The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

The outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic has been a decisive moment in the destruction of the unipolar world and the collapse of globalization. The crisis of unipolarity and the slippage of globalization has been noticeable since the very beginning of the 2000s - the 9/11 catastrophe, the sharp growth of China's economy, the return to global politics of Putin's Russia as an increasingly sovereign entity, the sharp activation of the Islamic factor, the growing crisis of migrants and the rise of populism in Europe and even the United States that resulted in the election of Trump and many other parallel phenomena have made it clear that the world formed in the 90s around the dominance of the West, the US and global capitalism has entered a crisis phase. The multipolar world order is beginning to form with new central actors, civilizations, as anticipated by Samuel Huntington. While there were signs of emerging multipolarity, a trend is one thing, and objective reality another. It is like cracked ice in spring - it is clear that it will not last long, but at the same time, it is undeniably here - you can even move across it, albeit with risk. No one can be certain when the cracked ice will actually give way. 

We should stand together with the awakened Iranians, awakened Shiites, awakened muslims and all awakened from other confessions and religions in order to participate on the same side in common struggle against Daddjal, the Lier which we call Antichrist and which is identified in the actual world in globalism, Western hegemony, global capitalism and murderous politics of United States of America with all theirs pawns, puppets and proxies.
The Iranian Revolution ids the revolt against modern World in favor of eternal truth and the coming age of the Restoration, Resurrection and establishing of global Justice. It is our common struggle – we have common enemy and we should feel ourselves as brothers in spirit and arms.

When Bush was in Moscow, at the moment of the invasion of the United States in Iraq, he said: ‘Please be patient, you will have democracy as well, like in Iraq.’ Putin said: ‘Thank you very much, we will find another way to build our society.’
I think the picture you gave is correct, but it has nothing to do with modern Western society, where there is a purely totalitarian way of describing the facts, not in favour of a small group of owners of one mass medium or another, but in favour of a political elite. And they are in that sense a kind of Platonists, taking their truths from their liberal ideology; that is something Platonic as well. And the people are in revolt against that, in different countries but also in the West. I think the wave of populism is precisely the refusal of the European people, not right wing or left wing, but a refusal by normal European citizens of this absolutely abstract agenda of liberal elites. So I think that it is not about the State now, we are speaking about political elites.

So, Russia is in trouble; its Logos, its people, its Dasein, its existential horizon. But 'nothing is lost when there is something that is not lost,’ as Curzio Malaparte has said. So I think that we are in a situation that is structurally close to the situation of Serbian people. We have different scale, different power, different space, different number of population, but the problem is the same. And Russia could not be regarded as the answer or alternative to what is going on. It is only the other place where the Noomahia still continues, with domination of the Cybelian Logos. So we are inside of Cybele. We are not outside of Cybele. That maybe was remarked by Milos Crnjanski in his final result of his book, that Russia is good but that is not the answer for Serbian quest for identity. Milos Crnjanski’s result or summary is a tragic one because Serbs become kind of in exile, in permanent exile, with no motherland left for them. But all the hopes on Russia should be measured with this pessimistic but very open solution of Milos Crnjanski because he loved Russia, and Serbians love Russia. And that is good, but when we have too much incorrect expectations, we could miss the question and unity in fight with something that already accomplished and perfect. So that is very important to Serbs and to all the fighters of identity to know that Russia fights. Russia is not yet defeated formally, because our people is, because it exists. But we have so great problem with Russian Logos, we could not yet start to continue the situation when our effort to create Russian philosophy was cut drastically by Communists. So we are outside of the place where really philosophy begins. We are outside. And this place is not attained, not reached yet. We are fighting to go to this moment. And because of great damage we had during last hundred years, we could not restart the process. In Russia today, there is pure social madness. We could not speak with nobody. As people, we are very good and open and very Christian, but as a kind of bearer of some intellectual ero. With so big people, so few people capable concretely to think, it is unimaginable. That is a kind of deep, dogmatical sleep (not dogmatical in the positive sense, it’s adogmatical), modern, post-modern sleep, conservative sleep of the people. So we are sleeping but that is good thing that we could be awake, lets hope.

So we consider the modernity not as the fate 'cause we have it now and we will have it tomorrow, and we are obliged to be modern’ and so on. Traditionalists affirm that to be modern is a decision. You can be modern or you can be not modern. And they have created two concepts - the tradition and the modernity. So modernity is not something actual. That is a kind of society or civilization or world vision or picture of the reality. That is one thing. And there is tradition. That is the picture of reality, the civilization, the culture, and the society that is different. And between them, affirmed the traditionalists, there is antagonism. That is very important because that gives us the possibility to study modernity not as something inevitable but as something that is the product of concrete historical development based on concrete sequence of decisions and choices.

We were very close to it in the Dusan the Strong in your history, with the first and the second Bulgarian Kingdoms in the history of Bulgarians, we were close some time in the Polish Kingdom with Lithuanian and Great Moravia as well with some philosophical tendency. But we have never achieved the final version of this Logos in Eastern Europe, as well in Russia. We didn’t achieve the final version of Logos. Our existential horizon is not finished. It hasn’t received the last form. And that maybe is our historical challenge. And Slavophile thinkers saw that we came to the history later than the other when there was already a huge building of German philosophy, German political history, French philosophy, Roman philosophy, Greek philosophy, and as well political history. We Slavs have arrived to this a little later, not in the history, but to the understanding of history, to Logos of history, and to our philosophy. Our philosophy is a little bit childish and infantile. There is great example, great explosion of intellectual richness of precious thinkers such as Petar II Petrović-Njegoš metaphysical as well, Russian Dostoyevsky but all that is a kind of feeling of coming of our Logos and not the Logos itself. We are living in the anticipation of the Slav Logos. And when we study the past, we see many heroic deeds but we could not say that is our Logos. No. That is something like that. There is Saint Sava in Serbia. That’s anticipation of the Serbian mission, of the history. The creation of Nemanja Dynasty, Russian Ivan the Terrible and the other moments in our Slavic history are anticipation of Logos and not the Logos itself. That’s my personal opinion and it’s more difficult to describe our own Logos than to study the Logos of the other because it demands very deep introspection inside in our culture.

n our European civilization, we have two existential horizons and two daseins. One is the Logos of Apollo represented by the official ideology, three functional ideology, and the other is the Logos of Cybele. That is very important in the shadow part, in our subconscious, in the mother tradition. It is a part of the second parallel, hidden, or secret ideology. It is not the void. It is an ideology that is present in our societies but is not obvious, is not explicit. It is an implicit Logos of Cybele but is still alive because we are living in the civilization with the huge part of agriculture system and economy because we continue to produce and to consume the agriculture and food and we are sedentary. This level which we could individuate put the concept of the Logos of Cybele, not to the ancient types, but the Logos of Cybele exists now inside of ourselves, because our society is partly based precisely on this moment of noomahia. But noomahia is a continuing process. We could not once and forever grant the victory of one logos. If the Logos of Apollo weakens, that means that some other pole will become stronger. If the patriarchy dissolves (which is the case now in modernity), the other counter-current begins to appear, becomes more and more explicit, not implicit. That is the most important result of this noological analysis.

    And we could regard this existential horizon as space where the people live, Lebensraum. But at the same time, it could not exist without human being, without people, without language, without tradition. If you put the mixed population in some space you don’t get this existential space. It is not Dasein. And that is very difficult example in our history - Kalingrad people by Russian that was Prussia people by Baltic tribes, invaded by Germans, assimilated, and after that taken by us and we have put the Germans aside. So that is space Russian, not so German, no, Baltic, no. There is the place, the people there living, the culture, and the history but there is no Dasein. So a part of territory of the space is evacuated from existential aspect. It’s very special conditions. I have studied Serbian history and that is kind of this idea of migration of Serbs that created the similar idea where are the borders of Serbia. Where is Serbians, the bearers of Serbia? Or could the Serbs exist without Serbian motherland or not? It is open question. So that is a kind of exilic tradition. So it deals with the problem of existential Dasein. Existential Dasein is not the territory. And that is not only the people. It is the relation, the Sein (being) to the place, existential relations of the being to the place that passes through the people, through the cultures, through the humans, through the thought. It’s very particular concept but it’s very important to geosophy because geosophy studies precisely existential horizons. It is the relations of the being to the space that goes through the culture, through the language, through the tradition, through the identity. So that is very important category of geosophy.

Today the West is imposing not its system, but its systemlessness, not its obviousness, but its doubt, not its assertion, but its deep internal crisis. When we join the global network, we do not receive a new identity and we do not come into contact with a new world. We simply irrevocably surrender to the storage room with a forgotten entry code those remnants of what made us who we were before and that reality in which we lived before. The act of dropping old certitudes and definitions is quite specific: it is a passport to the “new times”, a credit card for complicity in globalism, a mandatory requirement, and all those who reject this “initiation into globalism” automatically end up on blacklists, henceforth deemed agents of the “axis of evil” – after all, they did not catch the “latest news” that the world and the human are dead (following the death of God). 

Over the course of this struggle, the flame of the “resurrection of the spiritual North”, the flame of Hyperborea, will transform geopolitical reality. The new global ideology will be that of Final Restoration, putting a final end to the geopolitical history of civilizations – but this will not be the end which the globalist spokesmen of the End of History have theorized. The materialistic, atheistic, anti-sacred, technocratic, Atlanticist version of the End will give way to a different epilogue – the final Victory of the sacred Avatar, the coming of the Great Judgement, which will grant those who chose voluntary poverty the kingdom of spiritual abundance, while those who preferred wealth founded on the assassination of the Spirit will be condemned to eternal damnation and torment in hell.

 Dugin enters into scene in a modernity which is crumbling but threatens to take to the grave the human essence itself with it. His rebellion is projected revolution over the earthly and the political action, without pretending in any way to transcend Dasein, which is an imperative task for each people. His proposal demands a new historical principle which culminates completely the end of modernity founding a new epochal life over the return of the sacred and eternal archetypes. For Gómez Dávila, this would be the return of the sign of Christ; its historical praxis: the devotion to the miracle. For Dugin, the aegis of his Russian Orthodox Church, which reaffirms however, a plural comprehension of the gods: the logos of each people.

The circle of sacred animals is apportioned according to the logic of the five elements: the Black Turtle or Snake is associated with Water and the Underworld (the land of the Yellow Springs); the Yellow Dragon with Wood, the East, and the Spring Equinox; the Red Phoenix with the South and the Summer Solstice; the White Tiger with Metal, the West, and the Autumnal Equinox; and the Yellow Unicorn (qilin) with Earth and the Center. All of these sacred beings, however, are described as having a whole complex set of properties, such as horns, the tails of snakes or fish, wings, paws, scales, etc. In other words, all of them are pantheria, or “all-beasts” featuring elements of other animals. They are proto-animals, spirits, and sacred symbols containing the powers of the fivefold rhythm of the dispensation of Yin-Yang. In some sense, they might be called “gods” or “onto-logoi” insofar as they exhibit the most general synthetic powers conjugated with each of the elements; but as living and personified beings, they embody these powers in a concentrated form drawn towards a single pole. Appealing to the pantheria is a kind of spell of the elements which, in order for it to be possible to be evoked, must have personal traits. 

Today we assist not only huge geopolitical transformations in the balance of leading world power (the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity), but as well the deep ideological changes. Concretely in the Middle East we see how important is still the role of USA, Israel and European Union on one hand, how Russian and China presence changes the situation in region, and how different Islamic countries and different tendencies in Islam confront or ally with each other. So there is ideological – sometimes theological dimension behind the geopolitics and we cannot any more reduce the problems to simply national States competition or East-West ideological opposition. We need new tools of analysis that would explore the ideological ground and project it on the geopolitical map. We are in need of new kind of mapping the space. And that concerns Middle Eastern space much more than any other. Because it is here where main trends are redefined now.

This is the phenomenological, Heideggerian foundation of object-oriented ontology: the object continues to be a constituted subject. Not the strong, hard subject which wields it - and this is where Deleuze’s proposal comes in - the paranoid subject which reinforces itself and dissects others, but one which begins to dissolve itself and becomes schizophrenic. This “subject”, according to Deleuze and Guattari, dissipates itself into schizo-masses. With this gradual self-denial, self-splitting, this kind of metaphysical suicide, Dasein begins to endow objects with its own decomposition which enlivens these objects. For instance, in David Lynch’s films, such as in the Twin Peaks series, the character speaks with his own leg. When the character gets lost in the woods, he suddenly starts to speak to his own leg, which responds with its own voice. In other words, the leg, a subordinate, mute, obedient thing, a slave to the human brain, suddenly demonstrates the qualities of autonomy, has its own preferences as to where to go, can be angry, and so on. This is, as object-oriented ontologists say, a kind of “parliament organs”, a “parliament of things” or…as Bruno Latour says the new ontologies of the creation of hybrids between subjects and objects. The talking leg is one example of the constitution of independent objects. Thus, the object of object-oriented ontology becomes a reality, the object acquires independence significance from the subject insofar as the subject is abolished. And this object itself will be extinguished.

The subject is not so much “done away with” as it is abandoned. In this case, the subject is understood not as a pre-phenomenological subject, but post-phenomenological, Dasein.

Martin Heidegger’s influence looms large over the field of political theory. Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, and others are among Heidegger’s sometimes rebellious, sometimes reverential intellectual offspring. But on the whole they and other political theorists responding to Heidegger tend to depart from his account of philosophy or his ideas about the relationship between philosophy and politics. This paper will argue that the Russian thinker Alexander Dugin, who tracks Heidegger much more closely than other theorists do, should be included in the list of philosophically serious and important political-theoretic Heidegger receptions. Including Dugin among receptions of Heidegger brings to light forgotten or suppressed possibilities of Heideggerian political philosophy not reducible to Nazism. Dugin's use of Dasein in particular provides a fruitful starting point for comparisons with liberal, leftist, and other uses of Dasein among political theorists.

“Huntington could foresee that instead of ideology, modernisation, westernisation, technological assertion, there is some core of self-consciousness or identity that is more stable and stronger. I think he could see that we are coming to this moment, this deep truth of fundamental spiritual identity of civilizations, as they appear on the historical scene after the collapse of liberalism—the last utopic modern political theory.”

“Liberalism is obsolete as Putin has said recently, and instead of it, civilizations reappear, and now the problem is what will be the multipolar order? What are the borders, and that is very important and significant. What are the numbers of civilizations that are ready or not yet? What will be the juridical aspect of civilizational? All that has to be decided now. We live in the moment that nothing is as yet decided, but everything is put under question,” Mr. Dugin observed

Pyotr Volkov: In Central America, the US political domination existed long before it reached South America. The US political and cultural domination of the South America began after 1947 with the demise of the British empire and the start of the Cold War.  Britain’s domination of our economy brought us a lot of technological progress but U.S domination of our economy brought the very opposite. If it wasn’t for the anti-Yankee sentiment, the U.S would had brought our people down to the Middle Ages.

Iurie Roșca: You are writing a lot in your book about Russian Orthodox Faith and about spiritual issues in general. Is it because of your Russian roots or because of your interest in the spiritual decadence of Modernity?  As we all know such decadence grew catastrophic during the current historical period of globalization and the Western ”culture of death”

Pyotr Volkov: I must admit that my preoccupation for the spiritual decadence of Modernity is something painful   that sometimes it keeps me awake at night, it just makes me sick. Despite my distant Russianroots,  I felt like some kind of superior force or reason guided me all along this path. Following this path is the entire reason of my earthly existence, anyone is in need of a true reason to live  or die.

The classic expression of this order was the ancient epoch of Mediterranean societies beginning with the Achaean conquests and Homeric Greece. Such a system was characteristic of Ancient Greece and Rome with the exception of periods of decline distinguished by a strengthening of the political positions of “urban dwellers”, who represented a mixture of higher castes with uprooted peasants that gave birth to a new type of merchant hitherto alien to classical Indo-European societies. This type of merchant could have taken shape through the degradation and materialization of the warrior caste (which Plato describes in his Republic as the phenomenon of timocracy), or from below through a specific deviation from social type on the part of former peasants or urban artisans. It cannot be ruled out that this was the result of influences that were altogether foreign to the Indo-European cultural circle, such as Phoenician or, more broadly, Semitic cultures, for whom trade was a widespread social occupation. In the city-states of Greece, “urban dwellers” and “citizens”, i.e., “townspeople”, formed a specific social milieu in which the three classical functions of Indo-European society found parodical manifestation. In the very least, this is what Aristotle presented in his Politics. The authority of king-priests (the sacred monarchy) transformed into tyranny. The domination of the warrior aristocracy gave way to domination by a financial oligarchy. The organic self-government of ethnically homogeneous and solidary communities (polity) became “democracy”, or the power of the sporadic and disparate crowd unified only by territory of urban residence.

It is significant that the Eurasianists rejected all three of these projects (and political theories), and even exposed their disastrous nature. The Eurasianists also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union from the very onset of its establishment. The Eurasianists discussed the importance of religion to the life of the people and the state, and the Eurasianists insisted on the peaceful coexistence of cultures and ethnoi. Although the Eurasianist movement proper existed only during the interwar period, it found successors in the Soviet Union and now in contemporary Russia. Of extreme interest in this regard are the ideas of the philosopher Alexander Dugin, who has proposed the model of a Fourth Political Theory. This variation of “society D” continues the line of classical Eurasianity and rejects the three historical political theories of Liberalism, Fascism, and Communism. If Muhammad Iqbal spoke of the need to obtain the collective self (Ijtimayi Khudi) for a new society, then Professor Dugin is employing the terminology of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger in speaking about the Selbst and Dasein.

The whole discourse of post-colonial criticism lies within the unequal and uneven depiction of culture, in contrast to political and social authority within the liberal world order. Hence, the emergence of post-colonial discourse as a domain knowledge explored the marginalization of subaltern identities and became a historical testimony of the marginalized “Third world” with a broader focus on minorities within the geopolitical division of East and West. Moreover, the whole context of post-colonial revolves around the ideological state apparatus by digging out the differences between culture, social gap and political discrimination within the rationalization of Liberal modernity.

Today, there is a heated continental debate between the Liberal Atlanticists and Eurasianists, the latter of whom reject the liberal led modernity of Europe. Moreover, the Eurasianist traces their racial and cultural identity from the Indo-European Chronology and calls themselves as indo-Europeans instead of Liberal modern Europeans – which despite the civic, legalistic criteria of the latter, is in fact a cultural, historical, economic supremacism over the broader Eurasian identity rooted in its people.

In Moscow, Eurasianist scholar Alexander Dugin influenced the policy of President Vladimir Putin and diverted Russian policy towards Eurasianism. The ultimate purpose of this diversion was aimed at Russian revisionism in order to bolster Russia’s role for the creation of a multi-polar, and multi-stakeholder, world.

According to Dugin, European civilization has degenerated and it must be destroyed. However, to fight the European civilization, Dugin suggests the Eurasianist Federation based on the strategic unity and ethnic plurality with a principle judicial element of the rights of people.

We need to begin forming the philosophy of multipolarity that should replace the liberal globalist theory (end of history, Western hegemony, world capitalism, unipolarity and so on)

The basis of the MPW is Russia-China multipolar allience. If there is such allience, MPW exists already today. Russia is one of the two major nuclear powers. China is one of the two major economic powers. If we unite Russian and China in multipolar allience, MPW is already here. India joins immediately after. Entrance of India and Pakistann in SCO is symbol of great importance.

BRI project wnen it includes Russia, is precisely the decisive step toward this multipolar allience. Putin recently suggested to link to BRI Northern Polar Road. So BRI goes eurasian.

Democracy today cannot be discussed objectively. It is not a neutral concept: behind “democracy,” as a political regime and corresponding value system, stands the West, Europe and the USA. For them “democracy” is a form of secular cult or a tool of political dogmatics, thus, to be fully accepted into society in the West, it is necessary by default to be “for” democracy. One who calls it into question falls out of the field of political correctness. Marginal opposition is tolerated; but if it is more than marginal, democracy sets its machines of oppression against its alternatives like any regime, any ideology, and any dominant religion. It is not possible to talk about “democracy” impartially. That is why in discussions about democracy we must say at once whether we are completely for or completely against it. I’ll respond with extreme candor: I’m against it, but I’m against it only because the West is for it. I’m not prepared to accept anything thoughtlessly and uncritically on faith, even if everyone believes it, and all the more so if this is accompanied by a concealed (or clear) threat. You suggest that I rely on my own reason, no? I’ll begin with the fact that reason advises me to reject all suggestions [predlozheniy, offers, proposals]. No one can give us freedom. It either is or it is not [we either have it or we don’t]. A slave will convert even freedom into slavery, or at least into swinishness, and a free person will never be a slave even in fetters. From his time enslaved Plato did not become either less Plato or less free, while we still pronounce the name of the tyrant Dionysus with contempt, so which of them is a slave? At any rate, as a popular textbook on technical analysis says, “the majority is always wrong.”