Dear Comrades, it's been a while since I last posted. I must confess, Substack has been a struggle for me. That said I feel compelled to bear witness a world where the contradictions of capital have reached their apex, embodied in two prodigies: Bitcoin, which has of late been described as "digital gold", and artificial intelligence, the mechanized intellect of the bourgeoisie and increasingly of the proletariat. These innovations further herald an alchemical mutation of physics and finance into a new form which can best described hypercapitalism (my apologies to whomever came up with this term, I would cite you here but I am still in catch up mode), the terminal stage of the capitalist mode of production, where the laws of value and surplus extraction radically implode, paving the way for devastating collapse and, hopefully, an opportunity for global proletariat to rebuild.
Bitcoin (I am told that crypto is a bad word among so-called Bitcoin maximalists also known simply as maxis), is the apotheosis of synthetic capital. In Capital, Volume III, I describe how capital, divorced from material production, inflates into speculative bubbles, chasing profit while grounded in machine labor. Bitcoin, is pure mathematics, arrived at via complex calculations via a process known as “mining” (don’t get me started on the abuse of that term). The Maxis and the cyber-libertarians herald it as freedom from state and bank, yet it binds the masses to new digital lords: crypto-barons, exchanges, and speculators. Oh and yes, malicious hackers. Security is everyone’s responsibility now. The state cannot be expected to provide protection on an individual basis. Dear Comrade, you are on your own! The proletariat, lacking means to “mine” or invest, have been excluded, isolated and left defenseless, while wealth concentrates in ever smaller albeit a different set of filthy hands. Bitcoin is not money as I am accustomed to understand it, but a rather a hyper-commodity, a mirror of capital’s alienation, compression and abstraction where social relations vanish into ones and zeros. This confinement to a binary state has been problematic for other media (yes I categorize money as media, a medium of exchange as they say), such as music or film for example, where the loss of information due to compression is an outright travesty.
"AI is for all intents and purposes is crack cocaine for the masses. The blockchain is gas station heroin."
Artificial intelligence further amplifies this nightmare. In Grundrisse, I foresaw machinery reducing necessary labor time, yet under capitalism, this liberatory potential becomes a veritable ball and chain. AI, the ultimate fixed capital, displaces the worker, rendering labor obsolete while intensifying exploitation (talk to the proletariats at Amazon if you wish to understand this further). The algorithms of Silicon Valley, owned by a new tech aristocracy or technocracy, extract surplus no longer from human toil but from the unpaid labor of data; our thoughts, desires, and movements commodified. AI optimizes production for solely for profit, further intensifying the anarchy of the markets. The proletariat, once a variable capital in the form of a worker, has been rendered to redundancy, cast into the precarity of gig servitude minus a social safety net, while capital’s intellectual property holdings increase to exponential proportions. The proletariat, no longer able to claim the title worker, are to be discarded once the quality or quantity of their data begins to atrophy.
Hypercapitalism then, co-piloted by Bitcoin and AI (and they are quite intoxicated I assure you), is capitalism stripped down to its most basic, essential form. We can also call this state Capitalist Minimalism, though I expect that will have the wrong connotation for many, therefore we will stay with the term Hypercapitalism for now. The law of value, rooted in socially necessary labor time, collapses as AI eliminates the need for human labor and Bitcoin detaches value from production. As crises of overproduction intensify goods and services multiply, yet the masses, immiserated, can no longer afford to consume! Consumption has been the oil that keeps capitalist engine in proper working order. Not only that, it has kept the pitch forks in the garage! Meanwhile, speculative bubbles (take for example Bitcoin’s vertiginous swings), explode with greater ferocity, destabilizing the system, on a minute by minute basis. Trading never stops, unlike the current stock market which of course will need to adapt and soon. Volatility as seen by physicists can be made to harness energy, and this is the key discovery in this new breed of alchelmical finance. This will change very soon I think. Such developments echo the fate of the horse: proletariats have become domesticated animals for the bourgeoisie, relegated primarily to racing. Otherwise, they possess no real utility in modern economics. The bourgeoisie, a shrinking contingent, not knowing that they too now live in a digital menagerie, will be content for some reason even though nothing that they own can be described as secure. The state puts little effort into protecting the proletariat and the neo-proletariat (formerly the bourgeosie) from say phishing attacks, but they are fully intent on optimizing their own digital fortresses. The state, a mere appendage of tech capital, is simply a tool for the enforcement of oligarchical policies. This has gone to absolutely insane lengths as exhibited by the various bunkers being built by oligarchs.
Yet, in this extremity lies a bit of hope. The contradictions of hypercapitalism sharpen class antagonism. The proletariat, unified by global networks, see their dispossession mirrored in Bitcoin’s exclusivity as well as AI’s inherently tyrannical nature. The system’s fragility, its reliance on energy, code, and belief, invites sabotage. I am told by engineers who have substantial knowledge in the development of the "bitcoin core" that such a scenario as sabotage is an impossibility, or if not likely the odds are so low as to be negligible as not to merit concern (such as the odds of getting hit by lightning twice a day, which has happened. Not to me fortunately). The exception, in this case, is the challenge and such a challenge would be difficult to resist for elite hackers, who thrive on bragging rights. Anyway, as I’ve said many times, capital sows the seeds of its own destruction. Or to quote my anonymous engineering friend "the kernel is where its own destruction lies. Like the one vulnerability of the Death Star (yes, I have seen most of George Lucas' oeuvre as I suspected that he had communist sympathies in his earlier works, but this is debatable). The revolution will seize these tools, not to perpetuate exchange, but to collectivize production. AI, freed from profit (a.k.a. Open Source), will plan for its own needs; Bitcoin’s blockchain, if it survives, will serve AI accounting, which requires absolute precision not speculation or book cooking. Hypercapitalism is the death rattle of the old order.
Bitcoin challenges the capitalist state’s monopoly over money. In The Communist Manifesto, you may remember that Engels and I called for the abolition of bourgeois institutions that perpetuate class rule. The bourgeois however is a shrinking class, with very little power and soon to be extinct. The state-backed bank, a pillar of this order, extracts surplus through debt and inflation, chaining the worker to wage slavery. These wages are akin to receiving payment in melting ice cubes while living in a desert. Bitcoin, operating on a network that is beyond state control (or is it?), obliterates this practice. Its transparency—every transaction recorded, immutable—could, in proletarian and neo-proletariat hands, serve as a ledger for communal resource allocation. Imagine a world where the means of exchange are not hoarded by bankers but managed collectively, ensuring no surplus is siphoned to the few. Bitcoin’s scarcity (cleverly capped at 21 million coins) is also a deadly flaw in my view, but a mathematically literate communist society could perform a hard fork, restoring money to its social essence.
Hard Forks not Pitch Forks
Artificial intelligence, meanwhile, is the realization of capital’s dream to fully seize the means of production through automation, yet it still holds revolutionary promise. AI, as with any tool, can be seized, particulary when it is in development. Violence is often needed to do it though, so proletariats must get into this mindset and quickly. Is it just a coincidence that UFC is one of the most popular sports among proletariats? In Capital, Volume I, I argued that machinery, under communism, would liberate humanity from toil, reducing necessary labor to a minimum. AI, with its capacity to analyze, predict, and optimize, could orchestrate a planned economy, surpassing the crude markets of capitalism. China will most likely make this happen or perhaps already has, though in terms of pure communist ideology they lost the plot years ago. Where AI serves profit to the oligarchies, by say hoarding data to manipulate markets, a proletarian AI would harness collective knowledge to meet human needs. Hunger, housing, medicine: these could be solved with algorithms unburdened by the profit motive. The proletariat, seizing data and code, as well as the means of computation (rather than production, which is outmoded), would turn AI from a tool of surveillance into one of emancipation.
The reboot of communism requires a global, organized meta-proletariat (not Meta the company), one that is comprised of the traditional proletariat described by Engels and myself but united with the humbled former bougeois class. Politics, itself a dying pursuit, is also a prime candidate for automation. It has been kept on life support by the classic divide and conquer strategy, pitting the proletariats against the bourgeois who are not really very bourgeois anymore, so they must create other distinctions. Racism, sexism and antisematism are often go to instruments for these hungry ghosts. Tech bro titans such as Sam Altman brag openly about the fact that there will soon be no jobs yet fail to explain what the proletariat will do with their abundance of free time (I have a hunch, and it involves a bottle of inexpensive Vodka, a handkerchiefand a lighter). This meta-proletariat knows how to code. And do math. Bitcoin’s borderless nature fosters solidarity, enabling workers to transact beyond barriers imposed by the technocracy. AI, and the new base operating system in the form of the blockchain, connects the oppressed, amplifying their voice against tyranny while keeping them relatively secure against the wolves who are trying to steal passwords. Yet, these tools are not neutral. Bitcoin enriches speculators, and AI displaces workers, deepening immiseration. The oligarchs wield them to fortify their rule. Thus, the task is clear: the proletariat must expropriate the means of computation and mathematics—servers, code, quantum physics, and infrastructure through revolutionary struggle. The blockchain must become a communal ledger, AI a planner for the common good.
In the shadow of hypercapitalism’s terminal decay, China stands poised to harness artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to birth a new form of communism, one that transcends the crude markets and exploitative labor relations of the dying capitalist order. AI, with its unparalleled capacity to analyze vast datasets and optimize resource allocation, will be deployed by the state to orchestrate a planned economy that prioritizes human needs over profit. Blockchain, stripped of Bitcoin’s speculative excesses, will serve as a transparent, immutable ledger for communal resource distribution, ensuring that wealth—whether in the form of digital yuan or public goods—flows equitably to the masses. China’s existing infrastructure, from its AI-driven social credit systems to its state-controlled digital currency, provides the scaffolding for this transition. By seizing the means of computation, the state will dismantle the anarchy of capitalist markets, replacing surplus extraction with algorithms that eradicate hunger, homelessness, and precarity, fulfilling the emancipatory promise I foresaw in Capital.
As capitalism succumbs to its own contradictions, such as overproduction, inequality, and ecological ruin and so on, China’s adoption of these tools will continue expose the meta-proletariat’s obsolescence. The meta-proletariat, once connected by global networks and empowered by open-source AI such as DeepSeek, will find in China’s model a blueprint for a classless society. While capitalism’s cancer, the relentless exploitation of labor, metastasizes into full on gig servitude and data commodification, China’s disciplined fusion of AI and blockchain will render such alienation obsolete. I’m not saying China is doing everything by the book, as I’ve said they’ve gone off the rails decades ago, but this is merely a case of the most efficient system wins, and out of pure desperation to control the raging masses other nation states will need to adopt their strategies.
In this new epoch, I foresee China executing an audacious hard fork of Bitcoin, wresting it from the clutches of cyber-libertarian speculators and crypto-barons who fetishize its scarcity as a digital idol. This forked Bitcoin—let us call it People’s Coin—will discard the capitalist flaw of its 21-million-coin cap, which entrenches wealth in the hands of a new digital oligarchy. Instead, China’s blockchain engineers, guided by the state’s revolutionary vision and using state of the art AI for guidance, will recalibrate the protocol to serve as a dynamic ledger for communal resource allocation, ensuring that value flows not to degens or cyber-criminals but to the proletariat’s collective needs. By integrating this People’s Coin with AI-driven economic planning, China will transform Bitcoin’s ones and zeros into a socialized instrument, transparent and immutable, that tracks and distributes wealth with precision, obliterating the speculative bubbles that haunt capitalism’s terminal stage.
This hard fork will not go unchallenged, of course; the Bitcoin maximalists, with their dogmatic chants of “HODL,” will decry it as heresy. If religion is the opium of the people, as I have claimed, Bitcoin is gas station heroin. More accessible than opioids also potentially far more dangerous. Yet, as sovereign nations, tethered to capitalism’s failing OS, adopt China’s model, evidenced already in the West’s clumsy emulation of social credit systems tracking keystrokes and citizenly virtue, they will have no choice but to embrace this People’s Coin. We must remember that the Bitcoin code has been made open-source by Satoshi, and is readily available on GitHub. Unlike the fragmented, privatized credit systems of the US and EU, which lack China’s centralized precision, this forked blockchain will harmonize with AI to eradicate the anarchy of markets, rendering obsolete the melting ice cube wages of capitalist servitude. In this act, China will not merely bury Bitcoin’s libertarian fantasy but will sow the seeds of a global, classless society, where the means of exchange and computation serve the many, not the miserly few.
I may be permitted a slight digression here as I feel that it is relevant information for the cause. I do not claim to know whether Satoshi, the progenitor of Bitcoin, is alive or dead, one individual or a squad of hackers. Or for that matter, whether he originated from the bowels of the state apparatus, and preparing to launch the mother of all rug pulls. Here is what I do know, dear comrade: Bitcoin’s shadowy origins lie with Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonymous figure (or collective) who unleashed this hyper-commodity upon the world in 2008, a specter as elusive as Lenin, whose embalmed form lies in Moscow’s mausoleum, a relic of revolutionary fervor. Like Lenin, preserved for posterity, Satoshi’s mystique has birthed a cult-like devotion among Bitcoin maxis, who venerate him as a liberator from state-backed fiat tyranny. Yet, this reverence risks elevating Satoshi to a Big Brother-esque figure, a disembodied deity whose white paper is scripture, and whose blockchain is a cathedral of ones and zeros. This religious fervor, fueled by Satoshi’s anonymity, casts him as both prophet and phantom, a potential overseer in a dystopian parable where faith in code supplants reason. Is it problematic that Satoshi remains pseudonymous? Indeed, for what if this revolution stems from a prank, a bored teenager with an uncanny intellect, steeped in math, physics, and economics, toying with the world’s financial order? Such a jest would only underscore capitalism’s fragility, collapsing under the weight of a child’s whim. The genesis block, Bitcoin’s first, bears Satoshi’s cryptic jab at the 2008 financial crisis: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” a sardonic nod to the state’s complicity in capital’s chaos, now repurposed by China’s fork as a rallying cry for a classless future.
This People’s Coin will face resistance from Bitcoin’s devout, who cling to their decentralized dogma as fervently as capitalists clutch their bunkers. Yet, as nations like the US and EU, tethered to capitalism’s failing paradigm, emulate China’s systems—evidenced by their derivative social credit frameworks—they will inevitably adopt this reimagined blockchain. Unlike the West’s scattered, profit-driven surveillance, China’s AI-blockchain synthesis will harmonize resource distribution, rendering wage slavery and speculative bubbles obsolete. In seizing Bitcoin’s kernel, China will not only bury its libertarian fantasy but also cultivate a global, proletarian solidarity, where the means of exchange and computation serve the collective, not the elite.
Nakamoto, like Lenin embalmed in his Moscow tomb, looms as a revolutionary icon, yet risks ascension to a Big Brother, a mythic overseer whose white paper is gospel to the Bitcoin maximalists. His anonymity, a shield against reprisal from the robber barrons, troubles me: for what if this Bitcoin is nothing but a prank (if so I say bravo), the whim of some prodigious youth, intoxicated by mathematics, physics, and economics, mocking capital’s fragility? Such a jest would only affirm the system’s decay, ripe for our seizure. In such a scenario, a funny meme becomes a reality, Bitcoin’s philosophy draws inspiration from Das Kapital and my numerous other works (consciously or not, I do not mind the ommission of credit as I have entered the collective economic unconscious), in its assault on centralized banks, which I decried as siphoning surplus through debt and inflation, etc. Bitcoin’s decentralized ledger, transparent and immutable, could serve a proletarian vision—a communal accounting, as I mused with my conception of the People’s Coin—echoing socialism’s call to collectivize wealth. Yet, Bitcoin’s individualism, its worship of scarcity, diverges from our collectivist ethos, inflating bubbles that immiserate the masses.
Imagine: Kommunismus 2.0
The blockchain, is akin to the true operating system which lies underneath, similar to say Unix or DOS, shares kinship with Linux, that open-source bastion born of Linus Torvalds’ genius. Both are decentralized, their codes freely distributed, their governance a rough consensus of global laborors (i.e. Linux’s kernel hackers, Bitcoin’s node runners). Linux, is a distributed engine, and powers the servers that mine Nakamoto’s digital gold, its peer-to-peer ethos mirrored in Bitcoin’s network, which scorns the gatekeepers of the robber barons. In Capital, I foresaw that machinery would liberate labor under communism; blockchain, like Linux in addition to opensource AI, is perhaps such a tool, a ledger for a classless economy, stripped of the tyranny of profit. Yet, under capitalism, both are co-opted, Linux fuels tech oligarchs, Bitcoin enriches speculators. Under Xi Jinping, the co-opt continues, that that co-adoption repeats back and forth between dominate nations ad infinitum.
Dear comrade, this is not utopia that I describe but a material possibility. The contradictions of capitalism, crises, inequality, ecological ruin, demand a new “operating system” as the tech bros say. Bitcoin and AI, while progeny of capital’s genius, also unwittingly serve as levers for a massive self-own. As the maximalists shrewdly point out, Bitcoin never does what you think it will. AI, now that it has been released by Pandora (not the streaming service, I date myself), remains a massive wildcard (see Polymarket’s predictions). The meta-proletariat, awakened, will wield these tools to build a classless society, where wealth and knowledge serve all, not only the 0.01%. One can make the argument that communism’s track record is suboptimal. My detractors (and they are legion!) are quick to point out the numerous failures incurred by communist movements in the 20th century. I have several arguments in my defense, one being of course that the practictioners went wildly off script (like any global collective we have our own unhinged characters), but that would need to be its own essay. We can view the communism of the 20th century as a minimum viable product, as they say in software engineering circles. Like software, we can learn from what went disasterously wrong, fix the “bugs”, and optimize accordingly. Like Linus Torvalds, I and my colleagues make these ideas fully available to the masses. A few bad actors is expected. But I ask you, how is it that China is now the second largest economy in the world? Something must have gone right there, no? And Vietnam, the 33rd largest economy in the world, and in South East Asia it ranks as the fourth largest economy. Again, was this merely and accidental development? Or does this phenomenon signal the inherent agile nature of communism, as a platform adaptation is built into the source code of the platform.
Comrades, we are in need of a critical (forced?) update. And a rebrand. I like Kommunismus 2.0. If you don’t like that one, I have been toying with Socialism as a Service (SaAS), which admittedly has a softer yet more capital-friendly tone to it. Kommunismus 2.0, or SaAS if you prefer, is not the communism of old, marred by bureaucratic foolishness, but a communism digitized, where technology, wielded by a unified non-working class, buries the old order in its own digital detritus (empty trash!), heralding a world where wealth and knowledge serve all, not the elite few. The specter of open-source communism, dormant, stirs anew.