Once relegated to the mere corners of some fringe political currents in Russia that nobody took seriously, we have had the misfortune of being subjected to Dugin in the English-speaking web thanks to the tireless efforts of the patsoc crowd, specifically the Infrared folks, who made it their mission to put communism and the revolution on hold to promote the word of Dugin.
With that in mind, and because I see some people uncritically accepting Dugin as this great figure to look up to (they never actually call him a Marxist) in the name of contrarianism, I figured I was gonna have to actually read Dugin. When the Internet was created and touted as a way to bring people closer together, I’m not sure this is what they had in mind.
Regardless, I have downloaded a PDF of Dugin’s foundational book, The Fourth Political Theory, and I can now look forward to a very good time for the foreseeable future.
Oh no what’s this
Oh shit shit shit
Oh fuck you at this point you’re just trolling
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There’s probably something there if you dig deep enough. But I don’t know why the mantra of the “we need to learn from the failures of the USSR and move beyond 20th century mechanistic and deterministic concepts of reality” left is always “read Dugin” and not “read Kim Jong-Il.”
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In typical American exuberance, they seem to believe they have invented national-bolshevism or what they now call patriotic socialism (to their credit, that is a uniquely USian strand).
Alain Soral needs no introduction to the French memeosphere; he is one of the best memes ever conceived by pure accident. Soral has long been a nazbol, but he came to prominence in the early 2000s by appearing on TV and creating polemics. His self-assured, confident style resonated with many and guaranteed him more airtime – one thing was sure, he left no one indifferent.
He was soon banned from appearing on public Television and after a period of relative calm, he came back with his own newspaper and now publishes his books with whoever will let him. Truthfully, he’s not doing great on the fundraising front but he has found backers that let him live in Switzerland (let that sink in; the ethnonationalist emigrated) in a very exclusive building that is reportedly owned by the Vatican. We should ask what Soral’s secret was to abolish his own rent, as I am sure many of our comrades would like to benefit from this simple trick too.
Like most nazbols (who prefer the lesser-charged “Fourth theory” name), Soral makes some nonsensical, surface-level criticisms at the imperial core and dresses that in an ideology that, they demand, must be taken seriously.
The “right on value, left on labour” you read up there is not there by chance; this is literally what Soral has boiled down his ideology to.
There is no communism in Soral’s ideas – anti-imperialism, even if for the wrong reasons, is not uniquely communist. There is however a whole bunch of ethnonationalism. Where they differ, however, is that they are not racist in the way you would expect. If they had their way, they will allow you to immigrate, provided you become French: learn the language, uphold the institutions,
To see Soral a) be given the foreword (despite being probably even more obscure than Dugin) and b) state point blank in that foreword that Dugin and he “agree on all the important points” tells me everything I need to know about this book and Dugin’s hot pot of ideas he borrowed here and there to create what he calls an ideology.
Nonetheless in moments that I hate my life enough, I will read this book as far as I can. If and when I do, you will be able to read my thoughts in this thread if you dare.
o7 thank you for your sacrifice, comrade. Put these 🤡 ideologies to rest.
It’s very clear, and probably was already back in 2009 (or should have been clear to such a scholar of Russian geopolitics) that the CIA was involved in the dissolution of the USSR coupled with revisionism making its way into the politburo. But it’s still very weird to me that he chooses to frame socialism in Russia this way. In the same vein he doesn’t really explain what liberalism is, it’s just kinda taken for granted.
also –
totalitarianism
Not only does he offer an absolutely cursed reading of liberalism and communism, he doesn’t even know the history and context of WW2.
Are we sure this guy is actually a scholar? Are we really?
Look, I don’t know if there’s any point to reading more of this. Dugin has a very metaphysical view of the world, that communism, fascism and capitalism are mortal enemies and will always fight each other. He is not a dialectician, he is not a materialist, he is not a Marxist. He is worse than a liberal, he is a neo-fascist: dressing up what is mostly reactionary points of view (with the odd bits of wisdom here and there) in a way that makes it look new.
I’ve read it, and i’m reading it again with new knowledge. Short version: Liberalism is bad. Fascism is bad. Corrupt soviet style communism is also bad. Liberalism is bad. We are in favour of things that are not this. And esp not liberalism.
What are we in favour of? things that are not these.
There you go. Now you know.
Lol yeah that sums up my reading of it so far too.
When was this not the case? The ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class and the state represents the interests of the ruling class.
Were religions not ideological? Were estates not ideological either?
What was the ideology of this solely Medieval framework he analyses here? He offers no answers.
Is Dugin saying that the class struggle is a thing of the past, which would mean we have effectively entered a classless stage in 2009?
My problem with these nazbol authors (as we see they even confuse self-proclaimed marxists) is that they use marxist-adjacent language just right, but never really hit deep. This is how they are able to recruit. On a surface level, Dugin is not wrong in this part. He even sounds profound. But digging further, applying Marxist theory, we see he is making a non-sequitur.
There’s the glimmer of an insight here, but it isn’t expressed well. A salient fact of liberalism is that it relates to the world purely in terms of abstractions (liberty, democracy, human rights, the atomized individual) which are not grounded in material reality – or, if they ever were grounded, were only so at a very specific moment in history. This is why liberals view as irrelevant the fact that the material base if clearly moving towards a socialistic mode of production, because in their view reality consists of manipulating a series of abstract words and concepts, almost like algebra. No previous ideology ever thought like this. Feudalism was consciously grounded in a set of paternalistic and communitarian property relations, and once it lost that grounding it also lost legitimacy in the eyes of the populace – they could see that an essential part of the feudal ideology was missing. Liberalism has similarly lost real material grounding, but it continues to maintain legitimacy, because it was always supposed to be separate and abstract.
During the 20th century, nearly all ideological thinking was to some degree infected by this liberal tendency to abstraction. You see this most clearly in fascism and anarchism, which attempt to remake society under the guise of an abstraction like “the race,” “the nation,” “the free individual.” But liberal abstraction had its pernicious effects even in countries like the Soviet Union and China; and it is in this removed sense that the 20th century can be called an “era of ideology.”
What happens when Marxism succumbs to abstract, moralistic thinking? You get, generally, either ultraleftism or right deviation. These two tendencies are actually similar in that they both try to make the material world conform (by sheer force of will) to some preconceived moral notion. The USSR in its late, right-deviationist phase reduced socialism to a set of phrases; the government thought, erroneously as we now see, that it could maintain socialism as a sort of “moral center,” regardless of the destruction of its material base. China under the Gang of Four tried to advance society politically without advancing it materially. Dengism in China, and the Juche Idea in Korea, represent the decisive defeat of liberal moralistic thinking, and full return of material analysis into Marxism. Dengism views the productive forces, as physically existing and evolving, as paramount in advancing toward communism. Juche grounds ideology in a proper understanding of humanity and its specific relation to (and difference from) the external world. Dugin, I think, makes a similar attempt, but it is confused, and suffers from the philosophical confusion which, we often think, was introduced into Russia during the Gorbachev, but actually has its origins in Krushchevite revisionism and the rejection of Stalin’s legacy.
Opposing “liberalism” to other ideologies is a very vulgar way of looking at the world. This is patently not Marxist theory; a Marxist would have opposed classes, not ideologies. The fight is not between liberalism and socialism, it is between the ruling class and the emergent exploited class. This tells us already that Dugin is a major idealist, the biggest one, a loser in the philosophies if you will, a complete nincompoop, a dummy and he takes the L.
This was apparent before this quote of course (after all the Fourth theory is “neither capitalism, communism or fascism”), but Dugin opposes fascism to capitalism, when we know beyond a doubt that fascism is but the other side of the coin of capitalism.
Also quoting a far right essayist in the opening paragraph 🤨 (really I’m just using far-right cause I’ve been saying fascist too much).
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Lock a die hard socialist, fascist, and monarchist in a room.
And find out what would happen. Give it enough time, one of these fuckers would be dead.
Posadism sounds more sane to me.
Here Dugin admits nazbol and eurasianism
What he means by National-bolshevism and Eurasianism is unclear to me, he will probably talk about it later or he already talked about it in an earlier book. What I mean to say is, I wouldn’t take the wikipedia definition of those to mean what Dugin means with those words.
I also included the next paragraph that just made me lol, it’s funny to me for some reason. Just waiting for other people to develop this ideology, it’s copyright-free guys come on.
Calling back to Alain de Benoist again in the next paragraph.
Oh shit good luck, I think this might be fun (for me reading about it that is, not for you probably).
Someone should invent a robot that automates the task of reading so nobody needs to toil in the Dugin mines. I also see great applications for anarchists.
(Just kidding I can’t read and so shouldn’t be throwing stones.)
i mean it’s fundamentally anti-communist, sooo. at the same time as i understand it there’s a lot of stuff about eurasian integration and he’s recently said ok things about china. at the best dugin should be approached like russia in general: a semi-south temporary ally against american imperialism.
destabilizing russia by attempting to assassinate someone who people have at least heard about (i.e. even if he actually wasn’t that important) was probably a bad thing given this context. after all, it was either NATO itself or through the ukranian SBU (or internal russian forces, potentially) that were responsible for the assassination attempt. it’s nothing like shinzo abe, whose assassination was totally home-grown and who represented something much worse
given this caveat, people like patsocs who stan dugin’s writing are seriously cringe and probably fascists or “national socialists.” mao’s CPC made a temporary alliance with the KMT to defeat japanese imperialism, but while retaining as much physical, organizational and ideological autonomy from them as possible. i feel this is a very important lesson to learn, and clearly shows how reactionary culty patsocs are.
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We already have that, it’s called white middle-class America
Go ahead and read him you want. Liberals in the west want to make him out to be some type of rasputin type figure and has this massive influence over Putin. It’s just not true. He’s a kook. Reminds me of trying to read Julius Evola…just remember thinking what are you on about exactly?
I don’t think Dugin is some sort of idiot, but I just think–despite his influence in right wing circles–he’s less influential then people realize. I’d also say he may be bright, his actual political theory is absolutely not marxist and should not be embraced or praised by anyone calling themself one.
I was listening to a recent war nerd podcast and they were talking about Dugin. Both hosts lived in Moscow in the 90’s and they talked about him. Basically, Dugin wasn’t taken very seriously at the time; his ideas didn’t connect with anyone.
He only became popular later, and he only became known in the west recently; usually as some sort of influence on Putin.
Dugin, Soral, Limonov (to an extent), maybe even Houellebecq…from the late 90’s to present day there are some semi popular right wing europeans who are almost anti-capitalist, but always talk about going back to some past (“appeal to tradition”), or refuse to make the leap to marxism, because something about their worldview won’t allow for it.
I have other thoughts on this but I’m tired and am having a hard time being coherent lmao
No no, this makes perfect sense.
Soral is often described as being “left on labour, right on values” – and evidently he also sees that himself, as seen in his foreword.
To me, socialism + fascism = fascism. Do they themselves know that this is what they are advocating for? I’m inconclusive on that. Part of me thinks they obviously know that they are just neo-fascists, ethnonationalists in different terms, and part of me thinks they’ve been doing this for so long they deluded themselves into thinking they actually created a fourth theory.
What would happen if they had their way? Well, we can infer at this stage the reactionary right is stronger than the progressive (socialist) left. This is because reaction is easier to move back to than the revolutionary ideology (see the end of feudalism). So I give the “left” part of their ideology about 6 months to live after they get into power.
Some of them know that they are advocating for fascism. I think some them (like Dugin) always talk about their beliefs in some psuedo spiritual way that leads them to believe they are somehow something other than fascists.
Thank you for doing this and sharing your observations.
For similar reasons I have “The Decline of the West” on my reading list (not sure when I’ll actually get around to reading it…)
Anyway, good luck with this. I’ll be interested to see your thoughts on it.
Yeah just sort the thread by new as I muster the courage to open this book
it’s important to keep an open mind, and it’s important to know that infrared people don’t consider him a marxist-leninist either. but i think they merely dispute the fact that he’s a facist or nazbol (i don’t think you can put him neatly into any of these catagories) hence the whole “fourth position” he coins… the old enemy of my enemy addage i guess. and all the liberals and actual mask-off ukranian neo-nazis celebrating (and most likely were involved with) his daughter’s death is a pretty telltale sign (to me at least) that he’s no friend of theirs and not ideologically aligned to that sort of rhetoric that they spout
and it’s important to know that infrared people don’t consider him a marxist-leninist either. but i think they merely dispute the fact that he’s a facist or nazbol
This tracks with what I observed back when I did watch some of Infrared’s content (a long time ago by now). I don’t know much about his audience particularly, but going by what I saw in his videos, I would say he loves to delve into sources that people, particularly liberal progressives, but also some MLs, might regard as “untouchable”.
I think for Infrared, and I imagine also his audience, a person’s willingness to approach these “dark” and “untouchable” ideas with nuance serves as somewhat of a litmus test of a person’s ideological fortitude. I would say that a fearless pursuit of knowledge is a correct attitude for a Marxist-Leninist to have, so I have no problem with that.
I do get the impression, though, that a lot of what the Infrared crowd seem to thrive on is a kind of delight in being mischaracterized. To be charitable about it, I would say they love to expose contradictions, which is a good thing. They seek out controversial stances, and enjoy attracting ire from every ideological corner. To be less charitable about it, to me it comes across mainly as edgelordism rather than rigorous work being done to expose and resolve contradictions. I think Infrared fails to cultivate in his audience a desire to investigate into the particularities of things, and breeds in them an eagerness to go on the attack or to adopt bold-sounding stances before investigating properly, basically just creating people who like to argue “because they’re right” rather than argue for the purpose of discovering and resolving contradictions.
From what I can tell, a big part of what Infrared tries to point out is that Marxism-Leninism doesn’t depend on any particular set of Western liberal values to function. He’s correct that a lot of people find this idea intimidating, and avoid talking about it. However, I think he overestimates (or oversells) how innovative and provocative he is really being on that front, and I imagine a lot of people who get super into him are just mindblown by this and find it to be such powerful ammunition for winning arguments with people of all political stripes that they don’t really move any further beyond it or see much need to question whatever beliefs or preferences they have that don’t line up with “Western liberal values”, feeling assured that they are simply correct and that there is no need to further investigate into things that they regard as springing out of Western “woke” liberal ideology.
It’s no secret that early on when Infrared started making videos, there were mostly nazbols in their comment sections. I’ve never seen that happen with any other ML figure where nazbols flocked to them from the start, and were also not discouraged right then and there.
Coming back to Dugin, I read chapter one and a friend read chapter 13 of the above book (mostly dealt with gender and sex) and gave me their impressions. I don’t get anything from that reading that other, better Marxist writers haven’t talked about. It’s okay to read stuff we disagree with, it’s something else to think that Dugin wrote some profound forbidden knowledge.
There is perhaps some edgelordism going on with Infrared, but I also think we don’t do things without a point to them. Infrared is turning more and more openly towards nazbolism (which is much like what Dugin and Soral want), and I think that’s their reason for promoting Dugin. Before Maupin and Infrared (who also have various ties between each other), no ML in the English world knew who Dugin was.
Thanks for your insight about his early audience. Frankly, I watched a handful of his videos (a year or two ago I guess? I don’t have a great sense of time) and then didn’t follow him much beyond that. I did lurk in some chatroom of his fans for a bit. I didn’t see much there that I couldn’t just find on 4chan (which I unfortunately have extensive experience with).
It’s okay to read stuff we disagree with, it’s something else to think that Dugin wrote some profound forbidden knowledge.
Yeah, I guess in the content I recall, I mostly remember Infrared kind of qualifying his statements around Heidegger, Dugin, Nick Land, etc. as them basically having some interesting/underexplored ideas, and emphasizing that liberals are too afraid to engage with things like that to find the kernels of truth in it and such. I may have just not noticed that he has a bigger fixation on Dugin than that, or the vids I saw just touched on that tangentially while he was talking about something else (iirc one thing I watched was a video of him explaining Capital).
There is perhaps some edgelordism going on with Infrared, but I also think we don’t do things without a point to them.
I’ll clarify that the “edgelordism” I was referring to is more about the limited view I had of his fans/my speculation about them, rather than Infrared himself, who I feel is quite purposeful in his actions. At least that’s the impression I got of him at the time. I think that his style creates an atmosphere that attracts contrarians who enjoy being smug about their views being “misinterpreted” by plebeians (an extrapolation I’ve made based on my many painful years spent visiting 4chan). I don’t mean to say that this would compose the entirety of his audience, though.
Looks like I need to go refresh my view on him and take another look at his community before I speak on it again.
great writeup. i agree with you here
