Peron, Fidel and Chavez: caudillos of a national socialism and reference points for the construction of a Fourth Political Theory

The world has changed very dramatically since the West's failure in Ukraine (2023), preceded by the terrified flight of the Americans to Afghanistan (2021) and their disastrous interference in Syria. The North American military machine, gigantic and omnipresent in all seas, is a fiasco. It can sow chaos and intimidate governments. It can condition policies and alliances and create ever more suffering. But its strategic failures herald the end of one era and the beginning of another.

There is a link between NATO's failure in Ukraine and Israel's genocidal and irresponsible attitude toward the Palestinians. That link is revealed; This is History and its epiphany: the unfolding of truth amidst rivers of blood and confusion of ideas. The bright rays of truth break through years after events have slipped. It is with a cold, sententious gaze that Time, stern judge, contemplates what has already been. And what did Chronos condemn, in the light of the facts?

There is no other truth: the American cycle is coming to a close. It is the cycle of a “long century”, which began in the period before the war against Spain in 1898. There, the American “young nation” launched itself against the world, having ruined a Hispanic (and, later, on a smaller scale, French) civilization from its own continent. The United States of America took over from the British empire in every sense: Anglo-Saxon culture bound the free ends of an economic-military machine of world domination, far more thalassocratic and distributed than the British one. Capitalism in its extremely predatory version would not have been possible without this process of imperial substitution and complementation. The reinvention of the Anglosphere after 1898 marked the beginning of the end for Europe and many other ancient and venerable civilizations. The European powers did not prevent Yankee abuses against Spain, and today they are paying the consequences. Instead of powers, they are dwarf nations and NATO protectorates without dignity.

The great Russian thinker Aleksandr Dugin offered a very comprehensive and well-designed framework for orchestrating a planetary revolt against the North American hegemon. It is an ontological and practical framework at the same time. It is about identifying the “Subject” of planetary transformation.

Liberalism has focused its ontology on the individual, atomized and deified. Liberalism in its extreme version denies the very existence of society (Thatcher), and in its fanatical and caricatured version it coincides with the anarchist heresies on which the Western postmodern left increasingly relies: abolition of the family, denial of the homeland, denial of one's own biological and sexual identity, masturbatory self-determination, hedonism. What we now call neoliberalism, from Milton Friedman to Javier Milei or Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is not so different from the awake anarchism of the left that Fusaro, with great plasticity and success, calls the “rainbow left”. This is the first political theory, a theory that would have been swept away by history because of its weakness and anti-humanism had it not had the support of the Anglosphere.

Dugin refers to the Second Political Theory in very interesting terms. Its cycle, with the fall of the USSR and the bloc of “real socialism” that began in 1989, seems closed, though not entirely. The evolution of the People's Republic of China is an interesting reminder of what socialism really is. One can speak of socialism in terms of planned redistribution of wealth and a national collectivist vision, while there is a genuine and sincere updating and validation of Confucian principles in the Asian country.

There is never true socialism without placing the principle of Authority at the center and without a revival of traditional polis values adapted to the present. Of course, the Western anarcho-liberal left is no longer able to understand what socialism means. In my country, Spain, we who follow with interest and admiration the whole imperial and socialist evolution of China can consider it “stale” or “red-brown”. That such epithets are used is not a sign of anything else: stupidity. Most of the left, in the style of “Sumar” or “Vamos”, is childish petty-bourgeois anarchism and knows nothing more than to distribute progressive papers on their social networks. Lenin, Mao, etc. They were well informed about the proper medicine these people need.

There is in Dugin a constructive attitude toward the 2nd Political Theory (2TP socialist, Marxist): in view of the 4th Political Theory he promotes, it is given critical and instrumental value, combative value in terms of the erosion of the 1st Political Theory, liberal capitalist or predatory under Anglo-American hegemony.

The best of recent Marxism contains conceptual tools clearly useful, I would say necessary, for the collective construction of the multipolar world. Marxist theories of dependency, unequal exchange and the oppression of the Center over the periphery (Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, among many others) are an obligatory study to encircle this Anglo-American empire that has emerged as the dominant and sole pole. The oppressed peoples in struggle and that growing alliance now called the “Global South” require an adequate theory of class struggle and a rigorous view of imperialism. In his famous work “The Fourth Political Theory”, Dugin clearly lays out the necessary articulation of the struggles of all the peoples of the Earth, each with its own worldview (religion, myth, ethics and other aspects of its anthropological context) against the hegemon. The hegemon is (neo)liberalism as an ideology or political theory, and it is also the Anglo-American empire (Anglosphere) as the owner or leader of the collective West.

The 3rd Political Theory (3TP, fascism and national socialism) is the one that was most severely damaged by Cronos, the severe judge. Its defeat in 1945 was just, necessary and final. In its pure fascist version (Mussolini), it constituted a statism not very different from other evolved socialist models (as we have already discussed, in the case of post-Maoist China). A statism with a strong trade union and workers' component can enter the broad catalog of “3rd Way” or “3rd Position” models without deserving, therefore, the current - so criminalized - label of fascist.

Statehood is greatly reduced and foreign to despotic tendencies if one adopts the interesting Peronist model of the “organized community”. The Organized Community attempted by General Perón was, as the term indicates, not so much a pure totalitarian state (like Mussolini's) but a strict organization of the People themselves into families, local communities, union sections and professional groups, etc. In the case of Francoist Spain, the unsustainability of its authoritarian regime was precisely based on the inability of the Caudillo himself and his personalist system to re-legitimize itself as a true corporate state or as a true organized community of workers. Faced with these organizational weaknesses, Franco merely prolonged an authoritarian state on a rather liberal basis, especially after the cornering of the Phalange and Carlism and the technocratic emergence of Opus Dei. Already a liberal and developmentalist base, the opposition fueled by the Americans and the Franco-German “pro-European” axis could only grow, and not to “inject democracy” into Spain but to take away all sovereignty, even that preserved by Franco, albeit in precarious conditions.

The greatest, and ultimate, defeat was that of National Socialism. The “Subject” of the 3rd Political Theory in the Fascist version is the State, while in its National Socialist version it is the Race. Hitler's criminal madness, his genocidal action and irrationality determined the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 prevented any revival of a political theory centered on the subject of “race”, although in a completely similar way Israeli Zionism is still, very much the same. Zionism is a Nazism that, today, represents a cancer on humanity and an existential danger, not only to its neighbors but to the entire planet, given its possession of nuclear weapons.

The evolution of “political theories” in the Duginian sense is the evolution of the various Subjects of political transformation in the world: the abstract and atomized individual (1TP), the social class, the proletariat (2TP), and the State or Race (3PT). The subject of the Fourth Political Theory is, as any reader of the Russian thinker knows, the Dasein. The Heideggerian Beingness, which, in my opinion, appears too nebulous to erect a Political Theory that transforms the world, and at the same time serves to understand it in a fully rational and non-romantic way. For it is necessary to identify that necessary Subject, while at the same time organizing a multipolar opposition to the American hegemon. A hegemon that, with the enormous help and also under the enormous pressure of racist Israeli Zionism, endangers the peace, coexistence and development of the other peoples of the world.

In the face of this nebulous Object of 4TP, I am very interested in highlighting the internal dialectics of previous Political Theories, their contingent reactivation in different scenarios and times, as well as their resurrections. Class struggle in the Marxist sense, the engine of History in the 2TP, might have seemed deactivated in the opulent, post-industrial West. The absence of a Revolutionary Subject explains the crisis of the Western Communist parties, despite having, until the 1980s, formidable organizational apparatuses, academic hegemony, great militancy, prestigious intellectuals and opinion leaders, broad parliamentary representation and all the rest. It was the objective gentrification of a part of the working class, as well as the relocation of Western industry, fleeing to the periphery in the form of cheaper and more exploitable human flesh (preferably in the “Third World”) that caused Parties and forces of the radical left to lose their identity, enter a crisis and seek out the “new proletarians” (foreign immigrants, women oppressed “just for being women”, animals endowed with “sensibilities and rights”, gays and lesbians, trans people, etc., etc.). All these people and all these entities amenable to being mourned, defended, praised, etc. are not “proletariat”. Marxist Theory, centered on a worldview according to which our world system is based on the exploitation of man on man and, in an increasingly abstract and terrible way, on the exploitation of man by Capital, is diluted and fatally destroyed in that the revolutionary Subject is no longer the worker, nor a social class defined more or less strictly as the wage-earning and exploited economic class.

What Western Marxism and almost all the Western radical left have lost sight of is the real Subject of the class struggle. This is not the case with the Marxism typical of workers' and peasants' organizations in the Global South, dependent and neocolonized areas where their actors are clear that the struggle against capitalism is proposed through strategies of popular solidarity. Only class solidarity can check oligarchies, end corrupt governments, expel multinational corporations and corner neo-slavery landowners.

It is terrifying to see how some leaders of the Spanish left have “woken up”, while enjoying ministerial portfolios, advising a “toy strike” and to stop eating meat (Baltasar Garzón), or dissolved into a verbal fight against a nonexistent fascism (Pablo Iglesias, I. Belarra, Monedero, Echenique, etc.), while there are millions of people in the world who cannot consider such “struggles” simply because they live like slaves and work from dawn to dusk to eat a handful of something edible one day.

These leftist “awakenings” and the neoliberal bourgeoisie make no contribution. The genuine left is a long way from them. Poor peasants in flip-flops and a rifle in hand evicted Americans in Vietnam and Cuba. This is the authentic left. That the Spanish and Western “left” cares about implementing Agenda 2030 in schools, forcing children into “workshops” of hedonistic-sexual indoctrination and promoting veganism and transsexualism by decree, while Capital continues throughout the South to ravage entire cities, condemning them to mass emigration, trafficking of children and organs and sending them as commodities to a decadent First World-with the necessary collaboration of the immigration mafia NGOs, is nothing less than a disgrace. That neoliberal, rainbow, “wokist” and postmodern left (that of Izquierda Unida, that of Podemos, Sumar, Comunes, Esquerra, etc. in the Spanish sphere) has nothing more to do with Dugin's 2TP.

The 2TP (socialism, Marxism) continues to be effective against the 1TP (liberalism, neoliberalism) in that it reconstructs the concept of class (social class understood according to economic criteria, as unequal control of the means of production) and, therefore, the concept of class struggle. the real 2TP, when reactivated in the multipolar and post-Cold War international context, takes on some elements of the 3TP, precisely those that are essentially emancipatory and untainted by fascist and, above all, national socialist criminality. Aleksandr Dugin asserts, in one way or another, that the valid background (and thus susceptible to reactivation in moments after the death by defeat of the 3TP in 1945) is ethnos. Beyond Mussolini, against him one can think of a national socialism, that is, the non-totalitarian state emanating organically from the People. A People's State, an organized community of workers. Beyond Hitler, and radically against him and his pseudoscientific and irrational racism, one can think of an ethnos or a Volk, a Subject endowed with a collective identity that equips itself with the means to ensure its own survival (autarky) and their coexistence (in solidarity) with other peoples.

Indeed, the great Ibero-American anti-imperialist leaders were “national socialists”, syntheses of the 2TP and 3TP, true representatives of inveterate Hispanic caudillism and references of the entire authentic left: Juan Domingo Perón, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez. This kind of Hispanic man is a caudillo, and caudillismo is the peculiar form of this area of civilization inherited from the Spanish Empire (also from the Portuguese, which has no substantial cultural or ethnic differences with Spain). The three great men mentioned were revolutionaries, anti-imperialists and, therefore, forerunners of new nations. They created true national socialism in practice. They are a synthesis of the 2TP and 3TP “purified” of any fascist or Nazi traces, the 3TP described by Dugin. They are essential reference points for building the 4TP: the Political Theory that speaks of a plurality of civilizations articulated around Empires that guarantee a) their internal diversity (every non-predatory Empire is plural) and b) human-planetary diversity. A diversity based on international law and not on Yankee “rules”: each empire must avoid interference in its neighbor's house, respect it and cooperate with it for the good of humanity.

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