Didn't I say waaaay back when I picked up The Natural Dividend (#1521292) that there would be a Bitcoin connection and it would come in handy at some point? #1565551
Yes, precisely.
Turns out, around the time I said that, Ben de Waal, a libertarian socialist, was writing a pair of seriously considered and well-argued books for the merging of these two Venn diagrams ("Bitcoin" + "Socialism," or the re-brand in his version _libertarian_ socialism)
- Orange, Black, and Red: An Exploration of Libertarian Socialism for Bitcoiners https://link.amazon/B0abikHBW
- Black, Red, and Orange: An Exploration of Bitcoin for Libertarian Socialists
I started reading the first one, the one specifically targeted at me I suppose, and really liked it... I like that it's novel (a pair-style book, two perspective for two difference audiences); I like that it's incredibly clear and eloquent, fairly impossible to put down.
...at least until dude started spouting madness about the industrial revolution and economic history of England ~1700s.
You come into myyy hooouse! Yeah, I mean this is generally the problem with socialists/left-leaning peeps: they're no good at history and reality (basically, economics) has a "well-known libertarian bias" that thwarts your plans everywhich step of the way.
Now, the entire closure story is a separate issue and is widely debunk by economic historians. (Warning: actually looking at the record might debunk your deeply held beliefs.)
Most specifically: enclosure definitely raised the productivity of land (could support higher land rents + better remunerated laborers) in pre-Jevons Jevons' Paradox (#1470476), making everybody richer -- especially and not limited to the agricultural workers. The most devastating observation is geographical: enclosure acts by Parliament were mostly in the south of England, the dark satanic mills of Lancashire in, uh, _Lancashire_ (check a map) -- and the latter were fueled and worked by Irish, Scots, and ex-farmers attracted to the cities and the hard labor there _because of its higher wages and better livelihood_ (not because they were kicked off their farms by capitalist enclosures).
The core and united intellectual mistake/sleigh-of-hand is to equate something unowned (like the commons or nature in the case of The Natural Dividend) with what is collectively owned by a community or villagers.
"Common" property is not a thing; what is owned collectively is owned by nobody. Yes, you can rule and regulate the access nonetheless (hashtag Ostrom etc) but that doesn't magically do away with the issues of fundamental economic scarcity and governance and economizing(!) that actually matters.
"The state enclosed the monetary commons by establishing a monopoly on currency issuance, and Bitcoin is the attempt to break that enclosure, to return money to the commons." (p. 23)
But money isn't a commons... it's the most private, highly charged potential economic power, held by the individual. If I were to steelman his case here it's that fiat money (like shitcoins) have an issuer and a beneficiary from using it... it's custodial and benefiting an issuer (central bank, commercial banking system); on Bitcoin it's libertarian, fair and free. No issuer (but the protocol itself), no insider earning rents from their advanced position, thus = returned to the commons.
... except that miners, as ruthlessly competitive as they are, are exactly that. Except that insiders and those early to bitcoin (like boomers, huh?!) are/were richly rewarded disproportionately to their efforts and risk.
It's just a different set of rent-extracted gains
But is Bitcoin, the protocol, a commons that everyone can use and that's collectively/globally/consensus-based regulated? Yeah, I mean, sure.
Also not: people pay access to use it (= tx fees) in a competitive auction-type market place for scarce blockspace. So again, not a commons.