. It cannot and, therefore, it should not.
Because of the growing interest in Ethereum, there has been a strange resurgence of interest in mechanism design and game theory among the crypto-community; some papers on crypto-economics proudly cite Leonid Hurwicz and Oskar Lange. If one studies this nascent discipline a bit closer, however, one is struck by its choice of focus: microeconomics is everywhere but macroeconomics – save for some Austrian critiques of fiat money – is nowhere, not even in the orthodox Samuelson version.
You put your finger on the nail. This is, again, the fallacy of composition: imagining that what works for you must work for society at large; that what makes sense in the micro-world makes sense in the macro one too. Crypto-enthusiasts with strong views on money, in this sense, fall under the category of people best described by Keynes as ‘resembling Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world’. Keynes was referring to classical economists who thought of money as a commodity, as a thing. The crypto-monetarists are repeating the same conceptual error.
From the very early days – i.e. the early 2010s – you have been arguing that ‘blockchain is a fantastic solution to the problem we have not yet discovered. But it is not the solution to the problem of money’. But are we that ignorant? One could say that the blockchain, as a project inspired by the cypherpunk ideology, has always been a solution to the problem of the state: it promises to take the state out of domains as diverse as law (with the rise of smart contracts) or arts funding (with the fractionalization of ownership through NFTs) or, most obviously, central banking (with its critique of fiat money).
To think that Bitcoin can solve the problem of money, or the problem of the state, is to misunderstand what money is or what states do. Every exploitative socio-economic system is predicated on what the minority running it can make the rest do for them (who does what to whom, as Lenin famously put it). Money and the state are epiphenomena of this system. To believe that you can fix money, or that you can fix the state, is to demonstrate a devastating innocence regarding the larger exploitative system with which they are integrated. No smart contract can, for example, subvert the labour contracts that underpin society’s layered patterns of exploitation. No NFT can change an art world where art is a commodity within a universe of commodified people and things. No central bank can serve the interests of the people so long as it is independent of the demos. Yes, blockchain will be useful in societies liberated from the patterned extractive power of the few. However, blockchain will not liberate us. Indeed, any digital service, currency, or good that is built on it within the present system will simply reproduce the present system’s legitimacy.
Assuming you are still upbeat about the blockchain, how do you reconcile this anti-statist bias with what you see as its potential in an emancipated society? What does that potential consist of exactly? Even if one assumes there’s some value in both game theory and mechanism design, what use are they to the progressive project stripped of any macro perspective?
My answer lies in my sci-fi novel, Another Now (in particular, Chapter 6). In it, I present a blueprint of a post-capitalist, non-exploitative social economy. Blockchain features there as a technology used both by central banks and local communities to create a public, distributed ledger for two things: Money, of course. And title leases for properties in a County’s commercial zone (which are on a perpetual auction, the proceeds of which are used to maintain and expand the County’s social zone). From this, you can see that I consider blockchain, and Ethereum-style mechanisms, as technologies that will prove extremely useful once private property in the means of production ends. But, on their own, these technologies will not liberate us from the extractive power of the few.
You have described yourself as an ‘erratic Marxist’, pointing out that you do have strong libertarian tendencies. In Italy, where I’ve been living for quite some time now, there’s, of course, this long-running tradition of Autonomous Marxism, which shares many of these beliefs. It has always been critical of the state and state bureaucracy, with its rigid, centralized ways of organizing society. Now, it seems there is a new promising solution to this age-old problem: DAOs, short for decentralized autonomous organizations, which promise to put transparent algorithmic rules in place of the Weberian charismatic leaders. Do you find anything of value in such new institutional forms? Or do they smack of the same technocratic credo – with its belief that political problems can be solved by designing clever mechanisms and incentives – that they claim to be attacking?
Karl Marx was erratic. He changed his mind all the time, infuriating his friends and comrades. He wrote furious repudiations of his earlier ideas. And he could not stand those who called themselves… Marxist (e.g. famously saying ‘If they are Marxists, I am not’). So, I described myself as an ‘erratic Marxist’ to signify two things: That I am not dogmatic. And, that I am at odds with those ‘official’ Marxists who seek personal power from a dogmatic custodianship of Marx’s thinking. In fact, I went one step beyond, referring to myself as a ‘libertarian Marxist’ – a self-description that was immediately derided by several libertarians and most Marxists. My reason? Like the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain and the Autonomous Marxists of Italy that you mentioned, I fail to see how one can genuinely cherish freedom and tolerate capitalism. And also: how one could be both illiberal and left-wing.
On the question of DAOs, I must say that I look at them with sympathy. But, again, as with my attitude to the blockchain, I am convinced that these are tools that will very much come in handy once a broad internationalist movement overthrows the oligarchy’s property rights over the means of production (including the cloud servers!). As I try to outline in my Another Now, a digital anarcho-syndicalist future society will use many of these DAO-like tools. But, and this is a gigantic but, DAO-like tools will not bring about this new society in which DAO-like tools are useful. (Nb. We can already see how DAOs are being usurped by regressives and real estate moguls in the United States.)
Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman.
Observing the crypto space from the sidelines, I get the impression that it has allowed many of the old neoliberal policy ideas to come back. I’m thinking especially about the use of market-based instruments in fighting climate change: all of a sudden, the blockchain promises to revive many of the ideas related to natural ecosystem services, while the rise of often anonymous activist organizations like KlimaDAO has helped boost what was once a languishing market in carbon emissions. As a result, the reputation of the market as a problem-solving device has been restored, even if temporarily. How should progressives react to such developments? Are these crypto-projects, which promise to reverse climate change via finance, occupying the empty activist space that should have been filled by central banks before they got somewhat sidetracked by the advice they are getting from BlackRock? What should the central banks be doing about this green-tech-finance axis?
Precisely my point. In the name of liberating us from moguls, states, and even climate change, crypto zealots are turbocharging the ideology of commodification (i.e. neoliberalism). What should we do? The only thing that will work is: To take over parliaments so as to legislate a corporate law that ends tradeable shares, and introduces the one-share-one-employee principle in its stead. To take over central banks and make them issue digital currencies on a distributed ledger that makes basic income possible. To take over governments and implement personal ownership of our data. In short, no algorithm will remove the need for a genuine revolution.
One of the interesting consequences of the ongoing currency crisis in Turkey has been the growing popularity of stablecoins such as Tether among the Turkish population. This is even more remarkable given that Tether has been rumored to have problems of its own, which many in the crypto community expect to explode sooner or later. Erdoğan’s hands seem to be tied, as Turkish cities brim with ads for crypto services, which are genuinely popular with the local population. You’ve spoken, somewhat dismissively, about stablecoins in the past but how do you see them changing the dynamics of a currency crisis like the one in Turkey? How should the government be reacting to them, if at all?
Bitcoin was, as I claimed earlier, the digital-algorithmic reincarnation of the Gold Standard – supported by the same vacuous arguments and the same underlying oligarchic motives. Stablecoins are yet another reincarnation of yet another primitive, failed idea: the so-called currency board.
The idea behind the Gold Standard was that national currencies gained credibility because their state/central bank gave up the right to print money at will. By fixing the exchange rate of a national currency to the price of gold (e.g. $35 for one ounce of gold), and freely allowing two-way convertibility, it was common knowledge that, if the authorities printed money in total value exceeding the value of the gold in the central bank’s vaults, at some point people holding paper money would demand gold that the central bank did not have.
A currency board (e.g. the system underpinning Bulgaria’s national currency today) is similar in that the central bank fixes the national currency’s exchange rate to equal the average price of a basket of hard currencies. Again, as long as there are no capital controls and the national currency is fully convertible to the hard currencies in the currency board, if the central bank prints more money than is equivalent (under the fixed exchange rate) to its foreign currency reserves, it risks a run on its reserves. As with the Gold Standard, currency boards have proven fragile – at the sign of economic crisis, war, or other types of stress, they are abandoned.
A stablecoin is a currency board with the difference that it applies to a stateless digital currency (like Tether), not a national currency. This means that there is no state to legislate that the system administrators honour the fixed exchange rate; that they not create stablecoins in excess of the value of their reserves, cash them in, and do a runner. In other words, in addition to the inherent instability of currency boards, stablecoins are ripe for fraud.
In conclusion, the fact that stablecoins or Bitcoin itself acquire the aura of saviours in countries hit by inflation, like Turkey, is nothing more than a measure of the desperation of the people: they will clutch at straws. Stablecoins offer Turks no respite from inflation that buying euros or dollars cannot offer. So, why buy Tether instead of dollars or euros? Why rely on the shadowy characters running a private currency board? Only because the latter deploy good marketing to exploit desperate people.
What do you make of China’s recent efforts to rein in both its FinTech market and the crypto industry, as well as to accelerate the development of the e-yuan? Are they an example for Europe and the US to emulate? And if so, what are the elements worth borrowing?
I am immensely impressed by these moves, especially when looked at as a package. The Chinese authorities are, at once: (1) deflating the real estate bubble (by taking down Evergrande, blow-by-blow); (2) aiming to reduce aggregate investment from 50% to 30% of GDP as a precondition for boosting the wage share of GDP; (3) ending the oppressive tutoring system for pupils that crushes young souls without helping nurture creative thinking; (4) sponsoring sci-fi writing and game design; (5) restricting the power of Big Tech; and, last but certainly not least, (6) bringing the digital yuan online.
That last move, the digital yuan, constitutes a revolution: when fully-fledged, it will equip every resident in China, but also anyone from around the world who wants to trade with China, with a digital wallet – a basic digital bank account. In one move, therefore, the commercial banks will have been ‘dis-intermediated’; or, in plain English, they will have lost their monopoly over the payments system. This is genuinely a radical break from finance as we have known it. And, yes, it is one that we should emulate in Europe and in the United States – which is, of course, why Wall Street and the rest of the West’s financiers will do their best to stop it, preferring to blow up the world rather than allow themselves to be… dis-intermediated.
Are you familiar with the plans for the ‘digital dollar’ advanced by the likes of Robert Hockett and Saule Omarova, which, in essence, insist on the need to build a democratically accountable CBDC? How likely do you think the Fed is to implement something like this, especially given how much opposition – including from the crypto industry – there was for Omarova’s nomination to the Biden administration? We have also recently heard from Congressman Tom Emmer, who, while proclaiming that Washington should be building crypto with ‘American characteristics’, wants to prohibit the Fed from any experiments with a CBDC. One of Emmer’s stated reasons for such action was to ‘maintain dollar dominance’. What do you think is behind such proclamations? Do they mean we are likely to see Facebook’s earlier efforts to launch its own stablecoin – now called (ironically) Diem – given an official stamp of approval?
The situation sounds complex but it is very, very simple. Most dollars, pounds, euros, and yen are already digital. The digitisation of money is not the issue. The issue is the monopoly of the payments system. Today, you use digital money (phone apps or plastic cards) to buy a cup of coffee at your local Starbucks. But, to do so, you first need an account with a commercial bank. In other words, to grant you access to digital fiat money, the state forces you to fall into the embrace of the commercial banks.
So, today, the state guarantees a monopoly over payments to commercial banks. And that is only one gift to the oligarchy. A second, even greater gift, is that only commercial banks are allowed to have an account with the central bank. So, when a recession hits, and the central bank decides to stimulate the economy, the central bank lowers the interest rate of the overdraft it grants commercial bankers – who then exploit this to profit from arbitrage (by lending the money on to customers at a higher interest rate). And when the recession gets even worse (as has been the case since 2008 and now with the pandemic), the central bank prints digital dollars or euros and credits them directly into the accounts the commercial banks have with the central bank. This is the definition of exorbitant privilege!
So, this is why Wall Street prefers to see the world explode, time end, or Armageddon arrives, rather than allow the Fed to proceed with the digital dollar: because a digital dollar would mean that every resident in the US, and anyone beyond US borders trading with Americans, will be granted a digital wallet. That would be detrimental to the power of commercial banks. First, because people would no longer be obliged to open a bank account with them (think of all the lost fees!). Secondly, because there will no longer exist a rationale as to why the Fed or the ECB, etc., cannot – when they think they must stimulate the economy – drop helicopter money on everyone. Why credit dollars only to the accounts commercial banks keep at the Fed and not credit the people’s digital wallets directly? Indeed, why give money to commercial banks at all?
One of the persistent critiques of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum is their immense energy use, which, on the surface, seems like the price to pay for not trusting the state as the arbiter of truth/provider of trust. The solution proposed by the Ethereum Foundation has been to shift from today’s energy-intensive mechanism of Proof of Work to the less environmentally damaging Proof of Stake. Yet, the latter, once you look closely at the details, solves the energy problem by making the entire system more plutocratic, because, in essence, it runs on the principle ‘one dollar (or ether) = one vote’. What makes this crypto-plutocracy tolerable to many of its advocates is their jaded view of today’s financial system, which they see as even more plutocratic and hell-bent on appropriating even more of the bailout money. How does one answer such critiques?
The environmental costs of crypto are very large, undoubtedly. But, even if there existed a magic wand whose waiving would make blockchain run on zero watts, crypto currencies would remain more of a problem than a solution – for reasons I explained above. In brief, within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman. This is why, in opposing the crypto enthusiasts, I never even bother to mention their environmental repercussions.
If one looks closely at some of the influential crypto projects, they feature a bizarre mix of ideologies. There’s, for example, a very ambitious project called Cosmos – it bills itself as ‘the Internet of blockchains’ – which is set up as a cooperative, an institutional form dear to the heart of many leftists. Yet its co-founder and CEO is a big believer in ‘free banking’, an ideology espoused by many libertarians in the US. Do you think the left has been too slow to make sense of the crypto/digital currency space? It seems that even on an earlier set of issues before crypto – complementary and alternative currencies, for example – there seems to be no coherent leftist position, so that today they can be easily appropriated by the crypto start-ups pushing the tokenization of everything…
The Left, radicals, progressives, etc. have either refused to acknowledge the genuine ingenuity of blockchain or have fallen for it. We seem to have forgotten how Marx and Engels had the nous and the ability, on the one hand, to admire and celebrate the technological and scientific wonders of their era and, on the other hand, grasp that these potentially liberating technologies were bound to enslave the many if they became instrumentalised by the very few. The two Germans believed in the emancipatory potential of the steam engine and of electromagnetism. But, they never believed that society would be liberated by the steam engine and/or electromagnetism. Liberation required a political movement that first overthrows the bourgeoisie and only then presses these magnificent technologies into the service of the many. This seems to me an excellent way of approaching today’s potentially liberating technologies, including blockchain.
You are acquainted with Michel Feher, the Belgian activist-philosopher. I don’t know if you’ve read his Rated Agency, but it does capture many arguments advanced by those who see something politically significant – something to be used by progressive forces – in the structural transformation of global finance associated not only with the rise of crypto but also with the popularity of day-trading apps like Robinhood. At least on the surface, the latter do allow retail investors to pool their efforts together and engage in financial activism that was previously available only to hedge funds (Feher himself had an interesting interpretation of the GameStop saga). I can see this logic working for coordinating divestment campaigns. Yet, apart from crowdfunding for, say, micro-municipal bonds, I can’t yet see a more proactive deployment of such power – except, perhaps, when driven by the desire to ‘stick it’ to the hedge fund industry and spoil their carefully engineered shorting of stocks like GameStop. How do you see this landscape? Is there much value in getting the left to proactively develop some capacities that would allow it to ‘move’ markets?
In Chapter 6 of my Another Now, I imagined how capitalism fell to a variety of techno-rebels who used a mix of financial engineering, worldwide consumer boycotts, and conventional industrial strikes/activism. A year later, I remember receiving calls from US journalists asking me: ‘Are your Crowdshorters in action?’ I was very amused to hear them talk of the Crowdshorters as if they were a real techno-rebel group. Of course, what occasioned the journalists’ questions was the GameStop mini-rebellion that saw millions of small-stake investors take on a couple of vile hedge funds, using the Robinhood platform. So, clearly, I am mightily excited by the idea of a techno-rebellion. If you want to see how I imagine it, on days when hope trumps pessimism, that chapter is my long answer.
I anticipate an almighty struggle for the right to a digital ECB wallet that will bring back memories of the struggle for universal franchise.
You’ve argued against depoliticizing money, which also explains, at least in part, your critical stance on Bitcoin. There have been plans, as you well know, for the digital euro. It would probably be more political than Bitcoin, as it would have a direct connection to the ECB. But as long as the ECB remains seen as a technocratic and apolitical institution, so would the digital euro. You’ve written and spoken extensively about it in the past but what would it mean, in practical terms, to politicize an institution such as the ECB? Stated more broadly, what would keeping the ‘political’ dimension of money in the picture imply in terms of practical politics?
European bankers loathe the idea of a digital euro just as vigorously as Wall Street bankers hate the idea of a digital dollar. It would end their monopoly over payments and make it hard to justify the exclusive umbilical cord connecting them to the printing presses of central banks (see above). What makes the Eurozone special is that it features no Eurozone Treasury, no common debt, no federal decision-making body. This is, lest we forget, a design feature of the Eurozone, one that Europe’s oligarchy adores. Come to think of it, the non-existence of any government with a capacity to transfer substantial wealth from financiers and corporates to the many (not even the German one can do this) is any oligarchy’s wet dream. Why would they want to spoil this triumph either by creating a democratically elected federal government or a digital euro?
But here is an interesting thought: The peoples of Europe have failed to push for a federal democracy in Europe. However, the Chinese central bank digital currency may prove harder to ignore: If a Dutch or German firm that trades with China can acquire a digital wallet from the Chinese central bank, they will most certainly use it. That means that the euro’s dominance will be challenged even within Europe. So, the pressure on the ECB to create a digital euro is enormous. But so is the oligarchy’s counter-pressure to ensure that, even if a digital euro is created, the people of Europe should not be allowed a digital euro wallet with the ECB. In this sense, I anticipate an almighty struggle for the right to a digital ECB wallet that will bring back memories of the struggle for universal franchise.
What do you make of what is going on in El Salvador? Not only has it made Bitcoin legal tender (shortly after announcing the Chivo Wallet with some money placed in it to incentivize use) but it will also be issuing the so-called Volcano Bonds, which have attracted their share of controversy. Is there a way to look at these bonds as a tactic that expands El Salvador’s options in negotiating with the IMF? Based on your own experience negotiating with that institution, do you think they stand any chance of success?
It is a preposterous stunt. For the life of me I cannot even begin to answer those who say to me: ‘Had you, Yanis, adopted Bitcoin back in 2015, all of the Greek people’s problems would have gone away!’ Why would they? The poor of Greece or of El Salvador would have no way to get their hands on Bitcoin anyway. Then the only beneficiaries would be Bitcoin hoarders (of whom very few live in El Salvador or Greece), who suddenly benefit from a spike in Bitcoin demand and from being able to spend their stash in El Salvador without the cost of converting them to dollars. The only poor El Salvadorians who may gain something are the expats sending money home in the form of remittances – people who are, now, fleeced by Western Union and the like.
On Volcano Bonds, this is a dangerous development. A government is inviting speculators to buy cryptocurrency backed by an impoverished state. Early Bitcoin enthusiasts were motivated, partly, by a loathing of governments that took on unsustainable debt – before indulging domestically in financial repression and austerity – in order to be able to extend-and-pretend their debt. The worry was that, at some point, Wall Street and other grubby conventional financiers would start building similar pyramids on… Bitcoin. And, the ultimate fear was that the state would join in. Well, Volcano Bonds are making this nightmare a reality, allowing speculators to speculate on a cryptocurrency using an impoverished sovereign state as backup.
More generally, and lest we forget, El Salvador’s public debt is in dollars, and thus impervious to whether Bitcoin is made legal tender or not. Making Bitcoin legal tender just adds enormous costs on small businesses, and ensures that those who do accept Bitcoin effectively exit the domestic fiscal system – leading to a substantial loss of fiscal space for the government, a development that increases its long term dollar debt burden.
As for the argument that, by adopting Bitcoin, Bitcoin will flood into the country thus boosting investment and giving the government more degrees of freedom vis-à-vis the IMF, again I cannot see the logic here. Bitcoin business moved into the Baltics, Puerto Rico, and elsewhere because of low costs, low taxes, and negligible regulation of their activities. They did not care if the local corner store is forced by law to accept Bitcoin. (In any case, most of these businesses are ultimately using Bitcoin to earn large amounts of… dollars!).
In view of the above, I cannot see why anyone would think that, in making Bitcoin legal tender, the El Salvador government is improving its bargaining position vis-à-vis the IMF. The fact that the IMF is utterly opposed to Bitcoin being granted legal tender status in El Salvador, as well as to its president’s Volcano Bonds, does not mean that the IMF is worried that its bargaining power vis-à-vis the El Salvador government is weakened. Quite the opposite: They predict that the Bitcoin experiment will deplete the El Salvador government’s fiscal space, boost the IMF’s power over El Salvador, but, at the same time, put more pressure on the IMF to commit more bailout funds to a failed El Salvador. After the recent IMF fiasco of huge bailouts to the radically right-wing Macri government in Argentina, it is not something the IMF folks cherish.
You have claimed, in an interview, that there are feudalistic elements to Bitcoin, for there is no democratic mechanism to determine who gets how many Bitcoins, thus favoring the early adopters. Interestingly, you contract feudalism to democracy here rather than to capitalism. Because if you think about capitalist competition – but also all the shady stuff that Marxists tend to lump under ‘primitive accumulation’ – one can easily argue that there’s nothing non-capitalist in what you describe: those who moved in early got the largest share of the pie, while crypto-mining, as it exists today, favors those with larger capital expenditures. Why describe this system as ‘feudalist’ when ‘capitalist’ would do just as well?
Assets, by themselves, are neither feudalist nor capitalist. Whether we are talking about gold, cucumbers, or Bitcoin, assets are assets – end of story. What makes an asset feudal or capitalist or socialist is the manner in which it interacts with a society’s social relations of production, the pattern of property rights it shores up, etc. My point, when referring to Bitcoin’s early adopters as a crypto-aristocracy, as crypto-lords, was that, when an asset like Bitcoin (whose exchange value is built on engineered scarcity) is embedded in any oligarchic exploitative system (capitalism, kleptocracy, techno-feudalism, etc.), it acquires the basic character of the (pre-capitalist) feudal order: a small minority are empowered to collect rents in proportion to the chunks of the asset that they began with. To recap, Bitcoin is neither feudalist nor capitalist per se. It is simply oligarchic.
Recently, you’ve taken up the theme of ‘techno-feudalism’, pointing out that capitalism is no longer what it once was. If I understand your thesis correctly, what makes the current system ‘feudal’ is that A) markets are no longer key to the making of profits (e.g. the QE experience suggests as much), while B) tech platforms have amassed immense political power, which is unprecedented in capitalism. Is it a correct summary of your argument? Are there other important dimensions to ‘techno-feudalism’ that this summary doesn’t capture?
The question is this: Is capitalism undergoing one more of its many metamorphoses, thus warranting nothing more than a new epithet, e.g. rentier capitalism, platform capitalism, hyper-capitalism or xxxxx-capitalism? Or are we witnessing a qualitative transformation of capitalism into a brand new exploitative mode of production? I think the latter. Moreover, this is not just a theoretical issue. If I am right, grasping the radicality of this transformation is crucial to opposing this new systemic exploitation.
Puzzlement is, of course, an understandable reaction to my claim – which needs a great deal of explanation and substantiation. Unable to offer it here in full (Nb. I am dedicating my next book to the subject), here is a flavour:
Capitalism is everywhere we look. Capital is accumulating rapidly and beating labour over the head everywhere and in cruel new ways. So, how come I argue that this is no longer capitalism – but, rather, something worse and distinct? Let me begin by reminding our readers that back in the 1780s, feudalism was everywhere and feudal lords were stronger than ever. However, surreptitiously, capitalism was already infecting feudalism’s roots and a new ruling class (the bourgeoisie) was in the process of taking over.
My claim is that, similarly today, capitalism – like feudalism in the 1780s – is being usurped by a far more exploitative and very distinct new extractive/exploitative system (which I call techno-feudalism), one that is arriving complete with a new ruling class.
Critics of my thesis will point out, correctly, that capitalism has undergone many transformations – from its early competitive phase, to monopoly-oligopoly capitalism (1910–onwards), its Bretton-Woods period (during which finance was kept on a leash with capital controls, etc.), financialised capitalism (from 1980–onwards) and, more recently, rentier capitalism. All these capitalisms were distinct and interestingly different from one another. BUT, they were each a version of capitalism.
What makes a system capitalist? The answer is: It is a system driven by private profits (Nb. not rents) extracted within markets. (To compare and contrast, feudalism was driven by rents extracted outside of markets.) Has that changed? I believe so. What has replaced profit on the one hand and markets on the other? My answer: Central bank money has replaced private profit (as the system’s main fuel and lubricant) and digital fiefdoms/platforms have become the realm in which value and capital are extracted from the majority by a tiny oligarchy.
Let me explain this in greater detail:
Hypothesis 1: Central bank money replaced private profits as the system’s driver
Profitability no longer drives the system-as-a-whole, even though it remains the be-all and end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Consider what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets learned that the British economy shrank disastrously – and by far more than analysts had expected (more than 20% of national income had been lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’
This is just one of countless manifestations of a new global reality: In the United States and all over the West, central banks print money that financiers lend to corporations, which then use it to buy back their shares – whose prices are thus decoupled from profits. The new barons, as a result, expand their fiefs, courtesy of state money, even if they never earn a dime of profit! Moreover, they dictate terms on the supposed Sovereign – the central banks that keep them ‘liquid’. While the Fed, for example, prides itself over its power and independence, it is today utterly powerless to stop that which it started in 2008: printing money on behalf of bankers and corporates. Even if the Fed suspects that, in keeping the corporate barons liquid, it is precipitating inflation, it knows that ending the money printing will bring the house down. The terror of causing a bad debt and bankruptcy avalanche makes the Fed a hostage to its own decision to print and ensures that it will continue printing to keep the barons liquid. This has never happened before. Powerful central banks, which today keep the system going singlehandedly, have never wielded so little power. Only under feudalism did the Sovereign feel similarly subservient to its barons, while remaining responsible for keeping the whole edifice together.
Hypothesis 2: Digital platforms are replacing markets
Amazon.com, Facebook, etc. are not markets. As you enter them, you leave capitalism behind. Within these platforms, one algorithm (belonging to one person or to very few persons) decides what is on sale, who sees which commodity is available, and how much rent the owner of the platform will keep from the profits of vassal-capitalists allowed to trade within the platform. In short, more and more economic activity is shifting from markets to digital fiefs. And that’s not all.
During the 20th century, and up to this day, workers in large capitalist oligopolistic firms (like General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, or General Motors) received approximately 80% of the company’s income. Big Tech’s workers do not even collect 1% of their employer’s revenues. This is because paid labour performs only a fraction of the work that Big Tech benefits from. Who performs the bulk of the work? Most of the rest of us! For the first time in history, almost everyone produces for free (often enthusiastically), adding to Big Tech’s capital stock (that is what it means to upload stuff on Facebook or move around while linked to Google Maps). And, moreover, this capital takes a new, far more powerful form (see below, where I talk about command capital).
At the same time, firms operating in normal capitalist markets – outside Big Tech and Big Finance – see their profitability collapse anyway, their dependence on central bank money grow exponentially, and their ownership be gobbled up by private equity and SPACs. Ergo, as feudal social relations of production were on the wane (and replaced by capitalist social relations) in the 1780s, today it is capitalist social relations of production that are being replaced by what I call technofeudal social relations.
Summing up:
Capital is getting stronger but capitalism is dying. A new system is taking over in which a new ruling class owns and runs both the state money that lubricates it (instead of profits) and the new non-market realms in which the very, very few make the many work on their behalf. Capitalist profits (in the sense of the entrepreneurial profits as understood by Adam Smith and Marx) are disappearing, while new forms of rent are accumulating in the accounts of the new techno-lords in control of both the state and the digital fiefs, in which unwaged or precarious work is performed by the masses – who begin to resemble techno-peasants.
EvgA common refrain in arguments about the rise of techno-feudalism is that tech platforms are just passive rentiers who are deriving immense profits from user data for which they pay very little. To put this in the most extreme way possible, these are lazy, mostly immaterial rentiers, who, having amassed a lot of IP, are now resting on their laurels. This reading also informs many of the enthusiastic accounts of Web3, which promise to share data wealth with the users who generated it. Yet, if one looks at the balance sheets and earnings statements of these firms, a different picture emerges: they actually invest more – rather than less – in material and tangible assets than non-tech firms (and more than they themselves did a decade ago), all while incurring immense R&D and capital expenditures (e.g. Amazon’s for 2020 was over $40 billion; Alphabet’s was almost $30 billion). This seems to fit rather well with the view of these firms as capitalist enterprises that, while controlling some markets, still compete in others (Google, Facebook, and Amazon in advertising; Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alibaba in cloud computing and AI services). Aren’t we running the risk of minimizing the really-existing capitalist dynamics of this tech economy when we emphasize those related to feudalism?
I agree with you in this sense: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al. invest massively and are nothing like the lazy aristocrats of the original feudal era. But that does not mean that their investment is part of a standard capitalist dynamic. Techno-feudalism is not merely feudalism with gadgets. It is simultaneously much more advanced than capitalism and reminiscent of feudalism.
Let me be more precise. The massive investment of Big Tech that you mention is crucial. Not just because of its size but, primarily, because of what it produces: a new form of capital that I call command capital. What is command capital?
Standard capital comprises produced means of production. Command capital, in contrast, comprises produced means of organising the means of industrial production. Its owners can extract huge new value without owning the means of industrial production; merely by owning the privatised informational networks that embody command capital.
Command capital, to be more precise, lives on privately owned networks/platforms and has the potential to command those who do not own it to do two things: Train the machines/algorithms on which it lives to (A) direct our consumption patterns; and (B) directly manufacture even more command capital on behalf of its owners (e.g. posting stuff on Facebook, a form of labour de-commodification).
In more abstract terms: Standard capital allows capitalists to amass surplus exchange value. Command capital, in contrast, allows techno-lords (i.e. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, et al.) to amass surplus command value. Command value? Yes: Any digital commodity has command value to the extent that its buyer can use it to convert expressive everyday human activity into the capacity to train an algorithm to do two things: (A) make us buy stuff, and (B) make us produce command capital for free and for their benefit.
In the language of Marx’s political economy, the magnitude of command value contained in any digital commodity is determined by the sum of: the surplus value of the commodities it makes us buy (see A above) + the labour time socially/technically necessary for us to produce a unit of command capital (under B above), to be appropriated instantly by the techno-lords.
In summary, what Bezos, Musk, et al. are accomplishing through their massive investments cannot be understood in terms of either feudalism or capitalism.
- Feudalism was based on the direct extraction of experiential/use value from peasants.
- Capitalism was based on the extraction of surplus labour from waged labour.
- Technofeudalism is a new system in which the techno-lords are extracting a new power to make the rest of us do things on their behalf. This new power comes from investing in a new form of capital (command capital) that allows them to amass a new type of value (command value) which, in turn, grants them the opportunity to extract surplus value from (i) vassal-capitalists, (ii) the precariat, and (iii) everyone using their platforms to produce on their behalf, unconsciously, even more command capital.
If I am right, by continuing to call this new environment…capitalism, we would miss the opportunity to appreciate the radically different, and new, processes determining our lives in the here and now. Techno-feudalism, I think, comes much closer to capturing this brave (albeit, dystopic) new world.
Interview conducted by Evgeny Morozov originally published at The Cryptus Syllabus.