As discussed in a recent SNN article, Russian professor and geo-political theorist Alexander Dugin’s first English-language book The Fourth Political Theory is a call to resistance against the Atlanticist-supported ’global liberal hegemony.’ Dugin’s view of modern history, competing ideologies and how liberalism prevailed is quite interesting. He agrees with conventional historians that liberalism was the first major political theory. Then came socialism and communism as a critique of bourgeois-capitalism. The last ideology to emerge was fascism. Each of these ideologies had its focus: that of liberalism was on the individual and his liberation from any collective identity or membership, socialism and communism was on class and fascism was on the state (while the related ideology of National Socialism was on race). Liberalism joined with socialism and communism to destroy fascism (as in the WWII alliance between the US, UK and USSR). Once fascism was destroyed, the two remaining ideologies struggled against one another throughout the Cold War, with Communism eventually dying in 1991.
Click on book cover above for link to purchase Professor Dugin’s book
With the complete ideological victory of liberalism, ‘the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind,’ Dugin writes. Individualism became a given, as mankind was liberated from community and collective identity. ‘Humanity under liberalism, comprised entirely of individuals, is naturally drawn toward universality and seeks to become global and unified,’ Dugin explains. From the triumph of individualism then, globalism is born. At this point, with no competitors left, liberalism as an ideology faded away, replaced by the ‘global capitalist market’ in which ‘states and nations are dissolved in the melting pot of world globalisation.’
This is where we are today, trapped in a global market society in which communities, states and nations have been discarded. A man is a ‘resident’ of an area while he temporarily lives there, neither establishing permanent roots nor truly being part of any real community. One is a worker, documented or undocumented, in a place for as long as he is a ‘resident’ in that place, until he relocates to another. Citizenship is simply a matter of having the correct government paperwork. Nationality no longer truly exists because all homogeneous nations have been purposefully undermined with ‘diversity’ – resulting in the destruction of actual diversity as the world becomes more uniformly devoid of differences. The state itself eventually becomes just a local management tool of the global market. It continues to lose sovereignty, having all important policies dictated to it by international banking, finance and regulatory institutions. Religious moralities no longer have much relevance in such a system and are replaced with a universal morality – human rights.
We can not return to communism or fascism, Dugin argues. Both were defeated as viable ideological alternatives. The Fourth Political Theory begins with resistance to post-modernity. It collects those things discarded along the way by liberalism and looks for flaws in the current system (and there are many) to exploit. It fights not against political ideas, but against the reality of the status quo. The answer will not be found in a new dogma or universalism, but in the rejection of all universalisms, Dugin assures us. There is neither Left nor Right in this perspective; there is only compliance with or dissent from post-modernity and the global market order.
Also see: Post-modernity, liberalism & the collapse of politics
“Finding several things to like and dislike in Alexander Dugin’s “Fourth Political Theory”
http://civilizingthebeast.blogspot.com/2012/09/finding-several-things-to-like-and.html