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@strypey @jeffcliff Marx didn't think that power would whither away. The socialists of his time saw what happened to the Paris commune and concluded that to succeed there would need to be a "dictatorship of proletarians" as a transitionary step to communism. Only if the social revolution believed to be immanent could be actively defended could it survive in an environment of hostile imperialism. This frames the thinking of the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union which followed.
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@strypey @jeffcliff That comes from Engels in Anti-Dühring:
"The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency [117]; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand"
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@strypey @jeffcliff this is an interesting question. The vulture capitalists depend upon two things:
i) centralisation of the chain of value production, usually by arranging some hierarchical social relations with contracts
ii) extraction of value from the system in a zero sum fashion. The critical part is that this is value which they themselves have not produced. To be a true capitalist you need to be riding on other people's efforts.
There's a problem for blockchains as I understand them in that they actively facilitate both of these steps. To get down to the nitty gritty:
i) The ability to solve blocks needs to be decoupled from the ability to command large amounts of Capital.
ii) Technical trust mechanisms, via encryption et al, need to be coupled to social trust ones. Bonds of real affinity or friendship, etc. This would make it hard to simply "do a runner" with value extracted via some asocial or antisocial methodology.
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@strypey @jeffcliff #Bitcoin failed mainly because of its bad design, which resulted in it only being a speculator's toy. My acid test for any currency is that if I can't purchase basic foodstuffs with it then it's of little use to me. Since there is no incentive to spend Bitcoin due to its design then it becomes irrelevant quite quickly.
Any viable cryptocurrency needs to be spendable. That is, there needs to be not much utility in holding onto it for very long and it needs to be creatable at the point of exchange.
Bob Mottram
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