The Sovereign Flip: Why 2020–2060 Will Mirror 1880–1920 Marxism Wave in Reverse

In 1848, Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto, diagnosing the birth pains of industrial capitalism. Das Kapital was publsihied in 1868.

In 1997, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg published The Sovereign Individual, diagnosing the death throes of the industrial state. Bitcoin manifesto was announced in 2008.

Between those two decades lies the entire arc of modernity — from the factory to the algorithm, from the proletarian to the coder.

What Marx saw as the rise of collective power, Davidson saw as its dissolution.
One described the birth of the state; the other, its unraveling.

The symmetry is uncanny.

1. 1850–1920: The Industrial Ascendancy

By 1850, London was the capital of the world — coal, iron, textiles, and empire.
Capital was visible, tangible, and territorial.

The right was religious and rentier: landlords, financiers, the Church.

The left was salaried and emergent: factory owners, merchants, educated urbanites, but owned little asset.

And in between stood a thin 10% — the center, the new meritocratic middle that believed in reason, law, and enterprise. They were pragmaticists.

Industrialization accelerated after 1880. The working class organized, ideologies hardened, and the century closed with a conflict between capital and labor that culminated in revolution and fascism.

By 1920, the state had become the central institution of society. Bureaucracy replaced aristocracy. Marx had won — not as communism, but as the managerial welfare state.

2. 1990–2020: The Digital Infrastructure Phase

Now we are in the mirror image of that story.

• 1990–2020 was our “1850-1880 moment”: the infrastructure phase of a new age. Since 2020, the concept of sovereign individual is entering the political whelm.
• The internet, cloud computing, and digital currencies replaced coal, rail, and factories.
• New “industrialists” emerged — coders, founders, creators, investors in intangibles.
• But they still relied on the old system’s scaffolding: fiat currencies, universities, national law.

The state was not yet challenged, only outpaced.

3. 2020–2060: The Great Rightward Flip

If 1850–1920 was the march of collectivism, 2020–2060 will be its reversal.
History doesn’t repeat; it inverts.

The ideological realignment:

The “left” today owns the institutions — government, universities, city real estate, media, public pensions. They resemble the rentier class of 1880: risk-averse, moralistic, extractive.

The “center” — digital entrepreneurs, engineers, remote founders — collaborate economically with the state but resent its taxes, regulations, and cultural decay.

And the “right” has devolved into the libertarian fringe: anti-government, anti-regulation, armed and atomized.

The Sovereign Individual is no longer a metaphor — it’s a demographic reality.

4.  The Coming Collapse of State Capacity

The state’s role will shrink, not by choice but by exhaustion.

In the Anglosphere (U.S., Canada, UK, Australia), the next 40 years will look like a libertarian revolution by attrition:

• Welfare and retirement funds collapse under demographics and debt.
• Education and healthcare privatize by necessity.
• Border and visa control disappears as Fed capacity weakens significantly.
• Interstate infrastructure decays; private logistics and satellites replace it.
• Military will be used for hire by the internatinoal with more indiscriminatory weapon sales to any country.
• Functional states with manufacturing and resouce capacity start offering border control, education and healthcare service, while weak states will experience massive exodus.

Trump’s populism was the early tremor — a nationalist reaction inside an emerging libertarian epoch, the same way 1880s nationalism preceded socialism.

Those libetarians would be lucky if they had self-sustaininig farms to work at. If they're in the cities with little public capacity left, they'll resort to underground activity such as illicit drug sales.

By the 2030s, nationalism itself will run out of money. What remains will be privatized sovereignty: industrialists and technologists replacing bureaucrats as service providers of last resort.

5.  The Left’s Stagnation: Europe’s Soviet Phase

The European Union will mirror the Latin America of the early 20th century. Latin America never adopted Marxism with the lack of industrial workers, which led to the eternal stagnation and multi decades populism coups. Similarly, EU'll resist the new wave of libertarninism:

• Heavy welfare burdens and aging populations;
• Shrinking productivity;
• Outflow of talent and digital capital;
• Cycles of populist resentment without revolution.

GDP per capita stagnates, currencies weaken, middle-class life erodes under rising import costs, with decreasing high paying job opportunity.

All the digital entrepreneurs would leave EU by 2030. Populism for competing for the limited economic pie increases while foreign pressure for libertarnism movement will intensify (Hungary is the early mover at EU scale), however, unlike US, EU political faction will never gain decisive consensus unlike USA libertarian future.

6.  The Center: Lean Sovereignties

The healthiest states will maintain order without excess — GDP share of government around 15%:

• Maintained border and military;
• Minimal welfare;
• Infrastructure and emergency insurance;
• Family structure still left;
• Globally attract digital capitalists;

Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea fit this mold. They have high saving rate to smooth out the transition without immediate spending cut or tax increase, and can survive the old age without state welfare. In case of Japan, healthcare/capita costs only half of US as well.

What would likely happen is as the GDP growth picks up, they'll not use those gain towards servicing the eldery or welfare. So the living standard guaranteed by the state just remains as is of today all the way into 2060, while the citizens tolerate the greater inequality.

They will look like the balanced 1900s United States: capitalist, conservative, and liberal.

Family replaces welfare; savings replace pensions; discipline replaces ideology.

They won’t be libertarian utopias, but lean republics that keep growth alive while avoiding bureaucratic sclerosis.

7.  The Religious and Familial Reformation

As the state withdraws, religion and kinship will fill the vacuum — the same way they did before the welfare state existed.

In libertarian societies, the only functioning safety net is family and faith.

Expect the rise of small, moral communities: traditionalist enclaves, intentional agrarian towns, or techno-familial networks.

The cultural future is paradoxical:

High technology + low trust → neo-traditionalism.
Bureaucratic + Fiscal Dependence → Gridlock Globalism

8.  Conclusion: The Mirror of Marx

Marx’s century was about collectivizing production — the factory, the union, the welfare state. It was in response to the growing share of factory production.

The next century will be about privatizing governance — AI, the DAO, the digital sovereign, the private city. It'll be in response to digital first share of wealth production.

• In 1850, the factory made the state necessary.
• In 2050, the algorithm will make it optional.

The next revolution will not seize power; it will render power obsolete.

The Sovereign Flip is already underway.

Just as Marx wrote at the dawn of industrial capitalism, the “Sovereign Individual” moment marks the sunset of it.

The only question left is not whether the state collapses — but who replaces it:
the devout, the digital, or the disciplined.