A Present from a Postcapitalist Future

by Akseli Virtanen and Dick Bryan

Our economic white paper Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression has just been published as a book (Colchester / New York / Port Watson: Minor Compositions 2023) and is now available from your favourite book store.

“What an accomplishment! This is what economics can look like when it does not treat the status quo like natural law. The Economic Space Protocol envisions a pathway toward an economy worthy of our networks, and a system of exchange not anchored in the police and armies of territorial governments. While so much in the realm of cryptocurrency has become mired in cynicism and avarice, copying the worst of what has already failed us, here is a welcome reminder that radical alternatives are in reach.” Nathan Schneider, Prof. Media Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

“This financial sketch book invites you to dream: the redistribution of money is possible. Read here how to redesign the economic space, through collaborative imagination. Stop the doom and follow the ECSA road map: define, decide, implement. If you’re not afraid of trial and error, join this most radical money design adventure!” Geert Lovink, Prof. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam

We are now also releasing Protocols as an ultimate open access experience —with audio, PDF & ePub versions available, modifiable mood-lighting & fonts, integrated footnotes and a glossary, everything also in mobile— accompanied with an experiment to rethink the economic model for open access publishing. More about that here.

We also wanted to share with you some background, like where we are coming from, and why. This text is based on our original book proposal for the Minor Compositions, written in the early spring 2023.

Finance is an instrument of freedom

Please read this short (5 min) medium piece first “What is cryptoeconomy — a macroview”.

It is like a quick intro to what we’re proposing.

The piece ends up saying that money is a very interesting networking technology. It is an interoperability protocol. And that through postcapitalist computation we now have the ability to create similar economic collaboration and networking protocols as money, credit and equity have historically been. This is empowering us to collectively define what a value and an asset can fundamentally be — and around what kind of values and assets we want to network.

The Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression basically outlines how such a collective definition and expression of a value can be concretely achieved and how this situates in the history of economic and political thinking. We think the book is a serious contribution in pushing economics into the information era and in opening it to politics. It shows how money and finance can be very concretely reappropriated in the direction of revolutionary activity today. In the book we explore what an autonomist monetary and financial politics looks like and how the power of finance can become, in the hands of the multitude, an instrument of freedom.

Postcapitalist economic media

The second way to think about the book is that it outlines a theory of economy as an expressive medium. The economy is moving on a programmable medium. It is catching up with the new substrate of high speed computer networks. Such networks with high informational capacities, bandwidth and connectivity can make radically new informational things economically possible: they can elevate the economy into something that resembles an expressive medium. It is in this sense that the book asks: what is that native thing that the new properties of the emerging p2p networking technologies are making possible?

And our answer is: economic expression. The economy as an expressive medium.

But we think that a new understanding of the economy is first required to unlock the full potentiality of distributed computation, an informationally mediated society and autonomist politics native to them. It means understanding the economy as a network — a group of agents interacting according to certain shared understanding of the relations that make the network and its state — and opening its interaction protocols as a design and expression space for everyone.

That is why the book can also be framed as the theory of a postcapitalist economic media.

What does that mean?

It means making possible the expression of heterogeneous values and the use of credit, equity and exchange protocols for collateralizing, circulating and allowing many different kinds of values to access a recording and accounting system, to become investable, liquidity creating and conceptualized as a “surplus”. Or to put it shortly: it means allowing different values to become economically expressible and economically generative — which is the opposite to financialization and/or commodification of everything. The economic networking protocols the book outlines allow the expression of any informational event or activity as a value proposition, their encoding into different token forms and entering into a value accounting, staking and circulation system.

This is called “performance” in the book; the book outlines fundamentally a value theory of performance.

Re-valuating value

Thirdly, the book goes outside what is standardly recognised as value-creating: it explores new notions of what is meant by ‘value’, and how that value might be expressed and measured with its own unit of account. We show concretely how cryptoeconomic primitives grant us the capacity to generate such a collectively defined unit of account and expression process consistent with the shared aspirations of the members of a network. The book is maybe the first economically and politically inventive application of our newly acquired expressive capacity.

At the centre of the analysis is the definition of production of value as a ‘performance’, motivated not only by profit, but by participants’ desire to exert change and create collective outcomes organised through distributed decision-making processes. This framing applies a deep autonomist politics to economic design — we are pitching postcapitalist economic media (economic network creation) particularly to the generation of people who want to do the economy differently: who know from personal experience that the conventional economic system is not serving them well individually or collectively, and who are looking for ways to participate in building a collective future of their shared design. The book is a tool box for this.

Autonomist economics = Distributed computational networks + Informational economics + Autonomist politics

Methodologically, the manuscript is an engagement between three traditions

• Distributed computational network and software architectures, including the coordination mechanisms like blockchains
• The major theoretical traditions of economics: Hayek on the theory of markets; Keynes on state management of the economy and Marx on class and accumulation
• Autonomist and post-truth politics

The manuscript explores concretely what kind of autonomist economics becomes possible when our economic-organizational composition (the protocols of our economic interaction) becomes a software design question with the emergence of new distributed computational networks. What kind of different socialities / minor compositions can we create using the technology of money and finance? Basically, we take much of the autonomist economic imagination of the “communicative turn”, “linguistic turn” and “aesthetics turn” of production, for example of Christian Marazzi, Franco Berardi, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, but move forward to show how distributed computation and finance can concretely be used to turn it into actuality of expression.

This combination has two features that should be noted.

First, it engages crypto not just with ‘formal’ economic theory but also with political and economic aspects of philosophy, cultural theory and anthropology (see below the list of people who have engaged in reviewing the manuscript). The result is a political engagement with the economy-beyond-the-capitalism — we concretely outline networking protocols for postcapitalist economic expression.

Secondly, it draws these social science and humanities perspectives, including their debates and ambiguities, into engagement with the technical formalism of computer programming. Intellectually, this diversity of engagement feels to us the major achievement of the book. It didn’t come easily — there was great debate and mutual education involved, all of us had to just let go of things we thought we knew — but we believe the outcome is methodologically unique and, in its own way, ground-breaking. It can claim to be maybe the first serious engagement with crypto that opens up approaches to imagine radical social and economic change that can be termed postcapitalist. In a field of continual innovation and rapidly-changing ideas, we believe our proposal is a piece of fundamental research that will hopefully be an on-going reference point for debates about cryptoeconomy, economic media, postcapitalism and postcapitalist economic architectures.

Credits

We would like to thank our close collaborators who have read and generously commented on drafts in detail:

Prof. Benjamin Lee, Anthropology and Philosophy, The New School, NY
Prof. Robert Meister, Social and Political Thought, UC Santa Cruz
Prof. Brian Massumi, Communication Science, University of Montreal
Prof. Erin Manning, Relational Art and Philosophy, Concordia University
Prof. Robert Wosnitzer, Finance, New York University
PhD Colin Drumm, Mimbres School
Prof. Leanne Ussher, Economics, Bard College, NY
Prof. Michael Rafferty, International Business, RMIT University, Australia
Prof. Stefano Lucarelli, Political Economy, University fo Bergamo
Prof. Tiziana Terranova, Human and Social Sciences, University of Naples.
Prof. Geert Lovink, Institute for Network Cultures, University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam
Prof. Douglas Russkoff, Queens College, CUNY.
Prof. Nathan Schneider, University of Boulder Colorado.