From Shaman to Heroes, From Prophets to Traders: Alexander Dugin’s A Russian Eurasian Perspective on Ethnogenesis

• a common language
• a belief in a common origin
• a complex of customs, beliefs, rituals, myth and art forms
• specific geographical and climatic conditions
• Are different from other ethnos

Dugin considers himself a “cultural primordialist”.

My sources
My article is  based on two books by Alexander Dugin, Ethnos and Society and Ethnosociology: The Foundations. Dugin drew from a long line of ethnos sociologists in Russia which included Sergei Shirokogoroff at the beginning of the 20^thcentury as well as Lev Gumilev’s Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere. In Germany there was the work of Richard Thurnwald and Wilhelm Mühlmann. One of the most interesting aspects of this history is its importance Dugin places on steppe people who tend to be marginalized in mainstream Western texts on social evolution.

Forms of attachment in history
My article traces forms of attachment in social evolution. There are five kinds of attachment and each form of attachment is a particular archetypal figure as well as a social formation:

• Ethnos – shaman – hunter-gatherers;
• Polyethnic – Narod – hero – complex horticulture and herding societies;
• Polyethic – prophet – agricultural primitive states;
• Nation-states – traders – industrial capitalist societies and
• Civil society – global individualists – finance capitalist  – neoliberal societies

Where are we going?
There are four tables in my article which summarize the differences between the forms of attachment and the individual archetypes in which they are embedded. One shows the difference between shaman and warriors (heroes). Another compares the differences between primitive states and nation-states. A third shows the history of the forms of attachment as they are connected to social organization: means of subsistence; social identity; political forms; the nature of stereotypes and the means communication. My last table in the conclusion shows Dugin’s forms of attachment in social evolution compared with Western models including Sombart, Tonnies, Morgan, Sumner, Redfield, Eliade, Durkheim, Levi- Bruhl, Dumont and Levi-Strauss. The first six pages describe the world-view of ethnos as they existed in hunter-gatherer societies. I spend a couple of pages describing the life of a Narod as they existed among the steppe herders. Dugin’s model pretty much ignores what happened in agricultural primitive states so I’ve filled in life in the primitive state and primitive city. I pick Dugan back up again as he describes the rises of nation-states between the 17^thand the 19^th century and what the ramifications are for forms of attachment. I close with a page of description of the current, global transnational society and its form, the cosmopolitan individual.

Why Should You Care?
For socialists, a knowledge of the history of human societies is vital to understand the dynamics of why societies arise and break down. As historical beings we train ourselves to accept the torch of existing social conditions and pass the torch to the next generation to help plant better social conditions. The Atlanticist world of the West is falling apart. The Asian world is rising. While Western anthropology and macrosociology has made some important contributions it has been relatively neglectful of steppe people and has generally looked skeptically on the value of ethnicity and other forms of attachment. This is because capitalist societies need individuals, not groups to be the lowest unit for its economic advertising. Dugin’s work, as shown in this article, supports both ancient forms of attachment and the place of steppe people in social evolution. In the extent to which socialists wish to be Eurasian polarists, we owe it to the world and ourselves understanding of their picture of how societies evolved.

Structure of Ethnos
Dugin envisions ethnos as like the atom of substances. It is the lowest sociological element before society breaks down the way subatomic particles do in nature. The ethnos can be divided into 3 parts:

• Ethnostatics — identifies how ethnicities tenaciously adhere together without implying anything biological.
  Ethnodynamics – the vibrating force processes occurring inside of ethnos which causes problems just a fluctuation or oscillation.
  Ethnokinetics — events that force the ethnos to change irreversibly and qualitatively

It becomes unconscious but present and a new form of attachment kicks in which Dugin calls the “Narod”. Since the first societies were hunter-gatherers, they are the first pure ethnos group.

Ethnostatics
Dugin contends that the elements in the structure of ethos include: ethnic thoughts; an ethnics lifeworld; ethnic narrative – language and myth; ethnic space; ethnic time; ethnic sacredness; ethnic anthropology; ethnic divisions and economic activity. I would include geography and climate. In these ethnos, economic practices are integrated into the context of a single whole and not treated autonomously as they are in capitalist societies.

Pre-objective and pre-subjective
Ethnos, according to Dugin is pre-subjective and pre-objective. This means that ethnicity at first does not see itself as being relative to other ethnoses or aspiring towards any universal categorization of objectivity. But neither does ethnicity have any subjective side that individuals aspire to identify with. It is a whole which resists both expansion or any fracturing. A good example of this cycle of reproduction is in many rituals of initiation when the hunter first kills forest animals he then become the victim of these animals in rites. There is not even a sense of a separate society, a separate nature or a separate individual. Individuality is perceived as a threat and a danger and it is classified as deviance, an anomaly. The individual appears as a social phenomenon only in forms of attachment that come later. Most archaic thought does not regard the soul or human as individual substances but a part of the ethnic soul.

Participation mystic
Following Levi-Bruhl, in these hunting and gathering societies there is no distinction between the representatives of things and the names of things. There is no distinction between sign and signifier. There is a direct equivalence between the names of fish, bears, plants and the actual fish, bears, plants. Here we find the source of magic power in language. In this participatory mind the ethnocentrism of the sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, lakes and forests are not objective properties of nature but are mixed up with the worlds of the invisible – souls, the ancestors and those yet to be born. People, animals, stars, weather conditions, climate, soil, technical equipment, social establishments, the dead, the unborn, mythological figures and spirits all have an equal ontological status.

The living, the dead and the yet unborn
Dugin presents a compelling visual image of the relationship between an ethnic group and its past and future. At the center of the map of the world is a river. The midpoint of the river is a tribe. Still in the river but to the left of the ethnos tribe is the realm of unborn embryos. To the right of the tribe but also in the river is the realm of those who have died which become the ancestors. The river embodies everything. The other image he presents is of a world tree. At the roots are the world of the dead. The trunk is presented as the world of the living, the middle world and the branches are the world of the yet unborn. In the invisible world there are three types of souls:

• The soul shadow which can abandon the body for hunting and wandering in search of lost souls or objects. The soul-shadow appears in in sleep or trance.
• The soul body which abides within the body and leaves with it.
• The soul Fate which is collective and resides in the sources of the river.

These souls and the world are interacting and mutually interdependent.

The ethnos and time
Dugin informs us time in the ethnos of hunter gatherers has a secondary character, derivative,instrumental and subordinated to spatial simultaneity. Where the ethnos does have a sense of time, it is cyclical. This virtual absence of time is characteristic of a number of hunter-gatherers who live in latitudes where seasons barely change. Usually, these zones are located near the equator. These societies engage the surrounding world immediately with no significant temporal displacement. On the other hand, If there is significant variation in the season, time will more likely be cyclical as we shall see shortly.

Ethno structures
Like rivers, trees, hills, mountains, cliffs, certain animals, plants, stones and spirits can act as a model for ethnos. The traits and qualities of the non-human world are applied to humans like animal totems. That is why in the majority of archaic languages there is not a term even closely analogous to human and the more so for the individual. The ethnos identity is critical in these hunter-gatherers. Being deprived of ethnic status is rare and extraordinary. The execution or sacrifice of the offender was considered a much milder Fate than exile from the group.

Magical structures of the Shaman: the main figure of the ethnos
The shaman stands at the center of the ethnos and is its principal mask, the mask of masks. He is the expression of the ethnos as a static phenomenon. The activities of the shaman include healing, prophesy rites, driving out spirits and participation in marriage ceremonies. Shirokogoroff writes that the Turgis fear nothing more than the period when one shaman dies and another has not yet been initiated. The shaman is a leader of souls and protector of the ethnos of the group. If someone dies in the period when the tribe has no shaman, it is believed that the process of the circulation of souls stops. All souls would go to the world of the ancestors and there would be no new souls being born. The shaman ensures protection by an invisible fence throughout the land which passes along the rivers, knolls, meadows, and thickets preventing evil spirits from entering the ethnos territory. The shaman is helped by bird spirits, animal spirits, fish spirits and earth spirits in the search for a new shaman. The shaman runs into the forest, eats nothing and acts spastically. Some call his altered states epilepsy.

He begins his journey through the mountains of the ancestors encountering a great animal mother, most often depicted as a mother deer. He then falls ill with a disease. The ethnos hunter-gatherers contend there was a time when people, animals, spirits were all one species. As a result of a tragic event, they all lost their freedom to interpenetrate. In his initiation, the shaman returns to the state when this separation had not yet happened. He integrates himself in all world levels – animal, human and spiritual. The shaman internalizes danger, risk, then overcomes it.

The polarity of masks
These masks represent the two processes of the ethnos, one of fullness overflowing abundance but also of danger because dancers can provoke earthquakes, tempests and catastrophes if not stopped in time. This positive pole stands for vitality. Then there is the pole of insufficiency, damage and failures in the field of existence. Its dangers lie not from overabundance, but its oppressive weakness. In modern science this stands for entropy. Relations among people and relations between people and their surrounding environment are  experienced, according to Dugin, as a carousel of masks.

Homo exogamous
Dugin points out that the basis of ethnic anthropology is governed by the most important rule, exogamy, that is marrying outside the group, tribe clan or kinship network. All mythological beings and the elements – sky, and earth – are also divided into two groups which correspond to the halves of the tribe. The two exogamous groups operate through harmony and rivalry organize the social field into an ethnos. This division does not provoke schism or direct enmity or aggression. After all, the other half of the tribe are in-laws and have the same genetic interests.

Ethnodynamics
Ethnodynamics is inseparable from the concept of danger. Yet in ethnos there is no death and the constancy of eternal return is preserved. Ethnodynamics can be seen operating in initiation rituals such as: the socialization of the dead, the socialization of nature and reciprocity of the primitive economy.

Initiation
According to Dugin, initiation is the principal element of ethnosocialization.  A pre-teenage body is taken a certain distance from the settlement as family members bid him farewell and bewail him using the same rites as they use over the deceased. There is usually a monster to be confronted.  Sometimes initiates are buried, suspended from a tree or exposed to physical torments. They undergo physical trauma—they are cut, or their teeth are knocked out. In it the initiated encounter danger and fear of  an abyss. It is the realistic taste of experience of death. In the next phase of initiation birth or resurrection is imitated. The youth crawls out of a tomb and emerges alive from the dummy monster. This is why initiation is consistently referred to as a second birth. The initiate is instructed in the rule and tricks of the trade –  hunting, rearing cattle and also magical operations. He  is reborn in the most direct sense, not as an individual organism but as a social member. The ethnosocialization of women was gradual rather than sudden. It is continuous and extended over time. Upon reaching maturity, girls were exposed to temporary isolation. No discussion is permitted with anyone except an old woman who is selected for the purpose. It is often accompanied by dwelling in dark quarters symbolizing the grave and the stage proceeding a new birth.

The socialization of the dead
Including the dead in the ethnos is one of the important tasks of ethnosocialization. In many archaic languages, the words dead person or deceased often have the same meaning as ancestor. In dying, a man or woman becomes an ancestor. Customs, rites myths, legends and institutions are rooted in the world of the ancestors. In some ethnoses, among ancient Slavs in particular, ancestors were buried under the threshold of the house or the house itself. Members of ethnos society do not fear death especially when the deceased was guaranteed their proper status in existence beyond the grave.

The socialization of nature
Ethnocentrism does not distinguish between the social and the natural worlds. Through myths animals, stones, light, stars, mountains, forests plants and rivers are integrated. All these rites and social institutions necessarily have a gender. Space is organized accordingly. Further, animals, stars, plants, stones and natural phenomenon are integrated, through:

• work practices;
• religious cults;
• joint tribal holidays;
• participation in military excursions;
• medical rites in which the entire tribe participates;
• tribal councils and
• collective games.

The anticapitalist primitive economy: economy of the gift

In his book The Gift, Marcel Mauss came to an important conclusion about the dynamics of the archaic economy which he called the economy of the gift. Mauss points out in the primitive economy exchange is not just in goods but also  courtesies, entertainments, rituals, military assistance, women, children, dances, feasts and fairs. Both loss and gain were considered a negative result. What is new in any form, whether loss or  gain was considered evil, erroneous and in need of  correction. The etymology of the words surplus, superfluous and interest are all forms from the root “likho” which is an embodiment of evil fate and misfortune. The Potlatch was designed to undermine the accumulation of resources. Surplus was thought to bring misfortune. The destruction of surplus has a sacred character. Balanced reciprocity is the key.

Mauss asked the Māori tribe how they described the logic of exchange. “Hau” (described as the spirit of the gift) was told is a kind of force inherent in boats, individuals, tribespeople, rivers or the sun. The obligation attached to the gift is not inert. It has a hold on the recipient and a hold on anyone who stole it. It is connected to the forest, the soil and the homeland. If this balance is disrupted the destructive aspects of the hau force come into play. The hau force belongs to no one, not to people, spirits nor animals. To repay the spirits means to return the hau to the place from which it was taken. Instruments of labor and weapons are destroyed which show technological progress. Dugin points out that orgies periodically are undertaken to cancel the accumulation and surplus of sexual desires.

The groups outside of exogamy are perceived as a danger, risk, threat, the appearance of the new and the accumulation of excess. There are also various taboos about the use of mirrors and the demonization of reflection. Mirrors are dangerous for 2 reasons:

• they double the object, splitting the masks, and
• they removes wholeness.

Even as late as the Middle Ages the mirror was regarded as an instrument of witchcraft. Twins were considered dangerous because they doubled the mask and were often killed. The overcoming of the new plays out in: initiations; marriage ceremonies; the circulation of gifts; burial rites; mythologies of rebirth; economic activities; linguistic intercourse; myths and rituals. All these ceremonies were attempts to keep the ethnos dynamics from spiraling outside the cycle.

Ethnokinetics
Fissures in ethnos continuity
As much as pre-state societies defend and hold out for their society being changeless, like it or not their life does not remain the same although these changes only appear over generations. What is irreversible are quantitative changes in the behavior of animals, the appearance or disappearance of species, and slight climatic shifts. Qualitative changes include particularly nasty wars or floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, epidemics, droughts, bad harvests, famines or the death of a shaman. In the case of the shaman this is translated as the deceased who cannot find the land of their ancestors, nor can souls be born and evil spirits break through the habitual closed chains of behavior. The shaman is perceived to lose his power to heal and reestablish balance. One important result of these qualitative crisis is the creation of secret societies of warriors. In the face of this helplessness it becomes more and more problematic to maintain the belief in simple cyclic reproduction. You either go under or you accumulate extra goods for a rainy day that might come at any time.

From shaman to secret societies of warriors
In order to ensure security for the band of hunter-gathers in troubled times it is necessary to create danger for its opposition. The emergence of secret societies of a warrior type has its origins here. This is a male union where the initiated youth is taught not only hunting, myths, rites, production of implements but how to attack enemies. They must have contact with evil, interact directly so that they themselves became dangerous even to their tribe. The secret societies of warriors is based on relations that differ fundamentally from ordinary relations with ethnos. Now the basic unit is not a kin phratry or family but the individual warrior. He has an individual warrior name and his own individual mask. The secret society is the first kind of subculture that is in contrast to ethnos and is built on the basis of the individual. The association of warriors is an artificial association, built up along special rules, different from those of ethnos, not based on consensus of the group but a consensus of warriors.

Secret warriors seek plunder surplus and slavery
Russian-Soviet folklorist and scholar Vladimir Propp connected the development of warrior unions from the older integral initiatory male unions. Here there is an interesting change in the structure of monster-slaying. In early ethnos monster slaying bore an integrating character. During battles men and monster exchanged their symbolic demands. In the imitation of warrior secret societies however, this complementarity is lost. The monster becomes an absolute enemy. Whereas earlier war was  imagined to be like a game with an exchange ritual where nothing is lost and nothing is gained, in secret societies the tradition was to kill enemies without warning. As we have seen before in earlier ethnos, surplus is destroyed through potash or sacrifice. In warrior secret societies surplus is intentionally sought after through plundering. Whereas in earlier hunter-gatherer societies no captive was taken, in these warrior-dominated societies the spoils of war were enslaved. They are brought into the ethnos as a visible expression of the conquered opposition . Lastly, there is a change in how tools and weapons are understood. In earlier times tools and weapons were personified and enlivened with a force. For the warriors the process of making weapons is secularized, used instrumentally and loses its magical power. Slavery is the fundamental notion for describing the transition phase from ethnos to our next phase the Narod. Here is a table contrasting ethnos to secret societies.

Table 1 Ethnos Shaman vs Warrior Secret Societies

From Ethnos to Narod
Appearance of herding  societies
“Narod” is the name Dugin gives to the  sociological structure that logically completes ethnokinetics. The ethnos of hunter-gatherers goes through a complex transformation as social structures change qualitatively. The Narod has another social formation within social evolution that most closely corresponds to Morton Fried’s ranked societies rather than hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. In the transition from ethnos to Narod they are most often inhabited by martial,  patriarchal tribes.  Unlike hunter gatherers there involves a male breeding of cattle, horses, oxen, camels, llamas and deer. These men move far away from the settlement to come in touch with other ethnos with whom they  are likely to conflict. This moment coincides with the continuance and expansion of male warrior unions. Herding Narod societies have masculine features that are mobile, aggressive and belligerent conquerors. With nomadic herdsman male status is placed in a clear vertical position above female status, unlike the earlier the hunter ethnos.

Emergence of polyethnic states based on conquest

The most frequent case of the appearance of Narod in history is the ethnos conquest of another group. This group of professional warriors is able to organize interethnic relations between the victors and the vanquished. Just as when we were dealing with ethnos we needed a minimum of two families to make up an ethnos, so in dealing with Narod we need a minimum two ethnoses as a Narod becomes a complex polyethnic structure Another indicator of a Narod is the presence of slaves as a principal factor in the dissolution of the earlier ethnos form of attachment. In the nomadic pastoral society, their herd is an intermediary between society and nature. The cycles of nature remain cyclical but are more open ended. The cyclic model is time broken open and now there is a certain distance between the past, the present and the future.

Breaking the spell of ethnos oneness
The Narod is a traumatic phenomenon, a split in ethnocentrism. The group cannot reestablish the ethnos model of a closed spatial and temporal cycle. It no longer possesses an innocence or ignorance about what other societies are like. There is a lost unity in form of what is now imbalanced, asymmetrical, traumatic and dramatic. The Narod has an external enemy and in the absence of real one it will create one. Dugin contends that to defeat the enemy is a way to overcome inner pain. These Narod relationships stretch from ethnos but they are still far more embedded in ethnos than the nation-states and civil societies which later become  part of capitalist societies. For Louis Henry Morgan narod is equivalent to his category of “barbarism”. Narod is Dugan’s mediator between ethnos on the one hand and nation on the other. Dugin warns if we do not distinguish narod as a separate ethnosociological category we will mix up ethnos with nation as many Western theorists do of nationalism.

Spirituality of The Narod
The spirits of hunter-gatherers are immanent, close to the ground and an extension of the kin group. Ethnocentrism is the joyous, terrifying experience of the immanence of everything into everything: spirits, gods, animals, people, ancestors souls, shadows, stones—they are all sacred in practically the same measure. The spirits of the Narod is more distant and not related to the kin group. What is close at hand can now be seen in a negative light. These sky spirits are set apart in inaccessible heights, producing a second layer of spirits. Sacred authorities are now prophets with the shaman reduced in stature. The prophet does not heal the world like the shaman but points to a deep traumatic open wound in the world. Dugin claims that the spirituality of narod is more like religion than magic. But unlike most historians of religion, Dugin translates the word religion not just to “bind” but to “bind back” meaning something has been lost. This is opposed to ethnos magic which everything is already bound. The religion of the Narod the attempt at binding the split—the separation, trauma, needing restoration.

The prophet and the hero
The prophet attempts to interpret the more unpredictable behavior of the sky spirits. The prophet also draws and preserves borders which is an expression of a loss of the interpenetrating worlds of the shaman. The present is no longer all there is but it can be evil. The past is thought of as a kind of heaven, a golden age. The future is messianic time, the time of salvation, the Narod striving to realize it’s being in the heroic act of self-overcoming, the healing the traumatic and a temporary restoration of the golden age. The members of the Narod society no longer have this experience so the hero must withdraw and travel so it can be brought back home. This is the fate of the hero. In the process the hero transforms his identity from a personality into individuality. The hero is tragic because of as his contempt of death and his drive to test Fate. His victory is not guaranteed. The Narod constantly changes on the surface and at the heights and yet the ethnos remains invariable in the depths in the Narod population.

Nomadic states
The state necessarily has a strategic center which was originally a military headquarters. This is a place from which soldiers launch raids and was convenient for a defense or attack. Nomadic states were the foundation for all other historical forms of statehood. In the 5^th  century Attila the Hun almost conquered the Western Roman Empire. The Great Steppe was united under the Turkish Empire. The Turks became one of the most important ethnic elements in each subsequent phase of polyethnic Narods in a steppe formation that tried to integrate its subjugated groups into a political system. The  Mongols of Genghis Khan built a world empire comparable only to Rome but superseded it in its reach of integrated territories. These warrior secret societies conquered Mongolia, Manchuria, China, Central Asia, Iran, the Cuman steppe and the territories of the Old Russian principalities. If Rome represented the historical maximum of empire-building West of the Eurasian continent, Genghis Khan’s empire is the symmetrical formation in Eastern Russia.

 The Primitive State
According to Elman Service in his Origins of the State and Civilization, the origin of the first agricultural states of Egypt, Mesopotamia and later, China and India was the need for centralized irrigation systems. All four civilization were located in large river valleys which lacked adequate rainfall while being surrounded by mountains or desert. The problem for them was how to get the water from the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers on to the farmlands of the peasants. The ruling classes of priests with the Divine King as the figurehead acted as coordinators of the centralized irrigation system. The primitive state was composed of six castes; the divine kings, the priesthood, the military elite, the merchants, artisans and peasants. Slaves served the priesthood and the king and queen. Unlike nation states these theocratic states were supposed to have a sacred mission which was to hear the voices of the gods and goddesses. These primitive states continued as a hierarchy of ethnos cultures with only a small secular culture composed of merchants who traded with other societies (not within society). Unlike nation-states there were no hard borders beyond the farmland of the peasants and other societies. The economy inside the state consisted of local markets where artisans sold their wares. Legal systems were local and conflicted with no attempt to work out the contradictions. Many languages were spoken with no attempt at a national language. There was no political constitution.

Primitive individualism in India
Unlike other agricultural states the state in India was unstable. Yet Dugin points out something very interesting. Though we normally imagine that individualism begins in Europe, Dugin reminds us that Louis Dumont wrote that there was a kind of spiritual individualism among the upper class Brahmins.

Indian civilization takes as its norm a type of solitary person, a hermit, devoting his life to pure ascesis, self-overcoming, the heroic practice of working with an absolute will. Dumont showed that individualism in Indian culture is much more radical and extreme than the individualism of the Western liberal society. Duality is an illusion. The power of this illusion – maya – is tremendous. But the power of the soul, of the ascetic and the philosopher hermit can defeat this. Though still members of a caste their forms of attachment continued the individualism of the warriors and heroes of Narod society.

The primitive city
Like the state, the city was originally an expression of the sociology of war. The basis of the city began as  miliary headquarters of the Narod’s political elite. In these cities large sections of the population consisted of tax collectors, builders, artisans, cooks, stablemen and kennel workers, laundresses, and producers of everyday goods and luxuries. In addition, people migrated to the cities who had come there because of bad harvests or natural catastrophes.  Unlike industrial cities, the primitive city had mixed public space use. Many activities were going on at the same place at the same time. Gambling and prostitution were going on side by side with singing, dancing and selling wares and storytelling. There were lots of holidays.  The primitive cities were filthy places of disease with no sanitation systems in place. Public beatings, hanging were common occurrences as there were no prisons. Children ran wild in the streets with no systematic attempt to protect them. Cities were also places where animals, such as horses were a normal part of city life. There were no paved streets or public transportation. In these cities, strangers with no loyalty to the ruling Narod ethos began to compete with the native population.  The city created a new kind of human being, rootless individuals able to relate to others in new ways that made city living not only possible but necessary. This city inhabitant gained the capacity for knowing people in fleeting, surface relationships. If the domain of ethnokinetics is the transition phase from the ethnos to the Narod, the sociology of the city lies as the basis of the second transition from the Narod to the nation.

The Nation-State
Nation-states are relatively recent
Naïve historians blithely treat nations as if  the nation-states have always existed, citing for example, the case of Israel. But theorists of nations and nationalism admit that nation-states only began 500 years ago and some say not even before the French Revolution at the end of the 18^thcentury. Dugin reminds us that even at the start of the 20^thcentury, national states – France, Italy, Spain, Holland, England – existed in Europe and Eurasia alongside empires that is, primitive  states like Austro-Hungary, Russia and the Ottoman empires.

What’s new about the nation-state?
Dugin lays out many interesting ways that the nation-state contrasts with the primitive state as we discussed earlier. Perhaps most importantly the merchant class has captured the economic system for capitalism, which means private ownership of tools,  means of harnessing energy and goods. Whereas in primitive states wealth was based on land, under capitalism wealth was based on trade and the accumulation of capital. Secondly, this capitalist system opens up the stratification system, changing from castes to social classes that have both upward and downward mobility.

Politically, usually the nation-state separates secular functions from religious functions. Furthermore, nation-states have constitutions that the authorities are supposed to abide by. Kings or emperors in primitive states might listen to priests or the military for advice but the final decisions were theirs. All but a couple percent of the population had little say. Whereas in primitive states ethnos and Narod had some representation. In nation-states there is formal representation of all atomized individuals citizens who vote. In addition, in primitive states ethnicity was an important identity and many ethnics were present because of fleeing natural disasters, lack of work or political wars. Nation-states make a concerted effort to weaken ethnic loyalty and convince the population through state propaganda that individual citizenship is their key identity. The bourgeois state has been atomized into individual citizens who are now not united by anything other than being political citizens and consumers of capitalist products.

Nationalism
The nation-state is founded when an ethnic majority language and culture becomes the official national identity. Lastly, although capitalists themselves are not very loyal to their nation-states, it is very important that they convince their citizens they have to fight for their nation-state as if it were a political calling. While defending their own ethnos and Narod, the nation-state bureaucrats and the capitalists engage in hundreds of years of old propaganda wars on the population using religious strategies to win the population over to identifying more with the nation rather than with the ethnos and Narod forms of attachment. The transition from the Narod to the nation only happened in Europe, not in other parts of the world. Secondly, and only after around 1500 at the earliest. Other societies around the world become nation-states when empires and primitive states were destroyed in colonial wars.

Reactionary nationalism
The purpose of reactionary forms of nationalism is to intensify the integrating processes within nation-states to extirpate the remains of local ethnic cultures, languages and customs. It includes direct violence and terror, often taking the form of xenophobia. In its imperialist form reactionary nationalism occurs when one state has pretensions to control the territories of another state on the basis of supposed  ethnic homogeneity.  Examples of violent control over ethnos and Narod include Indian reservations, concentration camps and the genocide of the Jews—and recently Palestinians.

Table 2 Primitive vs Modern Nation-State

From Heroes to Traders
The meaning for the capitalist trader is not the heroes’ struggle with the Fate of his society but the rationalization and optimization of economic life. If the hero and the prophets are  the general social type of the Narod  than the tradesperson symbolizes the nation. The sacred powers are driven out of the world into a transcendental realm. The workers still retain their ethnos Narod roots but they are under attack. In addition, capitalism introduces class struggle which complexifies the forms of attachment of workers.

How to understand the relationship between nation, ethnos and Narod

Different theorists of nations disagree over the relationship between nations and nationalism. Most argue that nation-states came first and nationalism develops out of that later. Dugin sides with Ernst Gellner who insists that nationalism is not a consequence of the existence of a nation, but that a nation itself can emerge from the political propaganda of nationalism. For Gellner and Dugin, nationalism invents the nation but still smuggles in ethnos and Narod forms of attachment as a foundation while at the same time nationalists try to suppress ethnos and Narod forms of attachments. Nationalists theorists try to slur nationalism off as a direct continuation of ethnos and Narod at the same time they try to dissolve these former forms of attachment. Ethnos and Narod are deprived of their meaning and buried under into a compulsory individualist identity imposed with the full force of the state apparatus. Gellner fails to notice that there is a fundamental sociological and conceptual shift between the ethnos itself and the Narod when the nation-state appears.

The relation between the ethnos, Narod and the nation are as contradictory as those between the primitive and modern nation-state. Ethnosymbolism theory of Anthony Smith is much more realistic. For him ethnos and the Narod are not present in the nation itself but still lie at the historical bases of society, continuing to inhabit in the sphere of the social unconscious while  continually being utilized symbolically.

Beyond The Nation-State? Civil Society and Global Society
Transnational capitalist society and the state
For about 22 years after World War II, the United States had little economic competition from neither Europe nor Japan. This began to change in the early 1970s as Japan and Germany recovered from the war and became competitive again while union membership in the states kept the standard of living for the working class steady. The capitalist solution to the threat to its profits was to transport its labor production overseas where the land and labor were cheaper. This was the foundation for a globalized capitalist society. Meanwhile the policies of the capitalists to the nation state were conflicted. On one hand, it fought bitterly against any nation-state in the world who dared to control capital flows across these nation-states. It was not above overthrowing governments who stood up for its national economy. But on the other hand, it needed to be able to recruit working-class people to fight against other states that threatened its resource bases. Their appeal to nationalism was the propaganda which sold the working class.

The individual in global society
In the meantime for the individuals living between 1970 and today the loyalty to the nation-state became shakier. For one thing the monopoly capital of the late 1970s became more financial than industrial, making it more difficult for workers or middle-class people to depend on the state for pensions and unemployment. Secondly, capitalist economic policy shifted from Keynesian support of state intervention to control by capitalism to a neoliberal policy which wanted to support less and less the “matriarchal” side of the state. All these tendencies weakened individualism compared to the previous 200 years of the nation-state. Yet at the same time this individual became a kind of unconscious globalized citizen in that he or she was now buying products from all over the world. In addition, the connections between the individual and the entire globe were expanded through the electronic networks of the internet. The relationship between individuals and their internet friends on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter have sometimes become more important than their face-to-face friends. The relationship between the individual on the one hand, global society on the other does more to undermine the previous attachments to ethnos, Narod or nation-states. This Neoliberal society has the most detachment from ethnic, religious. state, estate or national identities.

Proto-civil society
Dugin calls the connection between the individual and global society “civil society.” Civil society is not just in the 21^stcentury but goes back to the Renaissance and Reformation. Dugin reminds us that there were projects for uniting all European states into a single confederation. They were the basis for mystical organization like Neoplatonists along with German and English Rosicrucians. Whereas citizens of a nation-state are protected by a civic code and a constitution, civil society does not have this.

The recalcitrant nature of ethnos, Narad and nations around the world
The structures of archaic ethnos and Nare much stronger and more stable in the East and Southern hemispheres of social life today. The populations of the North are steadily decreasing and aging while demographic processes in the periphery increase. Non-European Narods form a major part of the global proletariat. Even now there are enclaves on the Earth in Asia, Africa, Latin American, the Arctic and the and Pacific region where ethnos still live in a primeval condition. Ethnos and Narod survive in the rural, regional parts of states along the working classes in the capitalist West.

The following is a summary of the history of forms of attachment along with their forms of social organization, their means of subsistence, social identity, political forms, nature of social connections, the nature of stereotypes and means of communication.

Table 3 Social Evolution of Forms of Attachment

Conclusion

We have woven our way through five kinds of attachment in social evolution and each form of attachment possesses particular archetypal figures and a social formation:

• ethnos – shaman – hunter-gatherers;
• polyethnic – Narod – hero – complex horticulture – herding societies;
• polyethnic – prophet – agricultural – primitive states;
• nation-states-traders – industrial capitalist societies and
• civil society – global individualists – finance capitalist – neoliberal societies.

Dugin’s work as shown in this article defends both ancient forms of attachment and the place of steppe people in social evolution. The extent to which socialists wish abandon the sinking ship of Atlanticism and join Eurasian multipolarists, we owe it to the world and ourselves to understand their picture of how societies evolved.

In his book Ethnosociology: The Foundations Dugin contrasts his theory of ethnosociology to Western theories of social evolution. See the contrasts below.

Table 4 Ethnos Equivalence on Western Theories