The Blockchain Socialist is a blog/podcast taking on the topic of how Blockchain can help create a more democratic political and economic system, according to the author of the website. Blockchain networks are usually filled with right wing extremists that usually shitpost against socialism and leftists are usually reluctant to accept blockchain technology in association to the usual right wing blockchain users and some sort of moral critique against speculation.
In their latest post, Would Marx have traded Dogecoin, The Blockchain Socialist interviews the youtuber 1Dime who made a video about stock markets from Marxist perspective called The Socialism of Warren Buffett: How The Stock Market Works.
I have not read yet the 3rd volume of Marx's Capital and I've wondered what were Marx's views on stock markets. This volume contains a chapter about Fictitious Capital ( Chapter 29. Component Parts of Bank Capital ). This type of capital is described as speculative value that has not come from actual exploitation but instead comes from a promise on future value. It's just the process of financial valuation at work. You guess that certain asset on paper (or on a digital database) is going to have certain value in the future and you assign a valuation to it. You can buy or sell such promise on future value and that's it. Of course this speculative value materializes into actual exploitation once you cash it out to buy labor or products from labor. So at that point it becomes exploitative but before that it is a fiction about potential access to capital and more specifically it is ownership over such fiction.
Marx and Engels were not against stock markets as it poses great potential to accelerate the concentration of capital in the hands of the elites, who of course are usually manipulating the markets they like to defend in order to expand their wealth, and that would result in more inequality which would increase discontent with capitalism and would trigger revolutionary movements (remember Occupy Wall Street?).
They also joked about taking advantage of the stock market extracting value from the swings in these fictitious capitals which would gather value from stolen surplus of workers production. You know, relief the rich from the burden of their capital.
I didn't know much about this until I heard this podcast and made some more reading.
This post addresses Marx and Engel's mentions of the stock market in their letters and work and in summary they supported stock market trading and speculation, even without taxes. I am not that suprised about this because I know Marx and Engels (Mario and Luigi) did not make moral judgements about capitalism but did systemic critique of it while ignoring huge ethical issues (such as authoritarianism). Speculation to me feels wrong and immoral (only when it comes from the whales who manipulate the market to accumulate more capital but is definitely radical when it is used by small fishes to streal from the thieves) but from a strategic and political point of view it is true that it vastly accelerates capitalism vices, inequality and the absurdity of it all. Recently I read about trading of water sources in the stock markets which is an awful consequence of this accelerated absurdity of depredatory capitalism.
Speaking of the huge ethical issues Marx ignored I know, for instance, that Marx described colonialism as a progressive situation which would accelerate the movement from feudalism to capitalism and would thus bring about class conflicts and eventually communist revolutions in the colonized countries. It is tempting to condemn Marx's ambivalence on colonialism and even on trading on the stock markets but what I learned form this podcast is that it is a mistake to judge this only from a moral point of view. Of course you can critique it from this point of view but we need to understand that Marx was not focused on that but instead was focused on the theory and praxis of communist revolution. Morality was the least of his concerns which is also mentioned by 1Dime through the lens of Nietzche's slave morality. Marx postmodernism at its best.
So this is what The Blockchain Socialist (TBS) and 1Dime talk about in this interview and in conclusion, Marx would have definitely invested in Dogecoin and would have been amused while recognizing the revolutionary potential of blockchain technology.
So I don't think leftists need Marx's approval to trade or approve trading. We should all get over Marx a little bit and stop putting him on a pedestal as some sort of major authority. I think the most valuable thing here is that seeing things morally keeps you from being practical and understanding things in depth. Sometimes we just discard an idea because it is "bad" and we don't stop to think what it actually means and what it implies materially. Morality is not that useful while the construction of revolutionary infrastructure is quite useful. I have been outside leftist discouse many times due to this obsesive focus on morality that disregards crypto as a right wing instrument and this is a shame because it can be used in many forms without the need to cancel right wing users. I even see some intersection between right wing and left wing people in some topics, such as the resistance to whales manipulation of markets to take advantage of minnows and exclude them from the economy. Anyway this is a topic for other posts.
I do believe blockchain offers great post-marxist revolutionary potential. Of course everything is post-marxist now but even this collapse is still a prediction from him and I believe blockchain could survive after such collapse and make possible other forms of social organization that we are barely beginning to understand. Blockchain is not perfect, though, and currently promotes many absurd situations in politics, economics and social organization, so don't get me wrong. I am not blindly selling you blockchain tech. As a programmer I largely appreciate the tech and as a leftist its revolutionary potential.
About trading, I think it is great to take value from the whales and enjoy from the profit I've made on it :) Socialism is not about moral judgements, whether you can enjoy money, trading, betting or not, but about liberation from the parasites that extract value from other people's productivity. And that is where we need to put our efforts on.
BTW, Hive is a bit revolutionary as well because it intends to reward workers (content creators) instead of stealing value from them like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram and many other platforms do through advertising and freemium business models. This is not working that well, though, because as always whales just want to grow their capital regardless of actual social value and they do it on the shoulders of the best content creators that are around here. That's also another reason for me to improve my voting script :) to get curation rewards from whales votes.
You can hear the interview here:
And watch the socialism of Warren Buffet here: