4PT - On the Need for a ‘Fourth Political Theory’... Wilberg on Wednesday

It is my firm belief, shared with Stalin, that Marxism is not a dogma but must undergo constant development. It is also my belief, shared with Alexander Dugin, that political theory and its language - whilst drawing on their best elements - must now go beyond all three principal ideologies of the 20th century - namely bourgeois liberalism and individualism (i.e. egotism), Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and what he calls ‘fascism’. I believe it would be more accurate to speak of National Socialism rather than ‘fascism’, since this shared a number of common features with Stalin’s ‘Socialism in one Country’ and the Russo-German tradition of ‘National Bolshevism’ that both influenced Stalin and survived his death. Though Stalin held to the language of Marxism-Leninism and Hitler’s economic success was inspired by Gottfried Feder’s analysis of usury capital, both leaders were forced by circumstance to place geopolitical considerations at the core of their practical policies. Recognising this, Dugin’s great contribution to political thought has been to rescue geopolitics from the margins of political theory and place it at its centre. In doing so he also returned to and recognised the central significance of McKinder’s model of global geopolitics which, since 1904, had been the foundation of Western imperialist foreign policy and the basis of its central agenda - to create a unipolar global hegemony of the ‘arc’ of oceanic capitalist ‘crescent’ states and their culture by using all possible means, not least the instigation of multi-front wars, to prevent the rise of a ‘multi-polar’ world, i.e. one based on an axis of regions and countries belonging to the Eurasian ‘heartland’ - and based on mutual respect for each other’s cultures. From this perspective the war between Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany - Russia and Germany having been the most important countries of the Heartland - was a catastrophic success for U.S. hegemonic imperial interests and ambitions. For despite military victory at enormous human cost, the Soviet Union and its Red Empire ultimately did not survive this war - West Germany having been turned into an vassal state of the U.S. Empire - to be followed, after the fall of the USSR and DDR - by all the countries of Eastern Europe. Thankfully, nations such as Russia and China have, after faltering during the post-Mao and Yeltsin eras, since refused to bow to the hegemonic unipolar model of Western global capitalism and geopolitics - though like the USSR and National Socialist Germany - and Iran, North Korea and China today - they are both now targets of Zionist backed US-NATO military expansionism, aggression and political-cultural subversion. Of course there is far more to Dugin’s Fourth Political Theory than ‘mere’ geopolitics, not least since it argues that, historically, politically - and philosophically - there is far more to ‘geopolitics’ itself than meets the eye. And though he does not present his book as a dogma but as an invitation to a new form of meta-political discussion and discourse, I concur with his basic thesis that neither Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism nor National Socialism, neither purely class nor race-based ideologies any longer offer an adequate, comprehensive and deep enough philosophical and theoretical foundation for our era - and that whatever vital and highly relevant elements they both still retain. It is Dugin’s recognition of these still relevant elements, together with his foundational Heideggerian philosophy, that have led to him becoming, like Martin Heidegger, a thinker reviled in the West - accused of promoting a toxic and veritably ‘Satanic’ Stalino-Nazi ideology, being Putin’s ‘Rasputin’ etc. So whilst, as a philosopher, I have both sympathy for and also question certain aspects of Dugin’s brand of 4PT, I am most certainly of the view that a ‘Fourth Political Theory’ is necessary - and that such a theory can only come to fruition through a constructive critical and questioning response to both Dugin and Heidegger.

Note: This is also the reason why, whilst in sympathy with many of the policies of SWPE, I see my role as one of contributing to a rethinking of their ‘classical’ political-theoretical foundations - elements of which I see as either partly contradicting or at least as not helpful in opening the way for a far deeper and more detailed philosophical, theoretical and practical articulation of these policies in the historical and geopolitical context of our times.