Capitalism, Communism, and the Extitutional Stakes of our Politics
Ethereum, so I’ve argued elsewhere, is one (major) part of a broader cultural awakening in the 21st century to the behaviors and economic flows of extitutional space (that ontologically flat and pluralistic “outside” to the institutional enclosures that have claimed dominion over Western culture since forever ago). [1] Extitutional space is defined by its exclusion from the stability, manufactured neutrality and access to dominant channels of reproduction afforded to institutions.
In one sense, in fact, “extitutional” is just a name for the emergent practices or tendencies that occur in this condition of exclusion.
Three such practices (among several others) are:
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Horizontal scaling: Necessarily spreading on a decentralized basis, patterns of behavior in extitutional space ride contingency rather than asserting universality, so that each scaled reproduction of an extitutional protocol of behavior is a monstrous mutation of its previous form, adequate to the issue at hand.
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Field Ontology [2]: Whereas administrative institutions bring categorical hierarchies to their systems - hierarchies which they tend to inherent from the state and which the two, through mutual reinforcement, conceal and naturalize - extitutional space is made up of field ontologies, shifting assumptions about what dimensions of the real deserve attention or operative preeminence adequate (again) to the contingency of the encounter. (The fact that practical knowledge often points in the direction of interrelation, intersubjectivity, codeterminacy, etc. is a convenient nod to the technical sense of the term field.)
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Open Protocolization: Institutional protocols share (to varying degrees) the two features of being antimimetic (containing some dimension which discourages its reproduction, think military classification, NDAs, industrial secrets) and anti-empirical (resistant to inconvenient truths, interpretations or revisions that may have empirical veracity but be contrary to the interests of the organization or its authorities - see David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs for a wide-spanning index of this tendency.) Open protocols, conversely, are maximally memetic and empirically defined - when they reach a status as a stable entity, they have done so by being battle-tested and extremely versatile, structured with minimal uniformity needed to maximally expand the possibility space of its users. (Ex. under the pressure of legal prohibition, the development of the phrase for LSD: Turn on, Tune in, Drop out. [3])
Over the past few months in the Ethereum community, the “specter of communism” has reared its head, as visions of gitcoin communists or soyboy-figureheads-with-marxist-affiliations-who-hate-to-win have been said to be tarnishing the reputation and cypherpunk ethos of Ethereum. Most recently, I had a discussion with a member of the community who was troubled by what they perceived to be “techno-communist ideas” circulated at the GFEL conference in Boulder. They were even troubled that the Ethereum Foundation associated itself with the conference, given the perception of those themes being validated.
I’m writing this short treatment because a) as a contributor who’s concerned with preserving and expanding the extitutional field, I abhor communism and wish to distinguish the discourse at GFEL from that label; b) it is my longheld belief that the Ethereum community need not involve itself in the vagaries of traditional politics so long as it maintains a healthy sense of the extitutional stakes of its enterprise.
Ethereum provides a permissionless computational substrate upon which many different kinds of economic behaviors - some of them as yet unimaginable - can be expressed without threat of censorship or, importantly, without need of affiliation or ideological inclusion within a dominant milieu in order to access the means of expressing them. You may use features of the network for centralized purposes in a way that is broadly disaligned with the ethos of Ethereum, but you won’t find yourself subject to sanction or restricted access in doing so. One such body, in the case of FTX, was so broadly associated with the Ethereum network and cryptocurrency in general that it threatened to discredit the whole enterprise; even then, restricted access or censorship wasn’t even on the table, such is the degree to which that behavior is anathema to Ethereum as an open and permissionless substrate.
The many commentators who are quick to remind us of the harsh death toll of communist ideology are right to affirm this historical truth. Communism, despite many who disagree, is the term for a state planned economy that enforces (through explicit or implicit violence) hegemonic enclosure of economic activity within a window of acceptable behavior - one that is often arbitrarily swayed by the whims of an authoritarian elite, and that frequently has decreasing adherence to reality as it degrades under the pressures of centralization. [4] These contradictions have often led to the mass persecution of dissent and mass violence of fitting the square peg of reality through the circle of ideology.
Mutual aid, on the other hand, being encounter-based practices of free sharing of goods between peers that have no basis in centralized institutions, is a characteristic of the extitutional field, and really any free social space - it is a universal enough behavior among humans that to suppress or eradicate it totally is an ideological fallacy. It is veridical, realist, whereas communism is defined by mechanisms of enclosure and ideological fantasy.
Broadly speaking, capitalist ideology has been implemented under more free and open social conditions. But structurally, it is always in danger of following the same patterns, and in the past has undeniably done so (though most often in the global South). Consider the actions of ORDEN and the White Warriors Union in El Salvador or the Contras in Nicaragua, under the documented support of the American government, in violently suppressing, through torture and spectacular executions, agricultural cooperatives and small businesses that might have threatened the hegemony of the United Fruit Company and other large corporations.
Like communism, capitalist ideology at its worst has been known to preach free markets and libertarian values while depending on astounding acts of coercive state intervention to fulfill missions of centralization, monopolization and capture.
From an extitutional lens, none of this ideological mystification speaks against the role of markets in facilitating channels of dissent, pluralism, and empirical inspiration.[5] Markets have been for centuries and remain a place for open values to express themselves under coercive regimes. [6]
| institutional form | extitutional form |
|---|---|
| communism 💀 | mutual aid 🌱 |
| capitalism 💀 | markets 🌱 |
This is the key point: both general positions, and many more between and among them, have their coercive, reductive, administrative embodiments in an institutional form that depends on enclosure, capture and unreality, just as both have their extitutional embodiments as vectors of open experimentation, practical adequacy, and dissent.
On the third day of the ETH Denver regen stage (secured by Gregory Landua, Kevin Owocki, Michael Zargham and others in a ferocious display of extitutional coordination), I had my friend Josh Spector read a brief statement on mutualism for my part in a panel I was too sick to attend. The reading went as follows:
Argument: Mutualism is a rich political orientation for Ethereum to explore because it is an operational rather than ideological politics.
Mutualism is: An encounter-based politics:
- rather than endorsing universalizing (legalistic or rights based) models of political change, mutualism finds spontaneous opportunities for association and alliance: free encounter in extitutional space.
A parallelist politics:
- mutualism is pacifistic and mutually coherent with both social liberalism and libertarianism. Associations, cooperatives and unions can be established within diverse contexts and are robustly compatible with markets.
An ontologically open politics:
- finally, sidestepping the ontological content of rights based or legalistic regimes, the consent based free association mutualism endorses is an imaginative project that could include ~diverse minds ~from the greater than human world.
If we want to take full advantage of what Ethereum has to offer, we need a politics that endorses practical imagination about social and economic configurations, an empirically curious, open ontology of what constitutes a participatory actor, all built on the grounds of peaceful, parallel autonomy from the state.
Mutualism is a - not the - adequate politics for the pacifistic, pluralistic and libertarian foundations of the Ethereum universe. I am partial to collective, cooperative, positive sum behavior - but I have no ideological allegiance to it, and I would never appeal, under any circumstances, to a coercive centralized body to enforce and maintain this behavior over and above competitive or rivalrous coordination markets. This is Ethereum alignment: The overton window is open, the ontology is flat - my allegiance is extitutional.
To those who are engaged in an anticommunist witch hunt, I pose two challenges:
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Locate where any actions by the Gitcoin community or the Ethereum Foundation have endorsed coercive restrictions on economic behavior, and I will disaffiliate, and champion your anti-communist cause until such discourse has been stamped out of the space.
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Present your politics of “operational capitalism,” truly libertarian (pacifist and grounded in free association and pluralism) so that me and my crew can have assurances that by capitalism you don’t mean “selective use of state intervention to the ends of freedom and captured access for me and my tribe.”
Conversely, to those who would seek to suppress or culturally marginalize free, open source, opt-in mechanisms for mutual aid or resource sharing built to operate as a complement to a pluralistic and free economic space on the grounds that they “sound marxist,” I have one message: we are extitutionalists, we understand the key value proposition of Ethereum, and you don’t speak for us.
This binary, these accusations, are counterproductive, and Ethereum as an extitutionally oriented community is well equipped to move beyond traditional politics and focus on the issues that matter: coercion, free association, open protocolization as a safeguard against the former and distributed ledger technologies as a tool to expand and optimize the latter.
This post is my first contribution to extitutional.space, a new knowledge garden and affiliate of the Open Civics “Open Protocol Library”. In coming months, The Open Machine and friends will be working to push the discursive gravity away from old political binaries - and even away from the blockchain - to the broader extitutional space, asking how distributed ledger technologies and other strategies can serve the project of creating an empirically imaginative, ontologically open post-coercion society.
Notes
[1] Alongside Ethereum I would place the psychedelic movement -especially LSD, which has to now defied cooptation by the “functionalist” medical industrial complex; “freak” or experimental art scenes that tend to dissolve patterns of passive consumption or spectatorship; BDSM and the kink space; and those experimenting with interspecies ethics and communication in grassroots, encounter based, non-legalistic contexts.
[2] This phrase was adopted from the phrase “field causality” as it appears in the work of Forensic Architecture and affiliated projects.
[3] Was this a psy-op? Was Timothy Leary a member of the intelligence community? Does it matter? The ‘67 March attempt to levitate the Pentagon was as much of a psy-op as the Macy Conferences were an infiltration by Buddhist pacifists into the utmost ranks of the military intellgentsia: the plane of nature has it’s own momentum, and it is open.
[4] Simulation drift, brain drain, yes men, etc.
[5] Most instructive to an extitutional politics that ignores legacy political narratives are those cases where state violence suppressed small businesses to preserve corporate monopolies under the banner of free market ideology (ditto to Soviet and Maoist suppression of alternative collectivist projects).
[6] Consider the role of the early 20th century carnival and the B-movie market of the 1950’s and 60’s in the states as a generative haven for queer and disabled expression that was dependent on pockets of market demand and renegade, sometimes ham-fisted entrepreneurship - in developing the global cultural imaginary of horror and sci-fi.