The Soviet Union was a reactionary project. It took the tyranny of the Tsars and at least doubled. Lenin killed more political prisoners in a year than all the Tsars had in the previous several hundred, and by a good margin, if memory serves. The Russians, and the Kazakhs, and the Georgians and the inhabitants of a dozen other nations were enslaved by an omnipotent tyrant who governed in the name of the religion of “history” and “science”.
The Nazis looked back mythically, certainly, but their racism was grounded firmly in a specific and then current iteration of biological science and eugenics specifically.
“Utopian” projects which do not elevate and honor the individual are innately retrogressive and reactionary. The individual is the sole unit of meaning, of action, of thought and perception, and of progress.
All paths to a better future have to provide a template for all individuals to improve themselves morally and spiritually, as individuals. Everything else is reaction. Everything else is truly, to use the dismally overused term, right wing.
By that standard, I am far left, in my respect for the individual.
And the French Revolution, by this standard, was also dismally right wing.
I won’t stick with this essentially arbitrary resassignment, but thought I would offer it once as a thought exercise.
The key question is this; are we empowering self organizing systems, by empowering individual people and all the implicate and deep order they provide; or are we REMOVING information from the system by limiting decisions and power to a small handful of individuals who are morally and intellectually among the worst the human species has to offer?