Why Karl Marx would have liked Bitcoin

Bitcoin was launched in 2009 as a Peer-to-Peer monetary network with a blockchain technology which can be used to send money to another party without going through a middle-man such as a bank or a money-institution.¹ Many young people were back then familiar with the P2P concept thanks to programmes which enabled users to share files. A P2P network is independent from a central server and its existence relies on the network of its users. It is in this way that Bitcoin gets its value. When someone says I’m buying Bitcoin, they are actually buying part of the Bitcoin network – the more money is put into this network, the higher its value. At the time of writing, the Bitcoin network cost €114.3 billion which equates to the total amount of value of all Bitcoin held. This does not include the multiplier effect of this Bitcoin network which includes brokerage companies and Bitcoin financial institutions, but includes the value of the miners who produce Bitcoin by mining it through complex mathematical equations. The value of Bitcoin can only increase if more money is added to the network because the supply of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million units. The Bitcoin digital network itself is by its own nature a security-function against digital attacks known popularly as hacking, however online brokers and financial institutions storing or owning Bitcoin may be more prone to hacking and digital attacks.

Karl Marx would have liked Bitcoin. Marx is one of the most misunderstood economists and philosophers in the world. Unfortunately, the theories and philosophy of Marx have been mostly understood and interpreted across the world through the lens of the Bolsheviks, namely Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. This polemic may be the subject of another essay some other time.

Andrew Kliman is one of the few Marxist economists whom I prefer against the mainstream Marxist traditions. Kliman offers a very rational and literal interpretation of Marx’s Capital. Das Kapital is Marx’s magnum opus, but it has often been obfuscated with Marx’s own political work such as the more popular The Communist Manifesto which was commissioned by an international political association of workers called The Communist League. Readers of Capital should simply take it as it is: a deep and technical critique of the capitalist system, and when one reads Capital in this unbiased way, one can only be fascinated with Marx’s insights on the abstractions of capitalism.

As Kliman rightly points out, in Capital, Marx did not say that capitalism was to implode, and neither did he say that the rate of profit would gradually decrease to the extent that capitalism would stagnate permanently. Marx put forward the case that when technological innovations decrease labour-costs and increase productivity, surplus-value may increase and the rate of profit decreases.² It is logical that if you want to make profits, you need customers, and customers are possible only if wages are paid and workers have money to spend. Furthermore, as Kliman correctly points out, Marx’s distinction between commodity-value and the price of the commodity was theoretical and in the real economy the two are interchangeable.³ Marx defined the value of a commodity according to its labour-time, and Marx’s contention with capitalism was that labour-value is artificially suppressed to create surplus-value.⁴ When one takes this logic in a literal manner, most of the economic stuff written about Marx’s theory of value which argues that capitalism produces two distinct values of the commodity is irrelevant. The second most important critique Marx makes of capitalism is that the concept of supply and demand in capitalism is not natural, given that demand is only conditioned by the supply and velocity of money and not by real and tangible demand. One can logically explain this by saying that if people had more money, they would spend more.⁵ The supply and velocity of money in the system is regulated by various means – namely credit, banking and interest-rates which in turn help regulate commodity prices and wages.⁶ When the general conditions of the economy reflect increasing commodity prices and people do not have any money to spend, an economic crisis is created which requires a readjustment in the system so as to increase the rate of profit. One way of adjusting the system is by issuing cheaper credit by lowering interest-rates.

Marx criticised the general notions and concepts adhered to the capitalist system, and clearly, Marx had a contention with how labour was valued. Marx’s contentions were made when workers lived very grueling lives and their wages were only meant to supplement their most basic needs. Those were the times of the industrial revolution, the child-workers, the dirt and disease, the poverty and hand-to-mouth subsistence life.⁷ Marx saw that the way the monetary and financial systems were constructed in capitalism favoured first and foremost the capitalist class. This does not mean that Marx was against the concept of money as a universal measure of value, in fact Marx made fun of Proudhon for proposing a system based on bartering.⁸

Briefly, what Marx saw was a gigantic financial and monetary system, run by a capitalist-class and regulated by a compromised government which enabled the same capitalist-class to accumulate even more capital and appropriate more resources. The private bankers and financiers were for Marx some of the most powerful players in the system so much so that in many cases they appropriated the resources of the capitalist, industrialist and merchant himself. On the other hand, the labourers were unable to determine their own labour-value let alone decide how this gigantic financial system worked. Marx never proposed any practical solutions for the creation of a society based on what he described as the “mode of production of associated labour”.⁹ Politically, Marx believed that the system had to change in its entirety, but after spending those years producing his lengthy critique of capitalism, Marx did not have enough time to creatively explore new and practical alternatives.

The founders of Bitcoin have, unwittingly, addressed one of Marx’s greatest contentions with capitalism – that of creating artificial values based on the needs of profits of one particular class rather than on natural and intrinsic values. Given that the value of Bitcoin is inherently based on the amount of money put into it, there can be, in theory, no artificial manipulation of the price of Bitcoin, in contrast to fiat currency, for example, where quantitative easing or other measures may influence the value of the currency. Simultaneously, Bitcoin is a monetary instrument inside another monetary system and is co-dependent on the mother monetary-system. Bitcoin is measured against fiat currency, like anything else, and one needs a bank account to extract the value of the Bitcoin but it is also this fungibility that makes Bitcoin potentially valuable. Founders of the blockchain technology have emphasised the argument that the monetary success of crypto-currency, namely Bitcoin, is simply that of buying the value of social scalability.¹⁰ This basically means that when I buy Bitcoin I believe that more people will buy it later and therefore its worth would increase.

One could argue that given that the price of Bitcoin has increased exponentially during the last ten years, being currently worth €6,242 at the time of writing, Bitcoin has been a massive success in social scalability. Indeed, many people made money from Bitcoin, but today it seems that Bitcoin has become a speculative instrument, so much so that in the recent weeks it has been correlated to the stock-markets.¹¹ The excessive volatility of the Bitcoin price makes it unattractive to people who would want to use it as a store-of-value, and a safe-haven asset, and in fact, gold as of now, marching slowly once again to its all-time-high, seems to remain the preferred safe-haven asset to investors. Bitcoin has proved that it could create value by itself due to social scalability and without direct interference from government institutions, however Bitcoin as of now remains an exotic financial and/or monetary asset. The number of total Bitcoin owners in the world f have been estimated at 20 million¹² to 25 million people.¹³

Could Bitcoin serve as a financial asset in a similar way to the traditional concept of bonds? Due to quantitative easing, and low interest-rates we have seen bonds turning into a speculative instrument and savers have been punished. Ordinary people no longer have the opportunity to receive some returns from their savings unless they risk their money in the equity market. It would be very difficult for Bitcoin to be considered as a safe investment if speculative capital drives up and down the Bitcoin price so violently in a short amount of time. Speculative capital in Bitcoin can only be counteracted in Bitcoin by exponential scalability which can either occurorganically or by strategic government use of Bitcoin itself.

Governments could make strategic use of Bitcoin to increase consumption in the economy and increase wages. For example, governments can buy Bitcoin units and then allow their employees to be paid from government’s Bitcoin supply in Bitcoin units. If European governments coordinate such schemes together and thus simultaneously attempt to stabilise the Bitcoin price, the large scalability of such use would exponentially increase the value of Bitcoin and the money held by people. Similar methods can be applied to financial aid packages and social relief payments during the current economic crisis. Naturally, such an international and strategic effort could only be made by an institution such as the European Union or the US Government.

Marx would have liked Bitcoin because he would have probably considered it as a way by which to appropriate value from a monetary-system which first and foremost served the interest of the capitalist classes. Bitcoin does not solve Marx’s dilemmas on value, but helps address it by offering a window of opportunity into an alternative monetary-value system which may rely only on the network of its users rather on large institutional or financial entities. Marx would have probably called Bitcoin “an associative way how to appropriate value from the capitalist-monetary system”. It is with great irony that most of the issue that Bitcoin maximalists complain about, namely the central-banking system, the debasement of currencies and inflation, the government’s appeasement of big financiers and the banking industry, were all targets of Marx’s deep critique of capitalism. I have no doubt that if Marx was alive today, he would have bought Bitcoin.

Disclosure: I own Bitcoin