Tokenistic Decentralisation or Non-Tokenistic Distributism: Capitalist Blockchain Narratives and Varoufakis’s Alternative

Abstract

Yanis Varoufakis wrote a science fiction novel, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, to encourage post-capitalist political projects in our so-called real world. Costa, a protagonist from the novel, invents a portal that enables communication between his universe and a parallel universe. The two universes diverged after the global financial crisis in 2008. Private money networks like Bitcoin emerged in Costa’s capitalist universe, while in the alternative universe, a post-capitalist society uses blockchain technology for “a plain vanilla public payments system”. Our essay draws a sophistic comparison between liberal-cum-libertarian blockchain narratives from our universe and the science-fictional blockchain narrative from Another Now. We distinguish tokenistic decentralisation (a liberal-cum-libertarian notion) and non-tokenistic distributism (a post-capitalist concept). Liberal-cum-libertarian narratives treat blockchain as a cause of decentralisation and self-sovereignty (individual empowerment). Varoufakis’s science-fictional narrative, by contrast, describes the use of blockchain for a distributist political cause.