This is the first part in a 3 part series to help explain the basics of blockchain.
“Are you seriously going to try to say Bitcoin is going to get us to socialism? Wow, you need to read more theory on that one bud. It doesn’t help achieve any of our goals and right wing libertarian chuds love it, so there’s no way it could be a good thing.” – The response to this from my inner Leftist™
Blockchain has become a corporate buzzword synonymous with others like “growth hacking “, “synergy”, or “disruptor”. In fact, a lot of the things you may have heard about bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain are probably true. The space can seem dominated by right wing libertarians, anarcho-capitalists, and crypto-fascists (pun intended). They generally have some pretty awful views on economics, present-day society, and a horrifying view of what the future should look like. People with these types of views are certainly not real comrades in any struggle for expanding democracy into the workplace and seizing the means of production for the working class.
However I’m still going to try to convince you of the impossible: that blockchain actually has some potential for some pretty good stuff. I need you to first try to clear your head of all of your current perceptions around bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and blockchain. I promise I won’t try to sell you the next big cryptocurrency to gamble all of your money away and I won’t give any investment advice. The reason I’m asking this is because I am going to give you a good-faith argument from a Leftist™ perspective on how this technology might actually be a good thing and deserves more of our attention and a more nuanced view than what is the mainstream among socialists from what I’ve seen.
In this 3-part series I will try my best to introduce the high level concepts of the technology and what it could mean for the future. Like most technologies, the current use of blockchain reflects the existing structure for organizing our socioeconomic relationships (i.e., Capitalism). Therefore, it is largely used by capitalists to bring forth an even worse version of the Hell World we currently live in but blockchain doesn’t have to further entrench the exploitation inherent to capitalism if we put our efforts into it.
As the blog progresses, I’ll try to answer questions like:
- Are cryptocurrencies compatible with socialism or just a bourgeois investment toy?
- Are there any Anti-capitalist Use Cases with Blockchain?
- What about the waste of energy used to keep up the networks for cryptocurrencies?
- Facebook’s Libra: All Hail Our Corporate Overlords?
- What do other Leftists Think about Blockchain?
- Won’t the State just Destroy the Blockchain?
So stick around and let me know what you think on the r/CryptoLeftists subreddit or follow me on Twitter @TBSocialist. Or don’t and let the libs win.
Check out Part 2 of the series here – Blockchain 101: The Technical Stuff (Part 2)
