The Fourth Political Theory

beyond left and right but against the center

Geopolitics in its present form is undoubtedly a worldly, “profane”, secularized science. But maybe, among all modern sciences, it saved in itself the greatest connection with Tradition and traditional sciences. René Guénon said that modern chemistry is the outcome of the desacralization of a traditional science — alchemy, as modern physics is of magic. Exactly in the same way one might say that modern geopolitics is the product of the laicizing and desacralizing of another traditional science — sacred geography. But since geopolitics holds a special place among modern sciences, and it is often ranked as a “pseudo-science”, its profanizing is not so accomplished and irreversible, as in the case of chemistry or physics. The connection with sacred geography here is rather distinctly visible. Therefore it is possible to say that geopolitics stands in an intermediate place between traditional science (sacred geography) and profane science.

The two primary concepts of geopolitics are land and sea. Just these two elements —Earth and Water — lie at the roots of human qualitative representation of earthly space. Through the experience of land and sea, earth and water, man enters into contact with the fundamental aspects of his existence. Land is stability, gravity, fixity, space as such. Water is mobility, softness, dynamics, time.

These two elements are in essence the most obvious display of the material nature of the world. They stand outside of man: everything is heavy and fluid. They are also inside him: body and blood. (The same happens also at a cellular level.)

The end of capitalism. The development of capitalism has reached its natural limit. There is only one path left to the world economic system — to collapse in upon itself. Based on a progressive increase of purely financial institutions, first banks, and then more complex and sophisticated stock structures, the system of modern capitalism has become completely divorced from reality, from the balance of supply and demand, from the production and consumption ratio, from connection with a real life. All the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of the world’s financial oligarchy by complicated manipulations of constructed financial pyramids. This oligarchy has devalued not only labor, but also the capital connected to the market fundamentals, secured through financial rent. All other economic forces are in bondage to this impersonal transnational ultraliberal elite. Regardless of how we feel about capitalism, it is clear now, that it is not just going through another crisis, but that the entire system stands on the verge of total collapse.
No matter how the global oligarchy tries to conceal the ongoing collapse from the masses of the world’s population, more and more people begin to suspect that this is inevitable, and that the global financial crisis, caused by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market and major banks is only the beginning of a global catastrophe.

Does financial capitalism represent just a random variant of the common essence of the development of the capitalist system ? Or is it rather the definitive incarnation of its whole logic, its triumph ?

The answer to this question can not be found within the classics of economic theory, their horizon being limited to the industrial phase of development - the general trend and the full economic significance of which they (and above all the Marxists) did investigate completely and correctly. Post-industrial society is still in many ways an obscure reality.  
In its analysis there are no adfirmed classics, although many authors have cast a deep-searching look upon this phenomenon. The task of understanding "financism" is ours, whether we like it or not.

Even to move the first steps in the direction of a consistent overview of this theme, we have to consider the whole history of the economic paradigm, and individuate there the place of "financism"- not just from  the point of view of quantitative chronology, but from the point of view of the qualitative relevance of this phenomenon in the general development of economic models.

 As a whole, the process of globalization is very abstract, and so requires an assessment from within and between various discrete fields of the social sciences.  David Harvey notes that “…if the word ‘globalization’ signifies anything about our recent historical geography, it is most likely to be a new phase of exactly the same underlying process of the capitalist production of space". Anthony G. McGrew , a professor of International Relations at Southampton University, describes globalization as “a process which generates flows and connections, not simply across nation-states and national territorial boundaries, but between global regions, continents and civilizations. This invites a definition of globalization as: ‘an historical process which engenders a significant shift in the spatial reach of networks and systems of social relations to transcontinental or interregional patterns of human organization, activity and the exercise of power”.

For Dugin, triumphant liberalism is embodied by Americanism; the United States, through its origins as an Enlightenment project, and through its superpower status in the twentieth and twenty-first century, is the global driver of liberal practice. As such, with the defeat of Marxism, it has created, and sought to perpetuate, a unipolar world defined by American, or Atlanticist, liberal hegemony. Russia has a long anti-Western, anti-liberal tradition, and for Dugin this planetary liberal hegemony is the enemy. Dugin would like the world to be multipolar, with Atlanticism counterbalanced by Eurasianism, and maybe other “isms.” In geopolitics, the need for a fourth political theory arises from a need to keep liberalism permanently challenged, confined to its native hemisphere, and, in a word, out of Russia.

In the 1920s, Russian Eurasianists as well as some Japanese philosophers try to organize a cultural stronghold able to serve as an orientation mark to “second rate” nations. The result is an autonomous intellectual tradition that leaves behind the dichotomy of particularism and universalism. Also in China, the interest in Asian cultural geography led Chinese intellectuals to an awareness of global space that they had to put in relation with the historical space of China. However, criticism of modernization in Japan and Russia, instead of questioning the idea of modernization as such, tends to deal with the quality of modernization. The article examines the consequences that these movements might have for the contemporary situation.

In the 1920s, Russian Eurasianists as well as some Japanese philosophers try to organize a cultural stronghold able to serve as an orientation mark to “second rate” nations. The result is an autonomous intellectual tradition that leaves behind the dichotomy of particularism and universalism. Also in China, the interest in Asian cultural geography led Chinese intellectuals to an awareness of global space that they had to put in relation with the historical space of China. However, criticism of modernization in Japan and Russia, instead of questioning the idea of modernization as such, tends to deal with the quality of modernization. The article examines the consequences that these movements might have for the contemporary situation.

Problems stemming from the West during the “unipolar moment” has led many to say that this “moment” is over, that he could not yet be a “destiny” of humanity.That is, a “unipolar moment” should be interpreted very broadly – not only geopolitical, but also ideologically, economically, axiologically, civilization wide. The crisis of identity, about which you ask, has scrapped all previous identities – civilizational, historical, national, political, ethnic, religious, cultural, in favor of a universal planetary Western-style identity  – with its concept of individualism, secularism, representative democracy, economic and political liberalism, cosmopolitanism and the ideology of human rights.Instead of a hierarchy of identities, which have traditionally played a large role in sets of collective identities, the “unipolar moment” affirmed a flat one-dimensional identity, with the absolutization of the individual singularity.  One individual = one identity, and any forms of the collective identity (for example, individual as the part of the religious community, nation, ethnic group, race, or even sex) underwent dismantling and overthrow. Hence the hatred of globalists for different kind of “majorities” and protection of minorities, up to the individual.

The Uni-polar Democracy of our moment - this is a democracy, which unambiguously protects the minority before the face of the majority and the individual before face of the group.  This is  the crisis of identity for those of non-Western or non-modern (or even not “postmodern”) societies,since this is where customary models are scrapped and liquidated. The postmodern West with  optimism, on the contrary, asserts individualism and hyper-liberalism in its space and zealously  exports it on the planetary scale.

Present-day Europe has its own strategic interests that differ substantially with American interests or with the approach of the Global West project. Europe has its particular positive attitude towards its southern and eastern neighbours. In some cases economic profit, the energy supply issues and common defence initiative don’t coincide at all with American ones.

These general considerations lead us, European intellectuals deeply concerned by the fate of our cultural and historical Motherland, Europe, to the conclusion that we badly need an alternative future world vision where the place, the role and the mission of Europe and European civilisation would be different, greater, better and safer than it is within the frame of the Global Empire project with too evident imperialistic features.

The only feasible alternative in present circumstances is to found in the context of a multi-polar world. Multi-polarity can grant to any country and civilisation on the planet the right and the freedom to develop its own potential, to organise its own internal reality in accordance with the specific identity of its culture and people, to propose a reliable basis of just and balanced international relations amongst the world’s nations. Multi-polarity should be based on the principle of equity among the different kinds of political, social and economic organisations of these nations and states. Technological progress and a growing openness of countries should promote dialogue amongst, and the prosperity of, all peoples and nations. But at the same time it shouldn’t endanger their respective identities. Differences between civilisations do not have to necessarily culminate in an inevitable clash between them – in contrast to the simplistic logic of some American writers. Dialogue, or rather ‘polylogue’, is a realistic and feasible possibility that we should all exploit in this regard.

In today's world, the impression is growing that politics has ended – at least the politics that we used to know.  Liberalism stubbornly fought it out with its political enemies, which had offered alternative recipes – with conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and communism – and, finally, at the end of the 20^th century, it beat them all.  It would have been logical to surmise that politics would become liberal, while all of liberalism's opponents, having turned up on the periphery, would begin to rethink strategies and to form a new front: the periphery against the centre (Alain de Benoist).  But at the beginning of the 21^st century everything followed a different script.

Liberalism, having always insisted upon the minimization of the political, decided after its victory to countermand politics altogether, possibly in order not to allow formation of political alternatives and to make its rule eternal, or from the completion of the political discussions of the day due to the lack of enemies, who are necessary, according to Carl Schmitt, for the proper constitution of a political position.  In any case, liberalism drove the matter to the wrapping up of politics.  At the same time it itself changed, having moved on from the level of ideas, political programs and declarations and entered into the very make-up of social reality, which became liberal, not in a political but in a natural, every-day manner.  As a consequence of such a turn of history, all the political ideologies that feuded passionately with one another over the last century lost their currency.  Conservatism, fascism and communism, together with their secondary variations, lost; but liberalism, having won, quickly mutated into a way of life: consumerism, individualism, and a post-modern style of fragmented and sub-political being.  Politics became bio-politics, redeployed on an individual and sub-individual level.  It turns out that not only the defeated political ideologies but politics as such left the scene – including the liberal variant.  For that reason, the formulation of alternatives is proliferating.  Those who do not agree with liberalism found themselves in a difficult situation: the victorious enemy dissolved and disappeared; they're fighting with the air.  How, then, is one to engage in politics, when politics is no longer?

Russian Eurasian geopolitics met the European continentalism in 1992 - during a joint visit to Moscow of Carlo Terracciano and Jean Thiriart. Jean Thiriart  was the author of the concept "Euro-Soviet empire from Vladivostok to Dublin" and Carlo Terracciano at that time has written his programmatic work "In the foam of history" (“Nel fiume della Storia”). Since European continentalism and Russian eurasianism became almost the same geopolitical line. Something similar was described in the project Haushofer continental concept of geopolitical block “Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo”. The same idea was revived on the theoretical level in the early 90s in Russia. The close Russian – European geopolitical dialogue started then in Moscow and is continuing and growing up to present day. At the same time, other European geopolitics, in particular, Alain de Benoist, Claudio Mutti visited Moscow, entering the same direction of geopolitical considerations. In France, a very similar views were held by an excellent traditionalist writer Jean Parvulesco.

The second point. When we speak or write Russian, French, Serbian, Polish, German, Arab, Turkish, Iranian and so on we are linked to the regional perspective. Our native languages impose on us the concrete national borders, historical experiences and idiosyncrasies. So we count on understanding and presume that listeners know the contexts. So the social context dictates the form of expression and affects thus the various semantic levels. Using English we are free from all these, so we try to be understood by anyone including by those whose historical experience is different from ours. So we choose the words and terms carefully, explaining the details and doing so we rethink what we are to say.

1.The human world is not one (Modern-Western) civilization as universal one and example of the development to all other, but rich variety  of civilizations, cultures, religions, ethnics and societies. Each one of them has absolute right of stay what it is or change at its own will in any direction. No society can judge another society because there is no common measure. Any judgment of the sort will be necessarily ethnocentric. The is only one universal think - total absence of any universality (concerning human society).

2. So we need to construct multipolar world where the Western (and North American) society will be one possibility among many other (and not common destiny).

3. The Russia is not a country like Germany or Italy, o Greece. It is something more. It is civilization on its own. It is cultural, geopolitical, historical and social pole of the human world charged with the mission. The Russia in not part of the West nor East. It is completely aside. To understand Russia we should compare it with Europe as whole or with Islamic civilization, or with chinese civilization.

From the depths of being, the contemporary Russian Worker sullenly glazes at this bustle. Awkward and concrete, tenacious as a machine, and sluggish like a thinker. He does not believe and will never believe the social demagoguery of the “pinks.” Them again? No, enough. For the “capitalists,” the reckoning will also be short. Only the dense, passionately melancholic power of arising nationalism can touch these solid and temperate people. But when there is talk of a “ruling dynasty,” “restoration of privileges to nobility,” gonfalons, cossacks, or “national entrepreneurship,” the patriots face gloomy indifference: “Maskers.” Each morning, with sunrise (nobody except these people has thought of the sun for a long time now) they crawl out of apartment cages from fat and stupid wives and snotty toddlers, move in a measured pace into the concrete womb of Production. So that - toiling without inspiration - persistently, rhythmically, uninterruptedly wage a cosmic battle with matter, so inflexible, raw, rough, so poisonous. Gloomy workers know - evil demon of substance has taken hostage delicate and frail Life, the Sun Maiden. It is the form stolen by a harsh usurper of matter. It can be saved only by heroic deed, a stubborn, terrifying, relentless war against the ground ice of reality.

There are no universal patterns of development. The plurality of landscapes on Earth produces a plurality of cultures, each one having its own cycles, internal criteria and logics. Geographical space has a huge (sometimes decisive) influence on peoples’ culture and national history. Every people, as long as it develops within some given geographical environment, elaborates its own national, ethical, juridical, linguistic, ritual, economic and political forms. The “place” where any people or state “development” happens predetermines to a great extent the path and sense of this “development” – up to the point when the two elements became one. It is impossible to separate history from spatial conditions, and the analysis of civilizations must proceed not only along the temporal axis (“before”, “after”, “development” or “non-development”, and so on) as also along the spatial axis (“east”, “west”, “steppe”, “mountains” and so on). 
No single state or region has the right to pretend to be the standard for all the rest. Every people has its own pattern of development, its own “times”, its own “rationality”, and deserves to be understood and evaluated according to its own internal criteria. 
The climate of Europe, the small extension of its spaces, the influence of its landscapes generated the peculiarity of the European civilization, where the influences of the wood (northern Europe) and of the coast (Mediterraneum) prevail. Different landscapes generated different kinds of civilizations: the boundless steppes generated the nomad empires (from the Scythians to the Turks), the loess lands the Chinese one, the mountain islands the Japanese one, the union of steppe and woods the Russian-Eurasian one. The mark of landscape lives in the whole history of each one of these civilizations, and cannot be either separated form them or suppressed. 

Almost all religions and traditions claim – globalization, “new world order” , “unipolar world”, “world cabinet” – are symbols of Lucifer , strategic constructions of “God enemies” – Archangel Michael`s direct enemies. Christians identify this “new world order” as “antichrist”, muslims as “dadjallah”, judes – “great melting” (“erev rav”), hinduists – as forces of Kali Juga, Buddhists – Mara, demon of illusion.v On the other side of all differences between doctrines, rituals and dogmata exists special tradition – tradition of Archangel Michael, “michaelic” veiled light. It is affiliation of human to “hierohistory”, right (and obligation) to be a soldier of one of the two opposing armies.

Eurasian idea in its highest sense – projection of michaelic, vertical outtime pillar of light on history in its final stage of redemption.

Archangel Michael is often pictured with a sword in one hand and with scales in another. Scales mean justice. German philosopher M. Haidegger in his “Holzwege” analyzed very important for us poem of Rhien Maria Rilke. It was about “handing over the scales from merchant to Archangel”.

The Eurasian Idea represents a fundamental revision of the political, ideological, ethnic, and religious history of mankind, and it offers a new system of classification and categories that will overcome standard cliches. The Eurasian theory went through two stages - a formational period of classical Eurasianism at the beginning of the XX century by Russian emigrant intellectuals (Trubeckoy, Savickiy, Alekseev, Suvchinckiy, Iljin, Bromberg, Hara-Davan etc.) followed by the historical works of Leonid Gumilev and, finally, the constitution of neo-Eurasianism (second half of 1980's to the present).

 Eurasism in social sphere means the priority of the public principle above the individual, subordination of economic patterns to strategic, social problems. The whole economic history of Eurasia proves that the development of economic mechanisms here happens according to an  alternative logic than the liberal-capitalist, individualist patterns of personal benefit which evolved in the West on the basis of Protestant ethics. The liberal logic of management is alien to Eurasia, and despite enormous efforts there is no way to break this deep-rooted feature of our people. The collective, communitarian principle of governing the economy, the contribution of the criterion of “equity” in the distribution process – all this represent a steady feature of our economic history. Eurasism insists on a positive account and evaluation of this circumstance, and on this basis gives preference to socially-oriented economic patterns. 

   Eurasism implies a positive re-evaluation of the archaic, of the ancient. It fervently refers to the past, to the world of Tradition. The development of cultural process is seen by Eurasism in a new reference to the archaic, to the insertion of original cultural motives in the fabric of modern forms. The priority in this area is given back to national motives, to the sources of national creativity, to the continuation and revival of traditions. 

We know that Marxism was a somewhat futuristic idea – Marxism prophesied the future victory of Communism at a time that nonetheless remained uncertain. In this regard it is a messianic doctrine, seeing the inevitability of its victory that would usher the culmination and end of the historical process. But Marx was a false prophet and the victory never eventuated.

Jean Baudrillard also states that this is not a clash of civilisations, but an almost innate resistance between one universal homogeneous culture and those who resist this globalisation.

Apart from liberalism two more ideologies are known for having tried to achieve world supremacy: Namely Communism (i.e. Marxism in its various aspects) and Fascism/National Socialism. As Alexander Gelyevich Dugin fairly notices, Fascism has arisen after the two ideologies and has disappeared before them. After the disintegration of the USSR the Marxism that was born in the 19^th Century has been definitely discredited as well.

After the Gulf War, almost all mass media outlets in Russia, as well as in the West, injected into the common speak the formula "New World Order," coined by George Bush, and then used by other politicians including Gorbachev and Yeltsin. The New World Order, based on the establishment of a One World Government, as has been candidly admitted by odeologists of the Trilateral Commission and Bildenburg, is not simply a question of politico-economic domination of a certain "occult" ruling clique of international bankers. This "Order" bases itself on the victory on a global scale of a certain special ideology, and so the concept concerns not only instruments of power, but also "ideological revolution," a "coup d'etat" consciousness, "new thinking." Vagueness of formulations, constant secretiveness and cautiousness, deliberate mysteriousness of the mondialists do not allow, until the last moment, to clearly discern the contour of this new ideology, which they decided to impose on the peoples of the world. And only after Iraq, as if following somebody's orders, certain bans were take off and multiple publications appeared, which began to call things by their own names. So, let us try, on the basis of analysis conducted by a group of employees of the editorial board of "Elements," to, in the most general terms, define the basics of the ideology of the New World Order.

The history is rivalry, the battle between two “macro-nations”, tending to universalization of their spiritual and ethical ideal at the moment of culmination of history. These are “nation of the West” (Roman-German world) and “nation of the East (Eurasian world). Gradually these two formations come to the most large-scale, purified, refined expression of their “manifest destiny”. The Manifest Destiny of “nation of West” is incarnated in conception of “10 lost tribes” of the protestant fundamentalists, underlies the planetary English dominance and later makes up the foundation of the civilization, which in reality is coming close to realization of the sole world control. “Russian truth” from the national state ascends to the state of empire and incarnates in Soviet bloc, having rallied round itself the mere half of the world.

The term “national-bolshevism” can mean several quite different things. It emerged practically simultaneously in Russia and Germany to signify some political thinkers` guess about a national character of bolshevik revolution of 1917, hidden in orthodox Marxism internationalist phraseology. In Russian context “national-bolsheviks” was a usual name for those communists, who tried to secure the integrity of state and (either consciously or not) continued the Great Russian historical mission geo-political policy. Those Russian national-bolsheviks were both among “whites” (Ustrialov, smenovekhovtsy, left Eurasians) and among “reds” (Lenin, Stalin, Radek, Lezhnev etc.) (1). In Germany the analogous phenomenon was associated with extremely left forms of nationalism of 20s-30s, in which the ideas of non-orthodox socialism, the national idea and positive attitude to Soviet Russia were combined. Among German national-bolsheviks Ernst Niekiesch was undoubtedly the most consistent and radical, though some conservative revolutionaries may also be referred to this movement, such as Ernst Juenger, Ernst von Salamon, August Winnig, Karl Petel, Harro Schultzen-Beysen, Hans Zehrera, communists Laufenberg and Wolffheim, and even some extremely left National-socialists, such as Strasser and, within a certain period, Josef Hoebbels.

Professor Tamotsu Murata told that story in the ancient little restaurant in Asakusa residential area, explaining the canvas which hanged there on a wall. The slender old profesor from a Samurai family was writing haiku poetry on a paper sheet, which opposite side was dotted with mathematic formulas. He was finishing a book on the problem of continuality.

"I think we should seek for the source of continuum in the mistery of a moment", he had told not long before. "One day many years ago, when I was totally young, not such as I am now (the impenetrable visage, in which the smile is expressed by the unnoticeable movement of the hair), I was standing in a tiny yard, looking at the sky, and suddenly I understood, that I am. That there is I and only I. And I not as something occured, lasting, but as something momentary. Continuity is born from a revelation moment."