All sixteen types

collective · centralized · internationalist · rupture

A revolution in one country alone gets surrounded and squeezed until it fails or goes rotten. So the break has to spread, and the people coordinating it have to be organised across borders from the very start.

Leon Trotsky, who argued exactly this against Stalin, was exiled for it, and was killed in Mexico in 1940.

collective · centralized · national · rupture

One organised party takes control of the whole country, then rebuilds who owns what from the top down. The old institutions are not repaired and handed on — they are replaced, deliberately and fast.

The Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution; most one-party states of the twentieth century.

collective · centralized · internationalist · gradual

Share the world’s resources — but through treaties, large international organisations and plans measured in decades. Patient, technical, and comfortable with a headquarters, as long as the headquarters is a global one.

The UN’s development agencies; worldwide climate agreements; proposals for a global Green New Deal.

collective · centralized · national · gradual

Use the system you already have. Win elections, pass laws one at a time, and put the big things — hospitals, housing, transport — into everybody’s hands. No dramatic break. The government at the centre is a tool, not a target.

Britain’s 1945 government, which built the NHS; Tommy Douglas bringing in public health care in Saskatchewan; Nordic social democracy.

private · centralized · internationalist · rupture

Use the crisis. A market system can be imposed much faster than it can be argued for, and the moment when everyone is too disorganised to push back is exactly the moment to move.

Chile under Pinochet, where economists rebuilt the economy under a dictatorship; Russia in 1992.

private · centralized · national · rupture

Property stays in private hands, all the power moves to one leader or party, the nation gets redefined by who is thrown out of it, and it happens fast. This is the corner fascism sits in. We are not going to call it something gentler.

Mussolini’s Italy; Nazi Germany; military coups that replace a government overnight.

private · centralized · internationalist · gradual

Let markets run things, but have expert international institutions manage them by rulebook and treaty. Not a defence of any one country, and not a revolution — an administration, run by people who believe the big arguments are basically over.

The World Trade Organization and the IMF; the EU’s single market; central banks deliberately kept out of politics.

private · centralized · national · gradual

Private property, a strong government to protect it, your own country as the frame, and change by small steps. Order comes first because nothing else works without it — and what already works is worth keeping.

Bismarck’s Germany; one-nation Toryism in Britain; most mainstream conservative parties today.

collective · decentralized · internationalist · rupture

Shared ownership, nobody in charge at the top, no borders, and no waiting. All four axes point the same way: people organise themselves, and they do it now. This is the corner that was an ordinary thing to be in 1891 and has since been pushed off the map entirely.

Peter Kropotkin; the anarchist region of Ukraine, 1918–21; Catalonia in 1936, where workers ran the factories and the buses during the Spanish Civil War.

collective · decentralized · national · rupture

The union is the unit, not the political party. Workers take over the workplace directly instead of waiting for a law to do it for them. The government is not the prize. It is the obstacle.

The Industrial Workers of the World — the “Wobblies”; Spain’s CNT union; the general strike, including Winnipeg in 1919.

collective · decentralized · internationalist · gradual

Things everybody shares — water, land, knowledge, software — looked after together by the people who actually use them. Grown slowly from the ground up, and it doesn’t matter what flag is flying over it.

Wikipedia; open-source software; the shared fisheries and irrigation systems Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing actually work.

collective · decentralized · national · gradual

Build it from your own town upward. Co-ops, community land, credit unions, budgets that residents vote on directly. Nobody has to capture the national government, because that is not where this gets made.

The Mondragón worker co-ops in Spain; Porto Alegre in Brazil, where residents voted on the city budget; credit unions and housing co-ops.

private · decentralized · internationalist · rupture

Private property, no government at all, no borders — and no interest in fixing anything. Build the replacement somewhere else, make the old country irrelevant, and walk out of it.

Anarcho-capitalism; seasteading — floating cities built outside any country’s laws; crypto and “network state” projects.

private · decentralized · national · rupture

Get out from under the government completely — on this ground, with these neighbours, and by force if it comes to collect. You defend your own property, because no distant authority has the standing to do it for you.

Armed militia movements in the United States; “sovereign citizen” groups; movements that want to break away and become their own country.

private · decentralized · internationalist · gradual

Open the borders to goods, money and people, keep the government small, and win the argument by trade and persuasion rather than by force. A country is a place with rules, not something you owe loyalty to.

Richard Cobden, who campaigned to scrap Britain’s tariffs on imported grain; open-borders libertarians today.

private · decentralized · national · gradual

A small government, private property protected by law, your own country as the working frame, and change that comes slowly and legally. Suspicious of anyone gathering too much power, but in no hurry to tear anything down.

Nineteenth-century British liberalism; Friedrich Hayek; most small-government conservatives today.