By: Jafe Arnold

Marx and the Indo-European Mode of Production

f the three main socio-political ideologies of modernity – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism (and their offshoots) – Marxism is arguably the most complex, scientific, and paradoxical. On the one hand, the theories of Karl Marx are no less contextually rooted in their 19th century Western European environment than other thinkers and currents that contributed to the first and third political ideologies. On the other hand, Marxism proved to be something more historically commanding and globally relevant than the myriad of other 19th century frameworks and theories which proposed a socio-political trajectory of modernity based on one or another meta-historical philosophical narrative. Societies claiming to be consciously guided by Marxist ideology and realizing its political pivot – the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – once covered nearly half of the globe for half of the most turbulent 20th century, thereby shaping a unique experience of modernity for more than a billion people and rather convincingly insisting that communism would be “the end of history.”

In this installment, we will address the dilemma of Marxism from two standpoints: (1) weighing the benefits, downsides, and paradoxes of Marx’s framework, and (2) demonstrating the relevance of Marxism’s identification of the relations of production and class to understanding the mythological, sociological, and political-economic developmental trends that uniquely affected primordial Indo-European society. With these analyses integrated into our arsenal, we can move ever closer to understanding the modernity that we are leaving, how it came about, and the multipolar world into which we are moving.  In order to broach such, we must first establish why it is worth picking Marx up again at all. Continue reading →

 By: Jafe Arnold 

Initiatic Geopolitics 

“Geopolitics”, coined in 1902 by Rudolf Kjellén and informed by Friedrich Ratzel’s 1897 “political geography”, is an esoteric term. Most generically, geopolitics is presented as the science of the relationship between geography and politics in international relations; and for this seemingly materialistic binding of the complexity and passions of human politics to physical earth and resources, geopolitics is often berated as “cynical”, “deterministic”, “reductionist”, or “materialist.” Of course, this misrepresentation is immediately based on an overlooking or misreading of the 19th and early 20th century founders of geopolitics, but the problem runs much deeper: it lies in a loss of the meaning and implications of space as encapsulated in geo- and politics.

The word geopolitics is nominatively composed of Greek gê (“earth”) and politika (“of, concerning the polis”). The definitions of polis and politika are the subject of immense controversy and are generically translated as “city-state” and “of, by, and for the city-state and/or its citizens”, although it is clear that in both cases we are dealing with the common denominator of a space with superstructural content – a socio-political space. If we trace the etymology of earth back to Proto-Indo-European, we have dheghom and h₁er-, whereby we arrive at a sense of earth as the space of humans, what they inhabit, what they dig in, what they are made out of – indeed, from this sense arises the notion of man as a microcosm of the earth as seen in numerous Indo-European linguistic and cosmological derivations.[1] Here must be added Ancient Greek khôra, which might be from the Proto-Indo-European gher (“to yearn for” as well as “to enclose”) and/or ghoros (ritual surrounding, e.g., with dance, music, etc.), and which nominally refers to “land” or “country”, particularly that surrounding the polis, but whose interpretations generally concern qualitative space. In Plato’s designation, khôra is the dimension of the “country” that shapes Being, the transitional realm between between forms and their realization. [2] In other words, we are dealing not merely with “earth-places” or, in the most scientific sense, “geography”, but space in a dimension that encompasses humans, their polities and politics, and is indivisible from their intimate sense of being part and parcel of the cosmos. At its etymological-cum-conceptual core, geopolitics thus deals with space as something qualitative, as something tied to subjectivity and humans; it deals with man and space as inseparable, not disconnected and not disenchanted.

In his Foundations of Geopolitics, Alexander Dugin summates: “Geopolitics speaks of ‘spatial man’ defined by space, formed by it, and conditioned by its specific quality…This conditioning vividly manifests itself in man’s large-scale social manifestations in states, ethnoi, cultures, civilizations, etc…” The quality and magnitude of these manifestations of space “are only seen at a certain distance from the individual”, as “civilizations” themselves are  “one of the largest concepts that the historical consciousness of mankind is capable of generating…which possess extensive spatial, temporal, and cultural boundaries…[and] possess a considerable volume, i.e., they should last a long time, control significant geographical areas, and produce a special, expressive cultural and religious (and sometimes ideological) style” [3]. We have quoted Dugin’s presentation of geopolitics in his 1997 textbook not only because it has shaped the discourse and heavily influenced major actors of geopolitics in the 21st century, but because its value also lies in Dugin’s cogent argument that the worldview of modernity and the worldview of geopolitics are ultimately opposed. Here should resonate Dugin’s side-by-side theses that “the path is from geopolitics to sacred geography” and that, simultaneously, geopolitics has become the essentially defining barometer of contemporary processes, particularly multipolarity. The resulting deduction is that the geopolitics of the current period are taking us towards the archaic. Continue reading →