Crypto Fascism Hits Latin America; Develops Into Global Political Body
Latin America is under siege from a bloom of fascist and right wing extremist politicians. El Salvador’s far-right dictator, Bukele, has been broadly condemned for human rights abuses. Most recently, we have the election of the fascist Javier Milei, whose political views are discussed in this piece out from the Guardian:
“Those ideas include legalising the sale of human organs, dramatically slashing social spending, downplaying the crimes of Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship, and cutting ties with Argentina’s two most important trade partners, Brazil and China. On the campaign trail, Milei vowed to abolish Argentina’s central bank and dollarise the economy, and brandished a chainsaw intended to symbolise ferocious cuts he believes will help stabilise the economy and ‘exterminate’ rampant inflation.”
Highlighting the raging battle against right-wing extremists, comments from Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro:
“The neo-Nazi extreme right has won in Argentina. It is an extreme far right that comes with a colonial project for Argentina, but intends to lead a colonial project in all of Latin America and the Caribbean. We respect the vote of the Argentinian people, they wanted to give themselves this government. Well, to the Argentineans we say: you have decided. But we will not remain silent, because the arrival of a right-wing extremist with a colonial project, absolutely colonial, kneeling before US imperialism, who wants to abolish the state and social rights, is a huge threat. We respect the decision of the Argentinian people, and simply call for reflection on the emergence of extreme right-wing groups, that are trying to impose themselves in order to recolonize Latin America.”
Of course here it is important to point out that Argentina welcomed Nazis into the country following the fall of the Reich, where they have and continue to maintain a stronghold of influence as part of long-term fascist plots; hence Maduro’s note on the neo-Nazi extreme right represented by Milei is extraordinarily relevant.
We will focus on a remarkable aspect of the recent election and its fallout, remarkable because it showed Bitcoin maxis — a growing group of generally 4chan-adjacent fascists who believe that Bitcoin should be the only form of money — take a new step in their growth as a floating global political body. This body has taken a serious interest in Argentina’s elections exactly because of promises to blow up the central bank, as Bitcoin is promised as an alternative to central banking and relies, ultimately, on the destruction of central banks in order to increase its adoption and thus increase the value of one’s stake in Bitcoin. This was a founding promise of Bitcoin. And is a challenge to the sovereignty of countries around the world, as determination over money and the financial system is fundamental to sovereignty. In Bitcoin, we see venture capital-owned financial infrastructure, where the distribution is severely unequal — just one venture firm, Coinbase, has 5% of the total Bitcoin. And this is proposed as an appropriate solution for countries.
Additionally sparking the hopes of Bitcoin maxis, Milei did a widely-publicized interview which has led Bitcoin maxis to believe that Milei will be supportive of Bitcoin adoption in the country, perhaps even adoption as legal tender, with de-regulation and perhaps the suspension of taxation, something that Bitcoin maxis hope to see across the board. This has a precedent in the fascist dictator of El Salvador, Bukele, adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, becoming known as the Bitcoin president, suspending taxes on “tech innovation” like crypto and AI, selling away natural resources to foreign venture capital for pennies on the dollar, opening a Bitcoin mine profiting venture capital above the country, and throwing 77,000 people in jail, most without due process nor much hope of release, in order to “clean up” for the crypto, startup and venture capital activity in the region; not unlike what we have seen with tech expansion in the Bay area resulting in increased criminalization, arrest and incarceration of local residents who often served as cheap labor for tech wealth despite not joining in its beneficence.
Much of Bitcoin maxi support for the Argentinan fascist hinges on comments made by Milei last year in a media interview; the comments are transcribed in full because most of the reporting on the matter has focused on just a few soundbites, and it is important to know these things in context.
“The central bank is a scam. It is a mechanism by which politicians cheat the good people with the inflationary tax. What Bitcoin is representing is the return of money to its original creator: the private sector. Money is a private invention; in order to be used to solve problems, for example in a bartering economy, the ‘double coincidence of wants’ and indivisibility. Then paper money appears to solve portability. Actually you had different currencies: linen, wheat, salt where it came from the word ‘salary’, hence comes the superstition that salt falls off the table. And then that was evolving and the currencies that the people chose were the silver for small transactions and the gold for the bigger ones. Then because back then it was very dangerous to move the gold, people used to deposit the gold and get in exchange a receipt. And then in the year 1445, in the first Genovese congress, the States appropriated the exclusivity to issue the money. That’s the legal tender, which is a key point, because the legal tender allows the politicians to scam you with the inflationary tax. Bitcoin has an algorithm that one day, it will reach a certain amount and there is no more, and it can compete with other currencies, in fact, it competes with Ethereum and others. And what is the good thing? It’s the return of the private money. But… what is the problem? The problem is that the governments will not give up the legal tender, because with the legal tender they can scam you with the inflationary tax. The Bitcoin is the natural reaction against the central banker scammers to make the money private again. And the flip side is that the thieving politicians are not going to allow you to go against the legal tender. In economics with high inflation, the scam problem is bigger… that’s why, as I suggest, you can propose to close the central bank.”
This is indeed a strong indictor that Argentina, of 45 million people and with a GDP of $487 billion, could become a desirable Bitcoin market, a place of tax evasion and sheltering, and of course of the rapidly growing “Bitcoin tourism”, aka, crypto fascists coming to work and live and recreate in the country, something we have seen in El Salvador as a core force of change because of its economic weight and transformative properties. Transformation into an economy that benefits fascist venture capitalists, that is.
The election in Argentina was watched closely by the Bitcoin community and Bitcoin rose 3%, as reported by Fortune, on the announcement of the fascist victory. So here we see a direct tie to fascism being positive and good for everyone’s venture capital tokens, and the election of fascists having a favorable economic result for Bitcoin holders.
It is important to know that in Latin America there have indeed been other, leftist visions of cryptocurrency development and adoption. Take the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, a vital point of discussion as the ALBA formation highlighted the alternatives to Western technological development, including alternative visions of cryptocurrency development and deployment; via Wikipedia: “In October 2009, ALBA leaders agreed at a summit in Bolivia to create a virtual currency, named the SUCRE. ‘The document is approved,’ said Bolivian President Evo Morales, the summit host. President of Venezuela Hugo Chávez announced ‘The sucre [is] an autonomous and sovereign monetary system that will be agreed upon today so that it can be implemented in 2010.’ As of 2015, the virtual currency is being used to compensate trade between Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and especially Ecuador and Venezuela.”
Venezuela has also experimented with the crypto token Petro, launched in February 2018,
“Announced in December 2017, it is supposed to be backed by the country's oil and mineral reserves, and is intended to supplement Venezuela's plummeting hard bolívar currency, as a means of circumventing U.S. sanctions and accessing international financing. On 20 August 2018, the sovereign bolívar was introduced, with the government stating it would be linked to the petro coin value. As of January, 2020, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro decreed it mandatory to pay with petro for government document services and airplane fuel for planes flying international flights.”
Both of these projects have floundered. Hey, getting the money right is hard work don’t we know it, and we should not write off very early forays into these spaces as evidence that alternative versions of cryptocurrency, not under fascism, are impossible or helpless or should be abandoned. Rather, as with all new technologies, what we hope to see is exactly this kind of engagement and experimentation with innovation. Important here is the repeated and sustained interest and exploration of these models, the respect of sovereignty and the anti-imperialist goals. We must continue to envision other possible conceptions of technology. The point here being, there are alternative and conflicting notions of crypto development in these areas and there are other versions that could and should be supported, particularly as they respect and support the sovereignty of these countries.
As Maduro’s comments reflect, issues of money bring with them the province of sovereignty and of sovereign economic systems, something very much in the target of Bitcoin maxis. I wrote extensively in a recent piece about cryptocurrency, sovereignty and currency collapse, about how Bitcoin’s body is incentivized to cause large and sudden disruptions in the economic systems of countries, where existing financial infrastructure is in the cross-hairs in favor of venture capital-owned financial systems. I won’t repeat myself as if you are interested in these topics it is a good next read.
What I find remarkable for our purposes is the way that these events point to the existence of a new political element — the Bitcoin and crypto body — as a floating, international political body, involved and invested in global elections for which it has no other interest than increasing the value of Bitcoin through country adoption ushered in by fascists. They have a clear economic incentive to get involved with and respond to global elections, regardless of any other tie to a country or even concern, much less for its peoples; to support and bolster global candidates, a floating, fascist economic block that is starting to develop its political character. We see a version of this happening with Coinbase’s “Stand with Crypto Campaign”, an attempt to mobilize its customers into a lobbying body and constituency actively involved in matters of government policy and elections. The critical axis being whether or not a candidate supports Bitcoin in any number of ways. The enthusiasm and support of extremist right wing candidates like Bukele and Milei by the large fascist elements of crypto, shows a dangerous force in global politics that is becoming aware of its own power, and beyond that, is fundamentally incentivized to take this character and thus will continue to.
An important factor as we ponder the formation of this political influence, is that the crypto interest is one with quite a bit of fucking money through it. Most of the people who think that Bitcoin will solve all the world’s problems have made a fuckton of money on it, and that may be out of financial savvy and a close reading of the market and the tech or it might just be because 4chan was an early adopter of these technologies and they were a bunch of Nazi incels very comfortable using sketchy technologies and long having used them. Either way, this is a community that is continually churning out rich people and that has a lot to bring to bear on these situations. The average household income in Argentina? $4,354. We should deeply fear the growing influence and organization of the fascist Bitcoin body, and its ability to manipulate elections and candidates. One of the incentivized effects of Bitcoin here is the bringing to bear a global far right network on political elections they don’t have a stake in outside of making money. When you add to this the money, the tendency of this community to use doxxing, trolling and hacking as tactics (4chan again), its sophistication and organization with social media, the possibility of this body to bring colonial “tourism” and living to a country, as well as investment, we are in a danger situation and the Bitcoin body should not be disregarded as a global political force.
In the new iterations of the fascist floating digital pool that we saw so clearly active, and ongoingly, in El Salvador, we see a higher level of responsiveness and engagement with global elections; in both cases, in the directionality of the election of fascists — and in the case of Bukele, an illegal disregard of the constitution’s limits on terms allowed to heads of state.
I’m freaked out, as the timeless battle of fascists vs the left enters a new and dangerous era. It is critical that we monitor, track, acknowledge and seek to limit, the bolstering of global fascist elements by the new floating political body represented in Bitcoin maxis and all their little friends from 8chan.