Category: Politics

In my post Renaming the New Right, I wrote: “On a general level, it must be said that both the term conservatism and the term Right are philosophically and historically inadequate. Insofar as the term Right is ever associated with the French National Assembly during the revolution, there is, at the very least, something disproportionate even in an Evola’s use of the term ‘the true Right’ for the uncompromising, integral ‘traditionalist’ position as he conceives it.”

This gave the wrong impression that Evola was not himself aware of this problem. I would therefore like to cite a passage from Il fascismo: Saggio di un’analisi critica dal punto di vista della Destra (1964) in French translation (see my comment on my use of French translations of Evola here; in this case, there is to my knowledge not yet any English translation), where he identifies precisely the problem I had in mind:

“En toute rigueur, par rapport à ce que nous avons en vue et qui constituera notre point de référence, le terme de ’Droite’ est impropre. Ce terme, en effet, suppose une dualité: la Droite, pratiquement, se définit dans le cadre du régime démo-parlementaire des partis, par opposition à une ‘gauche’, donc dans un cadre différent du cadre traditionnel des régimes précédents. Ces régimes connurent tout  au plus un système sur le modèle anglais dans ses formes originelles pré-victoriennes, c’est-à-dire avec un parti qui représentait le gouvernement (et celui-ci était, d’une certaine façon, la Droite), et une opposition, non pas comprise comme une opposition idéologique ou de principe, une opposition au système, mais comme une opposition dans le système (ou la structure) avec des fonctions de critique rectificatrice et intégratrice, sans que fût mise en question, de toute namière, l’idée, en quelque sorte transcendante et intangible, de l’État. Une telle opposition ‘fonctionelle’, bien délimité dans un contexte organique et toujours loyaliste, n’a rien à voir avec l’opposition que peut exercer tel ou tel des multiples partis, chacun pour son propre compte et voué à la conquête du pouvoir et de l’État, si ce n’est à l’institution de l’anti-État…Il faut donc concevoir la Droite, prise dans son meilleur sens, politique et non économique, comme quelque chose de lié à une phase déja involutive, à la phase marquée par l’avènement du parlementarisme démocratique avec le régime des nombreux partis. Dans cette phase, la Droite se présente fatalement comme l’antithèse des différentes gauches, pratiquement en compétition avec elles sur le même plan. Mais elle représente en principe, ou devrait représenter, une exigence plus élevée, elle devrait être la dépositaire et l’affirmatrice de valeurs directement rattachées à l’idée de l’État vrai: valeurs d’une certaine manière centrales, c’est-á-dire supérieures à toute opposition de partis, selon la supériorité comprise dans le comcept même d’autorité ou de souveraineté pris dans son sens le plus complet.” (Le fascisme vu de droite suivi de Notes sur le Troisième Reich (1993 (1981)), 15-16.)

What Evola has “en vue”, his “point de référence”, i.e. what I called “the uncompromising, integral ‘traditionalist’ position as he conceives it”, he considers it legitimate to describe in this context in terms of “la grande tradition politique européenne, non en pensant à un régime particulier comme modèle, mais bien à certaines idées fondamentales qui, en mode varié mais constant, ont été à la base de différents États”. (15)

It is likely – I cannot remember right now – that he has remarked on the inadequacy of the term Right and even true Right for this tradition and these “idées fondamentales” in other works too, most likely perhaps in Gli uomini e le rovine (one of the many works now published in English translation by Inner Traditions, Men Among the Ruins), to which he makes reference in this same chapter in Il fascismo for a systematic exposition of his doctrine of the state. I happened to find it now in the latter book, and the passage cited gives a sufficient account of his perception of the problem.

Having thus clearly explained the inadequacy of the term Right, Evola still chooses to use the term the true Right, and concludes by saying that “idéalement le concept de la vraie Droite, de la Droite telle que nous l’entendons, doit être défini en fonction des forces et des traditions qui agirent d’une maniére formatrice dans un groupe de nations et parfois aussi dans des unité supranationales, avant la Révolution française, avant l’avènement du tiers état et du monde des masses, avant la civilisation bourgeoise et industrielle, avec toutes leurs conséquences et les jeux d’actions et de réactions concordantes qui ont conduit au marasme actuel et à ce qui menace d’une destruction définitive le peu qui reste encore de la civilisation européenne et du prestige européen”. (17)

It might be said that speaking of the true Right does not remove the problem, when Evola has correctly defined the Right in historical terms. There is, it could be said, nothing “false” about the Right thus defined, since it simply is what the Right is. It is the true Right. En toute rigueur, the term true Right is therefore also impropre. What could at the most be said, it might seem, is that what Evola means to say is that there ought to be another Right, distinct from the real, historical Right, an alternative Right which truly defends and upholds the pre-right order which Evola calls the true Right.

But then it appears Evola does think there has been at least periodically in the historical Right, and, it would seem, even within “le cadre du régime démo-parlementaire des partis”, something similar to his true Right, something that has in fact not been exhaustively defined by that cadre and the “opposition à une ‘gauche’” in substantial terms by, most fundamentally, simply accepting their legitimacy. The “false” Right is then for Evola that which allows itself to be defined by the new duality of the “régime démo-parlementaire”, while the true Right is that which somehow resists or tries to resist it and to defend the pre-Right regime and its principles.

Much needs to be said of course about the relation between the “true right” thus defined and modernity, and not least what I prefer to speak of as an “alternative modernity”, an area where, as I have explained elsewhere, my understanding is in some important respects different from that of what Mark Sedgwick, introducing an important distinction, calls the “hard” traditionalists. But here the question is only the very limited one of the appropriateness of the terms Right and true Right; I wanted to do justice to Evola’s own reasoning and his awareness of the problem I mentioned in my earlier post.

I recently posted a public debate between Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton at the Royal Institution in London last year. It seemed to me Eagleton had changed. Scruton himself hinted at this in the debate.

This was also confirmed when I read his recent, short book Why Marx Was Right (2011). It is the first book I have read about Marxism – including Marx’s own – which did not immediately strike me as presenting a system of thought and historical analysis that, while containing important partial truths, is almost absurd in its onesidedness and reductionism. It seems to me this is not Eagleton’s own Marxism as I first encountered it long ago.

Eagleton sets out to refute what he claims are the misunderstandings of the critics of Marxism. What he overlooks is that these misunderstandings are quite as much those of the Marxists themselves, of Marx’s own followers. But it is clear that what we have to do with here is a Marxist who has actually understood and absorbed criticism of Marxism from positions that used to be ignored and dismissed a priori. And this seems to be the result of a process of development of personal maturity, including deepened historical reflection. The nature of Eagleton’s defence of Marx strongly suggests that this could not have been achieved without his primary scholarly orientation, namely literature and the history of literature. As he says in the debate with Scruton, he has taught Shakespeare all of his life – and he has also of course written about him. Living with the classics during a long career does have its effects, even, in many cases, when that career is devoted to ideological reinterpretation.

It is highly significant that, in the book, Eagleton uses Scruton’s own formulation – several times repeated in his works – about the Communist Manifesto and Marx’s philosophy of history as there expressed. Eagleton does in fact also criticize Marx on a few points.

But it could, it seems to me, be argued that although he often does succeed in defending Marx against both critics and Marxists, what he primarily does is to present his own, more tenable version of Marxism, rather than defend Marx as he is. And he does it at least partly because he has finally realized the weight of and the need to assimilate kinds of criticism which were previously for the most part simply not understood at all among Marxists. One after another, most of the main points are taken up, in the way one always thought Marxists should have had the intelligence to do it long ago.

All of them are not taken up, and the defence is in many cases far from sufficient with regard to the ones that are. And quite apart from philosophical considerations, it seems far too late to save Marxism as such in a new and more reasonable form. Moreover, he still does not seem to have fully absorbed the Hegelian and phenomenological versions of Marxism, culminating perhaps in the work of Karel Kosík, which I always found to be philosophically the most important and tenable, although it was important and tenable not because of its specifically Marxist content but because of its retention, partly inspired by the early, “pre-Marxist” Marx (Kosík emphatically denied that this Marx was pre-Marxist), of central elements of idealism. As I said, all presentations of Marxism struck me as absurd in its basic philosophical premises, and although post-Marxism and postmodernism had already for a long time been overshadowing and even replacing it, at the time I started my academic studies one still, at least in the historically oriented humanities, had to go through and thoroughly familiarize oneself with most of its main currents.

Eagleton’s book is not a good introduction to Marx. He is still far too deeply absorbed in the erroneous positions of Marx and the general radical main current of modernity to be able to see clearly the nature of Marx’s thought and the currents in which he too was caught up. Most of the vast and fundamental issues here involved are still simply ignored, or, more precisely, simply not perceived by Eagleton.

But in some respects it is a better introduction to Marx than any other I have read (I should emphasize that it is not an extensive, scholarly work but only a brief essay presenting the outline of a defence). I remember how, when I was a young student, Marxists used to praise certain introductions to Marxism as brilliant, and how they seemed to think they must almost of necessity convince the reader. I found this totally incomprehensible. The effect they had on me was the opposite: they immediately made me see the monumental untruth of Marxism, and this impression was not changed by deeper familiarity with Marxism. They said all the things Eagleton now says Marx does not say, and often in a studiedly provocative manner which revealed everything about the true nature and motivation of their authors.

Many decades after the heyday of Marxism, Eagleton seems in these respects different indeed. With him, it is clearly possible to have an intelligent and meaningful discussion – which is what Scruton does, albeit somewhat awkwardly, having in the past had reason to sharply criticize his interlocutor.

If time allows, I will develop my argument here into a series of posts, in which I go through Eagleton’s main arguments in defence of Marx and emphasize what is new and important in them. Defending almost the entirety of Marx’s work or his positions is an impossible task, and Eagleton of course does not succeed in this. But what could be regarded as the in reality most important contribution Eagleton makes in Why Marx Was Right is that he facilitates the rescue, as it were, of Marx’s important partial truths. These  seem, it seems to me, in some cases more easily assimilable by non-Marxists in the form in which they are here presented than in most other Marxists, and indeed Marx himself.

This rescue is not least important in the face of post-Marxism. For the partial truths of Marx, truths to some extent dissociable from his system as a whole, are the ones often found in his many-layered criticism of capitalism, and what characterizes post-Marxism is not least their loss. Even a (paleo)conservative critic of post-Marxism like Paul Gottfried, who does not focus on Marx’s criticism of capitalism, clearly perceives that post-Marxism is in important respects more problematic than Marxism and far less intellectually rigorous.

We find here a general tendency of convergence between paleoconservative and more or less paleomarxist analyses of post-Marxism. Like Fredric Jameson, Eagleton has, it seems, long criticized the development of post-Marxism (Why Marx Was Right prompted me to read also The Illusions of Postmodernism from 1996), whereby the relative theoretical strength of Marxism is clearly demonstrated and several overlappings with certain kinds of conservative analyses become visible, although at the same time the weaknesses in comparison with such analyses become obvious. Eagleton is always, like Jameson, for many reasons compelled to accept much in post-Marxism in a way a Gottfried is not. Eagleton and Jameson are simply part of the general, broader and deeper dynamic of modernity, the nature of which cannot be properly grasped from inside of it.

Of course, some branches of Marxism were always supported by capitalists, since the effects of the general cultural radicalism promoted by such branches and indeed in many cases socialism itself are in the interests of capitalists. But in post-Marxism, we tend to see a wholesale adoption on the part of the left of the long-standing schemes of global capitalism. With only few remaining exceptions, the left has become its faithful supporters and promoters, and not least much more openly funded by it. With Obama, the transformation described by Gottfried of the the anti-Americanism of the European Left into “extreme affection” during the Clinton years has only been intensified.

Unfortunately, Eagleton does not sufficiently distance himself from the current post-Marxist left, the global capitalist left, the American imperialist left, the war left. It remains unclear to me where exactly he stands with regard to the issues I have here briefly indicated. He cannot see things as clearly as Gottfried, a representative of the only real alternative America. But he also cannot see them as clearly as his fellow leftist Jean Bricmont – who wrote Impostures intellectuelles with Alan Sokal and who collaborates with the Chomsky who is now of course increasingly rejected by the left – in this recent mise au point.

Scruton too, being more attached to the old cold-war controversies between left and right (as he understood them) than Gottfried, unfortunately fails to perceive these things. He is, as it were, right in the Royal Institution debate that the left still dominates the universities, while at the same time Eagleton is right that they have been taken over by capitalism. None of them sees, or wants to see, the whole picture.

The European Left in the New Millennium

University of Missouri Press, 2005     Amazon.com

Front & Back Flaps:

Albin Michel, 2011     Amazon.fr

Description de l’ouvrage:

Pourquoi Nicolas Sarkozy et Angela Merkel considèrent-ils le “capitalisme de l’ombre” comme la plus grave menace à laquelle nous sommes confrontés?

Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society, 2004     Amazon.co.uk

Back Cover:

The nation state provides us with the surest model for peace, prosperity, and the defence of human rights. In spite of this, the idea of the nation state is under attack, derided as a cause of conflict, and destined to be replaced by more “enlightened” forms of jurisdiction. This is in spite of the fact that all recent attempts to transcend the nation state into some kind of transnational political order have ended up  either as totalitarian dictatorships like the former Soviet Union or as unaccountable bureaucracies like the European Union.

Attempts to change the nature of the European Union in ways that will expropriate our sovereignty and annihilate the boundaries between jurisdictions have brought us to a turning point in our history. Roger Scruton writes:

“I believe that we are on the brink of decisions that could prove disastrous for Europe and for the world, and that we have only a few years in which to take stock of our inheritance and to reassume it. Now more than ever do those lines from Goethe’s Faust ring true for us: Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. What you have inherited from your forefathers, earn it, that you might own it. We in the nation states of Europe need to earn again the sovereignty that previous generations so laboriously shaped from the inheritance of Christianity, imperial government and Roman law. Earning it, we will own it, and owning it, we will be at peace within our borders.”

Contents:

1  Introduction

2  Citizenship

3  Membership and Nationality

4  Nations and Nationalism

5  Britain and Its Constituent Nations

6  The Virtues of the Nation State

7  Panglossian Universalism

8  Oikophobia

9  The New World Order

10  Threats to the Nation

11  Overcoming the Threats

JOB’s Comment:

Scruton is more of a “nationalist” than I am, although he does not defend nationalism and, in this book, clearly distinguishes it from the “national loyalty” that is what he does defend. But his arguments about nations etc. are important and often essential for all who believe, like me, in a truly European union.

Antwerp, July 2006

From The Brussels Journal

“When I was invited to give this talk by my old friend Paul Belien, my first reaction was one of pleasure that a political party in Belgium should be interested in my ideas. I have never been asked to address a political party in Western Europe, and I long ago concluded that a voice like mine is irrelevant to the practice of European politics, and must be regarded merely as a vague murmur in the stratosphere of thinking, with no clear application in the realm of political facts. I had heard of the Vlaams Belang, and its predecessor, the Vlaams Blok, as a controversial party, with widespread support among the Flemish population of Belgium. I knew that the party had been targeted by the liberal establishment, had been accused of ‘racism and xenophobia’, and had been disbanded, in its previous incarnation, by a Belgian court. On the other hand, there were plenty of explanations of the accusations apart from their truth, and it seemed likely to me that the true offence of the Vlaams Belang had been to threaten the vested interests of the European Union.”   Read more

Fayard (2011)     Amazon.fr

Présentation de l’éditeur:

Clarity Press, 2012     Amazon.com

Book Description:

Spawned by the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s existence was justified as a guarantee against any Soviet threats towards Western Europe. That raison d’être is long gone with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless NATO has expanded relentlessly eastward towards its former enemy, even though Communism has disappeared. Yugoslavia marked a turning point for the Atlantic Alliance and its mandate. The organization moved from a defensive posture to an offensive one under the pretexts of humanitarianism. Starting from Yugoslavia, NATO began its journey towards globalization, taking on a broader area of operations outside of the European continent, leading to NATO missions in East Africa, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and most strikingly, Libya. Increasingly symbolic of U.S. militarism and missile diplomacy, NATO has acted as an arm of the Pentagon and formally or informally moved into combat zones where the US and its allies have been combatants, as the world increasingly militarizes through the globalization of NATO and the formation of new military counter-alliance.

Seven Stories Press, 2008     Amazon.com

Book Description:

What do Eastern Europe’s booming sex trade, America’s subprime mortgage lending scandal, China’s fake goods industry, and celebrity philanthropy in Africa have in common? With biopirates trolling the blood industry, fish-farming bandits ravaging the high seas, pornography developing virtually in Second Life, and games like World of Warcraft spawning online sweatshops, how are rogue industries transmuting into global empires? And will the entire system be transformed by the advent of sharia economics? With the precision of an economist and the narrative deftness of a storyteller, syndicated journalist Loretta Napoleoni examines how the world is being reshaped by dark economic forces, creating victims out of millions of ordinary people whose lives have become trapped inside a fantasy world of consumerism. Napoleoni reveals the architecture of our world, and in doing so provides fresh insight into many of the most insoluble problems of our era.

”The fourth political theory”, Alexander Dugin explains in his new book with this title, is a collaborative project involving also the French intellectual leader of la nouvelle droite, Alain de Benoist, with whom Dugin has apparently reestablished his former close relation. The two thinkers seem to have met for a prolonged period in Moscow to discuss the concept, and in connection with this, Dugin also published a Russian translation of a collection of essays by de Benoist, the title of which, in English, is Against Liberalism: Towards the Fourth Political Theory – a title which could be said to be simply a more precise indication of the content of Dugin’s own book.

This indicates that what we have to do with here is an attempt on the part of Dugin and de Benoist to launch the concept of the fourth political theory as the most adequate designation of their shared positions. But this in turn raises the question if this is all simply a matter of renaming the New Right. If that is the case, there are, to begin with, two things that must be said about it.

First, there is the obvious advantage that the fourth political theory is for several reasons a better designation than the New Right. de Benoist and other New Rightists themselves have always complained about the latter, inasmuch as it was first used by the French media and in no way indicated the ambitions of GRECE to reject and transcend the left-right distinction. Although it was indeed clear they often did try to do this, the objections were sometimes hard to understand in view of the fact that de Benoist was, and, I think, to this day remains best known for his early book Vu de droite. Anthologie critique des idées contemporaines (1977), awarded by the French Academy with its grand prix de l’essai, and his thinking seemed to incorporate or overlap more obviously with various strands in what had always correctly been classified as rightist thought than with leftist thought. He also seems to have finally accepted the term New Right.

Still, the categorization of his intellectual groupement as simply beloning to the right is insufficient and partly misleading in view of the distinct whole of its philosophical position and interpretation of history. The right, and the term right, are too closely associated with conservatism in the forms in which it has historically existed in Europe, and it is, I believe (I have discussed this elsewhere), a correct insight of de Benoist’s that those conservatisms are not only insufficient in various respects in the present, but have shown themselves to be so in the past as well. The fourth political theory is a much better term, which, while purely formal and abstract, does greater justice to the ambitious GRECE project and communicates better its true nature.

On a general level, it must be said that both the term conservatism and the term right are philosophically and historically inadequate. Insofar as the term right is ever associated with the French National Assembly during the revolution, there is, at the very least, something disproportionate even in Evola’s use of the term “the true Right” for the uncompromising, integral “traditionalist” position as he conceives it.

Now, some will probably think that inasmuch as in the shallow and propagandistic discourse of the Left (including liberalism), the third political theory as described by Dugin and, I suppose, de Benoist, namely fascism broadly and, it must be said, somewhat imprecisely conceived, is almost always simplistically associated with the Right, described as a “right wing extremism” or “radicalism”, serving the interests of or behind the Right in a new historical situation etc., de Benoist regards the use of the term the fourth political theory as particularly suited to serving the need of marking and signaling the differences between this theory and the third, which have been deliberately obscured and downplayed by ideological opponents. But in this connection, it must perhaps be kept in mind that his objections to fascism are such as in substance are in fact rather associated with the historical European right and not new or specifically New Right ones, so that contrary to other parts of the fourth political theory where there is some substantial agreement with the (socialist) left, in this particular respect the need to disown the term right would at least not seem to have to be paramount. Needless to say, this does not imply that de Benoist shares all of the historical right’s objections to fascism.

The advantages of the new designation are, as I have indicated, much more general. The introduction of it, and the consensus regarding it between de Benoist and Dugin, are to be welcomed. But the second thing that must initially be said about it as amounting simply to a renaming of the New Right is that it inevitably raises again the question of the problems and limitations of the New Right as it has historically existed. If the fourth political theory is in substanc simply the New Right, it does not represent any advance in relation to it. The term would connote and express not only the same strengths but also the same weaknesses. I have briefly indicated elsewhere what I find those weaknesses to be, and will not develop or even repeat this here, but I hope to return to it shortly. The weaknesses are, from my position, serious. As I have had to emphasize, the New Right has in central respects always been quite far from my own positions, especially with regard to what I include as defining the concept of the alternative modernity (which, I add, is not the same as that with which all others who may also use it prefer to define it). I have found this regrettable, since there are also several strengths, valuable parts of a body of work that is by now enormous, which I would have liked to be able to support.

One obvious thing that must be asked here is whether the renewed collaboration between Dugin and de Benoist implies that the former has simply accepted all the New Right’s positions. The fact that this is unlikely speaks against interpreting the forth political theory as simply a new name for an old thing. Dugin is much closer to the traditionalist school than de Benoist, and he has related traditionalism to Russian identity in a way that makes it hard to see how he could relinquish it. For me as partly a Lindbomian, this is, prima facie, in some central respects a strength in Dugin’s thinking in comparison with de Benoist’s, and signifies, in the perspective of the resumed collaboration, at least a potential for one needed modification and development of the New Right legacy. On the other hand, it is of course not clear to what extent de Benoist has been prepared to adapt to Dugin.

But that the fourth political theory is not intended as a mere new name also is suggested by the way Dugin describes it in terms of “a correctly posed question” rather than a set of ready answers, and invites us to a constructive dialogue instead of awaiting a response to an already elaborated theory as a finished result. For many, this is undoubtedly promising, after decades of the New Right’s consistent alienation of large groups of important potential supporters by their insistence on its more outlandish elements as essential and fundamental programmatic points (in the sense in which things can for them be essential and fundamental). By this, they seem unnecessarily to have marginalized themselves in a way that sometimes went so far as to border on sectarian irrelevance.

On the other hand, it might seem a little far-fetched to hope that Dugin, known for a number of rather extreme and problematic positions of his own, different from those of the New Right, will be able to correct and improve on the New Right positions in these respects. But with the new name and some of the new formulations, they – he and de Benoist together – now at least to some extent appear to be signalling a new openness. It seems it is not impossible that this could finally hold out the promise of another rapprochement, namely with the kinds of positions and traditions I have tried to point to as necessary to uphold and defend. This would mark a decisive, historic shift. We certainly need a fourth political theory, but we also need this theory to go beyond the New Right. The new name should signal a new philosophy, or a philosophy in some important respects different from that of the New Right. I will come back to the question of the extent to which Dugin’s book bears out as reasonable the hopes for such a development.