Democratic Centralism and the Looping Dialectic of Chinese Leninism: Reading Li Ganjie’s “Strictly Implementing and Enforcing Democratic Centralism” [民主集中制与中国列宁主义的循环辩证法 ——党的二十届五中全会《决定》、官方阐释及党的治理方法的核心渊源]

 

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It is common, in studying the Fifth Plenum of the 20th Central Committee, to ask what the meeting did. On 29 October 2026 it adopted a Resolution on persevering with full and rigorous Party self-governance, confirmed disciplinary action against thirty-four named officials, and fixed the date of the 21st Congress. It may be more useful, and perhaps more revealing, to ask what the Plenum is a case of, and to read the official glosses that surround it for what they disclose about the system that produced them. This essay takes up the second question through a single gloss, the People’s Daily article of 11 November 2026 by Li Ganjie, Head of the United Front Work Department, on strictly implementing and enforcing democratic centralism, which it reads against the adopted Resolution and Xi Jinping’s Explanation of the draft. The suggestion is that the Plenum and its official gloss have now begun to reveal their deeper connection to the core sources of Chinese Leninism, and with it the nature of the spiraling loop of dialectics at the heart of that ideological project.

The argument turns on a distinction that is easily lost. Chinese Marxism-Leninism is often read as Marxism, a normative ideal toward which Party and state organs are tasked to move along a Socialist Path whose stages are fixed by a historical and “scientific” sequence, and the reading is not wrong, although it describes the horizon and not the machinery. What distinguishes the Leninist component, and what the article makes visible, is that Leninism is the conscious and intentional mechanism for refining and accelerating movement along that path, by organizing and deploying all productive forces in an ordered way. The article narrates its own lineage in that order. Marx and Engels supply the idea of combining democracy with centralism; Lenin proposes that it be written into Party statutes and exported to the parties of the Communist International; and the present leadership claims a theoretical innovation and an institutional sublimation. Marxism enters, tellingly, as a doctrine of party-building. The Path stays in the background, and the instrument is placed in the foreground.

The instrument is a loop. Contradiction diagnoses the stage; the mass line gathers experience from below and returns it; democratic centralism concentrates it into binding decision; and the Party’s self-revolution, with the social revolution it is meant to lead, tests whether the concentration was sound. What the article adds is a demonstration that the loop is applied by the Party to itself before it is offered as the template for the larger project of moving the nation forward, which is then diffused to society through the mass line. Its closing image, in which “the governance of the Communist Party of China” leads “the governance of China,” says as much. The effectiveness of the template is thus tied to the Party’s open instrumentalist dialectics, in which discussion, concentration, execution and accountability are repeated, each pass at a higher resolution, so that the loop spirals and does not merely circle. The article’s own insistence on repetition, in decisions formed through “repeated discussion,” views “studied repeatedly” and conclusions “repeatedly tested in practice,” is a textual trace of that structure.

The evidence is textual and should be weighed as such. The article is silent on communism, on contradiction and on social revolution, yet the adopted Resolution still asks members to keep faith in communism, instructs the Party not to evade contradictions, and follows the mass line, while the 2024 Third Plenum Decision names the Party’s self-revolution as the leader of social revolution. One reasonable reading, which I develop with caution, is that the texts divide the labor between a telos installed in persons (the Resolution’s account of Party spirit) and a process machinery for moving toward it (the article’s democratic centralism), and that modernization is the horizon in which the two are made to cohere. I do not claim that the reading is the only one the documents permit.

I proceed in four parts and a conclusion. Part 1 offers a translation of the article, attentive to the overtones of official Party prose, followed by a reading of the article on its own terms and in its connection to the Resolution (1.1). Part 2 reads it critically through my governing-loop framework, locating it in the matrix of normative, state-constitutional, Party-line and Party-internal-organizational strands and weaving into that analysis the article’s own provisions on reporting, accountability and political ecology. Part 3 places it in the sequence of Fifth Plenums and tests it against the final text of the Resolution, Xi Jinping’s Explanation, and the Third Plenum Decision. Part 4 asks what follows when the article is read as an expression of modernization as the lifeworld of Chinese constitutionalism, and as an instance of a closed-loop conception of governance that the heuristic of cybernetic democratic centralism can examine. The method is reconstructive before it is normative, for my aim is to make the system legible in its own terms before any judgment is passed on it. Two cautions apply: counts and absences of terms come from a reading of the Chinese texts and should be confirmed by full-text search, and the question whether the dispositions the texts prescribe actually form is not one that documents can answer.

The essay follows below and may be accessed HERE. 

Techno-Human Rights: The RightsX Summit 18 November 2026

 

 

Those upcoming event may be of interest especially for people working in the business and human rights field. The RightsX Summit is a global platform convened by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) that brings together governments, civil society, technologists, and private-sector leaders to design and scale technology- and data-enabled solutions for human rights. The Inaugural Summit was held in December 2025 at Palais Wilson in Geneva, Switzerland, and online, convening over 1,400 participants and 70 speakers. RightsX Summit 2026is scheduled for November 18–19, 2026, featuring a virtual Solutions Festival on November 18 and a hybrid High-Level Day at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on November 19.

It is populated by the "usual suspects" that tend to contribute significantly to the UN's work, and in that process help shape its ideology and regulatory politics: That alone is reason enough to pay attention. And it is also the caution when receiving the "data" generated b its participants. This is especially significant because of its ambitions: (1) Moving beyond traditional forums to prototype a "human rights toolbox of the future," leveraging data, AI governance, foresight, and year-round working groups; and with apologies for the jargon, (2) Transitioning toward the launch of HRDx as a digital platform to support ongoing co-creation and cross-country replication of solutions. See the RightsX Website HERE.

Borrador para comentarios: «Sistemas regulatorios de blockchain: desafíos conceptuales y operativos»" ["Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges"]

 

Imagen creada con Grok

 English Version

 中文版本请见此处

Mi asistente de investigación, Daniil Rose, y yo hemos preparado un artículo titulado «Sistemas regulatorios de blockchain: desafíos conceptuales y operativos», cuya versión final y revisada tiene previsto publicarse en 2027 en la *Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal*.

Este artículo ha argumentado, a lo largo de sus diversos niveles analíticos, que la suposición común que organiza la mayor parte del discurso contemporáneo sobre la cadena de bloques —a saber, que el código puede entenderse como una «regla» análoga a la ley— confunde el objeto de la regulación con algo considerablemente más pequeño y manejable de lo que realmente es, y que, por el contrario, es mejor concebir el código como un sistema en capas, un entorno o una ecología de producción de reglas, dentro del cual lo humano —y la sistémica humana en general— no se opone ni se obedece tanto como se ve progresivamente desplazado, traducido y, al final, solo parcialmente recuperable. El modelo de la Sacher-Torte desarrollado anteriormente le da a ese desplazamiento una estructura en lugar de dejarlo como una metáfora: el significado legal, a medida que desciende desde la ley y la intención a través del compilador, el código de bytes, el código de operación y la capa de consenso, pierde parte de su contenido semántico original en cada traducción, de modo que lo que queda a disposición de los reguladores humanos para cuando se ejecuta una transacción no es el control sobre las capas inferiores del sistema —que para entonces se han convertido en un lenguaje en gran medida autónomo y autorreferencial—, sino solo una serie de puertas, ubicadas dondequiera que la ecología en capas se cruce con las instituciones legales y políticas humanas, en las que los reguladores pueden decidir, a menudo tardíamente y siempre de manera incompleta, si admiten lo que el sistema ya ha producido. El verdadero conflicto que este artículo ha buscado exponer, entonces, no es el conflicto que habitualmente se escenifica entre el Estado de derecho y el gobierno del código (o por código), como si se tratara de dos soberanos que se disputan un mismo trono, sino un conflicto entre distintas ecologías regulatorias, cada una de las cuales organiza el significado, la autoridad y ahora, como ha demostrado el análisis de la arquitectura temporal de la cadena de bloques, incluso el tiempo mismo de acuerdo con lógicas internas incompatibles, de modo que la única tarea que le queda al derecho es la relativamente modesta, pero de ninguna manera trivial, de dotar de contenido normativo a las puertas en las que esas ecologías se ven obligadas a encontrarse.

Hay otras dos ideas, desarrolladas en detalle más arriba, que agudizan esa afirmación general y no deben quedar relegadas a un segundo plano. La primera es que toda explicación sobre el propósito y la gobernanza adecuada de la cadena de bloques, incluida la explicación de la Sacher-Torte que aquí se ofrece, es en sí misma una forma de discurso interesado y oracular: una afirmación, planteada por una parte que tiene algo que ganar, sobre un futuro tecnológico que aún no puede verificarse, calculada para asegurar una distribución particular de la autoridad entre el ser humano y la máquina bajo el pretexto de describir una situación técnica. Ese reconocimiento reflexivo, tomado del debate más amplio entre las narrativas competidoras sobre la gobernanza de la IA analizadas en otros lugares, exige que la tesis de este artículo no se lea como una descripción neutral finalmente capaz de zanjar el debate sobre el gobierno del código, sino como un participante más en ese mismo debate, cuya capacidad de persuasión radica precisamente en cuán plausiblemente pide a sus lectores que acepten como suficiente un orden particular de la autoridad entre humanos y máquinas. La segunda idea se refiere al tiempo y, en algunos aspectos, es la más fundamental de las dos, porque muestra que el logro técnico más aclamado de la cadena de bloques —la producción de una sucesión lineal y consensuada de estados validados entre nodos que no comparten un reloj común, un soberano ni un presente físico— no es ni un descubrimiento atemporal sobre la naturaleza de la sucesión ni un logro metafísico que deba celebrarse sin reservas o descartarse como una ilusión, sino más bien una elección, que requiere energía, se vuelve a ganar continuamente y es objeto de disputa política, para imponer una imagen particular e históricamente específica del orden: un modelo de sucesión estrictamente serial, dialéctico y de un bloque a la vez, cuyo poder es inseparable de su estrechez, y que ha demostrado ser lo suficientemente duradero como para sobrevivir, aparentemente intacto, incluso a su última y más exótica propuesta de revisión: el injerto de representaciones genuinamente no clásicas y entrelazadas cuánticamente en un libro mayor que, a pesar de toda esa innovación, sigue permitiendo que cada nuevo estado se construya únicamente a partir del único estado que lo precede inmediatamente. La cadena de bloques, en otras palabras, no se limita a organizar transacciones; fabrica, a partir de su propia arquitectura, las condiciones mismas de legitimidad, secuencia y verdad histórica que luego presenta a sus participantes como descubiertas en lugar de creadas, y es precisamente esta silenciosa sustitución del orden descubierto por el orden fabricado lo que tanto la Sacher-Torte como los análisis temporales de este artículo han buscado hacer visible.

Nada de esto, si se entiende correctamente, aconseja alejarse de la cadena de bloques, ni tampoco aconseja ese tipo de entusiasmo regulatorio que trataría a la tecnología como un problema que hay que resolver de una vez por todas o como una solución que no requiere más atención humana. El código puede automatizar la aplicación de la ley con una perfección lógica que ningún texto legal puede igualar; sin embargo, sigue siendo constitucionalmente incapaz de captar la intención, el criterio y la capacidad de hacer excepciones que la ley, por imperfecta que sea, aún encarna; la ley, por el contrario, puede albergar valores, equidad y flexibilidad dentro de un único marco institucional, pero se mueve con demasiada lentitud y demasiada timidez para gobernar un sistema cuyo logro definitorio es precisamente la velocidad y la aparente neutralidad de su propia autoejecución. La cadena de bloques se sitúa, de manera incómoda, en la intersección de estas dos competencias inconmensurables, y ya sea que se aborde como tecnología, como ideología o, como ha preferido este artículo, como práctica semiótica, se erige como un experimento en curso sobre cómo una comunidad proyecta valor, orden y ahora incluso tiempo sobre lo que es, después de todo, un artefacto intangible y totalmente construido; su importancia radica no solo en las transacciones que liquida, sino en las arquitecturas alternativas de rendición de cuentas y gobernanza colectiva que hace que sean ahora concebibles, para bien o para mal.Los sistemas automatizados, registrados en un libro mayor y secuenciados de este tipo, enriquecidos por los lenguajes en capas del código y por su interpenetración cada vez más íntima con la toma de decisiones humana, han llegado para quedarse, salvo que ocurra alguna catástrofe que este artículo no prevé, y la tarea regulatoria no es, por lo tanto, resistirse a esa permanencia, sino tomar en serio su valor sin dejar de estar atentos a la lógica semióticamente completa —y, por lo tanto, semióticamente autojustificante— de los espacios virtuales que ha construido.

Esa vigilancia es importante porque el riesgo que plantea la cadena de bloques no depende tanto de la herramienta como del impulso tan humano de construir primero un instrumento, luego otorgarle la dignidad de una agencia autónoma y, finalmente, culpar al instrumento por las consecuencias predecibles de decisiones que, por muchas capas de código que intervengan, siguen siendo reconociblemente humanas; un mal trabajador, como dice el proverbio, culpa a sus herramientas, y la lógica del proverbio perdura incluso cuando las herramientas del trabajador se vuelven autorreferenciales, aseguradas criptográficamente y distribuidas a nivel global, una supervivencia que se debe en gran parte a la semiótica de la internalización y la externalización a través de la cual los agentes humanos proyectan su propia agencia hacia afuera, sobre los instrumentos que construyen, para luego desentenderse de ella.Esto no es meramente una afirmación sobre la naturaleza de los símbolos y la representación simbólica en abstracto; es una afirmación sobre cómo tales representaciones llegan a cumplir, dentro del contexto institucional y cultural específico que este artículo ha examinado, una función propiamente mitificadora,[4] convirtiendo un orden de autoridad contingente, logrado políticamente y mantenido continuamente, en algo que se presenta ante sus participantes como natural, inevitable y, por lo tanto, más allá del alcance de la controversia política ordinaria. Aquí, por fin, uno se encuentra con la ironía más profunda que este artículo ha ido trazando desde sus primeras páginas hasta las últimas: que, sea lo que sea lo que la humanidad crea estar codificando cuando construye sistemas a su propia imagen, destinados a representar una versión idealizada de sí misma, incorporará en ese sistema, de una forma u otra, los marcadores inconfundibles de su propio y persistente fracaso para alcanzar ese ideal, porque los humanos siguen siendo capaces —y apenas eso— de regularse a sí mismos, ya sea a través de las instituciones explícitas del derecho o mediante los sistemas codificados y automatizados que tratan la discreción y el juicio como cuestiones indiferentes, precisamente porque los humanos han delegado esos asuntos. Las máquinas ofrecen una coartada poco convincente para los fracasos de larga data de la humanidad en materia de autogobierno colectivo; el impulso de externalizar la culpa hacia los propios instrumentos es un tropo psicológico antiguo, comúnmente llamado «sesgo egoísta», que se basa en la presunción de que es más fácil, y más barato, suprimir o gestionar el instrumento que disciplinar a su usuario, incluso cuando, como ocurre cada vez más con los sistemas digitales, el ser humano permanece integrado en el mismo sistema al que se culpa. Esa explicación, sin embargo, no capta del todo la esencia de la cadena de bloques, pues lo que está en juego no es tanto la culpa como la confianza, y la premisa y práctica específicas de la confianza mediante las cuales la arquitectura de la cadena de bloques está diseñada para generar confianza sin exigir que nadie, incluidos sus propios diseñadores, rinda cuentas por haberla creado. El peligro de regular la cadena de bloques, en consecuencia, no es que los reguladores no aborden la tecnología, sino que la regulación que favorezcan no aborde este problema en absoluto, sirviendo en cambio para trasladar la culpa y la agencia a un instrumento que, incluso en su forma más aparentemente autónoma y autorreferencial, sigue ejecutando únicamente los términos que las decisiones humanas —tomadas en cada capa de la Sacher-Torte— continúan estableciendo.

La cadena de bloques, entendida de esta manera, no es tanto el fin de una era como el inicio de otro capítulo en el largo y inconcluso esfuerzo de la humanidad por gobernar, racionalizar y dar un significado coherente a su propia vida colectiva, un capítulo que será escrito, tal como lo ha sido este, por narradores interesados, cada uno de los cuales reivindica de manera competitiva la autoridad que confiere el gobierno exitoso de la tecnología. La prueba de cualquier análisis sobre la importancia regulatoria de la cadena de bloques, incluido el que se presenta en estas páginas, no es, por lo tanto, si gana la discusión que plantea, sino, más exactamente, qué orden de autoridad entre humanos y máquinas pide discretamente a sus lectores que acepten como suficiente; y si este artículo ha logrado algo, es hacer de esa pregunta, más que de cualquier respuesta prematura a ella, el punto de partida adecuado para lo que sea que venga después.

 

征求意见稿——《区块链监管体系：概念与实践层面的挑战》[Draft for Comments--"Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges"]

 

 

图片由 Grok 生成

 


English Version

Versión en Español

我的研究助理丹尼尔·罗斯（Daniil Rose）与我共同撰写了一篇题为《区块链监管体系：概念与实践层面的挑战》（Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges）的文章。该文的修订定稿计划于 2027 年由《罗格斯计算机与技术法学期刊》（Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal）发表。

  

本文通过多个分析层面论证指出，组织大多数当代区块链话语的普遍假设——即代码可被理解为与法律类似的“规则”——将规制对象误认为比其实际规模小得多且更易于掌控的事物， 而代码更应被视为一个分层系统、一种环境，或一个规则生产的生态系统；在此系统中，人类——更广泛地说，人类的系统性——与其说是被对立或被服从，不如说正被逐步取代、转化，并最终仅能部分地被恢复。 上文提出的萨赫蛋糕模型为这种位移赋予了结构，而非将其留作一种隐喻：法律意义从成文法和立法意图出发，经由编译器、字节码、操作码和共识层层传递，在每次转换中都会丧失部分原始语义内容， 因此，当交易执行之时，人类监管者所能掌控的已非对系统底层的支配权——这些底层此时已演变为一种高度自主且自指的语言——而仅剩一系列闸门。这些闸门分布于分层生态与人类法律及政治制度的交汇处，监管者可在这些节点上决定——通常为时已晚且永远不完整——是否接纳系统已产出的结果。 因此，本文试图揭示的真正冲突，并非通常所呈现的“法治”与“代码之治”（或“依代码而治”）之间的冲突——仿佛这两者是争夺同一王座的两个主权者——而是不同监管生态系统之间的冲突。这些生态系统各自依据不相容的内部逻辑来组织意义、权威，而正如对区块链时间架构的讨论所揭示的，如今甚至连时间本身也是如此。因此，法律唯一剩下的任务，便是为那些生态系统被迫交汇的“闸门”赋予规范性内容——这一任务虽相对温和，但绝非微不足道。

上文已详尽阐述的另外两点见解，进一步深化了这一普遍论断，不应被允许湮没其中。 其一，关于区块链目的与恰当治理的任何论述——包括本文提出的“萨赫蛋糕”模型——本身都是一种带有既得利益的、预言式的言说：这是由某一方（其自身有所图）针对尚无法验证的技术未来所提出的论断，其目的在于以描述技术现状为幌子，确保人类与机器之间的一种特定权力分配。 这种反思性认识——借鉴自其他地方探讨过的、关于相互竞争的人工智能治理叙事之间的更广泛论战——要求读者不要将本文的论点视为一种最终能够解决“代码之治”争论的中立描述，而应将其视为该论战中的又一参与者；其说服力恰恰在于，它以何等令人信服的方式要求读者接受一种特定的人机权力秩序，并认为这种秩序是充分的。 第二个见解涉及时间，在某些方面，它比前一个更为根本，因为它表明，区块链最受赞誉的技术成就——即在没有共同时钟、主权者或物理现实的节点之间，生成一系列经共识验证的、线性连续的状态——既不是关于继承本质的超时空发现，也不是一种既应无条件颂扬又应视为幻象而予以驳斥的形而上学成就， 而是一种以能量为代价、需持续重新赢得、且在政治上备受争议的选择，旨在强制推行一种特定且具有历史特殊性的秩序图景： 一种严格序列化、辩证的、逐区块推进的序列模型，其力量与其局限性密不可分，且已被证明足够坚韧——甚至在经历了最新、最奇特的修订提案（即将真正非经典的量子纠缠表示嫁接到账本上）后，该模型仍看似完好无损地存续下来；尽管进行了如此创新，该账本仍仅允许每个新状态基于其直接前一个状态构建。 换言之，区块链不仅组织交易；它还通过自身的架构，制造出合法性、序列性和历史真实性的条件，随后将其呈现给参与者，使其看起来像是“发现”而非“制造”的；而正是这种用“制造”的秩序悄然取代“发现”的秩序的现象，正是萨赫蛋糕的比喻以及本文的时序分析所试图揭示的。

如果正确理解这些观点，既不应因此而放弃区块链，也不应因此产生那种将该技术视为“必须一劳永逸解决的问题”或“无需人类进一步关注的解决方案”的监管狂热。 代码能够以任何法律文本都无法企及的逻辑完美性实现自动执法，但从本质上讲，它仍无法捕捉法律所体现的意图、判断力和例外处理能力——尽管法律本身并不完美；反过来说，法律可以在单一制度框架内兼顾价值观、公平性和灵活性，但其运作速度过慢，且过于拘泥于自身，难以治理一个其核心成就恰恰在于自我执行的速度与表面中立性的系统。 区块链尴尬地处于这两种不可通约能力的交汇点上；无论将其视为技术、意识形态，还是如本文所倾向的那样视为符号实践，它都代表着一项持续进行的实验——探索一个社区如何将价值、秩序，乃至时间，投射到本质上是一种无形且完全人为构建的人造物之上； 其意义不仅在于它所结算的交易，更在于它使问责与集体治理的替代性架构变得可被重新构想——无论结果是好是坏。  此类自动化、基于账本的序列化系统，得益于代码的多层语言以及其与人类决策之间日益紧密的相互渗透，将长期存在——除非发生本文未预见的灾难。因此，监管任务并非抵制这种持久性，而是要认真对待其价值，同时保持警惕，警惕其所构建的虚拟空间中那种符号学上完整的、因而具有符号学自我正当性逻辑。

这种警惕至关重要，因为区块链带来的风险与其说是源于工具本身，不如说源于一种再人性不过的冲动：先制造出工具，继而赋予其自主行为的主体尊严，最后却将决策的可预见后果归咎于工具——尽管代码介入了多少层，这些决策仍明显是人类所为； 正如谚语所言，拙工怪工具，而这一谚语的逻辑即便在工人的工具变得自指、加密保护且全球分布式之后依然成立——这种延续在很大程度上归因于“内化”与“外化”的符号学机制：人类行为者将自身的能动性投射到所建造的工具之上，随后又对此予以否认。 这不仅仅是对符号及其象征性表征本质的抽象论断；它更揭示了在本文所考察的特定制度与文化语境中，此类表征如何发挥出真正的“制造神话”的功能， 将一种偶然形成、通过政治手段确立并持续维系的权威秩序，转化为在参与者眼中显得自然、不可避免、因而超脱于普通政治抗争之上的存在。 至此，我们终于触及了本文从开篇至结尾所追溯的更深层讽刺：无论人类在构建以自身形象为蓝本、旨在呈现其理想化版本的系统时，自认为在其中编码了什么，它终将以某种方式在该系统中嵌入 其自身在实现该理想方面持续失败的无可辩驳的标志，因为人类仍然能够——尽管仅是勉强能够——进行自我调节，无论是通过明确的法律制度，还是通过那些将裁量权和判断力视为无关紧要之事的编码化、自动化系统——而正是因为人类已将这些事务委托给了这些系统。 机器为人类长期以来在集体自治方面的失败提供了一个拙劣的借口；将责任归咎于自身工具的冲动是一种古老的心理套路，通常被称为“自利偏见”， 其依据是这样一种假设：压制或管理工具比 约束其使用者更容易、成本更低， 即使——正如数字系统日益呈现的那样——人类仍然嵌入在被指责的系统之中。 然而，这种解释并未完全涵盖区块链的本质，因为其中涉及的核心问题与其说是归咎，不如说是信任——以及区块链架构所依据的特定信任前提与实践，其设计旨在建立信任，却无需任何人（包括其设计者本身）为这种信任的建立承担责任。 因此，监管区块链的危险不在于监管者无法应对这项技术，而在于他们所推崇的监管措施根本无法触及这一核心问题，反而会将责任和能动性转嫁给一种工具——即便该工具看似最具自主性且具有自我指涉性，它终究只是在执行人类在“萨赫蛋糕”每一层所做出的选择所持续设定的条款。

从这一角度理解，区块链与其说是某个时代的终结，不如说是人类在治理、理性化并为其集体生活赋予连贯意义这一漫长而未竟的努力中开启的新篇章——这一篇章将如同前文所述，由各怀私心的叙述者共同书写，他们各自对成功治理该技术所赋予的权威提出相互竞争的主张。 因此，对任何关于区块链监管意义的论述——包括本文所提出的观点——的检验标准，并非在于它能否赢得其所构建的论战，而在于它更严谨地要求读者默默接受何种人类与机器权威的秩序作为充分条件；如果本文在某方面取得了成功，那就是让这个问题——而非对其任何为时过早的答案——成为后续探讨的恰当起点。

 

Draft for Comments--"Blockchain Regulatory Systems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges"

 

Image created with Grok

 中文版本请见此处

 VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL

My research assistant Daniil Rose and I have prepared an article, Blockchain RegulatorySystems—Conceptual and Operational Challenges, the revised and final version of which is scheduled to be published in 2027 by the Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal. 

This article has argued, across its several analytical levels, that the common assumption organizing most contemporary blockchain discourse, namely that code can be understood as a "rule" analogous to law, mistakes the object of regulation for something considerably smaller and more tractable than it actually is, and that code is better conceived instead as a layered system, an environment, or an ecology of rule-production, within which the human, and human systemicity more generally, is not so much opposed or obeyed as it is progressively displaced, translated, and in the end only partially recoverable. The Sacher-Torte model developed above gives that displacement a structure rather than leaving it a metaphor: legal meaning, as it descends from statute and intention through compiler, bytecode, opcode, and consensus layer, loses something of its original semantic content at every translation, so that what remains available to human regulators by the time a transaction executes is not command over the system's lower layers, which have by then become a largely autonomous and self-referential language, but only a series of gates, positioned wherever the layered ecology happens to intersect with human legal and political institutions, at which regulators may decide, often belatedly and always incompletely, whether to admit what the system has already produced. The real conflict this article has sought to expose, then, is not the conflict ordinarily staged between the Rule of Law and the Rule of, or by, Code, as though these were two sovereigns contesting a single throne, but a conflict among distinct regulatory ecologies, each organizing meaning, authority, and now, as the discussion of blockchain's temporal architecture has shown, even time itself according to incompatible internal logics, so that the only task remaining to law is the comparatively modest but by no means trivial one of giving normative content to the gates at which those ecologies are compelled to meet.

Two further insights, developed at length above, sharpen that general claim and ought not be allowed to recede into it. The first is that every account of blockchain's purpose and proper governance, including the Sacher-Torte account offered here, is itself a species of interested, oracular speech: a claim, advanced by a party with something to gain, about a technological future that cannot yet be verified, calculated to secure one particular allocation of authority between human and machine under cover of describing a technical state of affairs. That reflexive recognition, borrowed from the broader contest among competing AI governance narratives surveyed elsewhere, requires that this article's own thesis be read not as a neutral description finally capable of settling the Rule of Code debate, but as one more entrant in that same contest, whose persuasiveness lies precisely in how plausibly it asks its readers to accept a particular ordering of human and machine authority as sufficient. The second insight concerns time, and it is in some respects the more fundamental of the two, because it shows that blockchain's most celebrated technical achievement, the production of an agreed, linear succession of validated states among nodes that share no common clock, sovereign, or physical present, is neither a timeless discovery about the nature of succession nor a metaphysical accomplishment to be either celebrated without qualification or dismissed as illusion, but rather an energy-purchased, continuously re-earned, and politically contested choice to enforce one particular and historically specific picture of order: a strictly serial, dialectical, one-block-at-a-time model of succession whose power is inseparable from its narrowness, and which has proven durable enough to survive, apparently intact, even its latest and most exotic proposed revision, the grafting of genuinely non-classical, quantum-entangled representations onto a ledger that still, for all that innovation, permits each new state to be built only out of the single state immediately preceding it. Blockchain, in other words, does not merely organize transactions; it manufactures, out of its own architecture, the very conditions of legitimacy, sequence, and historical truth that it then presents to its participants as discovered rather than made, and it is precisely this quiet substitution of manufactured order for discovered order that both the Sacher-Torte and the temporal analyses of this article have sought to render visible.

None of this, properly understood, counsels retreat from blockchain, nor does it counsel the kind of regulatory enthusiasm that would treat the technology as either a problem to be solved once and for all or a solution requiring no further human attention. Code can automate enforcement with a logical perfection no legal text can match, yet it remains constitutionally incapable of capturing the intent, judgment, and capacity for exception that law, however imperfectly, still embodies; law, conversely, can hold values, fairness, and flexibility within a single institutional frame, yet it moves too slowly, and too self-consciously, to govern a system whose defining achievement is exactly the speed and apparent neutrality of its own self-execution. Blockchain sits, uneasily, at the intersection of these two incommensurable competences, and whether one approaches it as technology, as ideology, or, as this article has preferred, as semiotic practice, it stands as an ongoing experiment in how a community projects value, order, and now even time onto what is, after all, an intangible and entirely constructed artifact; its significance lies not only in the transactions it settles but in the alternative architectures of accountability and collective governance it makes newly thinkable, for better and for worse. Automated, ledgered, sequencing systems of this kind, enriched by the layered languages of code and by their increasingly intimate interpenetration with human decision-making, are here to stay, absent some catastrophe this article does not predict, and the regulatory task is accordingly not to resist that permanence but to take its value seriously while remaining alert to the semiotically complete, and therefore semiotically self-justifying, logic of the virtual spaces it has built.

That alertness matters because the risk blockchain poses is less a function of the tool than of the all-too-human impulse to first build an instrument, then grant it the dignity of autonomous agency, and finally blame the instrument for the predictable consequences of decisions that remain, however many layers of code intervene, recognizably human; a bad worker, as the proverb has it, blames his tools, and the proverb's logic survives the worker's tools becoming self-referential, cryptographically secured, and globally distributed, a survival owed in no small part to the semiotics of internalization and externalization through which human agents project their own agency outward onto the instruments they build and then disclaim it. This is not merely a claim about the nature of symbols and symbolic representation in the abstract; it is a claim about how such representations come to serve, within the specific institutional and cultural setting this article has examined, a properly mythmaking function, converting a contingent, politically achieved, and continuously maintained ordering of authority into something that presents itself to its participants as natural, inevitable, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary political contestation. Here, finally, one meets the deeper irony this article has traced from its opening pages to its last: that whatever humanity believes itself to be encoding when it builds systems in its own image, meant to represent an idealized version of itself, it will embed in that system, one way or another, the unmistakable markers of its own persistent failure to attain that ideal, because humans remain capable, and then only barely, of regulating themselves, whether through the explicit institutions of law or through the encoded, automated systems that treat discretion and judgment as matters of indifference precisely because humans have delegated those matters away. 

Machines offer a poor alibi for humanity's long-running failures of collective self-governance; the impulse to externalize blame onto one's own instruments is an ancient psychological trope, commonly called the self-serving bias, resting on the presumption that it is easier, and cheaper, to suppress or manage the instrument than to discipline its user, even when, as digital systems increasingly do, the human remains embedded within the very system being blamed. That account, however, does not quite capture blockchain, for what is at stake there is less blame than trust, and the specific premise and practice of trust by which blockchain's architecture is designed to manufacture confidence without requiring anyone, including its own designers, to remain accountable for having manufactured it. The danger in regulating blockchain, accordingly, is not that regulators will fail to address the technology, but that the regulation they favor will fail to reach this problem at all, serving instead to relocate blame and agency onto an instrument that is, even at its most apparently autonomous and self-referencing, still only executing the terms that human choices, made at every layer of the Sacher-Torte, continue to set. 

Blockchain, understood this way, is less the closing of an era than the opening of another chapter in humanity's long and unfinished effort to govern, rationalize, and give coherent meaning to its own collective life, a chapter that will be written, as this one has been, by interested narrators each staking a competing claim to the authority that successful governance of the technology confers. The test of any account of blockchain's regulatory significance, including the one advanced in these pages, is accordingly not whether it wins the argument it stages, but, more exactingly, what ordering of human and machine authority it quietly asks its readers to accept as sufficient; and if this article has succeeded in anything, it is in making that question, rather than any premature answer to it, the proper starting point for whatever comes next. 

The Abstract and Introduction may be accessed here. The full draft may be accessed here. The Draft is available in Chinese (中文版本请见此处) and Spanish (VERSIÓN EN ESPAÑOL).

New working paper: "The Vanguard Explains Itself: 党性, Self-Revolution and the Governing Loop in the Text and Gloss of the Fifth Plenum Resolution on Party Self-Governance (2026) ["新工作论文：“先锋队的自我阐释：党性、自我革命与《关于持之以恒推进全面从严治党若干重大问题的决定》（2026）文本及疏解中的治理闭环”]

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On 29 October 2026 the Fifth Plenum of the 20th Central Committee adopted a Resolution (决定) on full and rigorous Party self-governance (全面从严治党). On 1 November, that Resolution was published together with Xi Jinping's Explanation (说明) of the draft. This paper reads the two documents as a pair — a text and its gloss — in the Chinese originals and the official English, and asks what they reveal about how the Party understands its own process of governing itself.  

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This paper reads the pair as a text and its gloss, and reads both through three Chinese signs (全面从严治党, 自我革命 and 社会革命) and through 党性, the Party spirit that the Resolution makes the fundamental task of Party self-governance. Working from the Chinese originals and the official English, I suggest, tentatively, that the pair may be understood as one moment in an iterative, mimetic and recursive dialectic: a deductive core ideology, a specified vanguard agent, contradiction as the occasion of expression, routinized processes of self-revolution, and the return of their results to state and society through institutionalized channels. On that reading 党性 is the form the dialectic takes in persons, self-revolution the same process at the scale of the Party, and social revolution, which neither text names, is carried by the vocabulary of mission, performance and national rejuvenation. I indicate where the texts support this reading and where they resist it: several doctrinal terms are left unnamed, the official English softens 自我革命 to "self-reform," and the outward test of self-revolution remains administered by the hierarchy it tests.

Section 2 places the pair in its occasion and sequence. Section 3 summarizes each document. Section 4 examines their relationship as an inter-subjective dialectic, a semiotic system and a phenomenology of action plans and goals. Section 5 takes the three Chinese signs in turn. Section 6 develops 党性 as the kernel of the loop and tests the account stated above link by link. Section 7 steps back to a broader analysis of the loop, the strands, the gate and the limits of self-reading. Section 8 draws the strands together and states hypotheses and expectations. The approach is reconstructive rather than evaluative. The aim is to describe the system in terms close to its own, before asking what its own grammar makes difficult for it to see. A few of the paper's central observations:

— The two documents divide labor rather than duplicate each other. The Explanation carries provenance — the drafting chronology, the consultations, a stipulative definition of self-revolution. The Resolution carries the program and the binding language. Read separately, each is partial; read together, they function as a single documentary account of concentration and return.
— 党性 (Party spirit) appears to operate as more than a slogan. It is named as the Resolution's fundamental task and the subject of its first substantive Part, and its associated measures — education, grounding in theory, cultivation through tradition, tempering in practice, and appraisal — move through a sequence that reproduces, at the scale of the individual member, the architecture the Resolution applies at the scale of the Party.
— Self-revolution (自我革命) is a narrower and more tightly controlled term than its English rendering suggests. It appears only five times across the two Chinese texts, always as a defined concept rather than an ordinary verb, and the official English translates it in every instance as "self-reform" — a choice that removes the word "revolution" from the English-language record entirely.
— Social revolution, which Xi's own prior doctrine names as the stated purpose of self-revolution, does not appear by name in either 2026 document. Its function is carried instead by the vocabulary of mission, modernization, and national rejuvenation, and by a three-part test of officials' achievements. The paper sets out several possible readings of that absence without resolving among them.
— The texts are candid about certain structural features of their own design — multiple organs of observation, vertical reporting lines, mechanisms for reversing erroneous accusations — while remaining silent on others. The paper argues that verification within this system is, as a structural matter, conducted by the hierarchy being verified, and that this is a feature the texts describe rather than one they can resolve.

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The theoretical account I want to examine can be put in a single sentence that has several layers. A deductive origin (the core ideology) supplies premises; an agent is specified (the vanguard Party at the head of a united front of patriots, organized against the unpatriotic); the expression of the whole is set in motion, in its phenomenology, by the triggering effect of contradiction; the meeting of that challenge requires a subset of routinized dialectical processes, which Xi calls self-revolution, leading toward what he calls social revolution; the results are expressed as policy meant to meet the challenge identified at each stage of historical development; and that policy is injected into the state through mechanisms I have elsewhere described as whole-process people's democracy. The proposal I take up in Section 6 is that this self-reflexive, recursive and inter-subjective process may be the essence of 党性, and that 党性 is the form in which the process exists in persons.

The paper closes with a set of explicit, falsifiable hypotheses — about appraisal criteria, reporting rhythms, Party organization in emerging economic sectors, and whether the self-revolution/social-revolution formula reappears at the 21st Congress in 2027 — together with the observations that would count against each.

This is offered as a working paper and a tentative reading. Comments, corrections, and other engagement offline from readers of the Chinese texts are genuinely welcome.

The working draft follows and may be accessed and downloaded HERE.

Brief Reflections on the 2026 American Elections and the Critical Importance of Lessons Unlearned for the Operation of the Republic

Pix Credit: William Blake the Great Red Dragon and the Beats from the sea

It appears that the political classes are doomed to repeat past errors. Or perhaps political classes have made a virtue of the vices that both bring them to power and that make inevitable the collapse of the "good feeling" that made their rise to power plausible.  

These are the thoughts that came to mind as I observe the vanguard of public intellectuals and what passes in modern form for press elements and perhaps as well the insertions of commentary by the propaganda departments of foreign and domestic actors respecting what has at least momentarily been names the "blue tsunami" referencing the  election of candidates put forward by a fractured Democratic Party that managed to hold itself together long enough to present a plausible united front to voters at least when measured against that motley crew of Republican Party cadres put forward by their parties, and in many cases endorsed by the President, and, it turns out, serving primarily as grist for the mill of popular entertainment for the masses.

I was reminded of all of this as I returned to an earlier assessment of the failures and cautions of another election cycle--the Presidential election of 2020, and its analysis of lessons and cautions to be learned. Neither Party did--the Democratic Party in 2024 and the Republicans in 2020 and (again) in 2026. As the Trump Administration Fades into the Shadows of History (and Myth) Lessons Left Unlearned (8 November 2020). 

I noted in 2020 the likelihood that lessons would tend to go unlearned or if learned, ignored.

And so, while they are fresh in mind, perhaps it serves some small purpose to briefly list some of the long term lessons that might be lost in the euphoria of the narrative of casting demons back to Hell--the moral of the story that is evidenced by our collective behaviors--now exposed. These are purely idiosyncratic. They will quickly be forgotten, buried beneath the glorious incantations of the myth making that will provide the catchy tunes that can distract the masses and keep them on course. Still, the recognition of demons might provide even marginal protection against temptation. We might in the end find solace in the fact that the temptations to which we will succumb will be different that those of our ancestors, and to that even myth making may prove of some value; clarity more. (As the Trump Administration Fades into the Shadows of History (and Myth) Lessons Left Unlearned)

So collective organizations find it hard to learn, or collective memory in the US is short, sharp, and brutal. Certainly the Republican Party and this President have been here before, in the course of an election that produced what one would have thought would be  core lessons for politics moving forward. But that is the ting about ideological positions within cognitive cages of ordering belief. Both Democratic and Republican Parties remain infected with this virus which, to the delight of those who produce and sell political those sort of certified pharmacopeia for alleviation (but not cure--there is no money in cure) of the symptoms of political cultures that appear to enhance the cyclical nature of mandate-disaster that appears to be the resting state of the American political environment at the moment. And, of course, there is another lesson--whatever one's cognitive cage, politics, like markets, is unforgiving of failure. A bad merchant is subject to penalty as severe as that which awaits a failed institutionalist, gloablist etc. Thus is a lesson learned over and over from the time of the Bush 1 Administration but never internalized.

Of course this is all meaningful at the margins. The American Republic is still blessed, to a lesser extent perhaps, but still blessed with  highly fractured political bases and a highly segmented  political-economic-social framework within which collectives have room to battle. Even if each of these collectives are themselves highly centralized--like the political parties, the core of economic sectors, the ruling elements of religious collectives, and identitarian socio-political collectives, there is enough fracture that mitigates the effects of these cyclical changes (within the parameters of the cognitive orders within which they occur). 

That plausible reality (as we understand that term in the here and now and among a semiotically collective aggregation of people/things/objects/ideas) does not minimize the power of the margins. American love the marginal. Marginalia is what tends to drive change and distort as well what appears to be the heartland of signification. But then that has been the case for a long time. But marginalia as driving forces can produce a simulated environment of signification within its communicative structures (the press, Tik-Tok, social media, sewing circles, agitation on the streets) that is itself quite potent. And the failure to play effectively to the margins tends to produce the simulacra of reality that then might be realized--for example in elections. 

In 2020 I offered these "lessons" that were then and appear again (2020) and again (2026) left unlearned. These are the lessons that serve as food for thought for Republican Party cadres and a warning to the cadre organization(s) of the Democratic Party especially now when in the intoxicating atmosphere of  victory it may well slip back into old patterns fueled, in the American style of this century (and part of the last) by arrogance, delusion (mandate versus narrow victory) and vanguardist dreamscapes that are belied by the fracture of the populace  whose welfare (not that of the cadres or their political collectives) is their charge. 

 1. The privileges of the press have produced quite poisoned fruit. News media are deeply political actors embedded in their own webs of ownership and control; the temptations of those webs, and of the class and political interests of those who serve press organs, have been both realized and effectively deployed. But in the process the Americans have lost their press, at least their myths about the press and press purity.  

2. Cruelty never pays.  The temptation to be cruel runs deep in American politics--of both the left and the right.  The Trump Administration gave in to the temptation of cruelty.  So did the Biden Administration after 2020.

3. Respect the dead and dying.  American cultural taboos remain strong in connection with the dead and dying; especially those who are dead or dying and who have given service to the state.  Their political views, the correctness of their positions, or their alignment with a speaker make no difference.  Leadership that fails to respect the dead and dying produce the sort of feeling of dirtiness that inevitably shows up in the polls. Both Parties partake in full measure the rejection of this lesson in their lust to rise up of the corpses of their enemies.

4. Loyalty is a prime value. Abandonment is certainly the prerogative of empire--but it runs against core principles of American morals. Loyalty, honor, respect--these are crucial elements in the American social order--derogation of which without sufficiently powerful explanation harms those engaging in these behaviors as much as their targets. 

5. Bullying plays well to the masses; but only for a short time. The psychology of the bully is well established, even in national and international relations.  It is a sign of weakness and while tolerated for a while (short term value of concessions to bullies may be useful in well thought out), one might want to be able to use bullies without being one  That was a lesson unlearned after 2016. And it is the great lesson that will have to be learned by other great states, and their helmsman int he coming decade. The bully eventually falls if only because, left to her own devices long enough, it becomes possible for former enemies to unite or establish a short term alliance to rid themselves of the bully.  

6. Social media is now a political territory in private hands. The tweet will never be the same again.  All actors are now learning the art of managing twitter accounts and of the development of policy through tweets.  Only the old worry about this. The revolution in communication invites suppression, displacement, and the passions of mobs which can be used effectively but which also consume those who deploy them. 

7. Your friends are not your enemies and your enemies are not your friends. The lesson is in the way in which friendships are managed and cultivated. A hierarch makes for a very bad ally even when the reality of the relationship is hierarchical. Bu worse, of course, is the appearance of treating friends contemptuously while appearing to cultivate the friendship of enemies.  The strategies underlying communication might have been sound, the performance of that strategy was both sloppy and dangerous for the Republic.  

8. If one is going to be ruthless one should not hold back. Playing "footsie" with adversarial states is one thing; failing to be ruthless when it is required is another. There are any number of situations that serve, in this respect, as contemporary traps for both the Republican and Democratic Party visions of the world.  Proportionality is the way that hierarchs disappear and become subaltern. Perhaps that is that awaits the Republic, and it is a choice that its polity is always free to make by remaking their own cultural norms that transform the unacceptable into the natural. 

9. Sloppiness is fatal in an administrative state. This is a lesson that will likely be learned well. The Trump Administration became famous for its administrative gestures--through executive orders, and the discretionary decision making of its officials in areas deeply unpopular with Administration's political enemies.  For 2026 I would add that the failure to ruthlessly drive home the point of judicial overreaching and to use media sources and political action to create and refine a narrative of judicial encroachment on the powers of the legislature and executive (especially with respect to their equity powers) magnified the opportunity for enemies to create a marvelously effective narrative of impotence.  

 10. If you are going to break something have an alternative already prepared. The corollary is that if one is going to blow stuff up, one must plan well for the consequences of the explosions. This is a lesson that neither Party feels much interest in learning precisely because the blowing up produces the necessary short term capital. Long term investments are harvested by those who come after. Follow through as opposed to media driven gesture  has now become a rarer species of political action. It  survives beyond political space, and that makes such spaces worth protecting against the political cadres of vanguardist collectives.

11. If you want to be a star be sure that the camera likes you and that you know your lines. There is almost nothing more revealing than the lens of a camera.  Americans became aware of that during the Nixon-Kennedy debates more than half a century ago.  Americans love a pretty face, they tend to be horrified  by camera presence that exposes. Yet they cannot get enough of either. And while scandal (manufactured, amplified, or distorted) brings attention the simulacra of the lives of candidates must be closely managed to be effective.  

12. "Not my President" has become an irresistible tactic of American politics.  The opposition first to President Obama and then to President Trump refined the value of the agit-prop technique of "Not my President." Other related theatrics now serves as the fetish of politics--as entertainment and solidarity building between one and the "other". Both political parties and the fringes around them have turned what had once been marginal theatre into the core of a strategy which has become too useful to resist.  But the price of its use is increasingly steep. Control is an illusion best served up post mortem. 

13. Majorities do not make mandates. The myth of majority power continues to exert a fatal influence on elected officials whose inclination to believe their own election propaganda leads to the sort of hubris that produces fatal miscalculations. Bare majorities ought to counsel caution and respect for the entirety of the polity, especially respecting subtle and complex issues of policy grounded in easier to understand (if not to embrace uniformly) core principles.  That lust to treat a majority as a mandate is an object that exacts sacrifice--one usually paid by the Republic rather than by those officials who invoke the myth.

14. Personal disloyalty produces betrayal. This was an administration notorious for the extent to which its former members engaged in increasingly passionate betrayals of their former leader.  There is a connection but it is more complex than the usual quid pro quo analysis.  Embracing a culture of disloyalty tends to attract like minded people.  The charterer of the leader s then reflected in her subordinates.  An office the operative glue of which is disloyalty would also tend to embrace betrayal as a useful (defensive and offensive) tool.  

I expect a repetition of these errors by the victorious candidates in the last election, whose victories I salute and whom I wish well enough. Beyond that there is myth making; necessary myth making--because reality is only what can be made to be believed, and one can cause many things to be believable.  Perhaps myths are the most useful product of analysis.That ensures the sort of stability in cyclicity that the Republic for some reason now appears to have embedded in its architecture. And it is always an antidote to bad television.