The Isocracy Network

Liberalism, properly understood, is not merely a justification for free markets or negative liberty. It is, at root, a philosophy of emancipation. Likewise, anarchism is not chaos, but the pursuit of a voluntary and non-dominating social order. When joined together and viewed through a dialectical libertarian lens, these traditions give birth to what I call liberal-anarchism.

The Dialectical Libertarian Method

Liberal-anarchism rests on the logic of dialectical libertarianism. This is not a rigid ideological formula but a context-sensitive methodology. Rather than judging every policy or institution by whether it is "formally libertarian," dialectical libertarianism asks whether it is functionally emancipatory in the specific social context. For example, anti-discrimination laws may restrict the formal liberty of a business owner, but in a society structured by historical domination, such laws are functionally libertarian because they reduce coercion and expand real freedom for marginalized people.

This method allows us to see that not all government interventions are oppressive. Indeed, some interventions — such as a land value taxor a social dividend — can dismantle monopolistic privileges and empower individuals. In a society where the playing field is rigged by historical concentrations of power and wealth, liberty demands more than non-interference; it demands active reconstruction.

The 2025 Canadian federal election, held on April 28, and the 2025 Australian federal election, held on May 3, both have similarities that are worth exploring, despite some of their significant differences in electoral system and political parties. In both cases, sitting centre (Liberal Party of Canada) to centre-left (Australian Labor Party) governments had struggled in polls prior to the election against their right-wing rivals, the centre-right to right-wing Conservative Party of Canada and the Liberal National Coalition in Australia. In both cases, two very clear issues dominated the election campaigns: (i) cost of living and (ii) the effects of Donald Trump as the re-elected president of the United States.

In Canada, the ruling Liberal Party rebounded from being behind the Conservatives in opinion polls for many months, gaining an 11% swing and picking up 17 seats. The Conservatives, too, made gains, however, increasing their vote by 7.5% and picking up 24 seats. However, not only did they lose the election, but their leader also lost his seat. What was important for the Liberals was, with their first-past-the-post voting system, was the drive from left-wing parties to the Liberals; Bloc Québécois declined by 1.35% and lost 11 seats, the leftist New Democratic Party dropped a remarkable 11.5% and lost 17 seats, and the Greens lost 1% of the vote and a seat. In a system that doesn't allow preferential voting or proportional representation, voters choose to vote strategically. The final result meant that the Liberals won a historic fourth term and won the highest vote share for any party in forty years. If Canada had preferential voting, it can be estimated that the two-party preferred vote would have been 55%-45%.

Sometimes there are books on political theory that are enticing in their title and vacuous in their content. Whilst many can simply be ignored, some are so impressive in both vectors that a review is justified, if only because a reader's suffrance is sufficient that they need to warn others. One such book is Mark Fisher's, "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?", published by the Zero Books (2009). The author, at the time of writing, is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University, where he earned his doctorate.

The book, cleverly, includes two references in the title and subtitle. The title is a play on the term "Socialist Realism" which, whilst the official cultural doctrine of the Eastern-bloc countries under communist rule, was thoroughly divorced from realism in any aethetic sense. "Socialist realism" was utopian, heroic, and romantic, functional rather than creative. The subtitle is a reference to the doctrine espoused by Margaret Thatcher on the alleged superiority and necessity of austerity in government expenditure for welfare. Thatcher didn't use the phrase precisely; "We have to get our production and our earnings into balance. There's no easy popularity in what we are proposing but it is fundamentally sound. Yet I believe people accept there's no real alternative.... What's the alternative? To go on as we were before? All that leads to is higher spending. And that means more taxes, more borrowing, higher interest rates more inflation, more unemployment". Clearly, Thatcher's understanding of public economics and monetary policy is flawed, promoting an old ideology that money is somehow exogenous to government.

"Fascism" has become a malediction to evoke fear and loathing of the US Republican Party under Trump, Alternative für Germany (AfD), the British Reform Party, and other right-wing movements. It's a strongly charged term, but in this context but it is false and harmful. Strategically, it is better to understand what these movements actually are rather than simply using "fascism" a pejorative. We are not witnessing the rise of fascism, but rather a fall of globalist liberal and social democracy. It has exhausted its possibilities and is losing supporters, who are turning to the populist and national-conservative right in the vain hope of improvement.

Social democracy arose in the 19th Century as a defence against the growing socialist movement. It modified capitalism, softened it to ease mass poverty and improve the living conditions of the working class, not out of benevolence but to forestall uprisings. It was effective for over a century. It is fair to say that it has included radical and socialist leanings (e.g., "Red Vienna" under the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria), but always modelled as reforms to capitalism and with parliamentary activity. Over time, it was inevitable that liberal and social democracy would become closer, a political centre for capitalism.

With the recent rise of machine learning and large language models, there is renewed interest in technological unemployment, that is, the displacement of jobs through the introduction of labour-saving devices. It is widely acknolwedged that technology causes short-term unemployment in a particular sector, the suggestion that it causes long-term unemployment has been largely considered fallacious; jobs lost to technology leads to increased productivity, lower real prices, and higher aggregate wages. Despite these historical examples, it is argued that new technologies are replacing employment without replacement in new sectors, ultimately trending toward the abolition of work. In our current political economy, a less than optimal vision of the future is presented, and alternatives must be explored.

Technology and Social Relations

There has been recognition of the role of technology, employment, and political economy for many centuries. Aristotle's Politics (325BCE) includes the following: "... a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments. For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus which, says the poet, 'of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves".

Despite the chaos and misery of Trump's first term in office, his recent re-election bodes an extreme, tumultuous, and dangerous next four years. This is not just the case for the United States, where it will have the greatest and most immediate effect, but also with other advanced economies in Europe and Australia; the far right is already ascendent in France and Germany, and it is likely to gain power in Australia. In all these cases, the success of the far-right will come from populism aimed at disenfranchised voters with lower levels of education and wealth, the collapse of the centre-right, and an ongoing identity crisis in social democracy.

The current and future far-right demagogues that will rule the world in the foreseeable future will enact a program of punishment toward their opposition, reward their favourites (regardless of legality), engage in a culture war against minorities, and, with great awareness of their ironic punishment of their supporters, engage in a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to their business allies. It is more than plausible that they will, given the opportunity, transform into a militaristic socialisation of labour in the interests of national capital. That is, a war of aggression against the developing world. Understanding this trajectory suggests not only the dire need for organised and effective political strategy but also a working reconsideration of democracy to prevent another rise of reactionary extremism.

One of the most dramatic global political changes in the last month was the military collapse of the Syrian government and President Bashar al-Assad's Ba'athist government. Starting on November 27, a coordinated attack by opposition groups launched a blitzkrieg against the positions of the government's Syrian Arab Army in Aleppo, then Homs, and Hama as other rebels advanced in the south. Within two days, rebel forces entered Aleppo, and three days after that, Hama. In the meantime, the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) took the city of Deir ez-Zor, as government forces rapidly withdrew to Damascus. By December 8, the Syrian government was overthrown with the Syrian Transitional Government taking power throughout most of the country with the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES, backed by the SDF), as Assad's family escaped and was granted asylum in Russia. Opportunistically, Israel has extended its military presence from the occupied Golan Heights into the Quneitra Governorate.

For many observers, the collapse of the Syrian government was quite a surprise. The war had been running for almost fourteen years. Following violent crackdowns on protests associated with the Arab Spring, outright rebellion against the government when a group of officers defected and declared the establishment of the Free Syrian Army. Opposition groups fragmented and were often in conflict with each other with the rise of Sunni militias led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, and Islamic State (an even more extremist split from al-Qaeda). Kurdish groups, following principles of democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism, led the formation of the Syrian Democratic Forces as the Free Syrian Army fragmented. Except for the SDF, which eventually managed to come into cease-fire agreements with the Assad government, whilst other rebels were eventually pushed into the Idlib governate, with Russia conducting significant airstrikes and ground operations supporting the government and the United States doing the same against the Islamic state. For the past four years, stalemate situations existed, albeit not after the deaths of over half a million civilians, overwhelmingly due to government military operations.

Upon taking control of the Communist Party of China in 1978, new paramount leader Deng Xiaoping inherited an economy that was very primitive for an industrialised nation, so set about replacing Maoist class struggle with reform and development. His famous quote of the time when referring to manners of growth was "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." That might seem very mild, but compared to what the population was used to reading from the late Chairman Mao, bromides such as "The contest of strength is not only a contest of military and economic power, but also a contest of human power and morale", this was a radical proposition. To illustrate the scale of the task Deng and his politburo had before them, in 1980 China's gross domestic product was estimated at around US$191 billion, or about $195 per capita given the population that year was around 982 million. By comparison, in 1980 Australia's GDP was not that much lower than the PRC's at US$150 billion, with a GDP per capita of $10,200. With Australia's population at the time being 14.7 million citizens, that meant that despite China having 66 times as many people, the Australian economy was 52 times more productive.

And Deng's reforms obviously worked. At the time of his death in 1997 Chinese GDP was approaching US$1 trillion, and GDP per capita was almost US$1000. To return to the above listed benchmark, this was now double the size of the Australian economy, and the difference in productivity had roughly halved. In 2006 the PRC overtook the United Kingdom to become the world's fourth largest economy, the following year Germany, and by 2010 China was finally ahead of Japan, with eyes on the global leader for the past century, the United States. In 2008 China hosted the Summer Olympics, and for those with a knowledge of history, the opening ceremony of the games was illustrative. It celebrated thousands of years of Chinese culture, and showed off the dynamic emerging China of the 21st Century. Missing was anything from recent history; at least before the world's gaze the Century of Humiliation had been banished. The term "rising" was inescapable and dragons replaced Russian bears in the editorial cartoons of western broadsheets. Foreign study of Mandarin increased, although it was also said at the time there were more Chinese learning English as a second language than there were native English speakers.

However just three weeks after the Olympics concluded with a spectacular closing ceremony and China topping the medal table, on the other side of the world, on September 15, Lehman Brothers suddenly collapsed. This was a key moment when the United States' subprime mortgage crisis triggered what became the Global Financial Crisis, which lead to The Great Recession. While there were multiple causes including the subprime mortgage sector in the US, the excessive risk taking by investment banks such as Lehman Brothers was symptomatic of mistakes of the broader financial industry that had spent the previous thirty years deliberately unlearning the lessons of the Great Depression. Governments responded with big stimulus spending in order to compensate for the sudden market contraction, but even with all this additional money to prevent job losses and prop up spending almost every major economy went into recession. China was one of the few that did not, yet the very thing that helped it not only avoid an economic contraction but enjoy another decade of strong growth is now strangling the PRC and will contribute to its decline.

There are many reasons why Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 United States presidential election. Most of these proffered will be true, but only to a very limited extent. Because political events are unique and cannot be run again with different variables, simply highlighting one or multiple factors and assigning blame to them without looking at some of more long term and structural reasons will be insufficient. Given the scale of this defeat many smaller tactical errors can be considered essentially meaningless. For example, the charge that Harris picking Minnesota governor Tim Walz rather than Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro was a fatal mistake. Or not going on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast in the closing stretch. Or for her comments on "The View" that she couldn't think of an instance where she would have done something different to what President Joe Biden had done. Even if all three of those had a different outcome it's unlikely they would have been sufficient to have swung the election, and ditto for the next 30 factors one can name. Any of these might have moved thousands or even tens of thousands of votes, but this was a contest lost by millions and the consequence of conditions that evolved over a period of years.

Likewise, those blaming Biden and his late abandonment of his own re-election bid as the main reason for Harris' loss will not find a simple explanation there, though many will claim to. A lot of the same journalists now writing their "She didn't have enough time to build her own campaign and had to inherit the weaknesses of her boss's political operation" autopsies will have also their bylines attached to "This truncated campaign is likely to help Harris and the vibes are totally great now that Biden is out of the picture" think-pieces from July and August. Ever since the 2022 midterms the perception had been growing that Biden was too old and shouldn't run for re-election, and it was only his disastrous debate performance in June that convinced him to step aside, finally admitting (after much outside cajoling) he wasn't up to the job. However consider that with all else being equal, what if the president been convinced by his family, staff and party to announce he would not stand for re-election earlier; what would have been the most likely scenario to play out?

Over the past two decades the main story in international politics and the global economy has been the inexorable rise of China. Yet today it is almost certainly the case that Beijing's power and influence has already peaked, just as its population recently has, so the story of the next decades will be how the ruling Communist Party manages this decline if the Party survives. The demise of such a major power is not something the international community has had to reckon with since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and as the war in Ukraine illustrates, over 30 years later the world is still dealing with the fallout from this. China is much larger in terms of population and far more crucial to the global economy than the USSR ever was. And with the bipolar certainties of the Cold War just a fading memory, the world no longer automatically looks to the United States for global leadership, and given the state of American politics of late, Washington cannot be relied upon to provide it. But Chinese decline is not a mere possibility, it is a certainty, the only questions left are when it happens and the form it takes.

The first and most obvious sign of Chinese decline is its population. In 1976 Communist Party General Secretary Mao Zedong died, and after a brief struggle for power in 1978 Deng Xiaoping emerged as China's new paramount leader. His first priority was economic reform to encourage development and growth, but the right sort of growth. China was always a populous nation, in 1949 at the defeat of the Nationalist government and the establishment of communist rule there were already more than half a billion Chinese. (By comparison, at that same time the population of the United States was about 150 million people, and there were close to 180 million in the Soviet Union.) Despite disasters such as the Great Leap Forward and, to a lesser extent, the Cultural Revolution, improvements in the economy and in maternal health plus encouragement from the state for large families meant that China's birthrate accelerated (to over five children per woman from the 1950s to the early 70s), infant mortality greatly diminished and average life expectancy rose from just 35 years in 1949 to 63 by 1975. Within a single generation China had gone from a mostly rural and agrarian society with high mortality to an industrialised and urbanised one with a high birthrate and good basic healthcare. Consequently, the already large population experienced rapid, and to the government in the 1970s, alarming growth.