The 20th century spanned the collapse of the Monarchical System, the rise and fall of Actually Existing Socialism , a bunch of unpleasant failed experiments in pyramid building using human skulls, and the ascent to supremacy of Neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus . In 2007/08, the system malfunctioned spectacularly: it's clearly unstable and has huge problems, but what's going to replace it?

In the right corner of the ring, Neo-reactionaries like Mencius Moldbug (blog here) and Michael Anissimov are effectively libertarians who have thrown up their hands in disgust and concluded that the modern age—by which they mean everything since the Enlightenment—is corrupting, degrading, and on a highway to hell, and the appropriate political solution to the problem is to go back to aristocracy as an organizing principle, or even the divine right of kings. (Techcrunch describe them as Geeks for Monarchy. I think they're full of shit (possibly because I live in a monarchy), and so does Scott Alexander, who has written a magisterial Anti-Reactionary FAQ in which he pulls the legs off the fascist reactionary insect, the better to anatomize it.)

And in the left, we have Accelerationism. (That's a link to the Accelerationist Manifesto, by the way.) Note that the term "Accelerationism" is a dual-use tool—it's also used by some singularitarians. I'm discussing the other variety here. Advocates such as Joshua Johnson sum it up thuswise:

Accelerationism is the notion that rather than halting the onslaught of capital, it is best to exacerbate its processes to bring forth its inner contradictions and thereby hasten its destruction. As a radical act, the genesis of this idea stretches back to Marx and continues through Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, and Nick Land's cybertechnics ...

It's fairly clear in context that entryism is a corollary of accelerationism. One may even speculate that the Spiked Online/Spiked Magazine nexus and the Institute of Ideas think tank are an entryist front.

The Spiked crew are drawn from the former Trotskyite Revolutionary Communist Party, led by Frank Furedi. In the wake of the collapse of the USSR the RCP entered a period of re-evaluating everything and then re-surfaced as free market Libertarians. Other offshoots included Living Marxism magazine in the early 90s (shut down in the wake of a libel lawsuit brought by ITN). Per wikipedia, "The green journalist George Monbiot has accused him of overseeing crypto-Trotskyist entryism designed to insert ex-RCPers into positions of cultural and media influence, where they pursue an extreme pro-technology right-wing libertarian agenda." That's not totally plausible in view of the bizarre direction the members of the RCP have taken since 1990.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Revolutionary Communist Party has probably adopted a Trotskyite flavour of Accelerationism as its guiding doctrine for the 21st century, and is pursuing their strategic goal by attempting to exacerbate the coming Crisis of Capitalism by acting as Libertarian/free-market agents provocateur. (Implicitly, in order to bring about the Left-Singularity.) ( Sanity Conservation Warning: The only bloggers currently using the term "Left-Singularity" seem to be barking hatstand neo-reactionaries. Memetic prophylactic recommended. You have been warned. )

Anyway. Let's chain the daisies together. What do we get?

We get former Trotskyites who have decided that the best way to achieve Communism is to encourage the worst excesses of Neoliberalism, until the system implodes under its own weight and it becomes apparent that the only way out of the rat-trap is forward on full afterburner into the Accelerationist future. They therefore establish Libertarian fronts and enthusiastically encourage the worst excesses of capitalist globalization, including the application of the shock doctrine to the western economies that originally applied it to their former colonies ... all the time living it up. (Because, let's face it, right wing think tank gurus might plausibly get to wear expensive suits, snort cocaine, and drive expensive BMWs rather than sitting around in dismal squats with leaky roofs holding self-criticism sessions like silly old-school Maoists: which lifestyle would you rather have? Alas, I am informed by Ken Macleod that the folks at Spiked Online are not in fact Gordon Gekko-like creatures of the night. Damn, I'll just have to file that caricature away for a near-future novel ...)

We also have former libertarians who, in despair at the failure of the tin idol of the free market, conclude that the Enlightenment was all some sort of horrible mistake and the only solution is to roll back the clock. Today, we are all—except for the aforementioned Neo-reactionaries—children of the Jacobin society: even modern Conservativism has its roots in the philosophy of Edmund Burke, who formulated a radical refutation of and opposition to the French Revolution—thereby basing his political theories on the axioms of his foe. As Trotsky observed, "Learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies." Despair is a common reaction to defeat, as is Stockholm syndrome: with the impending death of neoliberalism becoming clearer to the many libertarians who assumed it would bring about the small government/small world goals of the paleolibertarians—as it becomes clear that the fruits of neoliberalism are instability and corporate parasitism rather than liberty and justice for all—is it unreasonable of them to look to an earlier, superficially simpler settlement?

This we come full-circle. The Trotskyites of old have donned the Armani suits of libertarian and neoliberal think-tank mavens. And the libertarians have begun to search for a purer pre-modern framework with which to defend themselves against the searing vision of the radiant future. Welcome to the century of the Trotskyite monarchists, the revolutionary reactionaries, and the fringe politics of the paradoxical! I hope you brought popcorn: it's going to be nothing if not entertaining.



