The nihilistic fascism of Alexander Dugin

"The Fourth Political Theory" is a book by Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher and political activist. He is sometimes referred to as a Traditionalist, at other times as an Eurasianist. Dugin is the leader of a small political party in Russia, the Eurasia Movement. More ominously, he is rumoured to be an advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin. As far as I can tell, "The Fourth Political Theory" is the only book by Dugin translated to English. It's not an easy read, since the author writes in a difficult prose filled with references to Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Deleuze and other thinkers not considered main stream. It took me about two weeks to sift through this material.

While Dugin claims to represent a striving to create a Fourth Political Theory beyond liberalism, socialism and fascism, I think it's obvious that he is a fascist. A nihilistic fascist, to be exact. While he pretends to oppose postmodernism, he is in fact heavily indebted to it for his own perspective. In Dugin's universe, there are no absolute truths. Each culture, nature or community is a (more or less) self-contained whole. Its worldview is purely subjective (even "time" and "past" are subjective concepts). Hence, no outsider can judge whether or not a certain culture is "right" or "wrong". Humans are constituted by "politics", by which Dugin seems to mean pre-existing hierarchies in each culture which inevitably moulds us into what we are. For this reason, Dugin rejects liberal individualism. Of course, this contradicts his claim that no absolute truths exists. There is at least one absolute truth in Dugin's system: the collective is everything, the individual nothing. How this squares with his claim that the most basic ontological category is the Radical Subject is unclear. The Radical Subject is, I suppose, individual. Dugin is well aware of his affinity with postmodernism. He wants to use postmodernism to further his own (fascist) agenda. The tolerance of postmodernism can be used to justify a multi-polar world in which "traditional" cultures can co-exist with each other, and (temporarily) with Anglo-American liberalism. The existence of classes and the left-right dichotomy is also denied in favour of a postmodernist-sounding perspective, according to which there is only "centre" and "periphery".

In a universe with no absolute truths, the will to power is central, and Dugin (unsurprisingly) believes that "geopolitics is epistemology" and that "the political" is fundamental. In plain English, Russian imperial expansionism is a good thing, and nothing meaningful can exist outside the imperial-hierarchic state. Of course, this is so only from a Russian perspective, but that's apparently irrelevant. War is a perennial condition of human existence. The author clearly wants the particular subjective perspective of his own tribe to win the day.

Since Hitler and the Nazis killed millions of Russians during World War II, Dugin has no choice but to repudiate Hitler's politics, especially his racism against Slav Untermenschen. At the same time, however, he is interested in the German current known as Conservative Revolution. His book contains a lot of references to "National Bolsheviks", who attempted to combine Communism and nationalism. Dugin makes the (admittedly interesting) observation that many Communist regimes were nationalist, and that National Bolshevism in all but name existed in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and so on. He claims that Communism as it looked like in practice wasn't really "modern", but a resurrection of archaic forms. Many critics of Stalin's Soviet Union or Mao's China have noticed similarities with the so-called Asiatic mode of production in ancient societies. Dugin agrees, but regards this as something positive! While rejecting liberalism, he wants to salvage the "positive" traits of both Communism (actually Stalin's regime) and fascism. This is a common project in Russia, where "Red-Brown Blocs" between Stalinists and right-wing nationalists (including fascists) were influential during the 1990's. Dugin himself was a founding member of the notorious National Bolshevik Party, but seems to have left the organization when it became too burlesque. (Today, the NBP is opposed to Putin, and Dugin actually accuses it of being in cahoots with Western intelligence services.) Although Dugin is included in Mark Sedgwick's seminal study of Traditionalism, "Against the Modern World", the Traditionalist traits of the Fourth Political Theory are incidental. Dugin is anti-modernist, and does mention Guénon and Evola. Yet, his covert postmodernism, relativism and nihilism are difficult to square with the Traditionalist insistence on an absolutely valid and universal esoteric truth.

Dugin is curiously oblivious to peak oil and peak uranium (perhaps because Russia has plenty of those natural resources?), and believes that postmodernism can actually succeed in creating a bizarre world dominated by "post-humans" and other "simulacra", apparently some kind of cyborgs. Both transhumanism and transgenderism are perceived as threats. When condemning LGBTQI, Dugin sounds more essentialist than relativist. However, resistance isn't futile, it seems. Here, Dugin has a voluntarist perspective. Humans can freely decide to resist the system, and thereby challenge and change their "fate". This is the will to power again. The step from this to gratuitous violence and terrorism is short.

Personally, I doubt that Vladimir Putin is listening to the gaga of Alexander Dugin. However, "The Fourth Political Theory" is interesting. It shows us the real face of fascism behind the ideological façade: nihilistic violence from the Supermen, just because they can. For more insight into this subject, see Shadia Drury's "Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics".