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The 21st Century is the 19th Revisited: The Contemporary Political Spectrum

19th Century                          21st Century

“Throne and Altar” =Traditional capitalist elites (big oil, agriculture, manufacturing)

Pro-royalist peasants=Populist nationalists (Trumpists, Le Penists, UKIP)

Rising bourgeoisie=techno-oligarchs, professional/managerial class

information/knowledge class, elites among traditional outgroups

Social Democrats (Bernstein)=Berniebros, Green Party

Communists (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky)=Antifa/SJWs/Neo-Communists

Establishment Classical Liberals (Spencer, Sumner)=Kochs, CATO Institute

Radical Classical Liberals (Bastiat, Molinari)=Mises Institute

Eugenicists/Racists (Galton, Chamberlain)=Alt-Right/White nationalists

Anarcho-Communists/Syndicalists=Left-Anarchists (LibCom, Anarkismo, AK Press, C4SS)

The remaining question is the issue of how to classify those of us who are attempting to formulate some kind of anarchist or radical tendency that is independent of the Left paradigm, e.g. post-leftists, agorists, primitivists, egoists, transhumanists, Zeitgeist/Venus Project, radical an-caps, startup societies, neo-tribalists, eco-villagers, national-anarchists, panarchists, neo-mutualists, neo-Georgists, etc. I’m inclined to think that the closest analogy would be to the utopian colonies, religious communes, early anarchists (Godwin, Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy), early socialists, and radical utopian thinkers from the 19th century (some of whose works read more like science fiction than political theory). In fact, ideas of this kind often defined the Left of the 19th century before leftism came to be identified with either reformist parliamentary social democracy or revolutionary Marxism (which many an-coms and an-syns also veered towards).

 

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