The political economy of Bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador. Temporary bandages to permanent wounds? (original) (raw)
The Political Economy of Bitcoin - Lecture, 2021
Based on the theoretical understanding of money as a social relation, this talk presents a comprehensive analysis of Bitcoin as a technical and monetary artefact, including its political economy, historical background, underlying ideas, and conditions of possibility. Among other things, it shows why Bitcoin is unable to establish itself as an alternative to the current monetary system as it does not meet elementary requirements of money, despised by the neoliberal ideology that sustains it. That is, despite its declared search for a substitution of world money, for monetary stability against the supposedly ‘inflationary’ state money and for ‘depoliticization’, decentralization and deconcentration of monetary power, what is empirically observed is precisely the opposite: low volume and range of circulation, great instability against state money, transactional (economic, ecological etc.) inefficiency and greater relative concentration of political and economic power among its users. In the end, the non-fulfilment of the radical neoliberal aspirations of Bitcoin shows that the attempt by its creators and enthusiasts of emptying money of its social content, i.e., to ‘neutralize’ it, in capitalism, is not feasible.