Civilization is seeing a shift that vindicates Alexander Dugin, and all others who’ve been vilified for recognizing where civilization is headed. Dugin—the man who western media has described as “Putin’s brain,” but is really more well-known in America than in Russia—challenges the liberal hegemony in a way that’s exceptionally dangerous.
His crime has been to reveal that language, the core tool used by academia and its ideological tailists, is profoundly limited in its ability to reflect reality. That Dugin makes the error of viewing Marxism as just another constructive dogma doesn’t make the correct parts of his ideas wrong; it’s the great test of one’s Marxism as to whether they can reconcile a personal contradiction like this one, and make the leap to a mode of left-wing politics that doesn’t hide from the task of the AI age. This task being to utilize the new technologies for the benefit of communism, of civilizational advancement, rather than declare these tools must simply go away.
Dugin clarifies that what’s chaotic, what escapes concrete definitions and ideological constraints, represents reality in a better way than any dogma can. Which is exactly what we must understand if we want to navigate the era of AI, where our lives are being taken over by a force that seems unknowable. The way we must respond to these developments is by embracing the unknown, recognizing AI can’t simply be “banned,” and turning the new technologies to our advantage in the class war.
Hegel already deduced the limitations on language, as I’ll show later, but Dugin’s unforgivable sin was to bring this insight to the 21st century’s generation of dissident political actors. And the reason why liberals demonized him for it is that they rely on the fetishization of the academic, of the dogmatic ideological prison. Is it any wonder why Chomsky, the Epsteinite propagator of imperial leftism, is also the type of linguist who’s pettily gatekept against alternative theories in his field? This is the same mindset that’s prominent among many millennial leftists in particular, who are the ones which drove the election of Zohran Mamdani and uphold his brand of empire. When our politics become mainstream enough, no doubt they’ll react by employing all the Russiagate tropes against us, and allying with the Zionist right in hunting us down.
What these people are fighting against is the reconciliation between the unknown and the tangible; between the chaotic realities the digital revolution has brought, and the concrete practice within our political movements. Because this fundamental change the world has seen isn’t something that can be properly grasped by someone whose formative years were right before it, and who clings to the old framework of understanding. Now that AI has heightened the new memetic technological reality, of course cognitive dissonance has exploded among those who were never comfortable with the transition.
Their initial reaction was to declare “ban AI,” but notice that they had to give up this phrase pretty quickly; it became absurd when the unknowable threat turned into something everyone accepts as normal. By reconciling their daily lives with what was supposed to be so inherently scary, the people have applied the logic of Dugin. As part of his “chaos can’t be dismissed” reasoning, Dugin urges us to utilize the inner-focused and holistic thinking of eastern spirituality, the antithesis to western empiricism:
The Eurasianist cosmos is the generalizing territory of the place-development of the spirit. It is the spiritual order that penetrates all levels of reality, both subtle and coarse, soulful and corporeal, social and natural. The Eurasianist cosmos is permeated with subtle trajectories traversed by fiery, eternal ideas and winged meanings. Reading these trajectories, revealing them out of concealment, and extracting complex meanings out of the corporeal plasma of disparate facts and phenomena is the task of humanity.
For the Eurasianists, the cosmos is an inner notion. It is revealed not through expansion, but rather, or on the contrary, through immersion deep within it, through concentration on the hidden aspects of the reality given here and now.
It’s when our movement grasps this principle—that the spiritual isn’t truly separate from the material, and therefore being “materialist” doesn’t mean reducing reality to categories—that it can internalize Dugin’s message about the role of chaos, as summarized by the communist leader Haz Al-Din:
by far the most important contribution of Dugin, and which permits him to be characterized as a true metaphysical materialist, going beyond even Heidegger - and that is in Dugin’s concept of Chaos, the true phenomenal form of material being. Whereas Heidegger understands in Heraclitus the beginning of Being’s oblivion, Dugin identifies at the precise incipience of Logos a dark counterpart to it - that is chaos. Chaos is not randomness, nor meaninglessness. It is really the antecedent density of material being. In contrast to the exclusive principle of Logos, based on differentiation, identity - which defines itself in contrast to the void of nothingness - chaos is an inclusive principle. It is a dark shadow of logos, corresponding to Being that it has forgotten, but which follows it. Whereas Chaos is ‘Nothing’ to the Logos (or the intellect), it is in reality something. What is this if not a precise materialist view, which asserts the primacy and antecedence of a reality which cannot ever be reduced to any product of the mind?
By advocating for this intellectual humility, where we must give up the obsession with fitting all of reality into our mental boxes, Dugin applies the same argument Hegel did. Referring to the “otherness” that comes from linguistic categorization of things, Hegel pointed out that
just as little as night or day is its being, it is just as truly also day and night; it is not in the least affected by this otherness through which it is what it is. A simple entity of this sort, which is by and through negation, which is neither this nor that, which is a not-this, and with equal indifference this as well as that – a thing of this kind we call a Universal. The Universal is therefore in point of fact the truth of sense-certainty, the true content of sense-experience.
It is as a universal, too, that we give utterance to sensuous fact. What we say is: “This”, i.e. the universal this; or we say: “it is”, i.e. being in general. Of course we do not present before our mind in saying, so the universal this, or being in general, but we utter what is universal; in other words, we do not actually and absolutely say what in this sense-certainty we really mean. Language, however, as we see, is the more truthful; in it we ourselves refute directly and at once our own “meaning”; and since universality is the real truth of sense-certainty, and language merely expresses this truth, it is not possible at all for us even to express in words any sensuous existence which we “mean”.
Why is this debate important on a practical level? Because it helps the workers movement figure out whether it should accept the promises that the compatible left makes, just because this tendency’s leaders use the language of “socialism” and “revolution.” When we make this clear, suddenly it becomes much harder for the reformists and crude economists to dismiss what we say with phrases like: “what does all of this theory matter to the workers struggle!”
Lenin talked about these exact same kinds of political actors when he said: “All those who talk about “overrating the importance of ideology”, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’. But this is a profound mistake.” The mistake being to leave the workers movement’s ideological development to the forces of bourgeois influence, which will always be able to mold an organized base that’s been cut off from the tools for understanding their conditions.
Without Dugin, the movement is vulnerable to whatever demagogy the liberals target it with. In this case, a growing danger is the petty-bourgeois politics that defined the Zohran movement, where it’s viewed as paramount to defend the interests of the professionals whose careers are threatened by AI. This isn’t yet the main danger, because the current administration is one that seeks AI acceleration; but Trump’s policy on AI will ultimately strengthen the liberals who seek to fan irrational fears of AI, and thereby divert the workers from the communist position. The good news is that the conditions necessitate a rise in Dugin’s thinking. Only by embracing his view on the unknown can humanity remain sane in the world as it will exist from here on.
————————————————————————
If you appreciate my work, I hope you become a one-time or regular donor to my Patreon account. Like most of us, I’m feeling the economic pressures from our era of accelerating inflation, and I need money to keep fighting for a new system that works for all of us. Go to my Patreon here.
To keep this platform effective amid the censorship against dissenting voices, join my Telegram channel.
