Quotes from Alexander Dugin’s “The Fourth Political Theory”

“The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind.

This is when the phenomenon of globalisation entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society makes itself known, and the postmodern era begins. ”

“The values of rationalism, scientism, and positivism are recognised as ‘veiled forms of repressive, totalitarian policies’, or the grand narrative, and are criticised. At the same time, this is accompanied by the glorification of total freedom and the independence of the individual from any kind of limits, including reason, morality, identity (social, ethnic, or even gender), discipline, and so on. This is the condition of postmodernity.”

“Thus, the beginning of the Twenty-first century coincides with the end of ideology — that is, all three of them. Each met a different end: the third political theory was destroyed in its ‘youth’, the second died of decrepit old age, and the first was reborn as something else — as postliberalism and the ‘global market society’.”

“The need for the Fourth Political Theory stems from this assessment.”

“The Fourth Political Theory is conceived as an alternative to postliberalism, but not as one ideological arrangement in relation to another. Instead, it is as an incorporeal idea opposed to corporeal matter; as a possibility entering into conflict with the actuality, as that which is yet to come into being attacking that which is already in existence.”

“The Fourth Political Theory is a ‘crusade’ against:

postmodernity,
the post-industrial society,
liberal thought realised in practice
and globalisation, as well as its its logistical and technological bases.”

“it is impossible to determine where the Right and the Left are located in relation to postliberalism. There are only two positions: compliance (the centre) and dissent (the periphery). Both positions are global.”

“The Fourth Political Theory is the amalgamation of a common project and arises from a common impulse to everything that was discarded, toppled, and humiliated during the course of constructing ‘the society of the spectacle’ (constructing postmodernity). ”

“The dictatorship of ideas is replaced by the dictatorship of things, login passwords, and bar codes.”

“Liberalism developed flawless weapons aimed at achieving its straightforward alternatives, which was the basis for its victory. But it is this very victory that holds the greatest risk to liberalism. We need only to ascertain the location of these new, vulnerable spots in the global system and decipher its login passwords in order to hack into its system. At the very least, we must try to do so. The events of 11 September 2001 in New York demonstrated that this is technologically possible.”

“Postmodernity and its conditions (the globalist world, gouvernance[28] or ‘micromanagement’, the market society, the universalism of human rights, ‘the real domination of capital’, and so on) represent the main object of the Fourth Political Theory. However, they are radically negated as values in themselves.”

“It is now safe to institute a political program that was once outlawed by modernity. It no longer appears as foolish and doomed for failure as before, because everything in postmodernity looks foolish and doomed for failure, including its most ‘glamorous’ aspects. It is not by chance that the heroes of postmodernity are ‘freaks’ and ‘monsters’ ,’transvestites’ and ‘degenerates’ — this is the law of style.”

“Not only the highest supra-mental symbols of faith can be taken on board once again as a new shield, but so can those irrational aspects of cults, rites, and legends that have perplexed theologians in earlier ages. If we reject the idea of progress that is inherent in modernity then all that is ancient gains value and credibility for us simply by virtue of the fact that it is ancient. ‘Ancient’ means good, and the more ancient — the better.

Of all creations, Paradise is the most ancient one. The carriers of the Fourth Political Theory must strive toward rediscovering it in the near future.”

“Heidegger’s philosophy may prove to be the central axis threading everything around itself — ranging from the reconceived second and third political theories to the return of theology and mythology.

Thus, at the heart of the Fourth Political Theory, as its magnetic centre, lies the trajectory of the approaching Ereignis (the ‘Event’), which will embody the triumphant return of Being, at the exact moment when mankind forgets about it, once and for all, to the point that the last traces of it disappear.”

“the entirety of Russian history is a dialectical argument with the West and against Western culture, the struggle for upholding our own (often only intuitively grasped) Russian truth, our own messianic idea, and our own version of the ‘end of history’, no matter how it is expressed — through Muscovite Orthodoxy, Peter’s secular empire, or the global Communist revolution. The brightest Russian minds clearly saw that the West was moving towards the abyss. Now, looking at where neoliberal economics and postmodern culture has led the world, we can be certain that this intuition, pushing generations of Russian people to search for alternatives, was completely justified.”

“Russia’s future completely relies on our efforts to develop the Fourth Political Theory.”

“Postmodernity’s challenge is tremendously significant: it is rooted in the logic of Being’s oblivion and in mankind’s departure from its existential (ontological) and spiritual (theological) roots. Responding to it with hat-tossing innovation or public-relations surrogates is impossible. Therefore, we must refer to the philosophical foundations of history and make a metaphysical effort in order to solve the current problems — the global economic crisis, countering the unipolar world, as well as the preservation and strengthening of sovereignty, and so on.”

“What the Fourth Political Theory is, in terms of what it opposes, is now clear. It is neither fascism, nor Communism, nor liberalism. In principle, this kind of negation is rather significant. It embodies our determination to go beyond the usual ideological and political paradigms and to make an effort to overcome the inertia of the clichés within political thinking. ”

“I do not really understand why certain people, when confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory, do not immediately rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing, celebrating the discovery of new possibilities. ”

“The Fourth Political Theory is the name for a breakthrough and a new beginning.”

“In each of the three ideologies there is a clearly defined historical subject.”

Liberalism

“All forms of collective identity — ethnic, national, religious, caste, and so on — impede an individual’s awareness of his individuality. Liberalism encourages the individual to become himself, that is, to be free of all those social identities and dependencies that constrain and define the individual from outside”

Communism

“The historical subject of the second political theory is class. The class structure of society and the conflict between the exploiter and the exploited classes are the core of the Communists’ dramatic vision of history. History is class struggle. Politics is its expression. The proletariat is a dialectic historical subject, which is called to set itself free from the domination of the bourgeoisie and to build a society on new foundations. A single individual is conceived here as a part of a class-based whole, and acquires social existence only in the process of raising class consciousness.”

Fascism

Fourth Political Theory

“On numerous occasions, I have written about the philosophical and the sociological potential of geopolitics in my works.”

“There are other forms of racism — cultural (asserting that there are high and low cultures), civilisational (dividing people into those civilised and those insufficiently civilised), technological (viewing technological development as the main criterion for the value of a society), social (stating, in the spirit of the Protestant doctrine of predestination, that the rich are the best and the greatest as compared to the poor), economic (in which all humanity is ranked according to the degree of material well-being), and evolutionary (for which it is axiomatic that human society is the result of biological development, in which the basic processes of the evolution of species — survival of the fittest, natural selection, and so on — continue today). European and American societies are fundamentally afflicted with these types of racism, unable to eradicate them from itself despite intensive efforts.”

“Conformity or nonconformity with the glamour code is located at the very base of the mass strategies for social segregation and cultural apartheid. Today, this is not associated directly with the economic factor, but is gradually gaining independent sociological features: this is the ghost of the glamour dictatorship — the new generation of racism.”

“The very ideology of progress is racist in its structure. The assertion that the present is better and more fulfilling than the past, and continual assurances that the future will be even better than the present, are discriminations against the past and the present, as well as the humiliation of all those who lived in the past, an insult to the honour and dignity of our ancestors and those of others, and a violation of the rights of the dead.”

“Undoubtedly racist is the idea of unipolar globalisation. It is based on the idea that the history and values of Western, and especially American, society are equivalent to universal laws, and artificially tries to construct a global society based on what are actually local and historically specific values — democracy, the market, parliamentarianism, capitalism, individualism, human rights, and unlimited technological development. These values are local ones, emerging from the particular development of a single culture, and globalisation is trying to impose them onto all of humanity as something that is universal and taken for granted. This attempt implicitly argues that the values of all other peoples and cultures are imperfect, underdeveloped, and should be subject to modernisation and standardisation in imitation of the Western model.”

“Globalisation is thus nothing more than a globally deployed model of Western European, or, rather, Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, which is the purest manifestation of racist ideology.”

“As one of its essential features, the Fourth Political Theory rejects all forms and varieties of racism and all forms of the normative hierarchisation of societies based on ethnic, religious, social, technological, economic, or cultural grounds. Societies can be compared, but we cannot state that any one of them is objectively better than the others. Such an assessment is always subjective, and any attempt to raise a subjective assessment to the status of a theory is racism. This type of an attempt is unscientific and inhumane. The differences between societies in any sense can, in no shape or form, imply the superiority of one over the other. This is a central axiom of the Fourth Political Theory. ”

“if anti-racism directly opposes the ideology of National Socialism (in other words, the third political theory), then it also indirectly attacks Communism, with its class hatred, as well as liberalism, with its progressivism as well as its inherent forms of economic, technological, and cultural racism. ”

“the ethnos and ethnocentrism (Wilhelm Mühlmann) have every reason to be considered as candidates for the becoming the subject of the Fourth Political Theory. At the same time, we must again and again pay attention to the fact that we view the ethnos in the plural, without trying to establish any kind of a hierarchical system: ethnicities are different, but each of them is, in itself, universal; ethnicities live and develop, but this life and this development do not fit into one specific paradigm; they are open and always distinct; ethnicities mix and separate, but neither one nor the other is good or evil per se — ethnicities themselves generate the crit”

“First and foremost, the Communist theories regarding historical materialism and the notion of unidirectional progress are inapplicable to our purposes. We have previously talked about the racist element, which is embedded in the idea of progress. It looks particularly revolting within historical materialism, which not only prioritises the future ahead of the past, brutally violating the ‘rights of the ancestors’, but also equates the living ‘human society’ (Richard Thurnwald) with a mechanical system operating independently of humanity, according to laws that are monotonic and uniform for all. Materialist reductionism and economic determinism comprise the most repulsive aspect of Marxism. In practice, it was expressed through the destruction of the spiritual and religious heritage of those societies in which Marxism came to dominate. An arrogant contempt for the past, a vulgar materialist interpretation of spiritual culture, a focus exclusively upon economic factors, a positive attitude toward the process of creating a social differential through the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, and the idea of class as the only historical subject — the Fourth Political Theory rejects all these aspects of Marxism.”

“The Marxism which we can accept is mythic, sociological Marxism.

As a myth, Marxism tells us the story of the original state of paradise (‘primitive Communism’), which was gradually lost (‘the initial division of labour and the stratification of the primitive society’). Then the contradictions grew, moving toward the point when, at the end of this world, they were reincarnated, in their most paradigmatically pure form, as the confrontation between Labour and Capital. Capital — the bourgeoisie and liberal democracy — personified global evil, exploitation, alienation, lies, and violence. ”

“Marxism is tremendously useful in revealing those mechanisms of alienation and mystification that liberalism uses to justify its dominion, and as proof of its ‘correctness’. ”

“Being a myth itself, in its polemical, activist form, Marxism serves as an excellent tool to expose the bourgeois ‘great stories’ in order to overthrow the credibility of liberal pathos.”

“Freedom is the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory, since it coincides with its centre and its dynamic, energetic core.”

“the Fourth Political Theory is a theory of liberation, of going beyond the prison walls into the outside world, which begins where the jurisdiction of individual identity ends.

Freedom is always fraught with chaos, but is also open to opportunities. Placed into the narrow framework of individuality, the amount of freedom becomes microscopic, and, ultimately, fictitious.”

“The bearer of freedom in this case will be Dasein. The previous ideologies, each in its own way, alienated Dasein from its meaning, restricted it, and imprisoned it in one way or another, making it inauthentic. Each of these ideologies put a cheerless doll, das Man,[99] in the place of Dasein. The freedom of Dasein lies in implementing the opportunity to be authentic: that is, in the realisation of Sein [100] more so than of da.”

“Unlike other political theories, the Fourth Political Theory does not want to lie, soothe, or seduce. It summons us to live dangerously, to think riskily, to liberate and to release all those things that cannot be driven back inside. The Fourth Political Theory trusts the fate of Being, and entrusts fate to Being.

Any strictly constructed ideology is always a simulacrum and always inauthentic, that is to say, it always is the lack of freedom. Therefore, the Fourth Political Theory should not hurry in order to become a set of basic axioms. Perhaps, it is more important to leave some things unsaid, to be discovered in expectations and insinuations, in allegations and premonitions. The Fourth Political Theory should be completely open.”

“an animalistic form of aggression is embedded in the liberal idea of progress, which is regarded as the main trajectory of social development. ”

“when we speak of ‘modernisation’ in the liberal vein, of necessity we mean the enhancement of the social, political, cultural, spiritual, and informational scenario within which the absolute aggression of the strong against the weak can be implemented.”

“If we understand modernisation like liberal democrats, then that means that we are invited to join in this terrible struggle for survival at its greatest intensity, and to become just like them, trying to grab a place at the trough of globalisation. Globalisation, in this case, is the new battlefield in the struggle for survival, the struggle of the rich against the poor.”

“Monotonic processes are the type that always proceed in only one direction: for example, all their indicators consistently increase without cyclical fluctuations and oscillations. Studying the monotonic process at three levels — at the level of biology (life), at the level of mechanics (steam engines, internal combustion engines), and at the level of social phenomena, Bateson concluded that when this process occurs in nature, it immediately destroys the species; if we are talking about an artificial device, it breaks down; if we mean a society, the society deteriorates and disappears. ”

“In terms of its methodological base, the Fourth Political Theory must be rooted in the fundamental rejection of the monotonic process. That is to say, the Fourth Political Theory must assert that the monotonic process is unscientific, inadequate, amoral, and untrue as its future axiom (without specifying how the monotonic process must be rejected). And, everything that appeals to the monotonic process and its variations, such as development, evolution, and modernisation, should, at the very least, be understood in terms of the cyclical mode… Instead of always looking for modernisation and growth, we should instead orient ourselves in the direction of balance, adaptability, and harmony. Instead of desiring to move upward and forward, we must adapt to that which exists, to understand where we are, and to harmonize socio-political processes.”

“The term ‘liberalism’ should be equated with the terms fascism and Communism.”

“The Fourth Political Theory must take a step toward the formulation of a coherent critique of the monotonic process. It must develop an alternative model of a conservative future, a conservative tomorrow, based on the principles of vitality, roots, constants, and eternity.”

“The Fourth Political Theory does not just discard progress and modernisation, however. This theory contemplates progress and modernisation relative to, and intimately connected with, current historical, social and political semantic occasions, as in occasionalist theory.[140] Progress and modernisation are real, but relative, not absolute. …the Fourth Political Theory suggests an alternative version of political history based on systematised occasionalism.”

“In the discussion of the political transformation of society, we place them in their specific semantic context: history, religion, philosophy, economics, and culture, with its ethnic and ethnic-sociological specifics considered. This demands a new classification of social and political transformation. We acknowledge these transformations, but we do not place them onto a broad-based scale that could be the common ‘destiny’ for all societies. This gives us political pluralism.”

“Dasein is the subject of the Fourth Political Theory. Dasein can be recovered by the refinement of the existential truth derived from the ontological superstructure of society.”

“Adherents of the Fourth Political Theory should act step by step: if we simply argue the reversibility of time and Dasein as the subjects of our theory, that would be the first and primary step. We would thus free ourselves to develop the pre-concepts. ”

“New actors of trans-national and sub-national scale are affirming their growing importance, and it is evident that the world is in need of a new paradigm in international relations.”

World Order from the American Point of View

“alist tendencies dominate? Will there be one unique world order? Or will there instead be various local or regional orders? Or, perhaps, will we have to deal with global chaos? It is not yet clear. The transition is not accomplished. We are living in the middle of it.

If the global elite, and first of all the American political and economic elite, has a clear vision of the future, which is rather doubtful, circumstances may and can prevent its realisation in practice. If, however, the global elite lack a consensual project, the issue becomes much more complicated.

So only the fact of transition to some new paradigm is certain. The paradigm as such is, to the contrary, quite uncertain.

World Order from the American Point-of-View

The position of the United States during this shift is absolutely assured but its long-term future is under question. The US is now undergoing a test of its global imperial rule and has to deal with many challenges, some of them quite new and original.

This could proceed in three different ways:

1) Creation of an American Empire stricto sensuwith a consolidated and technically and socially developed central area, or imperial core, with the periphery kept divided and fragmented in a state of permanent unrest, bordering chaos. The neoconservatives, it would seem, are in favour of such a pattern.

2) Creation of a multilateral unipolarity where the USA would cooperate with other friendly powers (Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel, Arab allies, and possibly other countries) in solving regional problems and putting pressure on ‘rogue states’ (such as Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, or North Korea), or preventing other powers from achieving regional independence and hegemony (China, Russia, etc.). It would seem that the Democrats and President Obama are inclined to this vision.

3) Promotion of accelerated globalisation with the creation of a world government and swift de-sovereignisation of nation-states in favour of the creation of a ‘United States’ of the world ruled by the global elite on legal terms (for example, the CFR project represented by the strategy of George Soros and his foundations).[147] The Colour Revolutions[148] are viewed here as the most effective weapon of destabilising and finally destroying states).

“In any case, the USA is interested in affirming its strategic, economic and political domination; in strengthening its control of other global actors and in weakening them; in the gradual or accelerated de-sovereignisation of what are now more or less independent states; and in the promotion of supposedly ‘universal’ values reflecting the values of the Western world, i.e. liberal democracy, parliamentarianism, free markets, humans rights, and so on.”

Geopolitics

This US-centric global geopolitical arrangement can be described on several different levels:

Historically: The USA considers itself to be the logical conclusion and peak of Western civilisation… History is considered to be a univocal and monotone process of technological and social progress, the path of the growing liberation of individuals from all kinds of collective identities. Tradition and conservatism are thus regarded as obstacles to freedom and should be rejected. The USA is in the vanguard of this historical progress, and has the right, obligation, and historical mission to move history further and further along this path.”

Politically: “The form of politics promoted globally by the USA is liberal democracy. The US supports the globalisation of liberalism, thus preparing the next step to political postmodernity as described in Empire, the famous book by Hardt and Negri. There remains some distance between liberal ultra-individualism and properly postmodern post-humanism, promoting cybernetics, genetic modification, cloning and chimeras. [152]But the world’s periphery still faces the universalising process — the accelerated destruction of all holistic social entities, and the fragmentation and atomisation of society, including via technology (the Internet, mobile phones, social networks), where the principal actor is strictly the individual, divorced from any organic and collective social context…. Democracy is thought to be an effective weapon to create chaos and to govern the dissipating world cultures from the core, emulating and installing the democratic codex everywhere.”

Ideologically:There is a tendency for the US to increasingly link ideology and politics in their relations with the periphery. In earlier times, American foreign policy acted on the basis of pure pragmatic realism. If the regimes were pro-American, they were tolerated without regard for their ideological principles… The double standards in the US’s political ideology are slowly vanishing, and the deepening of the promotion of democracy progresses. ”

Economically: The US economy is challenged by Chinese growth, energy security and scarcity, crippling debt and budget deficits, and the critical divergence and disproportion between the financial sector and the zone of real industry. The overgrowth, or bubble, of the American financial institutions and the delocalisation of industry have created a discontinuity between the sphere of money and the sphere of the classical capitalist balance of industrial supply and consumer demands… The main challenge is how to organise the post-modern and finance-centric economy around continuing growth, overcoming the widening critical gap between the real economy and the financial sector whose logic and self-interest become more and more autonomous.”

The World Order from the Non-American Point of View

“There can be and there are alternative visions of world political architecture that can be taken into consideration. There are secondary and tertiary actors that are inevitable losers in the case of the success of the American strategies; the countries, states, peoples, and cultures that would lose everything, even their own identity, and gain nothing if the USA realised its global aspirations. They are both multiple and heterogeneous, and can be grouped into several different categories.”

“Among this group of nation-states seeking to preserve their sovereignty in the face of US/Western hegemonic or globalist strategies are:

1) Those states who try to adapt their societies to Western standards and to keep friendly relations with the West and the USA, but to avoid direct and total de-sovereignisation; this includes India, Turkey, Brazil, and up to a certain point Russia and Kazakhstan.

2) Those states who are ready to cooperate with the USA, but under the condition of non-interference in their domestic affairs, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

3) Those states who, while cooperating with the USA, strictly observe the uniqueness of their society by filtering those elements of Western culture that are compatible with their domestic culture from those which are not, and, at the same time, trying to use the dividends received by this cooperation to strengthen their national independence, such as China, and, at times, Russia.”

“4) Those states who try to oppose the USA directly, rejecting Western values, unipolarity, and US/Western hegemony, including Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea.”

“The second category of actors who reject the transition consists of sub-national groups, movements, and organisations that oppose American dominance of the structures of the global geopolitical arrangement for ideological, religious, and/or cultural reasons. These groups are quite different from one another and vary from state to state.”

“The paradox is that in the process of globalisation, which aims to universalise and make uniform all particularities and collective identities on the basis of a purely individual identity, such sub-national actors easily become transnational — the same religions and ideologies often being present in different nations and across state borders.”

“We can roughly summarise the different ideas of some of the more important sub-national/trans-national groups as follows:

The most recognised form at present is the Islamist world vision, which aspires toward the utopia of an individual state based upon a strict interpretation of Islamic law, or else a Universal Caliphate which will bring the entire world under Islamic rule.”
Another such project can be defined as the transnational neo-socialist plan represented in the South American Left, and personally by Hugo Chávez. This is roughly a new version of the Marxist critique of capitalism, strengthened by nationalist emotion, and, in some cases, such as the Zapatistas and Bolivia, in ethnic sentiments or Green ecological critiques. Some Arab regimes, such as the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya under Gaddafi until recently, can be considered in the same vein. The vision of the future world order is here presented as global socialist revolution proceeded by anti-American liberation campaigns in every country across the globe.
A third such example can be found in the Eurasianist (aka multipolarity, Great Spaces, or Great Powers) project, proposing an alternative model of world order based on the paradigm of unique civilisations and Great Powers. It presupposes the creation of different transnational political, strategic, and economic entities united regionally by the community of common geographic areas and shared values, in some cases religious and in others secular and/or cultural.”

“The European Union is one such example; the nascent Eurasian Union proposed by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, another. An Islamic Union, a South American/Bolivarian[159] Union, a Chinese Union, an Indian Union, or a Pan-Pacific Union are other possibilities. The North American Great Space, covering today’s NAFTA, would be regarded as just one among several other more or less equal poles, nothing more.”

“The nation-states lack vision and ideology, and the alternative movements lack sufficient infrastructure and resources to put their ideas into practice. If, in some circumstance, it were possible to bridge that gap, taking into consideration the increasing demographic, economic, and strategic weight of the non-Western world, or ‘the Rest’, an alternative to the American/Western-led transition could obtain realistic shape and be regarded seriously as a consequential and theoretically sound alternate paradigm for world order. ”

Conservatism and Postmodernity

“The spectator of postmodernism basically understands nothing of what happens; there is just a stream of pictures, which amuse. Television viewers are drawn into micro-processes, they become those who have not got their fill of the spectacle, ‘sub-spectators’, who never watch an entire programme from start to finish, but only bits and pieces of various programmes.”

“…one will be able to come to the conclusion that, in general, human life is possible, and perhaps even has the potential to be entirely happy, without the washing machine.

But for a liberal society, this is a terrifying thing, almost sacrilege. We can understand everything, but life without the washing machine? That’s already a really unscientific saying: life without the washing machine is impossible. There is no such thing. Life is the washing machine. In this resides the effect of the force of the liberal argument, which takes on a totalitarian character. There is always an element of some kind of constraint in liberation — this is the paradox of freedom. ”

Fundamental Conservativism

“A more logical traditionalism — substantial, philosophical, ontological and conceptual — is one that criticises, not various aspects of modernity and postmodernity, but that rejects the fundamental vector of historical development — that is, one that essentially opposes time. Traditionalism is that form of conservatism which contends the following: what is bad are not those separate fragments here and there within a larger system that call out for our repudiation. In the contemporary world, everything is bad.”

“Traditionalists advanced the programme of fundamental conservatism, when matters concerning Tradition approached their nadir. In this way, fundamental conservatism was able to be formulated into a philosophical, political and ideological model once modernism had practically conquered all positions, but not while there were definite political and social forces still actively struggling against it.”

“In their works, Guénon and Evola gave an exhaustive description of the most fundamental conservative position. They described traditional society as a super-temporal ideal, and the contemporary world of modernity and its foundational principles as a product of the Fall, degeneration, degradation, the blending of castes, the decomposition of hierarchy, and the shift of attention away from the spiritual[167] to the material, from heaven to earth, from the eternal to the ephemeral, and so on. The positions of the traditionalists are distinguished by perfect orderliness and scale. Their theories can serve as a model of the conservative paradigm in its pure form.”

“The positions of the traditionalists are distinguished by perfect orderliness and scale. Their theories can serve as a model of the conservative paradigm in its pure form.”

Status Quo Conservatism — Liberal Conservatism

“Liberal conservatives do not like Leftists. They also do not like Right-wingers, such as Evola and Guénon, either, but these they do not notice at all. But as soon as they see Leftists, they immediately square up.”

“Liberal conservatives are distinguished by the following qualitative structural characteristics: agreement with the general trends of modernity, but disagreement with its more avant-garde manifestations, which seem excessively dangerous and unhealthy. For instance, the English philosopher, Edmund Burke,[171] at first sympathised with the Enlightenment, but after the French Revolution, he pushed away from it and developed a liberal-conservative theory with a front-end criticism of revolution and Leftists. Hence the liberal conservative programme: to defend freedom, rights, the independence of man, progress and equality, but by other means — through evolution, not revolution; lest there be, God forbid, a release from some basement of those dormant energies which with the Jacobins issued in the Terror,[172] and then in the anti-Terror, and so on.”

The Simulacra of Che Guevara

“ In the epoch of modernity, Che Guevara was the enemy of capitalism; in the epoch of postmodernity, he advertises mobile connections on gigantic billboards. This is the style in which Communism can return — in the form of a simulacra. The meaning of this commercial gesture consists in the postmodern laughing off of the pretensions of Communism to be an alternative logos within the framework of modernity.

Nevertheless, liberal conservatism, as a rule, is a stranger to this irony, and is not inclined to joke with either ‘Reds’ or ‘Browns’. The reason for this is that liberal conservatism fears the relativisation of logos in postmodernity, being uncertain that the enemy has been completely defeated. It dreams that the prostrate carcass still stirs, and therefore it does not recommend approaching it too closely or mocking it, seeing this as flirting with danger.”

The Conservative Revolution

There exists yet a third kind of conservatism. From a philosophical point of view, it is the most interesting. This is a family of conservative ideologies that it is customary to call the Conservative Revolution (CR). This constellation of ideologies and political philosophies considers the problem of the correlation between conservatism and modernity dialectically.

Conservatives Must Head the Revolution

One can describe the general paradigm of the Conservative Revolutionary worldview in the following manner. There exists an objective process of degradation in the world. This is not simply the striving of ‘evil forces’ to perpetrate their chicanery; it is the forces of freedom, the forces of the market, which lead humanity along the path of degeneration. The peak of degeneration, from the point of view of Conservative Revolutionaries, is modernity. So far, everything overlaps with the traditionalist position. But, in contrast to it, Conservative Revolutionaries begin to ask themselves: why did it happen that belief in God, who created the world, in divine providence, in the sacred, in myth, transforms in a specific moment into its own opposite? Why does it slacken and why are the enemies of God victorious? A further suspicion arises: maybe that remarkable golden age, which the fundamentalist conservatives defend, carried in itself some kind of gene of future perversion? ”

“We believe’, continue the Conservative Revolutionaries, ‘that in the very Source, in the very Deity, in the very First Cause, there is drawn up the intention of organising this eschatological drama.’ In such a vision, the modern acquires a paradoxical character. It is not merely today’s sickness (in the repudiated present), it is a disclosure in today’s world of that which yesterday’s world prepared for it (so precious for traditionalists). Modernity does not become better from this; and tradition, meanwhile, loses its unequivocal positivity.”

“the task of Conservative Revolutionaries is not simply to overcome nothingness and the nihilism of modernity, but to untangle the tangle of the history of philosophy and to decipher the message contained in Ge-stell. The nihilism of modernity, thus, is not only evil (as for the traditionalists), but also a sign, pointing to the deep structures of being and the paradoxes lying within them.”

Left-Wing Conservatism (Social Conservatism)

“The typical representative of social conservatism is Georges Sorel[181] (see his Reflections on Violence).[182] He held back his Leftist views, but at a specific moment discovered that both the Left and the Right (monarchists and Communists) fight the same enemy: the bourgeoisie.

Left-wing conservatism is close to the Russian National Bolshevism of Ustrialov, who detected Russian national myths under the purely Left-wing Marxist ideology. This is even more distinctly set forth in the National Socialism of Strasser,[183] and in the National Bolshevism of Niekisch. Such Left-wing conservatism can be brought to the family of the Conservative Revolution, or it can be separated into a distinct school.

Eurasianism as an Episteme

Eurasianism is not a political philosophy, but an episteme. It concerns itself with the class of conservative ideologies and shares some characteristics with fundamental conservatism (traditionalism) and with the Conservative Revolution.

The one thing in conservatism that is not acceptable to Eurasianists is liberal conservatism.”

“It considers Western culture as a local and temporary phenomenon, and affirms a multiplicity of cultures and civilisations which coexist at different moments of a cycle. For Eurasianists, modernity is a phenomenon peculiar only to the West, while other cultures must divest these pretensions to the universality of Western civilisation and build their societies on internal values. There is no single historical process; every nation has its own historical model, which moves in a different rhythm and at times in different directions…

The unitary episteme of modernity — including science, politics, culture and anthropology — is opposed by the multiplicity of epistemes, built on the foundations of each existing civilisation — the Eurasianist episteme for Russian civilisation, the Chinese for the Chinese, the Islamic for Islam, the Indian for the Indian, and so on. And only on these foundations, cleansed of Western-mandated epistemes, must long-term sociopolitical, cultural and economic projects be built.”

Neo-Eurasianism

Neo-Eurasianism, which appeared in Russia in the late 1980s, completely apprehended the fundamental points of the previous Eurasianists’ episteme, but it supplemented them with attention to traditionalism, geopolitics, structuralism, the fundamental-ontology of Heidegger, sociology, and anthropology, and likewise carried out the gigantic task of producing concord between the basic conditions of Eurasianism and the realities of the second half of the Twentieth century and the beginning of the Twenty-first, with an enumeration of new scientific developments and studies. ”

“In this way, an intellectual chain is retraced — Eurasianism, structuralism, and Neo-Eurasianism. In this sense, Neo-Eurasianism becomes the restoration of a broad spectrum of ideas, insights and intuitions, which the first Eurasianists outlined and into which entered organically the results of the scientific activity of various schools and authors (for the most part, those with a conservative orientation) that developed in parallel throughout the entire course of the Twentieth century.”

‘Civilisation’ as an Ideological Concept

“Marxists adopted such an interpretation of civilisation easily, having written it into the theory of the evolution of economic systems. According to Morgan, Taylor and Engels,[190] ‘savagery’ characterises tribes engaged in gathering and primitive kinds of hunting. ‘Barbarity’ relates to non-literate societies, occupied with the simplest kinds of rural economy and cattle-breeding, without a clear division of labour or development of sociopolitical institutions. ‘Civilisation’ signifies by itself the stage of the appearance of letters, sociopolitical institutions, cities, crafts, technological improvements, the division of society into classes, and the appearance of developed theological and religious systems. ‘Civilisations’ were thought of as historically steady and able to be preserved; developing, but with their primary features remaining constant over the course of millennia (such as the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and Roman civilisations”

‘Civilisation’ and ‘Empire’

However, together with the purely historical-phase meaning in the concept of ‘civilisation’, a territorial sense was also included, though less explicitly. ‘Civilisation’ offered a vast enough area of diffusion; that is, in addition to a considerable temporal dimension, a broad spatial diffusion was also presumed to characterise it. In this territorial sense, the borders of the term ‘civilisation’ in part coincided with the meaning of the word ‘empire’, in the sense of a ‘world power’. ‘Empire’ in this civilisational sense pointed not to the peculiarity of a political and administrative arrangement, but to the fact of an active and intense spread of influence, proceeding from the centres of civilisation to the surrounding territory, supposedly populated by ‘barbarians’ or ‘savages’.”

“..at the time of the move to ‘civilisation’, social anthropology qualitatively changed: man, turning to ‘civilisation’, had a collective identity imprinted on a fixed body of spiritual culture, which he was obliged to assimilate to a certain degree.

Civilisation assumed a rational and volitional force from the side of man; that, which in the Seventeenth century, after Descartes, philosophers started to call ‘the subject’. But the necessity of such a force, and the presence of a model, abstracted and fixed in the culture, equalised itself, to a certain extent, with both the representatives of the core ethnos (of religion), lying at the foundation of ‘civilisation’, and those who ended up in the zone of influence from other ethnic contexts. To adopt the foundations of civilisation was qualitatively easier than to be accepted into a tribe, inasmuch as there was for this no demand to organically absorb the gigantic reservoirs of unconscious archetypes, but to perform a series of rational, logical operations.

Civilisation and Culture

In some contexts (depending on the country or the author) in the Nineteenth century, the concept of civilisation was identified with the concept of culture…

Oswald Spengler, in his famous book The Decline of the West, even contrasted civilisation and culture, considering the second an expression of the organic, vital spirit of man, but the first a product of the cooling off of that spirit in mechanical and purely technical boundaries. According to Spengler, civilisation is a product of cultural death. However, such a sharp-witted observation, correctly interpreting some qualities of contemporary Western civilisation, did not receive general acknowledgement; and most often today the terms civilisation and culture are used as synonyms, although each researcher can have his own opinion on this point.”

Postmodernism and the Synchronistic Understanding of Civilization

“In postmodernity, criticism of historical optimism, universalism and historicism acquired a systematic character and established the doctrinal premises for a total revision of the conceptual apparatus of Western European philosophy. This revision itself has not yet been carried out to its conclusion, but what has been done (by Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Ricoeur, Foucalt, Deleuze, Derrida, and others) is already enough to convince one of the impossibility of using the dictionary of modernity without a thorough and rigorous deconstruction. Paul Ricoeur, summarising the theses of the ‘philosophers of suspicion’, paints the following picture: man and man’s society consist in rational-conscious components (kerigma, according to Bultmann; ‘superstructure’, according to Marx; ‘ego’, to Freud) and the unconscious (properly, ‘structures’ in the Structuralist understanding; ‘bases’; ‘the will to power’ of Nietzsche; ‘the unconscious’).[191] And although externally it seems that the path of man leads directly from the captivity of the unconscious to the kingdom of reason, and that this exactly represents progress and the content of history, in fact, under the closest scrutiny, it becomes clear that the unconscious (‘myth’) proves much stronger and, as before, considerably predetermines the work of the intellect. Moreover, reason itself and conscious, logical activity is almost always nothing other than a gigantic work of repressing unconscious impulses — in other words, an expression of complexes, strategies of displacement, the substitution of projection, and so on. In Marx, the unconscious is played by ‘the forces of production’ and ‘industrial relations”.

“Consequently, civilisation does not merely remove ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’, entirely overcoming them, but itself is built precisely on ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’ grounds, which transfer to the sphere of the unconscious, but there is not only nowhere to escape from this, but, on the contrary, they acquire unlimited power over man, to a large extent precisely because they are thought to be overcome, and even non-existent. This explains the striking difference between the historical practices of nations and societies, full of warfare, oppression, cruelty, and wild outbursts of terror, abounding in aggravating psychological disorders, and the pretensions of reason to a harmonious, peaceful and enlightened existence under the shadow of progress and development. In this respect, the modern era is not only not an exception but also the peak of the intensification of this discrepancy between the pretensions of reason and the bloody reality of world wars, ethnic cleansing, and the historically unprecedented mass genocides of entire races and narodi”.

The Deconstruction of Civilization

Among the ancient Persians, who represented precisely a civilisation with pretensions to the universality in the form of their Mazdian religion, this was expressed even more clearly: division into Iran (people) and Turan (demons) was drawn on the level of religion, cults, rites and ethics.

In a word, even a rough deconstruction of civilisation shows that the claims to overcoming previous phases are illusions, while in practice, big and ‘developed’ collectives of people, united in a civilisation, in essence simply repeat, on a different level, the archetypes of the behaviour and moral systems of ‘savages’. Hence, endless and ever bloodier wars, double standards in international politics, fits of passion in private life, and the constantly broken ethical and normative codes of moderate and rational societies.

“The Synchronic and Plural Understanding of Civilisation Prevails Today”

“And if we dismiss the recurrences of uncritical liberalism and the narrow-minded naïvety of pro-American and pro-Western propaganda, we will see that today the term civilisation, in operational and active political analysis, is used above all synchronically and functionally, in order to designate wide and stable geographical and cultural zones, united by approximately common spiritual, moral, stylistic and psychological arrangements and historical experience.

Civilisation in the context of the Twenty-first century signifies precisely this: a zone of the steady and rooted influence of a definite social-cultural style, most often (though not necessarily) coinciding with the borders of the diffusion of the world religions. And the political formation of separate segments entering into a civilisation can be rather different: civilisations, as a rule, are broader than one government, and can consist of some or even many countries; moreover, the borders of some civilisations cross countries, dividing them in parts.”

The Crisis of Classical Models of Historical Analysis (Classical, Economic, Liberal, Racial)

“Among the ancient Persians, who represented precisely a civilisation with pretensions to the universality in the form of their Mazdian religion, this was expressed even more clearly: division into Iran (people) and Turan (demons) was drawn on the level of religion, cults, rites and ethics. The matter came to the point of the absolutising of endogenous relations and the normalisation of incest, in order that the solar sun of the Iranians (Ahura Mazda) would not be profaned by the impurities of the sons of Angra-Mainyu.

Judaism as a world religion, having pretensions to universalism and having laid the theological foundations of monotheism ”

“one can say that the ‘civilised’ man is none other than the ‘wicked savage’, a defective and perverted ‘barbarian’.”

“The Synchronic and Plural Understanding of Civilisation Prevails Today”

“In Huntington’s famous and aforementioned article, there is not a word about barbarism; he speaks exclusively of the borders, structures, peculiarities, frictions and differences of various civilisations which are opposed to each other. And this feature is one of not only those of his positions or lines of argument stemming from Toynbee, whom Huntington clearly follows. The use of this term in the contemporary context already suggests a blatant pluralism, comparativism, and, if you like, synchronism.”

“today the term civilisation, in operational and active political analysis, is used above all synchronically and functionally, in order to designate wide and stable geographical and cultural zones, united by approximately common spiritual, moral, stylistic and psychological arrangements and historical experience.

“To speak seriously of races is not acceptable after the tragic history of European fascism. Class-based analysis in the mainstream became irrelevant after the fall of socialism and the break-up of the USSR. And at that moment, it seemed that the sole paradigm of political science would be liberalism. ”

“in his policy book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama brought the development of the phased interpretation of the concept of civilisation to its logical conclusion: the end of history, in his version, signified the final defeat of civilisation over barbarism in all its forms, guises and variants.

Huntington argued with Fukuyama, advancing as his main argument the fact that the end of the opposition of the clearly-defined ideologies of modernity (Marxism and Liberalism) in no way signified the automatic integration of humanity into a unified liberal utopia, inasmuch as under the formal constructions of national governments and ideological camps were found deep tectonic plates; as it were — continents of collective unconsciousness, which, as soon became clear, were by no means overcome by modernisation, colonisation, ideologisation and enlightenment, and as before, predetermined the most important aspects of life — including politics, economics and geopolitics — in one or another segment of human society according to their belonging to a civilisation.

In other words, Huntington proposed to introduce the concept ‘civilisation’ as a fundamental ideological concept, and called for the replacement not only of the class-based analysis, but also of the liberal utopia, which took too earnestly the Cold War, and thus became, in its turn, its victim. Capitalism, the market, liberalism, and democracy seem universal and commonly human only externally. Each civilisation reinterprets its substance in accordance with its own unconscious templates, where religion, culture, language and psychology play a massive and often decisive role.

In this context, civilisation acquires a central significance in the analysis of political science, stepping into first place and replacing with itself the clichés of the liberal Vulgate.”

“Fukuyama says almost nothing about the concept of civilisation, but clearly takes into account Huntington’s theses, indirectly responding to him: the steady development of national governments, which proved cramped both in the epoch of colonisation, in the epoch of national-liberation movements, and in the epoch of the ideological opposition of the two camps, must now proceed in due course.”

Thomas Barnett’s The World as Network

In American political science and foreign policy analysis, there also exists a new promulgation of a purely global theory, presented this time in the essays of Thomas Barnett.[199] The meaning of this conception comes down to this: that technological development establishes a zonal division of all territories on Earth into three regions: the core, the zone of connectedness, and the zone of disconnectedness. Barnett thinks that network processes freely penetrate through borders, governments and civilisations, and structure the strategic space of the world in their own way. The USA and European Union are the core; there are concentrated all the codes of the new technologies and the decision-making centres. The majority of other countries, doomed to a ‘user’ relationship to the network, constitute the ‘zone of connectedness’ (they are compelled to use ready-made technological means and to adjust to the rules that are worked out by the core). To the ‘zone of disconnectedness’ belong the countries and political forces that have stood up in direct opposition to the USA, the West and globalisation.”

“It is significant that those forces in the world which strive to slip away from globalisation, Westernisation and American hegemony in order to preserve and strengthen anew their traditional identity hold to precisely Huntington’s thesis. ”

“in contrast to both globalist-maximalists (like Barnett) and to moderate liberal-statists, the supporters of the civilisational method explicitly or implicitly take their stand on the position of a structuralist, philosophical approach to the understanding of world processes.

The marking out of civilisation as the foundational subject, pole and actor of contemporary world politics is the most promising ideological approach, both for those who want to objectively evaluate the real state of affairs in world politics, for those who are striving to select an adequate toolkit for political science’s generalisations of the new epoch, the epoch of postmodernity, and for those who are striving to defend their own unique identity in the conditions of a progressive blending and also of the real attacks of network globalisation. In other words, the appeal to civilisations allows one to organically fill the ideological vacuum that was formed after the historical crisis of all theories that had opposed liberalism, and also after the internal crisis of liberalism itself, which was unable to handle the guardianship of the contemporary world space, as the unfortunate experience of Fukuyama’s utopia confirms.

“Civilisation as a concept construed in the contemporary philosophical context proves to be the centre of a new ideology. This ideology can be described as multi-polarity.”

“The Scantiness of the Ideological Arsenal of Opponents of Globalism and the Unipolar World”

“Opposition to globalism, which announces itself ever more loudly on all levels and in all corners of the planet, has not yet formed into a concrete system of views.In this is the weakness of the anti-globalist movement; it is unsystematic and deprived of ideological orderliness; patchy and chaotic elements prevail in it, most often representing an inarticulate mixture of anarchism, irrelevant Leftism, ecology and even more extravagant and marginal ideas. In it, third-rate losers of Western gauchism[201] lay claim to the leading roles. ”

“the representatives of traditional religion, as well as supporters of ethnic and religious independence, actively resist globalisation and its Atlantic-Western liberal-democratic code, its networked nature and its value system (individualism, hedonism, laxity); we see this especially clearly in the Islamic world.”

“These three existing levels of opposition to globalisation and American hegemony are unable to lead to the development of a general strategy and distinct ideology, which would be able to unite different and disconnected forces, at times incomparable in scale and oriented in contrary ways in relation to local problems. The anti-globalist movement suffers from ‘the disease of infantile Leftism’ and is blocked by the experience of a whole series of defeats suffered by the global Leftist movement in the last century.

National governments, as a rule, do not have enough of a scope to throw down a challenge to the highly developed technological might of the West; besides, their political and especially economic elites are completely involved in transnational projects, dependent on that very West; while local, ethnic and religious movements and communities, although they can, at certain moments, prove to be an effective opposition to globalisation, are too uncoordinated to count on in earnest for a change in the foundational trends of the world, or even for a correction of course.”

“Here both conflicts and alliances are possible. The most important thing is that a multi-polar world, emerging in such an instance, will create the real preconditions for the continuation of the political history of mankind, inasmuch as it will normatively affirm a variety of sociopolitical, religious, moral, economic and cultural systems. Otherwise, simple and sporadic opposition to globalism on a local level or on behalf of an ideologically amorphous mass of anti-globalists (and that in the best case) will only postpone this ‘end’, and will put the brakes on its onset, but will not become a real alternative.”

Toward ‘Large Spaces’

“After Carl Schmitt, it is customary in political science to call analogical projects of integration ‘large spaces’.[202] In economics, even before Schmitt, this was theoretically understood and employed in practice with colossal success by the creator of the model of the German ‘customs union’, Friedrich von List.[203] The ‘large space’ is a different name for that, which we understand by ‘civilisation’ in its geopolitical, spatial and cultural senses. The ‘large space’ differs from other existing national governments precisely in that it is built on the foundation of a common value system and historical kinship, and it also unifies a few or even a multitude of different governments, tied together by a ‘community of fate’. In various large spaces, the integrating factor can vary; somewhere it will be religion; somewhere ethnic origin; somewhere, cultural form; somewhere, the sociopolitical type; somewhere, geographic position.”

A Register of Civilisations

In contrast to national governments, it is possible to argue about the number and borders between civilisations. Huntington separates out the following:

Western
Confucian (Chinese)
Japanese
Islamic
Indian
Slavic-Orthodox
Latin American, and possibly
African civilisations.

“Europe has two identities: the ‘Atlantic’ (for which it is entirely fair to identify Europe and North America) and the ‘Continental’ (which, on the contrary, is strongly attracted to the construction of independent policies and to the return of Europe to history as an independent player, and not as a mere military beachhead for its North American ‘younger brother’).

Euroatlantism has its headquarters in England and the countries of Eastern Europe (which are moved by an inertial Russophobia), while Eurocontinentalism has its in France and Germany, with the support of Spain and Italy (this is classic Old Europe). The civilisation is, in any case, one, Western, but its ‘large spaces’, it may be, will be organised somewhat differently.”

The Multi-polar Ideal

The idea of a multi-polar world, where the poles will be as many as there are civilisations, allows one to propose to humanity a broad choice of cultural, paradigmatic, social and spiritual alternatives.”

“in such a system, regionalism and the autonomous and independent development of local, ethnic and religious communities can be developed at full speed, inasmuch as the more unifying pressure, characteristic of national governments, weakens considerably (we see this in the European Union, where integration considerably facilitates the development of local communes and so called Euroregions).”

“Something in man changes with time, but something remains eternal and invariable. Civilisation allows one to strictly develop everything in its place. Reason and the philosophical, social, political, and economic systems created by it will be able to develop according to their own lines, while the collective unconscious will freely preserve its archetypes, its basis and inviolability. Moreover, in every civilisation, both rationality and the unconscious can affirm their own standards, secure their correctness, and strengthen them or change them according to its own discretion.

There will be no universal standard, neither in the material nor in the spiritual aspect. Each civilisation will at last receive the right to freely proclaim that which is, according to its wishes, the measure of things. Somewhere that will be man, somewhere religion, somewhere ethics, somewhere materialism.”

“But in order that the project of multi-polarity can realise itself, we must still survive more than a few skirmishes. And in the first place, it is necessary to get the better of the first and foremost enemy: globalisation, the striving of the Atlantic Western pole to hang its unipolar hegemony on all the nations and countries on Earth. ”

The Transformation of the Left in the Twenty-first Century

The Leftist Philosophy in Crisis”

“Leftist political philosophy from the beginning was thought of as a fundamental, general and systematic criticism of liberal capitalism. In the middle of the Twentieth century, there arose the phenomenon of a systematic critique of the Leftist project (both from the side of liberals — Hayek, Popper, Aron, and so on, as well as from the side of neo-Marxists and Freudian-Marxists); with the Leftist ideology itself, the philosophical schools carried out the same thing that the Leftist ideology carried out concerning liberal capitalism 100, or 150 years ago.”

The Old Left Today (The Blind Alley of Orthodoxy; Perspectives of Evolutionary Strategy and Pro-Liberal Revisionism)

The Old Left are now divided into a few orientations:

Orthodox Marxists;
Social Democrats;
Post-Social Democrats (adherents of the Third Way, along the lines of Giddens);[207]
European Orthodox Marxists.”

“The most important shortcoming of Western Orthodox Marxists consists in their continuing to operate using the terms of the industrial society at a time when Western European and especially American society have moved to a qualitatively new stage, the post-industrial (information) society, of which almost nothing is said in classical Marxism, excluding the troubled intuitions of the young Marx about ‘the real domination of capital’. In the absence or failure of the socialist revolutions, this can come as a replacement of ‘the formal domination of capital’, characteristic of the industrial age. ”

“Most often, classical Social Democrats are also:

For progress;
For the battle against archaic and religious prejudices;
For science and culture.

At the same time, there are no serious theoretical developments regarding the new conditions of post-industrial society discussed in this camp, and both the criticism of classical Marxism and the thematisation of capitalism on the new historical stage (in contrast to the postmodernists and ‘the New Left’) are almost entirely absent from them.”

“In contrast to classical Social Democrats and even European Communists, the adherents of the Third Way relate sympathetically to the USA and insist on strengthening the Atlantic alliance (whereas typical Leftists — both old and new — harshly criticise America and American society for its liberalism, inequality and imperialism).

If there are real renegades among the Leftist movements, then these are precisely the followers of the Third Way. Next come former Trotskyites (such as certain Americans — the theoretical founders of neoconservatism… The Leftist project in the case of Third Way socialists is to preserve the status quo.”

“socialist (proletarian) revolutions were victorious only in those countries that Marx thought were entirely unprepared for them by virtue of the following:

Their agrarian character;
Underdevelopment (or lack) of capitalist relations;
A paucity of urban proletarians;
Weak industrialisation;
The preservation of the fundamental social conditions of traditional societies (in virtue of their belonging to pre-modernity).

And this is the fundamental paradox of Marxism: where socialism was supposed to be victorious, and where all conditions came together to this end, it was not victorious; ”

“Up to the present day, many political movements, for instance in Latin America, are inspired by this complex of ideas, while the political regimes of Cuba, Venezuela or Bolivia (Evo Morales is the first South American leader of native Indian heritage), or Ollanta Humala,[214] the supporters of whom are close to seizing power in Peru, and other National Communist movements are full-blown political realities. Either a governmental system is already founded on them, or else this could happen in the near future. And everywhere where Communism has a realistic chance, there we face Leftist ideas that have been multiplied by national (ethnic, archaic) energies and are implemented along the lines of traditional society. ”

“The meaning of Leftist nationalism (National Gauchism) consists in the mobilisation of archaic foundations — local, as a rule — in order to break away to the surface and exhibit itself in sociopolitical creativity. Here, socialist theory comes into play, serving as a sort of ‘interface’ for those energies, without which it would be forced to remain a strictly local phenomena, but thanks to Marxism — however understood and interpreted — these national energies receive the possibility of communicating with other energies, analogical by nature but different structurally, and can even claim universality and planetary breadth; transforming, thanks to a socialist rationality warmed up by nationalism, into a messianic project.”

“The experience of Venezuela and Bolivia, for its part, illustrates that National Communist regimes arise even in our time, and demonstrate their capacity for life in the face of great pressure. ”

“From a theoretical point of view, in the phenomenon of National Gauchism we are faced with Marxism, interpreted in the spirit of archaic eschatological expectations and deep national mythologies, connected to the expectation of ‘the end of times’ and the return of ‘the golden age’ (cargo cults, millenarianism). The thesis of justice and ‘government rights’ on which the socialist utopia is built is recognised as religious, which awakens the fundamental tectonic energies of the ethnos.

Does National Gauchism today have a project for the future? In its completed form, no.

“It is hampered by a series of factors:

The persisting shock of the dissolution of Soviet National Communism”
The lack of a conceptualisation and rationalisation of the national component in the general ideological complex of National Communist movements and ideologies (the absolute majority of supporters of this ideological orientation truly reckon themselves to be ‘simply Marxists’ or ‘socialists’);
The weak institutional communication of National Bolshevik circles between themselves on a global scale (there are no serious, large-scale conferences on this theme, no theoretical journals are published, or, if they are, they remain marginalized, and there are no philosophical developments).

Nevertheless, in my opinion, National Gauchism could certainly have a global future, insofar as among many segments of humanity archaic, ethnic and religious energies are far from being spent, whatever can be said of the citizens of the modern, enlightened and rational West.”

The New Left (Anti-Globalism, Postmodern Paths, Labyrinths of Freedom, to the Advent of Post-humanity

“The ‘philosophers of suspicion’, drawing not only on Marx but also on Freud and Nietzsche, exerted a great influence upon the philosophy of the New Leftists. Through Sartre, one of the classic theorists of the New Leftists, the deep influence of Martin Heidegger and the existential problem penetrated into the Leftist movement”

“The Marxist analysis of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ became, for the New Leftists, the key to the interpretation of society, philosophy, man and the economy. But that same train of thought they discovered from Nietzsche, who had raised the whole spectrum of philosophical ideas to the primordial ‘will to power’ (this was its very basis, according to Nietzsche), and from Freud, for whom the base was the subconscious and unconscious impulses, rooted in the mineral foundations of man’s sexuality and the habitual structures that form in early childhood.”

“All the various decipherings of the ‘base’ were aggregated by the New Leftists into a general scheme, where the role of ‘the base’ as such — regardless of a concrete philosophical tendency — was carried over into the notion of structure. Structure — that is, simultaneous industrial forces reproduced in industrial relations, the subconscious, ‘the will to power’, and Dasein.

The basic idea of the New Leftists is that bourgeois society is a result of many-faceted violence and oppression by the ‘superstructures’ (of the bourgeoisie political system, ordinary consciousness, the rule of elites, generally accepted philosophical systems, science, society, the market economy, and so on), ‘bases’ and ‘structures’ (also understood very broadly, including ‘unconscious’, ‘proletariat’, ‘corporeity’, ‘mass’, the experience of authentic existence, freedom and justice). By such means, the New Leftists, in contrast to the Old Leftists, mount a systematic, critical attack on capitalist society simultaneously from all directions, from the political (the events of May 1968 in European capitals) to the cultural, philosophical, artistic, the very presentation of man, reason, science, and reality. In the course of this massive intellectual work (to which, incidentally, neither the Old Leftists nor the National Gauchists paid the slightest attention), the New Leftists came[…] the New Leftists came to the conclusion that capitalism is not only sociopolitical evil, but the fundamental expression of a global lie concerning man, reality, reason, and society, and consequently, in capitalist society, as in the resulting moments, is concentrated the whole history of alienation. The New Leftists re-animated Rousseau’s idea of the ‘Noble Savage’ and proposed an extensive panorama of an ideal society without exploitation, alienation, lies, suppression, or exclusion, by analogy with the archaic groups which are motivated by the ‘economy of the gift’ (M. Mauss).[218]

The analysis of the New Leftists showed that modernity not only did not realise in practice its ‘liberation’ slogans, but made the dictatorship of alienation even more rigid and repulsive, although hidden behind democratic and liberal facades. In this manner was the theory of postmodernism assembled, founded on the fact that, at the very foundation of the picture of the world, science, philosophy and political ideologies, which had been assembled at the dawn of the epoch of modernity or in the course of its development, are strained interpretations, infelicities, delusions and ‘racist’ presuppositions, which even theoretically block the possibility of liberating ‘the structure’ (‘the base’) from ‘superstructures’. This led to the reconsideration of the philosophical tradition of modernity with the unmasking of those mechanisms that concentrate the nodes of alienation in themselves. This practice received the name ‘deconstruction’, which proposes a careful and thorough structural analysis of the context from which one or another idea proceeded, with a detailed ex-articulation of the substantial nuclei from out of the layer of pathos, moralism, rhetorical figures and conscious juggling. ”

“In this consists the main difference between the New Leftists and the Old Leftists: the New Leftists doubt the structure of reason, they contest the basis of our conception of reality, disrobe positive science as a mystification and dictatorship of the academic circles (Feyerabend, Kuhn)[221], and sharply criticise the concept of man as a totalitarian abstraction. They do not believe that it is possible to change something by the path of evolution in the Leftist manner of the existing system, but also contest the effectiveness of radical Marxism, noting that it did not overcome what it was supposed to; and that where it did, it was not Orthodox Marxism (they borrow from Trotsky the criticism of Stalinism and the Soviet experience).

And so the New Leftists formulate a vast project of ‘the correct’ future, in which the central place is occupied by:

The rejection of reason (the call to the conscious adoption of schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari);
The renunciation of man as the measure of all things (‘the death of man’ of Levi, ‘the death of the author’ of Barthes);
The overcoming of all sexual taboos (freedom to choose one’s orientation, renunciation of the prohibition on incest, a refusal to recognise perversion as perversion, and so on);
The legalisation of all kinds of narcotics, including the hard ones;
A move to new forms of spontaneous and sporadic being (the ‘rhizome’ of Deleuze);
The destruction of structural society and government in the service of new, free and anarchical communes.

The book Empire by Negri and Hardt, in which are given the theses of the New Leftists, can be read as a political manifesto of these tendencies, simplified to the point of primitive “ness. Negri and Hardt call the global capitalistic system ‘Empire’ and identify it with globalism and American world government. In their opinion, globalism creates the conditions for a universal, planetary revolution of the masses, who, using the common character of globalism and its possibilities for communication and the wide, open spread of knowledge, create a network of world sabotage, for the shift from humanity (standing out as the subject and object of oppression, hierarchical relations, exploitation and disciplinarian strategies) to post-humanity (mutants, cyborgs, clones, and virtuality), and the free selection of gender, appearance and individual rationality according to one’s arbitrary rule and for any space of time. Negri and Hardt think that this will lead to the freeing up of the creative potential of the masses and at the same time to the destruction of the global power of ‘Empire’. This theme is endlessly repeated in the cinematography in such films as The Matrix, The Boys’ Club, and so on.”

“The anti-globalisation movement in whole is oriented precisely to such a project of the future. And such actions as ‘the Conference in São Paulo’,[222] where anti-globalists first tried to aim at a common strategy, attest that the New Leftist project is discovering forms of concrete political realisation. Many concrete actions — gay parades, anti-globalisation protests, Occupy Wall Street, the disturbances in immigrant suburbs of European cities, the rebellions of ‘autonomous ones’ in defence of squatters’ rights, broad social protests of new labour unions (all reminding one of a carnival), the movement for the legalisation of drugs, ecological actions and protests and so on — are included in this orientation.

Moreover, postmodernism as an artistic style, having become the mainstream of contemporary Western art, expresses this very New Left political philosophy, entering our way of life through pictures, design or the films of Tarantino and Rodriguez, without preliminary political-philosophical analysis, outrunning our conscious selection, hooking itself into our minds without our knowledge or will. This is attended by both a general broadening of virtual communication technologies, which in their own system carry an implicit invitation to postmodernity, and the dispersion into post-human, hedonistic fragments.

Liberalism as a Summary of Western Civilisation, and Its Definition

In order to adequately understand the essence of liberalism, we must recognise that it is not accidental, that its appearance in the history of political and economic ideologies is based on fundamental processes, proceeding in all of Western civilisation. Liberalism is not only a part of that history, but its purest and most refined expression, its result. This principal observation demands from us a stricter definition of liberalism.

Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy and ideology, embodying in itself the most important force-lines of the modern age and of the epoch of modernity:

The understanding of the individual as the measure of all things;
Belief in the sacred character of private property;
The assertion of the equality of opportunity as the moral law of society;
Belief in the ‘contractual’ basis of all sociopolitical institutions, including governmental;
The abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who lay claim to ‘the common truth’;
The separation of powers and the making of social systems of control over any government institution whatsoever;
The creation of a civil society without races, peoples and religions in place of traditional governments;
The dominance of market relations over other forms of politics (the thesis: ‘economics is fate’);
Certainty that the historical path of Western peoples and countries is a universal model of development and progress for the entire world, which must, in an imperative order, be taken as the standard and pattern.”

It is specifically these principles which lie at the base of historical liberalism, developed by the philosophers Locke, Mill, Kant, and later Bentham and Constance, right up to the neo-liberal school of the Twentieth century, such as Friedrich Hayek[235] and Karl Popper. Adam Smith,[236] the follower of Locke,[237] on the basis of the ideas of his teacher, analysed business activity and laid the foundations for political economy, having written the political and economic Bible of the modern epoch.

“…liberal philosophers, in particular Mill, underscore that the freedom they stand for is a strictly negative freedom. Moreover, they separate freedom from and freedom to and suggest using for these things two different English words: ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. Liberty implies freedom from something. It is from here that the name liberalism is derived. Liberals fight for this freedom and insist on it. As for ‘freedom to’ -that is, the meaning and goal of freedom — here liberals fall silent, reckoning that each individual can himself find a way to apply his freedom, or that he can neglect altogether to search for a way to use it”

“freedom from’ is defined precisely and has a dogmatic character. Liberals propose to be free from:

Government and its control over the economy, politics and civil society;
Churches and their dogmas;
Class systems;
Any form of common areas of responsibility for the economy;
Any attempt to redistribute, with one or another government or social institutions, the results of material and non-material labour (the formula of the liberal philosopher Philip Nemo, a follower of Hayek: ‘Social justice is deeply immoral’);
Ethnic attachments;
Any collective identity whatsoever.”

“liberals, for pragmatic reasons, support the government if it is bourgeois-democratic, facilitates the development of the market, guarantees to ‘civil society’ safety and protection against aggressive neighbours, and staves off ‘the war of all against all’ (Hobbes).

In everything else, liberals go rather far, repudiating practically all sociopolitical institutions, right up to the family and sexual differentiation. ”

“On the whole, liberals insist not only on ‘freedom from’ tradition and sacrality (not to mention previous forms of traditional society), but even on ‘freedom from’ socialisation and redistribution, on which Leftist — socialist and Communist — political ideologies insist.

Liberalism and the Nation

“Such a ‘nation-state’ (état-nation) had no common historical goal and no determinate mission. It conceived of itself as a corporation or business that is founded through the reciprocal agreement of its participants and that can theoretically be dissolved on those same bases.”

“The European nations kicked religion, ethnic identity and classes to the curb, believing these to be remnants of the ‘dark ages’. This is the difference between liberal nationalism and other versions thereof: here, no values of ethno-religious or historical communities are taken into consideration; the accent is put only on the benefits and advantages of the collective agreement of the individuals concerned, who have established a government for concrete, pragmatic reasons.”

The Challenge of Marxism

“…in the depths of the philosophy of the modern era there appeared a movement contesting with liberals for the right to first place in the process of modernisation, and coming out with a powerful conceptual critique of liberalism derived not from positions of the past (from the Right), but from positions of the future (the Left). Such were socialist and Communist ideas, receiving their most systematic expression in Marxism.

Marx carefully analysed the political economy of Adam Smith, and, more broadly, of the liberal school, but he drew from these ideas an absolutely original conclusion. He recognised their partial correctness — in comparison to feudal models of traditional societies — but he offered to go further, and in the name of the future of mankind, to refute what are for liberals the most important postulates.

In liberalism, Marxism:

Denied the identification of the subject with the individual (thinking instead that the subject has a collective-class nature);
Recognised the unjust system of the appropriation of surplus value by capitalists in the process of a market economy;
Reckoned the ‘freedom’ of bourgeois society a veiled form of class supremacy, masking under new clothes the mechanisms of exploitation, alienation and oppression;
Called for a proletarian revolution and abolition of the market and private property;
Pinned its hopes on aiming for the social collectivisation of property (expropriation of the expropriator);
Claimed creative labour as the social freedom of the Communist future (as the realisation of man’s ‘freedom to’);”
Criticised bourgeois nationalism as a form of collective violence over the poorest layers of its respective societies, and as an instrument of international aggression in the name of the egoistic interests of the national bourgeoisie.

Thus, over two centuries, Marxism transformed into the most important ideological opponent and competitor of liberalism, attacking its system, and ideologically following and sometimes scoring important successes, especially in the Twentieth century, with the appearance of a world socialist system.”

The Definitive Victory of the Liberals in the 1990s

The fall of the USSR and our defeat in the Cold War signified, from an ideological point of view, the final distribution of roles in the fight for the heritage of the Enlightenment and for the way of the future.

Soviet society and other socialist regimes turned out to be carefully disguised versions of archaic structures, having interpreted in their own way the ‘mystically’, ‘religiously’ understood Marxism.

This all-important moment in the political history of mankind first of all put the dot on the i with respect to the most important question of the times: which of the two central ideologies of the Twentieth century would follow the past (the spirit of the Enlightenment) and automatically receive the future (the right to dominate, by ideological means, the coming days). The question of the goal of the historical process was principally settled.”

From that moment, there not only began the take-off of liberalism in its most orthodox, fundamentalist Anglo-Saxon and anti-socialist forms, but also the laying bare of the fundamental fact of the ideological history of man: liberalism is destiny. But this means that its theses — its philosophical, political, social and economic principles and dogmas — should be looked at as something universal and absolute, having no alternatives.”

On the Threshold of the American Century

“From an ideological point of view, the victory of liberalism and the rise of the USA is not an accidental coincidence, but two sides of one and the same occurrence. The USA won ‘the Cold War’ not because it amassed more potential and got ahead in the technological competition, but because it based itself on the liberal ideology, proving both its technological competence and its historical rightness in the ideological war, substantiating the balance of the modern era. And just as liberalism displayed its fated dimension, the USA received a concrete confirmation of its messianism, which, in the ideology of Manifest Destiny, was, since the Nineteenth century, an article of faith for the American political elite.”

“The American century is thought of as a re-smelting of the existing world order into a new one, built up on strictly American patterns. This process is conditionally called ‘democratisation’, and it is directed at a few concrete geopolitical enclaves that are, in the first place, problematic from the point of view of liberalism.”

“it was no accident that the neoconservatives emerged from Trotskyism. Just as Trotskyites sought a global Communist revolution, mercilessly criticising Stalin and the idea of building socialism in one country, contemporary neoconservatives call for a global liberal revolution, categorically rejecting the call of ‘isolationists’ to limit themselves to the American borders and their historical allies. Precisely the neoconservatives, setting the tone for contemporary American politics, most deeply understand the ideological meaning of the fate of political teachings at the dawn of the Twenty-first century. American neoconservative circles most adequately perceive the significance of the large-scale changes happening in the world. For them, ideology remains the most important subject of attention, although today it also turns into ‘soft ideology’ or ‘soft power’.”

Liberalism and Postmodernity

After defeating its rivals, liberalism brought back a monopoly on ideological thinking; it became the sole ideology, not allowing any other alongside itself. One could say that it switched over from the level of a programme to the level of an operating system, having become something common.

“…the most frightening crisis of the individual does not begin when he is fighting alternative ideologies that deny man is the highest value, but when he attains his conclusive and irreversible victory.”

Liberalism in Contemporary Russia

If we were to juxtapose all the aforementioned about liberalism with what is understood by liberalism in Russia, we would have to admit that there is no liberalism here. There are liberals, but no liberalism. ”

“Practically none of the post-Soviet elite selected liberalism consciously and deliberately: until the last moment of the fall of the USSR, the leaders of Russian liberalism eulogised the Communist Party, the ideas of Marx, the Plan and socialism, while the oligarchs made a living in the Committee of Komsomols or served in the KGB. Liberalism as a political ideology interested no one; not a penny was paid for it. Such a cheap and crooked liberalism was maintained in the 1990s as an ersatz ideology for post-Soviet Russia. But instead of mastering liberal principles, its supporters and preachers engaged in careerism, privatisation and setting up their own little deals, in the best case fulfilling the guidelines of the Western curators of the breakdown of the Soviet and Russian state.”

“In Russia, irrespective of the whole period of the 1990s, liberalism did not penetrate deeply and did not spawn a political generation of authentic, convinced liberals. It operated on Russia mainly from without, which led in the end to a worsening of relations with the US, to the obstruction of Putin and his course in the West, and, in response, to his Munich speech.”

“The real liberal is the one who acts in compliance with the fundamental principles of liberalism, including in those instances when to do so could lead to serious consequences, repressions and even deprivation of life. If people turn out to be liberals only when liberalism is permitted, in fashion or even out of obligation, ready at the first difficulty to repudiate these principles, such ‘liberalism’ has no relation to the real kind. ”

The Crusade Against the West

However much liberalism today claims that there are no alternatives, there is always a choice in human history. While man exists, he is free to choose; both what everyone chooses, and what no one does.”

“The people’s refusal to adopt liberalism is completely understandable, and can be met at every turn. But it will remain impotent and ineffective until we recognise that we are dealing not with an accident, but with something systemic; not with a temporary deviation from the norm, but with a fatal, incurable disease, the origins of which we should seek in those periods in which to many everything seemed unclouded and clear, and humanity seemed to enter into the epoch of progress, development, freedom and equal rights. But this was simply a syndrome of approaching agony. Liberalism is an absolute evil; not only in its factual embodiment, but also in its fundamental theoretical presuppositions. And its victory, its world triumph, only underscores and displays those most wicked qualities, which earlier were veiled.

‘Freedom from’ is the most disgusting formula of slavery, inasmuch as it tempts man to an insurrection against God, against traditional values, against the moral and spiritual foundations of his people and his culture.

And even if liberalism won all the formal battles and brought us indeed to the cusp of ‘an American century’, the real battle is still ahead…

Only a global crusade against the US, the West, globalisation, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response.

The elaboration of the ideology of this Crusader campaign, undoubtedly, is a matter for Russia not to pursue alone, but together with all the world powers, who, in one way or another, oppose ‘the American century’. Nevertheless, in any case this ideology must begin with the recognition of the fatal role of liberalism, which has characterised the path of the West from the moment when it rejected the values of God and Tradition.”

The Ontology of the Future

“History is awareness of the presence of the past in the present. The vanishing events continue to sound in the act of recalling of them. Clio and Polyhymnia, the Muses of History and Time respectively in Greek mythology, are sisters. This recalling is necessary to give us our sense of the present. The anamnesis[250] of Plato has the same function. The soul should recall the hidden past of its previous lives in order to reconstruct the wholeness of the melody of destiny. Only thus could it be played harmoniously.”

“In the present, the consciousness perceives itself and nothing else. That is the ultimate experience of the last source of reality. According to Husserl, the foundation of all consciousness is transcendental subjectivity, from whence it conceives itself as a kind of short circuit. This experience is self-referential. In it, there is the perception of pure being as the presence of the subjectivity of consciousness.”

“The future is social because it is a historical feature and not immanent to an object’s nature. The object has no future. The Earth, animals, stones, machines — all have no future. Only that which is included in the human social context can take part in the future, and then only indirectly. Without self-referential consciousness, there can be no time. Time is that which is inside us, and what makes us what who we are. Time is man’s ultimate identity.”

“The future makes sense. It makes sense even before it happens. More than this, the future makes sense even if it will never happen. In this lies the semantic value of prophecy and prognosis: even if it does not occur, it is also pregnant with meaning and helps explain the present. Prophecies and prognosis, further, help us to discern the meaning of the future. ”

“The histories of different societies are different. Different, too, are the pieces, the musicians, the composers, the instruments, the musical genre, and the types of notation used by them. That is why humanity as a whole cannot have a future. It has no future. To speak of the future of humanity is quite senseless because it completely lacks semantic value, as well as the sense of these different societal constructions of history and time. Every society is a separate act of consciousness, expanded in the rational and temporal horizons. All are unique and open. But before coming to an understanding of the history of a given society, we should immerse ourselves in the depths of its identity. The fact that every people, every culture, every society has its own history, makes time a local phenomenon, grounded in geography.”

“According to Heidegger, ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) is a concept that describes the interactions of the subject with its surroundings in everyday life that cause it to act upon instincts, form immediate reactions to other people’s language and actions, ‘flow with the situation’, and make immediate interpretations. Being ‘thrown into a situation’ without being able to reflect on it first, and therefore not acting is also an action, for reflection on the situation (i.e., not acting) is also something that can be interpreted as an action. One therefore must rely on instinctual interpretations, and go with the flow. ”

“Western society is particularly afflicted with such an ethnocentric approach and ‘universal’ pretensions rooted in its racist and colonialist past. But in the Twentieth century, this was proven to be completely unfounded and false. Structuralists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, postmodernists, phenomenologist, linguists, existentialists, and so on, have all deployed convincing arguments demonstrating that the inner nature of such an attitude is rooted in the will to power and paranoid imposition of one’s own identity on the Other. This illness is called Western racism.

The West is a local and historical phenomenon. It is a very acute civilisation, very particular, very arrogant, and very smart. But it is just one civilisation among many others. The West has history, and is because of its history. The attempt to abdicate this history in favour of pure universalism and in favour of meta-culture and meta-language is doomed. There are two possible outcomes of this:

1) either the West will lose its own identity and will turn into an automaton;

2) or it will try to impose its own history, conceived by itself as being universal, on all the other existing civilisations, destroying them in the process, and creating a new kind of global concentration camp for their cultures.

The first outcome implies a struggle of automatons with humanity. The second implies an inevitable global liberation movement struggling against this neo-imperialism. It is for the West to decide how to manage the consequences of its proper history and its implications. The West can try to close its history, but it is unlikely that it will succeed in closing the history of all the others.”

“Globalisation is equivalent to the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. They are semantically linked. Different societies have different histories. That means different futures. If we going to make a ‘tomorrow’ common to all societies existing on the planet, if we are going to propose a global future, then we need first to destroy the history of those other societies, to delete their pasts, to annihilate the continuous moment of the present, virtualising the realities that are constructed by the content of historical time. A ‘common future’ means the deletion of particular histories. But this means that no histories at all, including their futures, will exist. The common future is no future. Globalisation is the death of time. Globalisation cancels out the transcendental subjectivity of Husserl or the Dasein of Heidegger. There would be neither any more time, nor being.”

“War and peace will always be. They serve to relive the tension and the stress of the present. They liberate and subjugate horror and death. Total war and total peace are equally murderous.”

The New Political Anthropology: The Political Man and His Mutations

Man as a Function of Politics

“Power itself consists of two elements: first is the power to shape the paradigm, integrated in society through state institutions, and second is power as the dispositive of violence, which serves as a means to integrate the paradigm into the society. Consequently, the single, highest authority of power and its structure controls our political concept of man in a given society.”

“In fact, it is politics that constitutes us. Whether we are born in a maternity hospital or in an open field, whether we are carried into a ward with electricity or a dark, smoky hut, depends on politics. Politics grants us our political status, our name, and our anthropological structure. Man’s anthropological structure shifts when one political system changes to another. Consequently, the political man and our political anthropology alike are given different shapes after the conversion from traditional to modern society.”

“postmodernity, declares that there are no differences as such between these two types of society, politics, and concepts of man. It matters not whether this very man is constituted according to the liberal, individualist approach or by the holistic eidos, it is Man which is the outcome.

The Boundaries of Post-anthropology and the Origin of Post-politics”

“today man is not regarded as a whole — his parts are considered to be independent. It is his desires, emotions, moods and inclinations that matter. ”

“Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use the term ‘rhizome’ and ‘rhizomatic’ to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation), which Hardt and Negri name a ‘multitude’. These ‘multitudes’ act for both subject and authority. ”

The Core Subjects of Postpolitics

Today we can sum up the situation in this way: we add the destructive, corrosive strategy of political postmodernity (possessing the same authoritative, offensive dispositive) into the sphere of the political (which is Schmitt’s classical politics, including pre-modernity and modernity), and we receive politics in its widest meaning, in its absolute meaning. This is the Absolute Political (absolut Politische), in the boundaries of which we can place two basic anthropological models. It sounds natural: the first is ‘contemporary man’, constructed by the political, struggling against politics as such.

The other figure is the political soldier (Das politische Soldat). ‘The political soldier’ is a different concept, developed in the 1930s, which is a personality, summing up what we have called the classical approach to“approach to the political. Its definition is very picturesque: the political soldier differs from the common man by the fact that he kills and dies for politics”

“Even a liberal can become a political soldier (although there is nothing spiritual or noble in liberal ideas). He may die for quite senseless ideas, but he remains a political soldier, and that is very important. The political soldier is an instrumental notion, and should not be hyperbolised. It is a charming, but purely utilitarian element of modernity.

We believe that, on the level of political anthropology, this political soldier is confronting the decomposed, rhizomatic post-human android. ”

“Having raised the question of anthropology, we must look for a solution, and at the same time we must acknowledge this post-anthropology, that is, not wait for what is coming to arrive, but to consider, instead, that it is already here. What do we gain from this perspective? I think that Schmitt, who created the classical approach to the political, might give us some hints. He spoke about political theology. Schmitt said that all political ideologies and systems are integral theological models with religions, dogmas, institutions, and rites of their own. That is why, in order to understand politics, one must regard it as a religious phenomenon.”

“We have political processes, sources of power and dispositives of influence, we observe paradigmatic epistemologies, which are pushed and promoted in the same way as they were in the framework of classical politics. They remain with us, which means that the political in its wider sense is here, it is simply that neither man nor God is there. Who is the actor of this post-politics? There is a certain hypothesis that I call the concept of Angelopolis, ‘the city of Angels’ or Angelpolitia (angelic politics) that is a turn from political theology to political angelology. What this means is that the sphere of the political is starting to be controlled by and is starting to ground itself upon the confrontation between superhuman entities. ”

“Angelopolis is a method to understand, to interpret and to hermeneutically decipher the contemporary processes which surround us and are regarded as being alienated from political anthropology, from humanity as a species, and as a politically institutionalised and constituted notion.”

Fourth Political Practice

“there is no such word as ‘thing’ in Greek, and this is very important, because it means that the concept of reality is also absent. Reality is formed on the basis of res, reality is a property of res, reality is (whose? what?) — something referring to the ‘thing’, or ‘thingness’. Therefore, there are the Greek words pragma, ‘existent’ and ‘practice’ for the Latin res. Pragma is the action and the object at the same time.

It is very interesting: the entirety of Greek metaphysics evolves between ‘theory’ as contemplation and ‘action’ (praxis), keeping short of severe Latin subjectivity, the ‘thingness’ hidden in the term res.”

“We should put Dasein as the centre and the pole of the Fourth Political Theory. What does this mean in the context of practice? It means that Dasein should not be qualified either as a theoretical construction, or as a principle. Should it be used as a myth, like a narrative? This comes much closer, but it should be carefully considered. It should not exactly be used as a mentality, at least not as an ontological mentality. Likewise, it should not be used as an idea or anything concerning the subject.”

“Unlike Hegelianism, Marxism, communication theory, and in principle, the entire structure of modernity, we are not interested in anything that sits upon the line between theory and practice. We are looking for something that does not belong to horizontal subspace, or to some ratio-based configuration of the columns, or to the line between theory and practice. We are interested in something hidden under the theory and practice, somewhere in the common root they both grow from…

“We should obtain practice as theory, take principle as manifestation, mentality as activity and thinking as action. What is Fourth Political Practice? It is contemplation. What is the manifestation of the Fourth Political Practice? It is a principle to be revealed.”

“What is the supranatural world? It is a world where there is no barrier between idea and realisation. It is the principle of adopting a magical view of the world based on the idea that thought is the only thing that crosses worlds, and everything we cross with is nothing more than a thought. ”

“There is no more space, no more topos, and no more topology in Fourth Political Practice aside from theory; we have annihilated any other spaces before we started, not in the consummation, but in the very beginning, before we started in a pre-ontological context. In other words, we should not look forward (it will never be changed) or backward if we really want to change the squalor we live in, because all the remnants that have made this ultimate form of degeneration possible and real have appeared and been stored there. ”

“the only path for real political struggle is appealing to the Fourth Political Practice as to the roots, free from the evolutionary process, from the very conception to the final point where we are now, because either our political struggle is soteriological and eschatological, or it has no meaning.”

“how does our traditionalism or new metaphysics relate to postmodernity? I consider them to be very close. Virtuality tries to mix the semantic fields of the columns on the horizontal level so as to become indistinguishable. We can say that Deleuze’s rhizome is a postmodern and post-structural mockery of Heidegger’s Dasein. They are alike and they are often described in the same terms. But pay attention to the fact of how postmodernism solves the problem of the reversal of the column’s order. It solves the problem by appealing to the surface, and this is the main idea we see with Deleuze. Remember his interpretation of Artaud’s [268] ‘body without organs’, [269] his interpretation of the necessity of destruction, of the leveling of structure, and his interpretation of man’s epidermis, his outer layer, as the basis for the screen onto which his image is projected. It is a point of mockery where Fourth Political Theory and postmodernism meet each other.

“If the Fourth Political Practice is not able to realise the end of times, then it would be invalid. The end of days should come; but it will not come by itself. This is a task, it is not a certainty. It is active metaphysics. It is a practice. And it can be a potential and rational solution of the enigmatic layers that are discovered while talking about Fourth Political Practice. ”

Gender in the Fourth Political Theory

“Gender is a social convention which can change from society to society. At the same time, the political formulation of gender is the social norm, which is approved as an imperative on the basis of political power.”

“From the viewpoint of modernity, a woman is not a person. A person can only be a man; however, not every man, only a special type of man. The characteristics of a real man include wealth (until the end of the Nineteenth century in Europe, property was a necessary attribute of citizenship, i.e., political gender), rationality, thrift, and living in a city (the peasant was not considered an equal in sociopolitical significance). Thus, in the elections of the first state Duma in Russia in 1905, the voice of one townsman was equal to 100 peasants’ voices. In modernity, a peasant is not quite a ‘person’. Other characteristics of being a ‘man’ include maturity and age. These socio-professional and age categories are included in the concepts of gender and gender functions. ”

“The Hungarian neo-Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács [274] said that ‘the dialectical method as the true historical method was reserved for the class which was able to discover within itself on the basis of its life-experience the identical subject-object, the subject of action; the ‘we’ of the genesis: namely the proletariat’.[275] Proceeding from such a formulation, classical Marxists consistently call for insanity, to schizophrenia, to the schizo-revolutionary (Deleuze). They rely on the urban poor and the proletarians, who could never become full-fledged bourgeois; they turn to the non-White urban populations; however, they ignore those who live in rural areas or peasants, seeing them through the prism of bourgeois perception. But on the whole, in the gender policy of the Communists, we see a new tendency: they recognise the status quo of gender and offer to change it under the banner of historical materialism. This means the transgression of bourgeois man in the downward direction, and the appeal to the material substance (literally ‘what stands below’ — the sub-state), to the undifferentiated realm of work, where there is no qualitative difference between the ‘good cooking woman’,[276] the sailor, or the masculine hero. Marxists venture even lower down, where nothing is left of gender hierarchies and strategies. Thus, the most extreme Marxist ideas have a desire to destroy the bourgeois archetype. ”

“Madness is part of the gender arsenal of the Fourth Political Theory. In general: non-White/European, insane, non-urban or defined by a constructed landscape. For example, the ecologist or aboriginal: that is, the person who did not break with nature, as discussed by Redfield in his The Folk Society.[281] Thus, we create a search algorithm woven of all those elements that are ignored or rejected by modernity. These elements make up a huge field of existence and metaphysics, a field of the intensive being of the Fourth Political Theory. Supplementing the Fourth Political Theory, we should refuse all those tenets about gender which liberalism carries within itself. ”

“we create a search algorithm woven of all those elements that are ignored or rejected by modernity. These elements make up a huge field of existence and metaphysics, a field of the intensive being of the Fourth Political Theory. Supplementing the Fourth Political Theory, we should refuse all those tenets about gender which liberalism carries within itself. From the second political theory’s gender conception, it would be permissible to borrow the idea of ‘the desiring-machine’, the idea of overcoming ‘the man’ through global egalitarianism within the limits of the material.”

“The re-extension of existing gender models can lead to the explosion of the hypermodern like a rotting fungus, and its gender archetypes will fail. Now we are in this moment of a postmodern re-extension, and the final breaking of gender. The stages of this break are feminism, homosexuality, sex-change operations, and transhumanity.

In the West, the second political theory had a great influence on the elites, particularly the creative professions (actors, writers, philosophers, etc.). This is ‘the desiring-machine’, incorporating Leftist feminism with its ideas of freedom from sex. Donna Haraway[284] is such a feminist, or rather loosely a neo-Marxist and a postmodernist. ”

Against the Postmodern World

The Evil of Unipolarity

“Geopolitically, it is the strategic dominance of the Earth by the North American hyperpower and the effort of Washington to organise the balance of forces on the planet in such a manner as to be able to rule the whole world in accordance with its own national, imperialistic interests. It is bad because it deprives other states and nations of their real sovereignty.

When there is only one power which decides who is right and who is wrong, and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship. This is not acceptable. Therefore, we should fight against it. If someone deprives us of our freedom, we have to react. And we will react. The American Empire should be destroyed.And at one point, it will be.”

Spiritually, globalisation is the creation of a grand parody, the kingdom of the Antichrist. And the United States is the centre of its expansion.American values pretend to be ‘universal’ ones. In reality, it is a new form of ideological aggression against the multiplicity of cultures and traditions still existing in the rest of the world. I am resolutely against Western values which are essentially modernist and postmodernist, and which are promulgated by the United States by force of arms or by obtrusion”

“The common enemy is the necessary instance for all kinds of political alliances. This means Muslims and Christians, Russians and Chinese, both Leftists and Rightists, the Hindus and the Jews who challenge the present state of affairs, globalisation and American imperialism. They are thus all virtually friends and allies. Let our ideals be different, but we have in common one very strong feature: hatred of the present social reality. Our ideals that differ are potential ones (in potentia). But the challenge we are dealing with is actual (in actu). That is the basis for a new alliance.”

Towards the Fourth Political Theory

I believe that all previous anti-liberal ideologies (Communism, socialism, and fascism) are no longer relevant. They tried to fight liberal capitalism and they failed. This is partly because, at the end of time, it is evil that prevails; and partly because of their inner contradictions and limitations.

…we need to separate out the materialist and modernist aspects of Communism and reject them, while preserving and embracing its social and holistic aspects.

There is no common or universal measure to judge different ethnic groups. When one society tries to judge another, it applies its own criteria, and so commits intellectual violence. This ethnocentric attitude is precisely the crime of globalisation and Westernisation, as well as of American imperialism.

“If we free socialism from its materialist, atheistic and modernist features, and if we reject the racist and narrow nationalist aspects of the Third Way doctrines, we arrive at a completely new kind of political ideology. We call it the Fourth Political Theory, or 4PT, the first being liberalism, that we essentially challenge; the second being the classical form of Communism; and the third being National Socialism and fascism. Its elaboration starts from the point of intersection between different anti-liberal political theories of the past (namely Communism and the Third Way theories). So we arrive at National Bolshevism, which represents socialism without materialism, atheism, progressivism, and modernism, as well as the modified Third Way theories.”

“We must go further and make an appeal to Tradition and to pre-modern sources of inspiration. There we have the Platonic ideal state, Medieval hierarchical society, and theological visions of the normative social and political system (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Jewish or Hindu). These pre-modern sources are a very important development for the National Bolshevism synthesis. Therefore, we need to find a new name for this kind of ideology, and Fourth Political Theory is quite appropriate. It does not tell us what this theory is, but rather what it is not. So it is a kind of invitation and appeal, rather than dogma.”

“These prejudices are the instruments in the hands of liberals and globalists with which they keep their enemies divided. ”

“So we need to unite the Right, the Left and the world’s traditional religions in a common struggle against the common enemy. Social justice, national sovereignty and traditional values are the three main principles of the Fourth Political Theory.”

“We propose, as a suggestion, that the main subject of the Fourth Political Theory can be found in the Heideggerian concept of Dasein. It is a concrete, but extremely profound instance that could be the common denominator for the further ontological development of the Fourth Political Theory.”

“The Fourth Political Theory insists on the authenticity of existence. So it is the antithesis to any kind of alienation — social, economic, national, religious or metaphysical. ”

“But Dasein is a concrete instance. Every individual and every culture possesses their own Dasein. They differ between each other, but they are always present.

Accepting Dasein as the subject of the Fourth Political Theory, we should progress toward the elaboration of a common strategy in the process of the creation of a future that fits to our demands and our visions. Such values as social justice, national sovereignty and traditional spirituality can serve us as the foundation.”

“The important concept of nous (intellect) developed by the Greek philosopher Plotinus[287] corresponds to our ideal. The intellect is one and multiple at the same time, because it has multiple differences in itself — it is not uniform or an amalgam, but taken as such with many parts, and with all their distinct particularities. The future world should be noetic in some way — characterised by multiplicity; diversity should be taken as its richness and its treasure, and not as a reason for inevitable conflict: many civilisations, many poles, many centres, many sets of values on one planet and in one humanity. Many worlds.”

“Who are aligned against such a project? Those who want to impose uniformity, the one (American) way of life, One World. And their methods are force, temptation, and persuasion. They are against multipolarity. So they are against us. ”

Appendix I

Political Post-Anthropology

Each type of political system and each stage of political history operates in accordance with the normative, political type of the human. We say ‘a man of the Middle Ages’, ‘a man of modernity’, and so on, describing the specific historical and political constructs. These constructs are directly dependent on the organisation and formalisation of power relations in a society and relate to the axis of power, which is the essence of the political, and with the designation of one’s friend and enemy (C. Schmitt), which is also the essence of the political. The political is power and political identification (the Self/the Other). Each political form provides a different model of power and such identification. However, many political systems exist, and each has its own political anthropology. Political theology (C. Schmitt)[288] suggests that the policy and political system reflects, and in certain cases constitutes, a standard of political anthropology.”

“Political post-anthropology is about forecasting and constructing the political human in postmodernity. It is normative. We do not just study what exists; we follow the process and try to affect it. Wishful thinking and self-fulfilling prophecy is quite legitimate and welcome here. By exploring political post-anthropology, we bring the political back to life.”

Political Post-humanity and the Post-State

The absolute features of the post-humanity of postmodernity are:

– depoliticisation;

– autonomisation;

– microscopisation;

– sub- and transhumanisation (as a special form of dehumanisation);

– Dividualisation (fragmentation).

That is, the rejection and denial of something that was political in the previous phases of history becomes the dominant form of politics.

“The industry of fashion, celebrity, glamour and show business inculcates the idea that, to attain material prosperity, one does not need to earn money through work; one must instead enter and be recognised by the relevant social set and become a member of the ever-changing glamour network. Glossy pages, on which a body without organs is sliding right and left, are like a concrete embodiment of Deleuze’s l’espace lisse [289] — an image of post-economics. Actual work is not necessary, it is optional.”

“In the post-state, institutions are mobile and ephemeral. Policies and legal principles are continuously and rapidly changing. It has neither vertical, nor horizontal symmetry, aiming instead to merge with the network. It is sort of a pirate republic placed in cyberspace, or a Brazilian carnival, which replaces the routine with a routine of spectacle. In the post-state, the serious and frivolous swap, and it is a kind of Saturnalia[290] rendered permanent. In post-politics, post-humanity constitutes this post-state through being amused by its own deadly, hallucinatory game.”

“Rather than being esteemed and experienced elders, politicians are chosen for their youth, glamour, appearance and inexperience. ”

“5. Why are we talking about post-politics when it is obviously about something directly opposite to the political? Because such an anthropological type of postmodernity, in theory and social practice, steps on, i.e. it attacks, persistently imposes itself, introduces itself, and gradually becomes the norm. It acts as a basic personality”

“7. Twitter revolutions in the Arab world or iPad presidents, such as Dmitri Medvedev, are clear signs of political post-anthropology and the phenomenon of the post-state. The revolt of the elites and the oscillation of the intensity level of consciousness of the ruling groups are near zero. A classic example is a drug addict as political strategist.”

III. The Political Soldier and His Simulacrum

“the political soldier fights for a model of power relationships, and directly and openly identifies himself with a particular group (‘ours’). A fundamental distinction of the political soldier is that he is ready and able to die for his political idea. This differentiates him from an ordinary soldier and an ordinary politician. A soldier dies, but not for a political idea. A politician fights for a political idea, but is not ready to die for it.”

Today there are no political soldiers. All that remains is their shells.

Alternative in Political Post-anthropology: Pre-human and PC

My thesis is reduced to the following affirmation: in the context of political post-anthropology, postmodernity and the post-human (dividual) cannot be opposed to modernity and human (individual). Opposing dualities will not be like the dividual vs. individual and post-human vs. human, but like dividual vs. pseudo-individual and post-human vs. pseudo-human. The anthropological fold (Deleuze) of postmodern anthropology is this: a simulacrum meets with a simulacrum.

“6. Here we can also touch on the delicate theme of angelomorphosis. It is no accident that in the eschatology of most religions and traditions we are dealing with the Endkampf [296] panoramic view, which necessarily involves angels. In Hollywood blockbusters, indeed, this also suffers from simulation. But it is inevitable.”

“The political expression of the Radical Subject can be defined, not as the area of political theology (Carl Schmitt), but as the area of political angelology. This topic requires further development.”

Appendix II

The Metaphysics of Chaos

Modern European philosophy began with the concept of logos and the logical order of being. For over two thousand years, this concept became fully exhausted. All the potentialities and the principles laid in this logocentric way of thinking have by now been thoroughly explored, exposed and abandoned by philosophers.

However, the problem of chaos and the nature of chaos was neglected and put aside from the very beginning of this philosophy. The only philosophy we know at present is the philosophy of logos. But chaos is something opposite to logos, its absolute alternative.

From the Nineteenth century and continuing until the present day, the most important and brilliant European philosophers (such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger) began to suspect that logos was fast approaching its end.”

One thought on “Quotes from Alexander Dugin’s “The Fourth Political Theory””

Andrei Lucas says:

October 12, 2019 at 5:58 am

You read more of Dugin than any sane person. Is makes sense, because you and Sasha both pedantic nerd of delusional granduer, for mixing fascism and left-wing ideology on dangerous purpose. Difference is he has an experience, opportunity, for not to say more Machiavellian … and you are just village fool floating in anglosphere, intoxicate for own echo chambers.

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