Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression
* Book: Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression. Agency, finance and sociality in the new economic space. By Dick Bryan, Jorge López & Akseli Virtanen (ECSA). Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2023
URL = https://frugal.systems/ecsa-book/ pdf
"a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit)." [1]
Description
1.
"What would an Internet native economic system look like? Could economic power be systematically shared amongst individuals and their self-defined groups, with no central economic authority? And could that system secure collectively defined social and environmental benefits and create liquidity for their production?
In Protocols for Postcapitalist Economic Expression Bryan, Lopez and Virtanen build the conditions for such a system. Where economic processes are not dictated by profit, what counts as value-creation, and is rewarded by dividends, can be collectively determined by the network. Care, the arts, the environment will not be after-thoughts, to be subsidized by states or the rich: they can be at the core of the economy’s value proposition.
This book develops protocols that can generate all these processes. A blend of theoretical engagement with big economic ideas (Marx, Keynes, Hayek and others), media and information analytics and careful protocol design of token-related processes of distributed exchange, matching, netting and clearing, Protocols systematically builds an alternative to neoliberal capitalism, centrally-planned socialism and reformist social democracy. In an expressive, creative, risk-sharing, data-rich network of investing, producing, exchanging and lending, standard economic propositions get stood on their heads… and new political possibilities emerge.
Bios: The book is a product of research undertaken by the Economic Space Agency (ECSA). Dick Bryan is the Chief Economist at ECSA and an Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Jorge Lopez is a distributed systems architect and the Lead Architect at ECSA. Akseli Virtanen, D.Sc.(Econ.), is the Co-founder of ECSA, and an Associate Professor at Aalto University."
(https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1195)
2. William Morgan:
"Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression, the Economic Space Agency’s latest experiment in radical economic design, explores the possibility of designing a digitally native economy that is geared towards care, the arts, and the environment, and which not only refuses to give up on the financial frontiers of contemporary capitalism, but actively seeks to marshal them towards innovative ends. The architecture of a novel economic space comes into view through a set of protocols, which integrate economic information within a social value framework. This ‘Economic Space Protocol’ involves crafting a new grammar for economic information production processes that have traditionally been tied to competitive market behavior. This essay interrogates the place of finance in the book, emphasizing price discovery’s generativity with regards to information. What is necessary in the imagination of any postcapitalist future are radical design initiatives that contend with both the necessity and the limits of the price discovery process."
Contents
- Ch1 Introduction video
- Ch2 From Capitalist to Post-Capitalist Economy: Transcending Hayek and his Digital Disciples video
- Ch3: Market as a space exchange and a space of communication video
- Ch4: Performance video
- Ch5: Stake as the Key to Value
- Ch6: Synthetic Commons
Review
William Morgan:
" what I see as the purpose of this essay is not so much to poke holes in any of the individual propositions elaborated in the book, but to raise a larger question about the text’s relationship to some of the economic techniques from which it borrows. In particular, I am interested in the relationship Protocols imagines between itself and modern finance. A chorus of voices is rising in both academic and non-academic spaces that demonstrates renewed interest in finance as a conceptual zone of inquiry not reserved for capitalist devotees (Zhang, Reference Zhang2023; Halpern, Reference Halpern2023; Noorizadeh, Reference Noorizadeh2023; Blas, Reference Blas2018). In the opening pages of Protocols, the authors announce their participation in this choir: ‘social and economic power has shifted dramatically since the 1970s from industrial capital, and the workplace-based unions who battled it, to finance, where there is little organized resistance, at least not the old kind of resistance’ (26). Given this, they argue that
if we want to build postcapitalism, we must start by recognising this power of finance and challenge it by building a different finance. The ultimate goal is an economy of production, animated by alternative social and ethical values, and the starting point is finance. (26)
What is meant by finance here? Not just banks or institutions: ‘[our] challenge means taking finance outside the state and current financial institutions’ precisely because ‘finance is too elusive, too liquid and mobile to be trapped in power battles with organized labor’ (28, 26). For ECSA, finance is a way of doing things with value: ‘we propose networks of people with their own financial capacities – units of account, distributed credit issuance and ways of investing, measuring and rewarding’ (28). What is a financial way of doing things but a mode of sensing through cybernetic information production and feedback processes? In the postwar period, biopolitics, which previously took life as its primary object of manipulation, gave way to infopolitics and information management (Kline, Reference Kline2015). Finance’s contemporary ascendence traces its lineage to this turn. As the Protocols authors write, ‘Information processing is clearly critical to programming an economy’ (52). Today, finance functions by incorporating the diverse and dispersed information of market participants in order to generate sophisticated informatic measurements of present and future risk. As such, finance is best understood as the advanced outrider of contemporary information society, both in a temporal sense of its being the sensory apparatus aimed at measuring future risk from the standpoint of the present, and in a spatial one, of its being tasked with uncovering latent risks prior to their proper appearance as such. Feeding these sensations backwards gives rise to the science of calibration that we call risk management.
Protocols concludes with an invitation for debate and I accept this invitation here by staging a disagreement about finance’s place in Protocols’ elaboration of new economic space. The debate takes place with one prominent reader of Protocols, Jonathan Beller, who is author of the book’s foreword, ‘On Economic Intelligence’. In this essay, I mobilize this disagreement as a point of divergence for charting a reading of Protocols that departs from Beller’s. Beller understands Protocols as a call to reinvent economic information production from the ground up in line with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s ‘general antagonism’, i.e., as a methodological touchstone for germinating ‘a new form of revolution’ (Beller, Reference Beller, Bryan, López and Virtanen2023: 22). The image of finance the reader finds in here is not one that highlights its ascendency, novelty, nor its fluidity. Beller instead hones in on the old chestnuts, the rapacious pursuit of profit and the endless extraction of surplus value. Lost in his analysis is the goal of Protocols to ‘[build] a different finance’ (26). The Bellerian reading of Protocols suggests that the book’s economic redesign ambitions are tied to the necessity of divorcing economic information production from the price discovery process and its attendant competitive behavior. To put my skepticism succinctly, I am unconvinced that these categories are cleaved as easily as Beller would like to believe. Thus, my disagreement with Beller turns upon a question of whether financial markets merely sort through and speculate upon existing information, in which case they could be replaced by technological facsimiles, or whether finance in fact generates novel quantities of information, which might otherwise not exist."
Discussion
Dick Bryan:
"The political claim, therefore, is not to provide the seeds of a mass movement, but to open, within capitalism, a spread of calculative systems and values. The invitation to people at large is to ‘live in the spread’; to ride the volatility and fashion the direction of the future within. We want to offer a put option on capitalism – we’ve called it ‘the big put’Footnote 1 – where people can pursue alternative modes of value calculus and the capital market is offered a means to bet against itself (and, in the process, to fund the buildout of a postcapitalist alternative). Whether this should be depicted as an evolutionary process is a moot point, for the conditions of coexistence and of rupture are dramatically different from conventional evolutionary politics.
These are the conditions that have motivated the writing of Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression. The book has three authors but is the product of input from a team of economists, anthropologists, finance and media theorists, philosophers, software engineers, artists, and game designers. You can scarcely imagine the challenges of combining this portfolio of skills, insights, visions, and, indeed, prejudices. The author-interactions that entered the book are also nurtured by the format of its publication. Protocols was released open access, with audio, PDF, and ePub versions available, with integrated footnotes and glossary. Its ‘co-publishing’ design, as William Morgan’s (2024) review emphasises, gives focus to ongoing reader-interactions."
Excerpt
From the introduction:
"Despite a deepening climate disaster, consecutive global economic crises and a socially devastating pandemic, the last two decades have found us living in an era of capitalist triumphalism. In almost all capitalist countries, political leaders celebrate their achievements in promoting economic growth and stock market record highs while ‘successfully managing’ wage growth. State ‘reforms’ of all kinds have seen growing precarity of those whose living standard is low and growing wealth and security for those at the top. Indeed increasing inequality seems to be the current engine of economic growth and it is only in the very recent past that concerns for the biosphere have looked like a constraint on that momentum.
Economically and politically, if we want to build postcapitalism, we must start by recognising this power of finance and challenge it by building a different finance. The ultimate goal is an economy of production, animated by alternative social and ethical values, and the starting point is finance.1
Finance is both dynamic and fragile. In its current dominant form, it goes to where the profits are greatest, but it instantly retreats when the profits are not appearing. So it is a direct discipline on those who need finance: they must deliver profits, or they suffocate.
But its liquidity and mobility is also its vulnerability, for it depends critically on the state to provide it with a money instrument and to underwrite its social reputation and its profit. The US-initiated sub-prime crisis of 2007-2008 and, even more emphatically, the 2020s Covid pandemic have revealed how the fast and free movement of finance can undermine its own conditions of existence. In both periods we have seen nation states (predominantly through their central banks) having to throw money at financial markets to secure liquidity and sustain financial market profits. In 2008, the US Federal Reserve Chairman argued behind closed doors that the state has to do whatever it takes to preserve financial market profits or economic disaster would follow.2 By 2020, the financial institutions were themselves confidently asserting the demand for the state to guarantee their profitability.3
Our project is to design a network where participants:
- interact in the creation of new outputs (not simply gambling on price movements);
communicate in the determination of what is deemed value-creating (not driven by private appropriation of profit);
- coordinate the assemblage of production (not corporate)
- bind in the building of a commons (not individualistic), and
- launch the capacity to scale and reproduce in sustainable ways (not reliant on on-going injections of external funding).
We cannot, and should not, pre-determine the outputs that people produce, nor what constitutes value or the content of the commons. The people who have participated in building the Economic Space Protocol outlined in this document all have views about what sorts of outcomes we would personally like to see, but it is critical that these are not predetermined in protocol design: that distributed network interactions and not a central authority coordinates network development. That’s why we frame our work as a political project as well as a project of network design.
More information
* Article: Article: Protocols for postcapitalist finance: A reply. By Dick Bryan.
"Protocols for Postcapitalist Expression is a book published by members of the Economic Space Agency. Its objective is to frame protocols (social agreements) on which to build the conditions for an economic system that is distributed (no centralised control) and can express network views about what constitutes, and how to measure, ‘value’ (value beyond profit). An insightful review by William Morgan (2024) probes some key dimensions of our project. This reply both reframes some of William’s insights and takes issue with others, especially those which emphasise a Hayekian interpretation."