Cryptocommunism

Mark Alizart (Author), Robin Mackay (Translated by)

9781509538577, Polity Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2020

135 pages
19.3 x 13 x 1.8 cm, 0.238 kg

"A fascinating antidote to reductive takes on cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are more than just cryptolibertarianism and this book makes a provocative and wide-ranging case for just how important they might be." 
Nick Srnicek, King’s College London

"Alizart's arguments are compelling and replete with insights into what a digital-empowered post-capitalist society might look like."
Red Pepper

"Creative and iconoclastic"
Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

Cryptocurrencies are often associated with right-wing political movements, or even with the alt-right. They are the preserve of libertarians and fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. With their promotion of anonymity and individualism, there’s no doubt that they seamlessly slot into the prevailing anti-State ideology. But in this book Mark Alizart argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us ‘to appropriate collectively the means of monetary production’, to paraphrase Marx, and to replace ‘the government of persons by the administration of things’, as Engels advocated, they form the basis for a political regime that begins to look like a communism which has at last come to fruition – a cryptocommunism.

Introduction: The Institution of Liberty

Notes

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]