PUTIN'S BRAIN
The Russian Wolf Speaks: Alexander Dugin
and the Fourth Political Theory
Rise of the populist right
In two previous articles I pointed out that the 18th century political spectrum makes no sense in the world today and it hasn’t made sense for at least the past 10 years. Today the leading forces against global monopoly and finance capital in the West are coming from the right wing of the political spectrum, not the left. Those who stand against the Anglo-American imperialism:
- defend the sovereignty of the nation-state;
- are not hostile to BRICS and the multipolar world and
- defend national borders against immigration and refugees implying opposition to global capitalism market for cheap labor.
Alain de Benoist, one of the heads of the European new right, writes that the periphery against the center is a better distinction than left vs right.
Amazon’s censorship of Dugin’s books courtesy of the CIA
Two and a half years ago I read an article by Max Parry in the Greanville Post called Alexander Dugin and the Origins of the ‘Red-Brown Alliance’ Myth. In it, Parry defended Dugin, professor of sociology and geopolitics at Lermontov University in Moscow against charges of being a fascist. Parry says that Amazon, with a 600-million-dollar contract with the CIA, has refused to sell any of his works while giving free reign to his critics. Two months ago, I tried ordering Dugin’s books through Amazon and sure enough I could not find any of his books. Fortunately, I was able to find three of them on Alibris Books. When we published Parry’s article on our website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism we were met with responses which consisted of dire warning by leftists that Dugin was a fascist. The intention of this article is to describe how Dugin is far from being a fascist. There are important differences between a traditional conservative (Dugin) and fascism.
Motives and Qualifications.
My interest in Dugin lies in his desire for at some kind of left right alliance. As you will see in my article Dugin is an anti-capitalist conservative, nothing like the libertarian right in the United States. Also, it is important to develop theories of what a multipolar political world will look like. BRICS has an economicpractice but to my knowledge there is no self-conscious political counterpart. Dugin’s work with its cultural relativism, might be a contribution to a multipolar political theory from the Russian side. By way of qualification this article is only a review of The Fourth Political Theory. I have not read any of his other works.
The Triumph of Liberalism
Dugin claims that “traditions” including religion, hierarchy, family and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. What Dugin says we have left are:
- the death of god (Nietzsche)—replaced by man;
- disenchantment of the world (Weber) – philosophy and science replaced religion, and
- end of the sacred and the place of revelation as it is overtaken by the liberal rationalization of religion.
Dugin begins by contending that by the end of the 20th century liberalism’s opponents – conservativism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism and communism – had all been defeated. Fascism emerged later than the other major political theories and vanished before them. Socialism and fascism positioned themselves as contenders for the soul of modernity and failed. Liberalism is the main enemy of the Fourth political theory. Dugan claims it is the forces of “freedom”, the forces of the market which have lead humanity along the path of degeneration. He wants to pull the roots of liberal evil out of the structure of the modern world.
Overview of the Fourth Political Theory and Multipolarity
In his book, the Fourth Political Theory Dugin defends traditional conservativism against three political theories he opposes liberalism (capitalism), communism, and fascism.
| Ideology | What is Included | Major Unit of Analysis |
| Liberalism | Both left liberalism and neoliberalism | Individual |
| Communism | Marxism (Leninism) social democracy | Social class |
| Fascism | Nazis (Germany) | Race |
| Mussolini (Italy) | The state |
Dugin is no ordinary conservative and makes significant distinction between liberal pro-capitalist conservatives of the West and his own. While critical of communism, his brand of conservatism is nothing like the liberal anti-communism of the West. Dugin says we need to unite the value center of the right and the labor-centered left to fortify the resistance against the Western Empire. In the process he wants to unite National Bolshevism and Eurasianism which came close to his 4th political theory. The National Bolshevik Party emerged in Russia in 1992 shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Dugin led it. He soon left the party to start his own, National Bolshevik Front. The original NBP has been banned by the Russian government. Does this sound like a fascist to you? What fascist author would use Situationist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle as a reference?
The Fourth Political Theory and Resistance to the Status Quo of Liberalism includes the following:
- Against globalism
- Against post modernity
- Against end of history
- Against neoclassical “laws” of economics
- Against the universal morality of “human rights”
- Against postindustrial society and its abandonment of industrial production
Dugin defends a Eurasian multipolar world against the Atlanticist West. He says the Russian population had almost entirely rejected the liberal ideology of the 1990s. How is Eurasian multipolar world to be achieved? By preserving the geopolitical sovereignty of the powers of the Eurasian continent Russia, China, Iran and India who he says safeguard the freedoms of other peoples on the planet. The inertia of liberal politics is such that a change of course is impossible to save the West. The Fourth Political Theory insists upon a multipolar world instead of universalism.
What is Liberalism?
Freedom from
For liberals all forms of collective identity – ethnic, national, religious, caste or class impede the individual’s awareness of individuality. John Stuart Mill was interested in “freedom from”, not “freedom for”. “Freedom from” includes:
- government and its control over the economy, politics and civil society;
- churches and their dogma;
- stratification systems;
- responsibility for the economy;
- any attempts to redistribute whether it be government or social institutions the results of material or non-material labor. For example, “social justice” is deeply immoral
- ethnic attachments and
- any collective identity whatsoever – even the family. The family is a contractual agreement
For liberals Freedom is synonymous with liberty. As for “freedom to”, here liberals have nothing to say. This is a question of private choice which is not discussed and has no political or ideological value. Locke is the most important philosopher of liberalism.
Ontological and epistemological foundations of liberalism
Besides freedom from, liberalism in the West is constituted by the following qualities:
- the understanding of the individualism as the measure of all things;
- belief in the sacred character of private property;
- equality of opportunity as the moral law of society;
- belief in the contractual basis of all sociopolitical institutions including government;
- the abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who lay claim to a common truth;
- the separation of powers and the making of social systems of control over any governmental institution whatsoever;
- the creation of a civil society without races, peoples or religion in places of traditional governments;
- the dominance of the market relations over other forms of economics;
- certainty that the historical path as progress as a universal model of development
- linear sense of time. the present better than the past; the future better than the present and
- the nation-state, founded on the basis of an imaginary contractual agreement as the only recognized political unit (as opposed to kingdoms, providences, principalities or city-states) These European nations kicked religion, ethnic identity or classes to the curb believing them to be remnants of the dark ages.
The question of how to relate to socialists and leftists reached its more difficult moments for liberals in the 1920s and 1930s. Left liberals like FDR wanted more state intervention to keep the capitalist economy from crises. Unlike left-liberals, right-wing liberals like Von Hayek and von Mises said liberalism is not a transition from feudalism to socialism but rather an ideology that is complete in itself, holding an exclusive monopoly over the heritage of The Enlightenment. Right-wing liberals saw Marxism as a regressive return of the feudal epoch of eschatological uprisings.
Dugin points out that liberalism is hardly a visionary ideology. In fact, it never gets beyond Darwinism. Liberal ideology is a complete animal discourse. Instead of moving beyond survival of the fittest, it allows increasingly varieties of opportunities for the strong to assert their power so that capitalists are no more than king of beasts. Globalization is the new battlefield for the struggle for survival
Criticism of Liberal Progress as Irreversibility is a Monstrous Process
One of the greatest weaknesses of liberals is in what Dugin calls its “monotonic” processes. Monotonic processes are the ideal of constant growth, accumulation which proceed in one direction without cyclic fluctuations or oscillations. Gregory Bateson points this problem out in his book, Mind In Nature. Bateson says the characteristics of monotonic ideology of the West do not apply in biology, mechanical systems or in society. In biology such a process destroys species, produces deviants, giants or dwarfs and cannot produce offspring. In mechanical systems Bateson says it causes systems to explode. He points out:
The most important problem in developing the steam engine is the centrifugal governor. When the steam engine reaches cruising speed, it is necessary to regulate the intake of fuel. Otherwise, everything begins to resonate and the speed of the engine will cause it to explode. This was the major problem in the earliest stages of industrialization.
Within society Marcel Mauss in 1872 criticized the monotonic process as well.
In the book he co-authored, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function and in The Gift, he described how traditional societies paid great attention to the ritual destruction or sacrifice of surplus goods. The surplus was seen as excessive usury and the essence of evil. Surplus crops were seen as disastrous. The community either organized a feast or gave it to the gods as a form of sacrifice or to the needy.
Russian historian Lev Gumilev had a cyclical theory of history which he explained with his famous theory of passionarity. He acknowledged there was development, but there is also decline. Gumilev saw passionarity as the level of vitality within a given ethnic group or civilization, a type of energy that would gradually increase, reaching a peak in which the group would reach its greatest achievements followed by a slow ebb. The Fourth Political Theory argues that history can be reversed. Socialism could turn into capitalism, into feudalism, into slave societies and back into primitive communism. Yet the Fourth Political Theory is not an invitation to a return of traditional society. It is not conservativism in a traditional sense.
Marxism’s criticism of liberals:
- denied the identification of the individual from collective and class nature;
- recognition of the unjust system of appropriation of surplus value by capitalists in the process of a market economy;
- recognition that freedom from of bourgeois society is a veiled form of class supremacy, masking under new clothes the mechanisms of exploitation, alienation and oppression;
- called for a proletarian revolution and the abolition of the market and private property
- aimed at the social collectivization of property;
- freedom to is creative labor as the social freedom of communist future and
- criticized bourgeois nationalism as a form of collective violence over the poorest layers of society and an instrument of international aggression in the name of the egoistic interests of the national bourgeoise.
What is Fascism?
In fascism everything is based on the right-wing version of Hegel since Hegel himself considered the Prussian state to be peak of historical development. Giovanni Gentile was an Italian philosopher and a proponent of Hegelianism applied this concept of “actual idealism” to fascist Italy. He developed what he called “actual idealism”. Here individual life only gains meaning in relation to the state. He was a staunch fascist from 1922 until his death at the hands of antifascists. He was regarded the official philosopher of Italian fascism. In German National Socialism, the historical subject is the Aryan race which according to racists and carries out the eternal struggle against the subhuman races.
The Field of the Contemporary Socialists
Dugin states that the break-up of the Soviet Union combined with the inability of European Marxism to produce any heads of state or even meaningful political parties were nails in the coffin for this communist ideology. However, there are aspects of communism that are worth preserving. Leftist political philosophy was a fundamental, general and systematic criticism of liberal capitalism. They provided critical observations concerning the capitalist system, its reification and exploitation. It has moral views and shows solidarity with the unfortunate along with deep criticism of liberalism, as we saw above. These views can arouse definite interest and sympathy. However, after Stalin, in the middle of the 20th century there arose a systematic critique of Leninism: from the Right the work of Von Hayek and the Austrian School of economics; from Cold War liberals Karl Popper in England and Raymond Aron in France. From the left Leninism was criticized by the social democratic Frankfort School which attempted to mix Marx and Freud.
Dugin names three varieties of socialist Ideology:
- The Old Left (French)
- Left nationalists (National Communists, National Bolsheviks)
- New Left – appeared in the 1950s and 1960s
- Postmodernists –1990s
The Old Left is now divided into at least four orientations:
- Orthodox Marxists (Leninists)
- Social Democrats (originating with Kautsky)
- Third way of Anthony Giddens which combines liberalism and social democracy
- European orthodox Marxists
They are often all embodied in the Communist Party which in some cases is capable of functioning as an umbrella organization.
European Social Democracy (Kautsky) is usually for a progressive income tax or flat tax, the nationalization of large monopolies, the broadening of government responsibilities in the social sector, free medicine, education, generous and guaranteed pension plans and the development and promotion of unions. The socialists of the third way are much closer to the Democratic Socialists of America. They seek to form alliances with liberal parties and they are sympathetic to Yankeedom and side with the Atlanticists internationally, passively or by actively supporting imperialism.
National Communists begin With What Marx Got Wrong:
- Socialist movements did not begin in advanced capitalist societies. They were agrarian.
- These socialist societies did not grow out of capitalist relations. They grew out of bureaucratic and tributary economic relations.
- These societies had very few urban proletarians. The population was mostly composed of peasants.
- These societies had little industrialization in the way of factories, railroads or mass communications systems.
- Contrary to the Marxist expectation that premodern spiritual conditions would wither as part of the socialist revolution, magical beliefs, peasant folklore continued.
- Racial and ethnic identities did not die out with improvement of class conditions.
With the exception of Peter the Great, Russia has never been at home with modernity. National communists wanted to preserve mythologies and use them to build socialism. They wanted history understood in the spirit of archaic eschatological expectations, deep national mythologies connected to the expectations of end times and a return to the golden age. Dugin claims it was national communism that has ruled in the USSR and in other parts of the world, not international socialism. It applies to communist China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and many communist movements in the Third World – Mexican Chiapas, the Peruvian Golden Path; the Kurdish Workers Party and in Islamic socialism. National Communists are a broad formation – social, psychological and political. In Russia they are the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the second largest party in Russia.
On the other hand, Soviet Marxist dissidents like Zinoviev, Shchedrovitsky and Medvedev are known but they were unable to start any sort of ideological school. There are liberals in Russia but no liberalism. The sole meaning of liberalism in contemporary Russia in the 1990s was freedom from Russian, Soviet political and economic traditions and an uncritical, ignorant and parodic imitation of the west. Liberalism as a political ideology interested no one. Its supporters engaged in politics. No one in Russia ever chose “freedom from”. Liberalism is the repudiation of God, tradition, community, ethnicity and empires.
The New Left
Dugin labels the philosophers of the New Left the “Philosophers of suspicion” who drew not only from Marx, but also Freud, Nietzsche and Sartre. The anarchists drew from the importance of economic reciprocity and referred to Mauss’ book The Gift for inspiration. Unlike the old leftists, the new leftists doubt what they felt was modernity’s glorification of reason and they denounced science as mystification and authoritarianism. They also supported relativist philosophers of science like Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn.
After reviewing all three political theories, Dugin identifies the bad tendencies that should be discarded from each theory and along with the good qualities that the Fourth Political Theory can learn from. He says nothing should stop us from rethinking the very fact of the failure of communism and fascism recasting their vices as virtues. By losing, Dugin says communism and fascism proved they did not belong to the spirit of modernity. He says each stood on the side of tradition in different ways. We must understand our new situation in a postmodern world no less profoundly than Marx understood the structure of industrial capitalism.
| Ideology | Discarded | Kept |
| Fascism | All forms of racism Biological racism and Hitler’s antisemitism vs Slavs | Ethnos as a cultural phenomenon (a self is more than an isolated monad) |
| Cultural Racism such as high and low cultures Those cultures that are “civilized “and those that aren’t | ||
| Marxism | Historical materialism Unidirectional progress Violates an appreciation of the ancestors Destruction of religious heritage Contempt for the culture’s past Exclusive focus on economic factors Class as the only historical subject Sides with bourgeoise against ancient identities such as feudal, reactionary or nationalism Marxism rejects conservativism in all its forms | How it describes liberalism as exploitative Identifies the contradictions of capitalism Description of primitive communism—original paradise Labor as the great dream of the common good Myth of eschatological consciousness Identification of reification and mysticism Good at describing the enemy, the bourgeoise |
| Liberalism | Attack individualism and abolish it Freedom is microscopic | |
| Modernization |
All three accept the irreversibility of history.
Liberalism and Postmodern Times
In the heyday of modernity, liberalism always co-existed with non-liberalism which means it was an object of choice. The choices included conservativism and the various forms of socialism. After defeating its rivals, liberalism brought back a monopoly on ideological thinking the way the Catholic Church once ruled Europe. Liberalism went from being one of many political theories to become the sole ideology. In postmodern times liberalism became a way of life. It became unconscious, and automatic.
Postmodernism
Triumphant liberalism mutated into a lifestyle consumerism, solipsistic individualism and a postmodern manifestation. Post modernists of the 1990s contained the following values:
- rejection of reason and call for the conscious adoption of schizophrenia – Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari;
- the renunciation of man as the measure of all things ;
- the death of man (Levi) death of the author (Barthes);
- the overcoming of sexual taboos;
- legalization of all kinds of narcotics;
- new forms of spontaneous and sporadic being;
- the measure of the individual is not the individual but the post individual, accidently placed ironic parts of people—clones, cyborgs and mutants;
- private property is idolized and transformed from what a man owns to what owns the man;
- belief in the contractual relations of all political and social institutions grows into the equalization of the real and the virtual;
- all forms of non-individual authorities disappear. Anyone is free to think about the world in any way they wish;
- the principle of the separation of powers transforms into a constant electronic referendum in which each internet user votes by giving an opinion of many forums -examples include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Telegraph and
- civil society completely displaces government and converts into a global cosmopolitan melting pot.
Dugin says that so much of the political vision of postmodernism is contained in the book Empire by Negri and Hardt. This book, according to Dugin can be read as a political manifesto of the tendencies above. While postmodernists fancy themselves as radicals, their ontology and epistemology is that of relativistic liberals.
Conservativism as a Model
Traditional conservativism
In traditionalism we have a full-blown and mostly complete complex of the conservative relationship to history, society and the world. The traditionalists – Rene Guenon and Jules Evola – rejected the Enlightenment and defended tradition while foretelling the end of the world through the victory of the fourth caste. Dugin says traditional conservatives want to return to the past, but they don’t go far back enough. They go back to ancient times, patriarchal times where monotheism began. They want to return to a condition when man exhibited the first symptoms of the illness. Rather, a better starting point to a time in tribal societies which, Dugin claims, were matriarchal.
Traditional Conservativism With the Following Characteristics:
- one who opposes time and irreversible history;
- sees progress as an illusion;
- technological development is not a saving grace;
- Descartes division of subject and object is crippling;
- Newton’s mechanical watchmaker (mechanism vs organicism) deadens the world;
- science reduces quality to quantity and
- education that is built on science rather than the arts and humanities.
Guenon and Evola acidically gave an exhaustive description of the most fundamental conservative position. They describe traditional society as super-temporal ideal and modernity is a product of a fall, a degeneration, degradation, a blending of castes, the decomposition of hierarchy and the shift away from the spiritual to material, from heaven to earth and from the eternal to the ephemeral.
Liberal conservativism (neoconservatives)
Dugin does not support the liberal conservatives of the United States because they do not condemn liberalism across the board. Rather, they say yes and no to liberal proposals. Liberal because when it says yes it merely attempts to step on the brakes; “let’s go slower”, “ let’s not do that now” it says. They agree with the general trends in modernity especially around capitalism and individualism. Edmund Burke is a good example. He first sympathized with the Enlightenment but pushed it away after the French Revolution. He defended:
- bourgeois freedom;
- independence of man;
- equality;
- rights;
- progress and
- evolution rather than revolution
William Kristol was one of the founders of neo-conservativism. The Project for New American Century includes projects of the Greater Middle East, Greater Central Asia where the goal is to uproot inertia, national, political, social, religious and cultural models and their replacement by the operating principles of American economic liberalism. For neocons liberalism must penetrate the depths of all societies. Contemporary neoconservatives call for a global liberal revolution rejecting all isolationism. They do not like leftists and continue to fear communism. Neither do they like right-wingers like Evola and Guenon who we will discuss next.
The conservative revolution in Europe
Left-wing historians like Karl Mannheim dismissed conservativism as an ideology of politics that was out of date. This may have seemed the case in Mannheim’s time, but it is not true today. There have been many conservatives in European history. Among the theorists was Arthur Moeller, van den Bruck, Ernst and Friedrich Junger, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Werner Sombart, Othmar Spann, Fredrich Hielscher many other German authors. Dugin says we must look for alternatives to liberalism in non-liberal versions of conservativism. Liberalism’s linear sense of time (present better than the past, future better than present) Dugin says it is an insult to the honor and dignity of our ancestors because in many cultures the dead play an important sociological role. They are considered alive in a certain sense. After all, Chinese civilization is built itself on reverence of the ancestors.
The Conservative Revolution is a term first coined by Hugo von Hofmannsthal which has come to designate a loose confederation of anti-liberal German thinkers who wrote during the Weimer Republic. They are opposed to capitalism and communism in favor of a synthesis of aristocratic traditions and spiritual values with socialism. Benoist is one of the pioneers of the European New Right and is an organist and a holist like any real conservative. There is a new gallery of thinkers who begin to defend the conservative position. Dugin writes that they do so with uncompromising consistency and persistence and not with the thoughts of the 18th and 19th centuries. They include Titus Burckhardt Leopold Ziegler.
Ethnos has no home in liberalism, communism or fascism
Ethnicity was not a focal point in either national socialism or fascism. For them race or the state was its center. Marxist ideology did not pay much attention to the ethnos either, believing that the ethnos would be overcome by the classless society where no trace of it will remain. Liberal globalization is equating the concrete ethnic, sociopolitical or religious pattern by a universal standard, the very important process of transcending ethnos itself, transforming its natural, organic and most often unconsciously imparted tradition into the rank of a man-made conscious, rational system. The common logic of social evolution from savagery to civilization was the distinctive feature of 19th century anthropology. The term “civilization” that we are using is saturated with the spirit of the Enlightenment, progressivism and historicism.
German and Russian Ethnosociology
Ethnos has found deep resonance in the conservative revolution. The German school of ethnic sociology included Wilhelm Muhlmann, Richard Thurnwald and Lev Gumilev. Thurnwald was an Austrian ethnologist who is credited with founding the school of ethnosociology. Lev Gumilev was a Soviet anthropologist who attempted to explain ethnic differences through geological factors. His book was Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere. Spengler, in his Decline of the West contrasted civilization and culture, considering culture the organic vital spirit of man. Civilization was a product of a cooling off of that spirit in mechanical and purely technical boundaries. The conservative ethnos is roughly equivalent to culture.
Dugin Ethnos: Cultural Primordialism
Enemies of Russia, whether they are liberals or many socialists of the West never tire of accusing Dugin of being a fascist, a racist and biological determinist. Dugin shows none these characteristics in his book The Fourth Political Theory. In that book, he argues that fascism is one of the first three political theories he rejects. He explicitly argues against the fascism of Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini in their champion of the state. He also spends pages rejecting the racism of the Nazis and the superiority of the white race. It is true that in terms of ethnos he does not share the liberal notion of the human individual as being a blank slate. He advocates what he calls a “cultural primordialism” ethnicity, but this ethnicity has nothing to do with any biological determinism or racial determinism. From his book Ethnosociology, the structure of the basic ethnosociological terms and concepts include:
- Ethnos
- Narod –German folk
- Nation
- Civil society
- Global society
Each has its own defined meaning and sense which does not overlap with any of the others. The general movement goes from simple societies to complex societies. At the same time, Dugin says we can describe these levels as a vector directed from the organic and integral to the mechanical, combined and complex
The inner structures of the ethnos: family, lineage, clan
A family can only be formed on the basis of two unrelated lineages. The structure of the family in all societies without exception is based on an exogamous principle to protect against incest. In order to get one family, it is necessary to have two lineages and exogamous rules of marriages. It is for this reason that the family is not considered the primary cell of society. In addition, it is customary in ethnosociology and anthropology to call a union of lineages a clan. For Dugin ethnicity contains the following 5 characteristics:
- speak the same language;
- belief in a common origin;
- possess a complex of customs, beliefs, rituals, myths and art forms;
- have a specific geographical location and
- are different from other ethnos.
The narod
The narod is different from ethnos. The narod is the social organization of society, qualitatively more complex than an ethnos. In the formation of a narod there are necessarily a few ethnos. Narods usually are in form in chiefdoms or agricultural states. Here there is a hierarchy between chiefs or kings at the top and commoners and peasants at the bottom. Other extreme archetypes are heroes and servants and masters and slaves. The state and polytheistic religions are other characteristics of narod. The table below adds some other differences.
| Ethnos | Category of Comparison | Narod |
| Less complex | Level of complexity | More complex |
| Static | Dynamics | More mobile |
| Natural | Artificial, goal oriented | |
| Survival and reproduction | Purpose | Oriented to a historical or military goal |
| Egalitarian | Political form | Stratified professional |
| Eternal return, cycle supported by myth | Place of history | Historical—linear time |
| Myths | Myths vs epics | Epics |
| There is none | individuality | Individuality is exclusive to heroes and chiefs |
| Two lineages | Social structure | The state, religion, civilization |
The nation
For most of human history societies consisted of ethnos and narods. In Europe beginning in either the High Middle Ages (England) or in early modern Europe a new political formation emerged, a new kind of political identity based on citizenship with the individual as its foundation. The political concept of the nation did everything possible to suppress the older allegiances of region, city, kingdom provinces, ethnos and narod but never quite successfully. Merchants were the new power and they were located in cities and towns .
Civil society and global society
In the 20th century thanks to the spread of capitalism around the globe, the nation-state became relativized and capitalist relations mostly ignored the political boundaries of nations unless nationalism could be used to seize resources of other countries.
The World Bank and the IMF helped grease the wheels of global economic relations. In a global society individual citizenship took a back seat to global human rights and rules of civil society. Again, all configurations aim to suppress the earlier ethnos and narod.
Dugin argues against seeing these levels as indicating any progress or irreversibly. Civil society can return to the nation level as is happening in some of the BRICS countries today. Another example is the fact that the Hungarian Prime Minister Orban does not support the regional European Union. Furthermore, some nations can disintegrate back into narods or ethnos. Dugin stands for an archaic and holistic sociology with ethnicity as its core.
Eurasian Multipolarism
Some countries that are more or less successful as nation-states do not want to lose their independence to a supernational external authority like the United States but they try not to directly oppose it. These countries include China, Russia, Iran and India. Other states try to oppose Mordor directly, rejecting Western values, unipolarity and US Western hegemony. They include Iran (Islamism), China, Venezuela and North Korea embodying socialism. But before BRICS all these groups lacked an alternative global strategy that could be symmetrically comparable to the West.
There is also the Eurasian approach: the Multipolarity, Great Spaces or Great Powers movement. Twelve years after this book was written no doubt BRICS would be part of this. The one tendency in conservatism that is not acceptable to Eurasians is the liberal conservatism of the West. For Eurasianists, modernity is a phenomenon peculiar only to the West. Other cultures must divest the pretentions to the universality of Western civilization and build their societies on the internal values they already possess. For Eurasianists there is an epistemology for Russian civilization an epistemology for the Chinese Islamic epistemology and one for India. It is not accidental that among Russian authors the first to refer to Guenon’s book East and West was the Eurasianist, N.N. Alekseev.
Towards a 4
Dugin claims to share the part of the vision of Rene Guenon and Julius Evola who considered modernity – individualism, liberal democracy, capitalism, consumerism – to be the cause of the future catastrophe of humanity. He wants there to be political alliances between Muslims and Christians, Russians and Chinese, between leftists and rightists, Hindus and Jews. There was a positive side of communism, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, anti-cosmopolitan and anti-individualist. Communism’s social solidarity, social justice, socialism and general holistic attitude are good. Dugin wants to get rid of the materialist and modernist aspects of communism. He arrives at national Bolshevism which presents socialism without materialism, atheism, progressivism and modernism. He supports Eurasianism. The differences in the ethnicities should be accepted and affirmed without any biological, racist or evolutionary sentiments. Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu – premodern sources are a very important development in the national Bolshevik synthesis. He wants to put aside anti-communist prejudices. He says we should strongly oppose any kind of confrontation between the various religious beliefs:
Muslim vs Christian
Jews vs Muslims
Muslims vs Hindus
Conclusion
In terms of opposition to Western global capitalism, the resistance has come from BRICS internationally but also from conservative populism at a national level. Given the bankruptcy of the 18th century political spectrum I explored the work of Alexander Dugin’s book, The Fourth Political Theory. In it he claims to be for a unity between a value centered right-wing of the political spectrum and a labor-centered left. Most of the book is taken up with his criticism of liberalism which seems inseparable from capitalism. He spends little time on fascism other than to condemn both between the state centered fascism of Italy and the race-centered Nazis in Germany. His criticism of the left has much complexity and he claims to be allied with National Bolshevism which supports most of Marx’s ideas minus the atheism, materialism and internationalism.
In the last third of my article I explore what Dugin calls the fourth political theory, his brand of conservativism. Dugin quickly points out that his conservativism is not that of the old monarchist or aristocratic tendencies in Europe. But neither does the fourth political theory have anything to do with the liberal conservativism of the United States with its pro-capitalism, pro-imperialist. anti-communism beliefs. Dugin aligns his brand of conservativism of the New Right Alain de Benoist who advocates that the major division on the political spectrum should be core vs periphery, not right vs left. Dugin considers himself a cultural primordialist with ethnos as its deepest level. This ethnos has nothing to do with racism or biology or social Darwinism. Dugin considers himself a multipolarist but does not spend much time developing it in this book.
Criticism of Dugin’s book The Fourth Political Theory:
What kind of sacred is he advocating?
Dugin says The Fourth Political Theory is free to ignore those theological and dogmatic elements in monotheistic societies that were influenced by rationalism. But does this advocate theology without rationalism? He says he wants to take aboard those irrational aspects of cults, rites and legends that have perplexed theologians in the earliest ages. He says the more ancient the better. Does this mean animism, polytheism or some kind of primitive monotheism?
What kind of economic system is he advocating?
Liberalism is inseparable from capitalism, but it is not clear what kind of economic system Dugin is advocating. After all, in the history of economic relations, in pre-state societies Marshall Sahlins writes that there are three kinds of systems-generalized reciprocity – balanced reciprocity and negative reciprocity. With the rise of the state, Karl Polyani has identified the relationship between the state and its population as “redistribution systems”. Lastly there is state socialism systems. If Dugin is against capitalism as it exists under liberalism, what kind of economic system is he advocating?
Politics: no mention of anarchism
Surprisingly, in his description the various kinds of leftist groups he ignores anarchism. This is hard to understand because some of the great anarchists of the 19th century were Russian, namely Bakunin and Kropotkin. He says nothing about the revolutionaries in Russia prior to the Bolsheviks and all the men and women who built the radical opposition to the Czar. Anarchism was not just an intellectual movement. It was followed and fought for between 1905 and 1917. Further, many working class people in factories and in the countryside, led by Nestor Makhno fought for an anti-capitalist world during the Russian Civil War between 1917-1921.
