Fourth Political Theory and Socialism in Latin America

In the last two months of 2020, we have participated in several collaborative instances with intellectuals and activists from the anti-imperialist struggle around the world. On November the 19th, as a representative of the Circle, I exposed in the international conference “Multipolar Alternative for Latin America: Geopolitics, Ideology and Culture” (Alternativa Multipolar para América Latina: La Geopolítica, La Ideología, La Cultura). In such occasion, and exposing the topics which I already had addressed in my text: “The Fourth Political Theory or a Thinking for Latin America”, I was able to appreciate many good lectures such as the ones from Vicente Quintero (Venezuela), Pavel Grass (Brazil), Nino Pagliccia (Canada/Venezuela), Valerii Korovin (Russia) among many others, and coinciding with them in many viewpoints. Professor Alexander Dugin’s lecture standed out in which he made the unmissable invitation to the peoples of Our America in order to address its problematiques from the Fourth Political Theory (4PT), this time making a proposal to think a new kind of Socialism, which would distinguish itself from the older one and also from the liberal left (“liberal-bolsheviks” as they are being called with some sarcasm).

This new socialism which, following Dugin’s idea, should look for its roots in Integral Populism (radical anti-liberalism), taking the best aspects of the old socialism, such as the class struggle of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation, but also it should rescue those aspects from the right (today, liberals and globalizers) which they had abandoned, or they dispose of in order to defend oligarchic interests, such as the defense of the Fatherland and certain traditions linked to the identity of the peoples.

This proposal is the one we have already been working on for a very long time in the Patriotic Circle of Chilean and Indo-American Studies (CPECI), on the one hand, Nationalism of the Praxis1, and on the other hand, Revisionism of Tradition2. The first one takes the backbone of Class War as a struggle for national liberation3 and the second is based upon the principle of Popular Living Tradition, meaning to think of the past from the future and not in an inverse way as the reactionaries aspire to. Both currents have came to constitute the corpus of an Authentic Chilean and Indo-American Thinking which connects with the geopolitical proposal of the 4PT, against the current unipolarism, headed by our biggest oppressor, the Empire of the United States of America and its collaborators in the local (anti)Chilean oligarchy.

Without a doubt, 4PT is controversial because it proposes both a superation of the already deceased nationalism/fascism, such as the old real socialism, in order to create a new force which would oppose liberalism. Beyond the individual, class, the nation or the State, it proposes that the subject of the new political theory must be Dasein (Being-there).

In Heideggerian philosophy, this “Being-there”, is the man (or woman) which is thrown into the world and as such can exist in many ways insofar as it is an entity (as worker, student, professional, unemployed, friend, inhabitant, citizen, etc.) but by asking “Who am I?” he looks to unravel its own sense of “Being”. Meaning, the “Being-there” is the entity asking the question for “Being”. And it is the only entity asking this question. All of the other entities have their own “Being”, meaning they “are”, they exist as entities, but they do not formulate this question for the “Being”. The “Being-there” is preeminent in the ontic compared to other entities in that it is conscious of its own existence and starting from there it can choose if it exists as himself or not as (authentic existence and inauthentic existence). However, it is also preeminent in the ontological given that it is the one that formulates the question for his own “Being”.

This topic was addressed in the interview that Luis Bozzo made to professor Dugin, on December the 4th of 2020, by asking for a more comprehensible explanation of the “Dasein” or “Being-there”, Dugin affirmed that in the topic of the framework of the Fourth Political Theory the “Dasein” is the People. Intuition which I share, because in politics it is the People themselves who ask the question “Who am I?” and it is the people who affirm their way of existing and reaffirming itself (check out Feinmann’s “A Philosophy for Latin America”). Both José Pablo Feinmann and Dugin affirm that the sense of knowing “Who am I” is with the negation of “who am I not”, in other words, the People rebel in front of the impositions of that which is foreign to their “Being”, and that was made clear with the Social Revolt of 2019 with the motto “Chile woke up”. Chile that for so many years was sold as a product to the international market (the inauthentic Chile), as an “example of the triumphs of neoliberal principles”, and as “a Milton Friedman’s prodigal son”, suddenly rose up in order to break its ideological chains and to claim its authentic way of existing (Dasein).

Each civilization has its own way of existing authentically, its own “Dasein” so to speak. Likewise, for example, if in the European Being, authenticity is within traditionalism and the pagan roots of the culture, and in the Eurasian Being we find it in Orthodox Christianity, Siberian Shamanism, or even in Sovietic and Post-Sovietic Patriotism; in Latin America, Being is reaffirmed in the opposition to imperialist domination (formerly from the Spanish Empire, and today from the United States Empire) and in opposition to the empire’s system, capitalism. Undoubtedly the will of Our America is oriented towards socialism and patriotism that fight for sovereignty. The difference between the old socialism and the new socialism which 4PT proposes, is that the latter, takes into consideration the People as its political subject, meaning the “Being-there” of Latin America and Chile. It is a proposal to overcome in some way, the dogmatism of analyzing everything as exclusively a matter of “class struggle”. Does this imply an abandonment or a negation of Marxism? Not at all. Dugin himself affirms that:

“Marxism is relevant for its description of liberalism, its identification of the contradictions of capitalism, its criticism of the bourgeois regime and the revelation of the truth behind demo-bourgeois politics of exploitation and slavery which present themselves as “progress” and “freedom”. The critical potential of Marxism is very useful and applicable being able to be included in the arsenal of the Fourth Political Theory” (A. Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory, p.64).

In principle, in analysis of class struggle, it remains as valid as ever, but to reduce every political analysis to the cosmogony between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat could narrow our panorama, specially if we take into consideration the reality of globalization and how this was generated the post-proletariat human group called the “precariat”, or the intricate geopolitical relations of our current times. It is here that Heidegger’s existential thinking can help us with the “Being-there” or its application in politics which translates this “Being-there” into “the People”.

The People can be defined as: “the organically structured human group, aware of its historical destiny, whose components are linked together by common ideals, more or less well defined” (Look the definition of People in our website3). The people fulfill a sovereign and political role, by identifying itself as a social class, meaning the “Popular Class”, fighting despotism and tyranny, exercising their right of rebellion in order to consolidate a full life, putting together its own history. Hence the formula: “against the tyrant’s horror, popular terror”. This People or Popular Class, whether it is not exactly what Marxism identifies as the Proletariat, is strictly linked to the latter, given that the heart of the People is the working class, later it also includes the sectors of the small bourgeoisie which tend towards proletarianization.

A socialism that puts at its center the struggle for the sovereignty of the people is exactly the Nationalism of the Praxis or Popular Patriotism, meaning an integral populism, an idea which goes beyond the old socialism and the old nationalism, but which integrates the most advanced aspects of both. Only in this way can a 4PT be understood in our beloved Chile and in our beloved Authentic America.

Notes

“Stalin and Nationalism of the Praxis” by Luis Bozzo. https://therevolutionaryconservative.com/articles/culture/stalin-and-nationalism-of-the-praxis/#.YGkG-WRKiRs
“Revisionism of Tradition” by Carlos Salazar. https://therevolutionaryconservative.com/articles/civil-rights/revisionism-of-tradition/#.YGkHFWRKiRs
“The social classes, the People and the Oligarchy” by CPECI. https://praxispatria.cl/2020/12/17/clases-sociales-pueblo-y-oligarquia/

Translated by Zero Schizo