Synarchism: The Right-Wing of the 22nd Century

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Socraftes

26 min readMar 5, 2023

This is the first of a two-part series. Read the second part, “Artelism: The Left-Wing of the 22nd Century” here.

There is a mixing of colors going on. And the bastard child of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev and Carl Schmitt has finally come home to roost. You will have to bear with me here as I talk about these two men, not necessarily because of the content of their political ideas, but the form of it.

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev

Back in the 1920s when European communists were organizing and strategizing en masse to start revolutions across the West to bring about an international socialist society, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was a maverick Tatar Bolshevik who argued that a communist revolution first taking over the West wouldn’t necessarily change anything for the overexploited peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America; with him presupposing that the new Western vanguard regimes would then be interested in preserving the same living standards that colonialism had previously afforded its people, and thus engaging in the continuation of pre-existing colonialism through either discreet or wildly indiscreet means.

Being one of the earliest proponents of what is now known as dependency theory, his new proposed strategy of action was based on starting revolutions across the colonies first and insulating these newly-independent polities from global capitalism, essentially cutting off the natural resources and cheap labor that Western countries had relied on to accumulate their wealth and raise their living standards. Only when the overwhelming majority of these former colonies had joined in on this great embargo of the West would the instruments of global capitalism that depended on colonial exploitation to stay powerful be finally starved out, eventually collapsing unto itself and making way for international egalitarian communism. Or at least, so was the saying.

But what made Sultan-Galiev so different wasn’t just his preference for a revolution in Asia and Africa over a revolution in Europe, but his belief that these proposed revolutions do not necessarily have to be communist in character for them to damage the influence of the West. It did not matter if the revolutions were communist, fascist, anarchist, liberal, or even theocratic, as long as those revolutionary regimes embargoed the colonialist West, it was still a blow to capitalism.

The plurality of these communist, fundamentalist, fascist, democratic and other regimes were to come under the umbrella of a Colonial International that would supersede the Communist International in importance by not only serving as a basis of collaboration, commerce and aid between these newly-liberated countries while excluding the West, but also to serve as a stage for an international coalitionary “dictatorship of the colonies over the metropole”, to return the capitalist plunder of the world from the West back to the rest in a historical correction of wealth redistribution as an act of indulgent mass vengeance, and by nature, a mass exportation of the developed West’s specific historical conditions of metropolitan industrial labor alienation onto the rest of the world, now with their brand new native capitalists and brand new native proletariat, now all truly ripe for an orthodox Marxist revolution bereft of need for Bolshevik-style socialist industrialization.

Seeing what he perceived as an ignored potential in the Muslim world for explosive revolutionary energy, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev had proposed an ideology that came to be known as Islamic National Communism, an attempt at reconciling Marxism-Leninism with anti-colonialist nationalism and Islamic integralism in order to cast as wide a net as possible in terms of appeal for Europe’s Muslim-majority colonies. A coalition against not only colonialist capitalism, but a coalition against Christianity and for Islam, a coalition against Westernization and for nativism.

The thing is that Sultan-Galiev wasn’t really a religious sectarian, he wasn’t a social conservative, he actually saw the decline of Islam as a good thing. But Sultan-Galiev seemed to believe that if his hypothesis of the dependency theory is indeed true, then the most pragmatic course of action for the international communists would be to break bread with the forces of petty nationalism and religious fundamentalism in the colonial peripheries of the world for until the time comes when communism no longer requires their alliance to continue sieging and subjugating the capitalist West.

For it was either this, or having to bear the insurmountable task of trying to export ideologically pure Marxist thought onto to the destitute reaches of the world and unironically replicating the same power dynamics of European missionaries exporting Christianity onto the native peoples of their New World colonies, something Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev already saw happening within the early days of the Soviet Union as he predicted that its government’s internal dynamic would slowly corrode the initial pluronationalist character of the Bolshevik regime by continuing to obfuscate the line between Marxism-Leninism and Russian assimilationism until both became inseparable from each other in terms of the USSR’s domestic policy practices.

Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev was the first person ever to be arrested by Stalin’s secret police, and would be executed in the USSR for the crimes of treason in 1940. The method of his treason being a conspiracy to organize a “Pan-Turkic bourgeois-democratic secessionist state within the USSR”.

Carl Schmitt

As Sultan-Galiev’s works faded into a footnote in Russian history, somewhere else in Europe, a disgraced legal scholar named Carl Schmitt would have trouble finding employment in West Germany due to his adamant refusal to disavow fascism. Schmitt had not only previously been a member of the Nazi Party, but was actually the person who provided the philosophical and legal justification for Adolf Hitler seizing ultimate power with the Enabling Act of 1933.

While Carl Schmitt would continue to write many books and articles before, during and after the Nazi regime regarding topics such as parliamentary democracy and constitutional law, it was his criticism of the liberal international order that came to be a cornerstone in the formation of a newer understanding in realist geopolitical thinking. Schmitt favored the international order of pre-WWI Europe for the reason that its nations had clearly delimitated “rights to war” and “laws of war”. The national right to declare war in Schmitt’s eyes, had changed the default understanding of war by making both parties of the war considered mutual belligerents, and the European order had no room for the concept of morally just wars.

By removing all moral narratives from war, not only would observing states possess the right to back either side or remain neutral without moral considerations to restrict their options, the warring sides themselves would be removed from having to appoint blame, allowing for a greater enforcement of the “laws of war”. If both sides are to equally hold each other and themselves responsible for the war, it becomes far easier to establish conventions between each other on how to conduct war, such as distinguishing between combatants and civilians, or abstaining from using methods of warfare that endangers civilians lives and property. For one side breaking the law of war would mean inviting in an international narrative that this may be have been a morally unequal war all along, and leading to a self-inflicted diplomatic isolation.

Once legitimate and illegitimate belligerency is separated, it becomes impossible to argue that observing states have the right to back either side. Schmitt rejected the project of creating a post-war international order that would subject war to a criteria of moral and legal legitimacy, for he argued that it would not only not prevent wars, but will make the laws of war unenforceable due to unjust belligerents now always being incentivized to fight total wars, and just defenders also having to resort to total wars in retaliation.

Schmitt’s solution for this was a realist global world order that delimitates spheres of influence between hegemonic nations, and advocates for complete non-intervention between them. Despite his Nazi beliefs, Schmitt himself was indifferent to the ideology these hegemons would possess as long as the ideology served to consolidate the sphere. Schmitt believed that only when every sphere of influence, whether its a German fascist hegemon in Western Europe, a Chinese communist hegemon in East Asia, an Indian democratic hegemon in South Asia, or a Russian monarchist hegemon in Eurasia is made into its own sovereign social order akin to pre-WWI Europe is when the enforcement of the laws of war and the abolition of total war could theoretically be possible.

But a universalist ideology let loose would not only see the entire world as a potential territory to expand in, but will be in direct opposition to this realist order due to its perception of seeing these regionalized ideological-cultural diversities as aberrations. Which is why Schmitt disliked the United States for its rejection of possessing a natural sphere of influence, its desire to continually expand its market share and financial hold over other states, and its tendency to export its ideology worldwide, all being seen as an obstacle to achieving his global order.

Schmitt’s suggested strategy for realist hegemons to handle other hegemons with universalist ideological aspirations was to always diplomatically force them into positions of ideological hypocrisy and dilemma until that universalist hegemon is to either compromise that the global application of their belief is impossible, or to collapse unto internal conflict due to committing to its own ideological purity.

Which was why Schmitt was so gleeful at the rise of Mao Zedong, for he knew more than most by instantly recognizing the territorialist, telluric and ultranationalist character of Mao’s regime despite its far-left claims long before anyone else did, and predicted that Communist China’s regional hegemonic aspirations would inevitably tear apart the Cold War narrative of competition between two universalist orders by reinserting great power politics into it once again. Schmitt hoped that the rise of political communities like Mao’s would eventually disintegrate the grandstanding global community into a realist world order that he had wanted all along.

What is Synarchism?

You may ask why I just made you read 1,580 words on a Bolshevik and a Nazi (each having 790 words). But the answer is that Sultan-Galiev and Schmitt had inadvertently founded the theoretical basis for both the far-left and far-right to pragmatically collaborate with each other without engaging in ideological hypocrisy.

The Bolshevik Sultan-Galiev had found a theoretically-sound use for assisting the far-right to counter capitalism, and the Nazi Carl Schmitt saw a potential for boosting the far-left to counter liberalism. These two men have never met, and their ideologies have never actually been synthesized into practice. All I wanted to show was that a tendency of reaching across the aisle to fight against the greater enemy of liberal capitalism was not only something that started and ended with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but had far greater philosophical and strategic considerations.

Because as we continue on the 21st century, a philosophical and political engagement across the aisle not just between fascists and communists, but between libertarians and authoritarians, republicans and monarchists, and socialists and capitalists are happening. A cross-pollination of all their conceptions onto a singular blob of idealistic contradiction and incompatibility that has surprisingly managed to actually become the most resilient form of dictatorial politics that the world has ever seen. And it is very likely the newest and strongest ideological enemy to liberal capitalism yet. The new right-wing.

This tendency in authoritarian ideocracy is something that has moved well beyond being named by terms and labels that already have baggage associated with them. Socialist republics, fascist autocracies, technocratic minarchies, integralist theocracies, communist dictatorships, absolute monarchies. Such labels are no longer viable to describe this highly schizophrenitized authoritarian tendency. And as such, I would prefer to term this phenomenon of post-ideological dictatorship with a new word that has little baggage: Synarchism.

Synarchism generally means “joint rule” or “harmonious rule”. Beyond this general definition, both synarchism and synarchy have been used to denote rule by a secret elite in Vichy France, Italy, China, and Hong Kong. — Wikipedia

I think it works? A joint rule between those who hate capitalism and those who hate democracy. A harmonious rule between those who advocate for progress and those who advocate for reaction. And also a combined rule of none of these people. Ideologies divorced from policies. Policies divorced from ideologies.

Is synarchism nationalist or globalist? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism fascist or communist? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism socialist or capitalist? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism syndicalist or corporatist? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism reactionary or revolutionary? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism progressive or conservative? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism centrist or extremist? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism monarchist or republican? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism religious or secular? Both, and neither.

Is synarchism accelerationist or decelerationist? Both, and neither.

Metamodern post-ironic authoritarianism. It is all of them, and none of them. It has the capacity to engage with all of the ideas above and even implement them, with all of its contradictions, all of its incompatibilities, all of its differences, all of it in their ridiculous glory. Or it will implement none at all. As the synarchist regime engages in all narratives, you cannot tell apart which ideas are it engaging in seriously, which are it engaging with facetiously, which are it engaging with ironically, and which are it engaging with for populist appeal. The fact that none, all and some are all possible answers is the greatest strength of synarchist dictatorship.

There were ideologically variable dictatorships before. Those that also simultaneously named themselves these things as well for the sake of populist appeal, but the main difference between the 21st century synarchism and those previous dictatorships is that synarchism has proven itself to actually be able to actually engage with all of its contradictory beliefs on a theoretical basis, no matter how ridiculous.

The Conception of Corporate Communism

Communism once was a conduit of punk energy, and its promises prophesized faster generation of new cultures, greater proliferation of new arts, and an unforeseen potential to unlock newer venues of free-thinking. Even the Bolsheviks made the openly gay Georgy Chicherin their very first Foreign Minister. While many communist movements from Marx’s death to the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War exhibited genuinely progressive, anti-authoritarian and revolutionary tendencies that were barely seen during the Soviet era, so much of that energy would eventually be either suffocated by Bolshevization, or reterritorialized onto edgy social democracy.

A problem with early communist dictatorships was that by completely concentrating all annals of power and all privileges of control onto itself, the vanguard party ended up becoming the only remaining outlet for the pathologically power-hungry, the pathologically prestige-hungry, and the pathologically wealth-hungry.

As the first generation of revolutionary firebrand communists died of old age, the next generation of supposed “communists” who were to succeed them that coalesced under their authoritarian system would be the very people that would otherwise have been ruthless capitalists or demagogue politicians in a market democracy. With each new generation, the revolutionary fervor gets diluted further and further. The old guard passes away one-by-one slowly until the socialist state and its leadership finds itself no longer occupied by fervent anti-capitalist theorists, but fervent anti-change careerists; cementing an unwritten and unspoken ideological shift from revolutionary anti-capitalism towards simply a comfortable civilizational statism.

Lev Gumilev would have been arrested for his ideas about the Eastern Bloc constituting a singular civilization of passionarity if he ever published those ideas in the early days of the USSR, but since it was the late-stage Soviet Union where not only his audience, but the nomenklatura that regulated them were now both full of those more open to ideas regarding conservative preservation than communist revolution, he ended up with an undeserved honor of a maverick intellectual of the Marxist strand. Gumilev’s ideas were nothing more than the pre-existing social order seeking to justify its own existence in hindsight through conservative sophism the same way capitalist austerity retrospectively justified its own existence through Thomas Malthus and Ayn Rand.

It is extremely telling that no truly radical and revolutionary anti-capitalist force was ever able to take hold in a pocket of Eastern Europe during the 1990s when such a movement was arguably the most in-demand. Oligarchization, austerity, mafiazation, recession, poverty, destitution all came together like capitalism speedrunning onto its endgame. Yet there were barely any movements of organized labor, barely any left-wing firebrand revolutionaries, barely any communities of mutual aid, all that once used to be the signatures of 1910s European communists assisting the proletariat in fighting through capitalist destruction was barely existent. In a moment of deep disillusionment, many of these post-socialist democracies would even end up re-electing their former communists for a reprieve from capitalist onslaught, only for these supposed communists to gleefully re-impose neoliberalism.

What were you even expecting from the anti-change careerists? The very organizations that were designed to harbor and monopolize left-wing political expression had inadvertently ended up training them instead of revolutionaries, and they were all intellectually unequipped to handle the sins of actual capitalism, and most would actually participate in it.

When the Iron Curtain fell, the supposed communist parties that still remained in its cadaver had scattered into many different avenues. Some remarketed as social democrats that followed the capitalist line (Hungary, Bulgaria, Albania etc.), while other transformed into ultranationalist authoritarians that founded regimes not unlike those of the Axis powers (Turkmenistan, Belarus, Uzbekistan etc.). But the most interesting to observe were from those who still decided to stick with the label of a leftist party and still arguably had leftist ideals, but were indubitably transformed by not only a sudden exposure to Western culture, but also to social progressivism.

Yes, I am talking about Gennady Zyuganov’s Communist Party of the Russian Federation. And not just them, but also Yefrem Sokolov’s Communist Party of Belarus, Zinaida Greceanîi’s Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova, Petro Symonenko’s Communist Party of Ukraine and the variety of other supposedly communist/socialist parties that not only had a goal of fighting capitalism and reinstituting socialism, but also fighting against Western progressivism and reinstituting reactionary conservatism, all the while shilling for right-wing dictators like Putin, Lukashenko and Nazarbayev.

Communists used to be the first people in Europe that advocated for LGBTQ+ rights, they used to be the ones that talked about the rights and protections of national minorities, Lenin himself even wrote about microaggressions within tsarist society that alienated its Polish and Tatar citizenry. But somewhere along the way, these leftists came to identify the tenets of social progressivism with capitalist corrosion as well, with the fight against capitalist domination now being translated into also a fight against tolerant societies.

Perhaps this evolution was foretold, for Kim il-Sung’s North Korea, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania, and Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia were all already intensely flirting with some truly right-wing notions on what nation, culture and society ought to be despite their socialist credentials.

On top of this was the recent reappreciation of the Chinese economic success by these reactionary leftists, especially by Gennady Zyuganov himself. As China continues on with its corporatist economic model that would have been the envy of Italian rightists instead of Russian leftists a century ago, the promise to make their respective countries more akin to the Chinese style of “socialism” has also become a marketable buzzword for this reactionary left to advertise themselves with.

As the Eastern European reactionary left fall into the Chinese communist logic of “keeping surplus value in the nation as a temporary substitute to keeping surplus value in labor” as an alternative for the neoliberal model of development, they engage in an indulgent fantasy where the Soviet Union continued to exist, now running under the Dengist hyper-capitalist economic model reappropriated as Neo-Bukharinism, still a superpower and still a Leninist state. Envious at the current glory of China as something that should have been reserved for their fantasy Soviet Union, this reactionary communist tendency has had their ideology transformed into something not quite what Marx or Lenin wanted at all.

If you call yourself a communist while waxing nostalgic over the loss of some glorious superpower, while identifying social progress as Western degeneracy and advocating for economic corporate dirigisme, wouldn’t that make you ideologically aligned with fascism instead of communism? Yes. Yes, it does. They would never admit to it (except the few intellectually honest ones that took on the moniker National Bolshevism), but this cross-pollination has been a fundamental building block for what we see today as the synarchist trend. As a phenomenon, it is no longer merely limited to the post-Eastern Bloc space, as movements such as the MAGA Communists in the United States and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany are taking to the Western mainstream these forms of politics that were mostly observed within the peripheries of the Global South, now driven by people who look back upon the USSR and the social order it imposed upon the Eurasia as not a Marxist dystopia, but a conservative aspiration. And the largest of the globe’s pulpits will get to endure a new set of firebrand promises to consider for the mid-21st century: communist means towards conservative ends.

The Conception of Anarchist Fascism

What about fascism? Did fascism have to conduct this ideological outreach onto far-left ideas? As an ideology that appreciated the absolute application of absolute power, fascists had long been envious of communist regimes for being able to effectively apply the power they desired. And no, fascism as an ideology wasn’t defeated after World War II unlike popular notions. It continued to proliferate after the war, with the catch being that these regimes couldn’t get to or didn’t bother to call themselves fascist.

East Asia had Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto and Ne Win. West Asia had Hafez al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and Mullah Muhammad Omar. Africa had Hendrik Verwoerd, Mobutu Sese Seko, Francisco Macías Nguema and Isaias Afwerki. Latin America had Rafael Trujillo, Augusto Pinochet, Jorge Rafael Videla and Emílio Garrastazu Médici.

The advantage with fascism is that it has no economic ideology. Fascists have little care for whether something is socialist or capitalist, as long as it is deemed suitable. As a matter of fact, fascism has no care for the meanings of the word “socialism” or “capitalism” at all. “Socialism” shall mean whatever the fascist needs it to mean, and the same goes for capitalism as well. They can get to define what is “socialism” because as a fascist dictatorship, they have not only monopolized the meaning of the word, but they have also monopolized the means to define words as well.

With the most famous case of this being the Nazis (short for National Socialism) implementing a mass privatization of Weimar Germany’s state-owned assets to such a degree that the word “privatization” was literally invented to explain the phenomenon, the Nazis had only managed to hold on to terming their policies socialist by implementing race-specific welfare programs to ethnic German people that excluded all other races, and implementing a dirigiste four-year economic-planning system to coordinate all of the megacorporations they just empowered. Welfare and economic planning is “socialist-ish”, so the government can get away with naming it that way, while literally anything else they did would not fall under any sane definition of socialism.

The same can be seen for many other fascist regimes as well. The Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athists establishing a corporate economy ran entirely by an insular family of Assads and Husseins in a structure not unlike aristocratic absolutism, but getting to call that system “socialist” because even with this patrimonial structure they had established, the economy was planned in nature. Even Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain flirted with the “syndicalist” label, trying to implement their own band-aids of labor justice onto a system that profoundly advantaged owners over workers.

But fascism’s role in synarchist tendency was not the appropriation of leftist ideas. You can already see that such a thing has already happened. What has been new is fascism’s reappropriation of libertarian capitalist ideas in favor of socialist ones. Libertarian capitalism has always had a complicated relationship with democracy, expressed in writing by right-libertarians such as Insula Qui, Frank Van Dun and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Even chief neoliberal Friedrich Hayek would express doubt that liberal democracy could be the best system in fully harnessing the self-correcting power of the market.

Democracy as a government prone to populist public will that continues to demand greater regulations, nationalizations, protections and expenditures that would only serve to derationalize and obfuscate the efficiency of market mechanisms down the line was frequently discussed by all of them. Many would argue for an absolute monarchy as an authoritarian defender of the free market, more would advocate for a propertarian oligarchy as a democracy of businesses to institutionally insulate political decision-making from populist market disruptions.

While libertarian capitalist thinkers had long possessed doubts over the compatibility between democracy and capitalism, it would be the work of one English jungle raver and philosophy professor Nick Land that would transform the libertarian capitalist cynicism towards democracy into a full-blown ideological embrace of fascism. Considered the father of accelerationist philosophy, Nick Land would originally start off as a left-wing philosopher who advocated for the acceleration of modern capitalism’s desire-producing, deterritorializing, self-cannibalizing, and crisis-perpetuating internal hyperstitional processes as self-reinforcing mechanisms that would inevitably manifest the physicality of capitalism’s complexity production onto tangible intelligence production through technological singularity. The concept of capitalism as an artificial intelligence operating through human communities as its microprocessors, and one that will always win at game theory was a novel one. And many of his initial ideological colleagues (and sometimese even Land himself) saw this entire process as a potential to have capitalism negate itself, towards either revolutionary progress or a progressive revolution.

Accelerationist philosophy had initially been a profoundly left-wing thought, with its adherents being either socialists who wanted to help capitalism destroy itself along the Marxist Impossibilist line, or xenofeminists that sought to deterritorialize gender through capitalist decoding and completely abolish its binaries. But Nick Land himself would eventually be radicalized onto the far-right due to circumstances regarding his mental stability, drug use, and his relocation to Shanghai to escape his previous life. No longer convinced that the acceleration of capitalism can ever be harnessed for left-wing purposes, Land saw in China the basis for a new strand of accelerationist thought.

Dubbing China a “fundamentally accelerationist society”, he saw the Chinese state’s systematic intervention in the economy as actually accelerating capitalism far faster than liberal democracies ever could and began to form a brand-new idea of accelerationism. Land would eventually come into contact with the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin (pen name Mencius Moldbug) to form the Dark Enlightenment: a movement synthesizing reactionarism, ultramunicipalism and anarcho-capitalism into a singular ideological strand of fascistic cyberpunk acceleration.

Coming into a similar conclusion with previous libertarian thinkers on how the concept of freedom within the context of a democratic nation-state government was a mechanism that would perpetually add more and more regulations, inhibitions and limitations upon the free flow of capital for the sake of “progress” and “equality”. International consensus politics as symbolized by those of the United Nations and the European Union came to be seen like the plague, as over-reaches of a global governance mechanism that actively delays intelligence production. Nick Land soon came to support all forms of conservative, fascist and reactionary politics, ranging from queerphobia and antisemitism to Nazi eugenics and Christian theocracy. His reasoning being that the right-wing, in his perception, was something that does not inhibit limitations upon Capital, but merely preserves and advances its reach, whether out of pro-market beliefs, ideological tunnel-vision or appropriation by capitalist interests themselves.

Land soon came to advocate for the concept of “cold anarchism”, a slow disintegration of the present world-order onto ever multiplying and ever Balkanizing fiefdoms and statelets, an order of a million city-states that only ever looks outwards, for its internal political dynamics are already settled by matter of plutocracy and dictatorship. A world order so beyond global consensus and regulation that no United Nations, no European Union, no BRICS or no ASEAN can ever survive within it. A million nations to choose from for the billion peoples of the world, nations that you vote for with the simple instinctual procedure of your own immigration rather than voting within a single anemic nation-state through the corrupted and bureaucratic mandate of ballots. Not the freedom to choose per se, but the freedom to exit.

But the theoretical conceptions of accelerationist philosophy are not important. What is important is that Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin had successfully bridged the ideological gap between fascism and anarcho-capitalism, paving the way towards a flurry of ideologues taking that synthesis into the political mainstream, as both the strategies of its praxis and the visions it carry are now considered the forerunner to and the theoretical basis of the modern alt-right movement.

The fascists, having long settled with advocating for corporate statism, national syndicalism and half-socialism as economic platforms to bleed supporters off the disillusioned left, would now have access to a profoundly liberal-minded political audience who found the increasing viability of businesses untenable with global crises coming year on year, slowly falling into far-right radicalization and extremist praxis.

So there you have it. As a communist, you have audiences if you synthesize with reactionarism, you have audiences if you synthesize with capitalism. As a fascist, you have audiences if you synthesize with socialism, you have audiences if you synthesize with libertarianism. Bereft of anarcho-communism, the stage has been set for autocrats to exploit all other political extremes in order to establish a coalitionary monster. So why wouldn’t pre-existing regimes jump on this to consolidate their power?

So What?

Is this some horseshoe theory take that when you go far-left enough you end up on the far-right? Or is it some Orwellian take that far-left and far-right regimes are functionally identical due to their totalitarian tendencies? No, and no. There is a functional capacity for nations to preserve a purely far-left or a far-right regime without such ideological combinatorics. What I am trying to say is that at this point in history where extremists have done a profound period of rediscovery due to having no currently existing ideological pole nation to idolize, this cross-pollination of extremes has now not only become possible, but incentivized for autocrats to compete with democracies. A dictatorship where you could be radicalized in either direction and still support the dictator.

If you combine the labels that modern anti-liberal regimes get named as, the labels they intellectually engage with, the labels they parade around as national aesthetics, and the labels that would describe their actual internal policies, it really would look something like this:

The Russian Federation, a Tsarist patrimonial, Soviet patriotic, antiliberal accelerationist, neo-feudal corporatist, Slavic supremacist, Eurasianist tellurocratic, antifascist fascist, gangster autocracy.

The People’s Republic of China, a Confucian conservative, technocratic accelerationist, Marxist-Leninist, neoliberal corporatist, Han supremacist, revolutionary internationalist, neocolonialist particracy.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, an ethnonational fascist, revolutionary communist, pagan conservative, single-party casteist stratocracy led by an apotheosized absolute monarchy.

The Islamic Republic of Iran, a reactionary Islamist, revolutionary anti-monarchist, multicultural Pan-Shia, theodemocratic counterintelligence state with a centrally-planned socialist economy.

Whether these labels are worn facetiously or seriously, the trick is to always engage with their ideas no matter what. But the true potential of synarchism has not quite been seen. It could embellish in creating its own natural history of supposed ideological diversity as China does. Yesterday was communism day, and tomorrow is fascism day, but today is liberalism day. It could perhaps even embellish it through panarchist diversification. Russia may be a fascist state, but Chechnya is an Islamist one. China may be authoritarian, but Macau is indubitably libertarian. Myanmar may be a right-wing military junta, but the Wa State is very much Marxist-Leninist. As long as the centralized power is stable, the ideology may not matter.

Communism bereft of socialism. Fascism bereft of nationalism. Libertarianism bereft of liberalism. All reterritorialized along a singular authoritarian line. Progressives may already be on the path of assimilation as Occidental politics flirt with pinkwashing and femonationalism to justify identitarianism. Perhaps even the anarchists are to be reterritorialized as well, we can only wait.

Which is the reason why the evolution of the Syrian Civil War has been so interesting, for Bashar al-Assad’s government and its de facto cooperation pact with the Kurdish libertarian socialist forces in Rojava have paved a possibility previously completely unconsidered: The prospect of anarchist localities existing within a dictatorship. It remains to be seen whether Rojava forces survive this conflict, but in the case that Bashar al-Assad and Îlham Ehmed manage to reach a power-sharing agreement, that would mark it as the first step of even left-wing anarchism being reterritorialized onto synarchism.

Only now are dictators truly realizing the true extent in which their states can remarket itself like a corporation. It can change labels and switch ideologies like a company going through marketing redesign: corporate statism can be remarketed as socialist planning, social reactionarism can be remarketed as cultural decolonialization, enterprise nationalization can be remarketed as wealth redistribution, mass privatization can be remarketed as pre-socialist market forces consolidation, authoritarianism can be remarketed as sovereign democracy. But the fundamental basis is the same. Whether it is the state that dominates or the oligarchs that dominate, the synarchist government still remains a corporate parasocial entity. And all it has to do is to conquer the alienated gaze.

Because synarchism is just as much a social phenomenon of projection than it is an actual ideology. There is a deep desire within many to wish for alternatives to neoliberalism. As fascists appreciate the Eastern Bloc states for keeping immigration away, as communists appreciate the Islamists for successfully throwing off Western neocolonialism, as Islamists share Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate videos on TikTok, as libertarians begin preferring the exit from democracy over their voice in democracy.

Alienations of all kinds, whether it drives far-left desires or far-right ones, all coalesce together into this singularity of authoritarian escapism. Dependency theory and realist theory gone amok. All dictatorships are fair game as long as they can insulate itself from neoliberalism. All of us anti-neoliberal states can come together to bring the West under siege and bring an end to entrenched globalization once and for all, whether that globalization is a capitalistic one, an Occidental one, or a Semitic one depends entirely on which label fits the day.

As the Russian Federation invades Ukraine, it is both Europe’s communists and fascists that continue to come to Putin’s defense. As the far-right idolizes the reactionary dictatorial governance model of Putin as an inspiration and seek to steer their own countries into the very same rabbit hole of post-truth oligarchic fascism, the far-left seems to still have holdover nostalgic allegiance to the USSR that they mull over with a justification that Putin’s regime is a potential counter-pole to all-encompassing American neoliberalism. Same goes with the Chinese system, for quite a majority of the communists seem to see China as a success of Bukharinist planned economics on the verge of achieving developed socialism, while the fascists see the Chinese governance of nationalist technocracy as a tried-and-true alternative to the degeneracies of liberal democracy.

Every loss of the West feels like a vindication of their beliefs, whether they are communist, fascist, theocratic or libertarian. Even a patchwork neoreactionary finds solace in China outcompeting the United States. Even a communist hardliner feels schadenfreude with every nuisance Russia inflicts upon the European Union. And don’t forget all the general anti-Westerners and anti-hegemonists in between that subscribe to some utopian conception of multipolarity that they imagine to be an improvement over American dominance in one way or another.

They will have talking points from the far-left, the far-right, the anarchists, the libertarians. They will quote Hegel, Kant, Hobbes and Roussaeu. They will quote Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. They will quote Mussolini, Gentile, Evola and Benoist. They will quote Hume, Spinoza, Locke and Descartes. They will quote Luxemburg, Bordiga, Gramsci and Trotsky. They will quote D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Land and Moldbug. They will quote Friedman, Hayek, Keynes and Smith. They will quote Chomsky, Parenti, Althusser and Žižek. They will quote Leontiev, Ilyin, Gumilev and Dugin. They will quote Bataille, Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari. They will quote Hoxha, Ceausescu, Sankara and Tito. They will quote Hitler, Goebbels, Codreanu and Horthy. They will quote Rand, Hoppe, Thatcher and Reagan.

They will quote Lee Kuan Yew. They will quote Ruhollah Khomeini. They will quote Nelson Mandela. They will quote Mohandas Gandhi. They will quote Subhas Chandra Bose. They will quote Michel Aflaq. They will quote Theodore Kaczynski. They will quote Napoleon Bonaparte.

These thinkers and these leaders. Their beliefs do not matter. All that matters is a single quote from them that is marginally agreeable in the synarchist’s eyes that they can share as a belittling vindication of their beliefs in the midst of the gurgling feed of propaganda.

Whether it’s saving the cohesion of the nation by showing the middle-finger to global government, whether it’s taking a stand against exploitative finance by the reintroduction of sound money, whether it’s the severance from global trade through complete protectionism and import substitution industrialization, whether it’s the mass nationalization of Western assets to have the people’s control over the economy, whether its the advocation of the native civilization-state over the values of thalassocracies. They will oppose American hegemony, they will advocate multipolarity, they will talk about how the Western model is not universal, or they will say cultures have their own presupposed existence incompatible with Western democracy, or they will say that modern liberal prosperity is only tenable with the Global North’s neo-imperialism.

But the truth is that those who oppose universal humanist values in the modern world are very efficiently and freely engaging with each other’s anti-universalist values, learning from each other and assisting each other at this very moment. What is this if not universalism? Multipolarity as a universal value. Cultural reaction as a universal value. Economic nationalism as a universal value. Rejection of universalism as a universal value. A metamodern post-ironic coalescing of all of authoritarian history come forth into a single universalist model of amorphous anti-humanism.

Synarchism. The dictatorship so flexible that anyone who finds capitalist democracy abhorrent in one way or another can project their own utopian beliefs on it. A Schrödinger’s dictatorship. And perhaps, the ultimate one.