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For the while, such falsehoods are held up high like gleaming trophies, and as the spell of commodity always commands the cult of abstract numbers, they’re often accompanied by the hackneyed millions of victims, those accounts of cherry-picked mass murder that pass for the conclusions of historical research. Like Robert Kurz’s black book – and in sharp contrast to the courteous ferret’s best-seller, translated in over twenty-five languages¹ – this chapter steers clear of any count of the dead that might be attributed to commodity fetichism, or even to modern capitalism, but rather reaffirms the intrinsic discrimination that the token operates between different life-forms. This might, oddly, sound as if value afforded differentiation between qualities of life (and with that idea we might slip back toward the illusion of linguistic ‘value’) – but as we’ll see, digging a little deeper, this discrimination has nothing to do with quality: it’s simply the binary opposition between an essentialised, abstract ‘life’, the highest ‘value’, conflated in monotheist religions with ‘everlasting life’, and its antipode, the unlife of the Other, the subhuman subsistence that can be spent and wasted – in ‘spiritual’ terms, the one that doesn’t get a sniff of afterlife and redemption.

Recall Louis Dumont expanding on Karl Polanyi, and asserting that the principle of individuation made the emergence of ‘the economy’ possible. With the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, ‘economic’ life disembedded itself from social structures; individuals became increasingly seen as independent agents whose labour, choices, and consumption patterns defined their worth. This individuation was supposedly necessary for the functioning of a market economy, where people had to be viewed as autonomous economic units capable of engaging in contracts, selling labour, and accumulating capital. Dumont therefore asserts that in Western society, the individual is the supreme ‘value’; each individual is represented as, or perceives itself as a ‘value’ in itself. Significantly, unique individuality takes us back to the notion of the immortal soul. Indeed, in his Essays on Individualism, Dumont (1983) suggests that modern individualism secularised the Christian idea of the soul’s uniqueness before God. In the first chapter of part 1 of this work, he argues that traditional society bounded human beings in rigid interdependence, enforcing collective obligations. Christianity shattered this by opposing earthly life and eternal salvation, elevating the latter. This created the ‘out-of-this-world’ individual – one who renounced society to follow Christ, yet paradoxically prefigured modern self-sufficiency by focusing solely on the self. Christianity’s ‘genius’, he claims, was linking absolute individualism (each soul’s eternal worth before God) with universalism (human brotherhood through the Saviour). But this infinite individuality came at a cost: the devaluation of the actual world. By the 8th century, spiritual and temporal powers merged, with the Church claiming supremacy even over worldly affairs. This forced the Christian individual to engage with society – giving birth to the ‘in-the-world’ individual. Luther and Calvin turbocharged this shift: predestination recast God as pure will, and the elect as earthly actors building His kingdom. The Church thus evolved from a community into the posse of predestined individuals that a Hayek celebrates when he writes that “the only moral principle that has ever made the growth of an advanced civilization possible is the principle of individual freedom.” (Hayek, 1979: 152-153). In sum, the ‘unique individual’ of liberal thought is the immortal soul stripped of its theological junk but still flexing its metaphysical supremacy. This principle is intrinsically tied to the commodity form and its ‘end product’, the token, the coin, money; incarnations of capital – that vast and terrifying abstraction – which go hand in hand with the cult of the ‘individual’. Capitalism can only ‘function’ by extending its destructive radiance, spreading death and banishing the Other beyond the walls of so-called “advanced civilisation”, while promising separate, ‘individual’ owners the amaranthine bliss of the Lord – that very mean delirium of overcoming death, rampant among transhumanist circles. Note how this same delirious cultural form is wholly present in the claim that Bitcoin maximalists (and plenty of less ‘radicalised’ blockchain agitators) make, of cryptocurrency as money that, just like gold, doesn’t ‘lose value’ with time. These tokens purportedly evade the conspiratorial virus of inflation that affects all fiat currencies; in other words, we’re dealing with money that doesn’t decay, that lives forever². The whole drive westward – of which our Web3 players are nolens volens contemporary avatars – appears for what it is: on the surface or ‘in its own terms’, a ‘divine inspired’ lurch pursuing Christianity’s impatience for Messiah, apocalypse and everlasting glory; at a more effective level: the individualistic and exclusionary high performance of commodity exchange.

In the first volume of Capital, Marx cites Christopher Columbus who wrote, in a 1503 letter from Jamaica: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Whoever possesses it is lord of all he wants. By means of gold one can even get souls into Paradise.” In the same paragraph, Marx adds that with the advent of money “social power becomes the private power of private persons”; “the ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things. Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.” (Marx, 1867: Ch. 3, Section 3). In the conclusions of Robert Kurz’s heady work Geld Ohne Wert, we find a clearly relevant theoretical development that further expands on this phenomenon, based on his prior analysis of the emergence of the coin as an evolution from sacrificial object. Kurz refers to the dual transformation “of the metallic sacrificial object (...) into the self-purpose of ‘abstract wealth’, and on the other, of the transcendent ‘abstract human’ into its immanent functionary”:

“Capital feeds on Christian constitution by replacing, through a paradoxical volte-face, the God-man sacrificed for earthly redemption with money, while simultaneously elevating money from sacrificial status to immanent pseudo-divinity. Thus, Christianity’s ‘grounding’ of God as a worldly sacrifice is parasitically exploited and reinterpreted; the same applies to capitalism’s ‘grounding’ of the ‘abstract human’ as a homogenised modern functional subject.” (Kurz, 2012: 406-407).

Moreover, he goes on to ask, what becomes of “debt” and the “perpetually unfulfilled promise of redemption in this transformation”? Referring to Walter Benjamin’s text ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’ he observes that “the latter is erased without substitute through the secularisation of sacrificial objectification into the immanent real-metaphysics of abstract value” and that “in place of merely otherworldly redemption arises the earthly eternalisation and absolutisation of ‘debt’, which itself undergoes a transmutation” (Ibid.: 407):

“Humans are no longer ‘indebted’ to a transcendent divinity to whom they must offer sacrifices for life and survival, but are now inversely ‘indebted’ to the former sacrificial object itself, elevated to a transcendental a priori. This new ‘indebtedness’, however, is no longer personally mediated or translated into derived relations of obligation; it is now literally reified. The transcendent God was never present and as such regulated nothing; reproduction was mediated through His personal representatives. Money, raised to self-purpose, is not only tangibly present but visibly governs reproduction through its reified autonomous logic – while personal representatives are reduced to mere secondary functionaries of this process. (…) State apparatuses, management, labour administrations – in short, the entire institutional framework of the capital-relation – represent the enforcement and, let us say it plainly: the torture personnel for the unleashed terrestrial sacrificial movement. This is not merely about the optimal sacrifice of life-energy and the employment-therapeutic conditioning or drilling of those not immediately caught up in it, preparing them to stand ready while being reduced to bare subsistence in the meantime, so as to feel the unpaid ‘debt’ acutely. Rather, in moments of crisis, when the inner mechanics of the sacrificial relation itself make the voluntary self-sacrifice of life as ‘labour’-energy objectively impossible for many, literal human sacrifice in the original archaic sense also emerges as the installation of a death machinery. This can happen in three ways: first, as an intensification of the reified sacrificial relation, where people are cut off from more and more means of reproduction; second, as industrialised war and civil war; and third, as the direct organised killing of human material no longer suitable for valorisation under a ‘state of exception’, through emergency legislation of various kinds. No one will admit it, but the Nazi terminology of ‘life unworthy of life’ expresses the unspoken general programme of this sacrificial movement, extending even into liberal and social-democratic governance.” (Ibid.: 407-409).

Liberals and social-democrats will of course shudder at such a harsh indictment of the sacrificial logic of capitalism, just as their theorists are incapable of seeing that money is ontologically an instrument of domination and exclusion of this ‘life unworthy of life’. The so-called “radical experiment that Marco Polo witnessed” (Goldstein, Ibid.: 10) corroborates this general argument on value, both ways: paper money was indeed backed by ‘nothing’, other than abstraction and sheer deadly force. And as we also saw in part 2 with the work of Alfred Mitchell-Innes, in Ancient Greece “there can be no doubt that all the coins were tokens and that the weight or composition was not regarded as a matter of importance. What was important was the name or distinguishing mark of the issuer, which is never absent.” (Mitchell-Innes, op. cit.). Yet, as we begin to further grasp with Benjamin and Kurz, in time the ‘metallic sacrificial object’ enacts the spellbinding task of value with its own reified autonomous logic, no longer even directly proclaiming or enforcing the authority and domination of those specific political or military leaders whose heads were minted on the coin, or whose initials were branded onto the skins of slaves.

The historical drive of the token’s autonomous logic of reification and the corollary abstraction of human life appears to be intensified with cryptocurrencies; we’ve seen that the veneration of exchange binds the false community and intensifies the realm of property to a level thus far unseen. This ‘automation’ is further suggested by the fact that the emergence of these particular forms of tokens, and to a certain extent, their present implementation, is conducted by humans who are not even directly in charge of what Kurz refers to as the “institutional framework of the capital-relation”. Or, as a blockchain agitator enthusiastically puts it:

“It’s very community driven. I strongly believe in the digital asset class. In general, crypto assets are retail driven. The development is very much pushed by retail, by developers, by enthusiasts and that’s the first time we see this in any asset class if we look at commodities like gold, real estate, (...) stocks, bonds, dividends, whatever: it’s all institutional driven. Everything [used to be] done by governments and this is a brand new asset class that’s there and it’s driven by retail.” (i59)

Nevertheless, the point is that the decentralisation of the exclusionary violence of the token doesn’t make it essentially any better. One might indeed ask what it tells us about the development of productive forces when the demand for such weapons to use against other living beings does indeed stem from the ‘grass-roots’. This is admittedly the key implication that we find in that declaration: like gold, real estate, stocks, bonds, dividends, and indeed precisely like fiat money, cryptos pursue the time-honed spell of value. This is why I maintain that we needn’t waste too much time discussing the ‘textbook’ definitions of money that are eagerly accepted by various purportedly critical commentators of Web3.

See how David Golumbia appears to prize the subtle differences between “medium of exchange”, “store of value” and “unit of account” (Golumbia, op. cit.: 49-50) when it’s time to call out Bitcoin. This same distinction is used by Brian Kelly, author of The Bitcoin Big Bang, that Golumbia mockingly calls a “currency trader and economics nerd”, then reprimanding him for employing the term currency instead of money (Ibid.: 53-54). Golumbia also fancies recalling the typology of currency proposed by John Kenneth Galbraith: (1) Precious metals like gold and silver, valued for their inherent desirability – used for adornment, prestige, or pride of ownership. (2) Exchangeable currency, which holds worth because it can be traded for something inherently valuable or carries a promise of future exchange. (3) Currency, which has no intrinsic value and relies solely on government decree to be accepted as legal tender. (Ibid.: 55). He then adds that “Bitcoin does not conform to any of these descriptions” – a bold sounding statement, yet one which is blatantly inexact, save for the third category (unless you live in El Salvador). One gets the unfortunate impression that in his urge to discredit cryptocurrencies, Golumbia ended up buggering flies (as the French saying goes), or counting the number of feathers on angels’ wings. For instance, why might only ‘currency’ (banknotes and coins issued by a State) constitute a means of exchange? From a historical and anthropological viewpoint, asserting this is simply absurd. And if one is at all interested in putting an end to the fundamental ways that “capital can readily manipulate to its own ends” surely there are finer tactics than getting embroiled in debates about where a currency ceases to be a commodity:

“Thus the involvement of high-profile players like the Winklevoss twins, too, cannot be a cause for celebration of Bitcoin’s potential as a currency, but rather demonstrates its utility as a commodity that established capital can readily manipulate to its own ends. In this sense, it becomes a tool for existing power to concentrate itself, rather than a challenge to the existing order: as some better economically informed commentators consistently point out, Bitcoin functions much more like a speculative investment than a currency (...), although what one is investing in, beyond Bitcoin itself, is not at all clear.” (Ibid.: 63).

Of course, who could blame him for pointing out how swiftly cryptocurrencies became a receptacle for surplus capital, but behind this sort of ‘analysis’ we find the same old idea of Bitcoin being a ‘dirty’ or a ‘fictitious’ investment, as opposed to the ‘clean’³ or ‘real’ assets (of a more “humane” form of capitalism no doubt). Investment – including forex trading, which is oddly swept under the carpet – is always a spellbinding affair with commodity exchange. Another regrettable foray into what David Golumbia himself calls “semantic play”, when talking of the nerd Kelly, is offered by Joshua Dávila in his book Blockchain Radicals – where he ends up listing various Web3 projects that offer ‘philosophies’ of currencies which are “different from money and [do] not need to have any ‘intrinsic value’ in the form of gold or some other commodity” (Dávila, op. cit.: 293) Thus, he mentions MetaCurrency:

“Using their definition of currencies, money is just one type of currency which is a flawed and limited measure of value since its focus is purely financial. There are other types of currencies that we use to measure different types of value, for example university degrees, which are a kind of reputation currency based on the grades you received and credits completed, which can be seen as flows of information on a transcript. This currency can then be used to apply for particular jobs or move on to other professional certifications. Other non-financial or monetary currencies we interact with include food labels and certifications (e.g. GMO-free, organic, fair trade, etc), online rating systems for Uber, eBay, Amazon, etc, awards and plenty more. All this is to say that money is not the only currency, and currencies do not have to be tradeable to be considered so. It is with this underlying philosophy of money and currencies that the group then started building Holochain.” (Ibid.: 293-294).

In fine whatever frilly ‘philosophies’ you wish to base a Web3 white-paper on, all these currencies, like money afford the unequal, exclusionary allocation of commodified material resources, the abstraction of living beings. As Quinn DuPont happens to sagaciously put it: “the generic theory of money is practically inconsequential for analysis, but consequential for ideology and sustaining broader social beliefs.” (DuPont, op. cit.: 71). Yet again we find ourselves faced with pseudo-scientific cultural forms skirting around key elements of the process by which material relations of production are experienced and upheld, and to some extent really contributing to this process, to the hazy consciousness that ideologisation effects.

Other cultural forms of the token veer back more firmly to the metaphysical and mystical realms, as we’ve seen with the vacuous notion of blockchain technology providing an illusory escape from decay and death, or of tokens as an embodiment of human-life-as-supreme-value. This is also notable in the purportedly ‘immutable’ character of blockchains that is asserted, repeatedly, by Web3 advocates. Note how this founder of a music distribution platform asserts the immortality of the ledger, with a curiously self-sacrificial tone:

“I can say it’s a platform, but even if [name of company] goes away, an artist’s music is still on the blockchain, still accessible, can still be traded. There’s actually still a royalty attached to that, so they have the potential to make money from secondary sales, even if we’re gone, even if the front end is gone. That’s what I mean by platform-less. The platform can go away, the NFTs still live on, the connection that you have with a collector is still on the blockchain and so independently, agnostic of any platform, you still have these elements of value.” (i28)

The immutable character of blockchains is however plainly contradicted by the discretionary authority exercised by groups effectively controlling ‘governance’ decisions on specific blockchains (in particular layer one chains), as points out this co-founder of a data storage network:

“Ethereum, they just turned off support for a certain opcode (...). That’s an instruction, a computer instruction that the machine could run and now, any piece of software that was launched on Ethereum that used that machine code, that opcode, would die. And so there are about 350 DAOs, some of the very earliest DAOs launched by the Aragon Project, that all perished when Ethereum was changed this way. So to me, at least, a white paper seems certainly insufficient to set the immutable properties of a network.” (i24)

Of course, at a more fundamental level, the very notion of immutability is plain bullshit, if you merely stop to consider for an instant that it blockchain technology is dependent on energy supply, which is finite, whatever your dreams and schemes of mining Mars and plundering Proxima Centauri for all eternity⁴. A second mystical ‘conception’ of this technology that deserves to be – briefly – debunked is that it is ‘trustless’, in other words that it allows humans to no longer rely on the trust that was formerly placed in social forms of relations of production, institutions, or simply in the other humans with whom they enter into these relations. At a very basic level, the idea of trustless technology enshrines the necessarily adversarial character of interaction between human beings: cooperation may sporadically, accidentally, occur but ultimately, it must cease, between the winner and the loser, the swindler and the sucker. Moreover, this avowal that trust between humans is not entirely conceivable, points both to a wholly post-political order and to an eternal encoded realm beyond the lives of specific human beings. Roll on robotics replacing the restricted and untrustworthy humans – as suggest two entrepreneurs trying to flog blockchain applications deploying ‘customised’ AI agents:

“I think how we interact with blockchains should be adapted to how artificial intelligence interacts with... with itself and how it could evolve. So I think, the biggest obstacle is seeing how the infrastructure is made, from a human centric perspective, to a more AI centric perspective on facilitating ways for payments for AI, facilitating ways for monetisation, for value chains.” (i49)

“These systems sort of autonomously work on behalf of a user in a given context. So for instance, we have this prediction market use case where the end user basically just owns one of those agents. And ultimately the agent works on their behalf, fully autonomously, and basically makes the money.” (i53)

When the alchemy of money making AI agents fizzles out, further utopian promises can be summoned, as we find with this founder of a Web3 writing community:

“I actually believe that we’re sort of being called as humanity to evolve, ourselves, in our sort of social, relational capacities, in order to work in these systems, and that a lot of leftist, socialist or communist ideology was just very early. We weren’t sort of ready for... developmentally ready for those systems to function. And, and we’re now sort of evolving into those possibilities for ourselves and doing that in unison with infrastructure and technology that makes those possibilities feasible, in terms of trustless blockchain systems, AI agents that are collectively trained, etc. I think this is very clearly coming together to create organisational systems that are more collectively intelligent and more representative of the truths, needs and desires of the people that they represent. And that’s the sort of utopian possibility that fires me and so many of my contemporaries.” (i37)

Are you fired likewise, or is it just me who finds that these cultural forms betray a deeply fearful, fairy-tale like consciousness? Don’t you get exasperated by all this vain reverie of statistical mastery of eternal life, and the hypocritical notion of abstract human life as ‘supreme value’ – not to mention the idealist malarky of universal ‘human rights’ which they drag behind them like tin cans tied to the back of a car? Our blockchain agitators once again recall the effusive puppet leaders of the New Left –

A little tot prancing the boards playing w/Revolution. When out there the World awaits & abounds w/heavy gangs of murderers & real madmen. (Morrison, op. cit.: 295).

Right on. You end up wanting to knock some sense into them: why not just sing the praise of human death? Why censor and erase Thanatos so? Or perhaps celebrate formicidaen life as ‘supreme value’?

I draw aside the curtain. You mock us with the beauty of your world. My heart hates the trees, the wind moving the branches, the dead diamond machinery of the sky. I pace the corridor between my teeth and my bladder, angry, murderous, comforted by the smell of my sweat. I weakened myself in your name. In my own eyes I disgraced myself for trusting you, against all evidence, against the prevailing winds of horror, over the bully’s laughter, the torturer’s loyalty, the sweet questions of the sly. Find me here, you whom David found in hell. The skeletons are waiting for your famous mechanical salvation. Swim through the blood, father of mercy. Broadcast your light through the apple of pain, radiant one, sourceless, source of light. I wait for you, king of the dead, here in this garden where you placed me, beside the poisonous grass, miasmal homesteads, black Hebrew gibberish of pruned grapevines. I wait for you in the springtime of beatings and gross unnecessary death. Direct me out of this, O magnet of the falling cherry petals. Make a truce between my disgust and the impeccable landscape of fields and milky towns. Crush my swollen smallness, infiltrate my shame. Broken in the unemployment of my soul, I have driven a bwedge into your world, fallen on both sides of it. Count me back to your mercy with the measures of a bitter song, and do not separate me from my tears.

Leonard Cohen, Book of Mercy, 1984

¹: Kurz (2005) notes of The Black Book of Communism: “That book is a tiresome list of the crimes of the State Socialist regimes, a work of pure propaganda without any critical-historical substance, directed against an enemy that no longer exists. Of course, if I wanted to just make a list of the crimes of western capitalism, I don’t think that even 100 thick volumes would suffice.”

²: It is noteworthy that many transhumanists opting for cryonics as a ‘medical time travel’ to bypass current biological limits have deposited significant amounts of crypto in online vaults, with the warped belief that this is the only means by which they will retrieve their fortune once they are resurrected.

³: On the issue of ‘dirty money’, consider these words of former French socialist (and somewhat more enduringly protestant) prime minster, Michel Rocard (1991): “The business of politics is to lay claim to power, which has two main functions in society. First, to exercise the public monopoly on violence – so as not to leave it to private violence (which requires policing) or to international violence (which requires self-defence). And second, to regulate the flow of money. By definition, this means dealing with the dirty side of things. And you get dirty when you deal with dirt, even if your motives are clean. Anyone who claims to engage in politics while neglecting these two aspects is an amateur, and as long as they cling to angelic ideals, they’re dangerous.”

⁴: Admittedly, given that Proxima Centauri is set to outlive the Sun, the Milky Way, and possibly even proton decay, and providing that humans find a means to transport energy or themselves over a distance of four light-years, those song royalties can keep on feeding collectors and musicians for a while.