The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

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.”

Alexander Dugin’s Political Platonism offers a seminal analysis of the contemporary philosophical crisis from one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. Through a series of essays, course transcripts, and a single long interview—each remarkable for the depth of its learning and the boldness of its vision—Dugin exposes the profoundest roots of the Western philosophical tradition, offering his view of why it has reached its final terminus, and his indication of where a new beginning must be sought.

The works collected in this volume present Dugin’s theory of Political Platonism as a fundamental philosophical and political orientation, capable at once of reviving higher political and social forms and furnishing solid ground for resistance to the collapse of the contemporary world. His multi-perspective thesis offers a thorough and thought-provoking critique of modernity and a masterful survey of Western philosophy, reaching from before Heraclitus to beyond Heidegger. In its provocative, clear-sighted analyses and its visionary flights, this book provides an invaluable reference for those already familiar with Dugin, and an intriguing introduction for those coming to him for the first time.

A number of various, altogether interesting conclusions can be extracted from Sedgwick’s analysis.[4] Here we will fixate on merely one point, that of the conceptual unity of 20th century Traditionalism (Guénon, Evola, etc.) and Renaissance Platonism (Plethon, Ficino, Steuco, etc.). Both of these philosophical currents can be generalized with the notion of “Perennialism.” If we can historically trace Guénon’s philosophical inspirations back to the Renaissance, which Guénon himself harshly criticized for misunderstanding the sacred civilization of the Middle Ages, and if we can find there the first formulations of Sophia Perennis or the Prisca theologia which compose the foundation of Traditionalist philosophy, then in it becomes completely obvious that these currents came to Western Europe in the Renaissance from the much deeper past and, to a certain extent, from a different cultural context (more specifically, the Byzantine-Greek). Of course, Platonism was well known in Medieval European Scholasticism, but it had long since yielded to Averroism and Aristotelianism enshrined virtually dogmatically in the realism of Thomas Aquinas. Hermeticism had existed in the form of alchemical currents and esoteric fraternities, but in the Renaissance these tendencies surfaced in rather vivid and magistral form, such as in the forms of open Neoplatonism and philosophically-formulated Hermeticism (with numerous direct or indirect polytheistic elements), which claimed to be not merely a secret tradition parallel to the dominant Scholasticism, but a foundational, universal worldview. Renaissance Platonism and Hermeticism directly opposed Catholic Tomism and formulated the agenda of Renaissance Humanism. This humanism was magical and sacred: man was understood to be the “perfect man”, the Platonic philosopher, the Angel-Initiator.

The spirit of of old Europe is alive in Heidegger’s work, just as much as in Evola’s work. Both represent the spirit of an age that knew – intimately, perhaps – the Nietzschean drive to its deep modernistic roots and its essence, and perhaps could be depicted in a certain sense as representing the age of the (aspiring) Overman, the active nihilist, and of the regimes that sought a new model of man – many of them Fascist, Communist or even Liberal – as opposed to the current age of the Last Man, a man who has lost the Faustian drive almost entirely and therefore succumbed to passive nihilism, and to the spirit of an age that has fully transitioned from Modernity to Post-Modernity. An age that now consequently, in our current epoch, faces complete dissolution. Evola addresses this age of dissolution just as intensively and concisely as Heidegger deconstructs the essence of Western logos and of its Metaphysics focused on unreal abstract presences, on reified essences, and on the thinking subject.

Kemi Seba is a man of his time. Speaking loudly, echoing the indignation of the proletarian layers of Africa and its diaspora. His speeches are the soundtrack of a people who can no longer be anesthetized, their resistance is like that of a young woman who has been so struck so many times that she no longer feels the blows landed on her. In the space of the former French colonies, since the death of Lumumba and Sankara, we have not seen in Africa young Africans arousing the enthusiasm of the masses and expressing the desire for total sovereignty of the people as Seba does in part in their struggle for self-determination populations of Francophone Africa.