“The End of History” is a rhetorical expression attributed to Francis Fukuyama, one-time civil servant in the US government, now a celebrity academic feted by the media. It was Fukuyama who, in 1989, announced “the end of history?“; the definitive “triumph of capitalism” over any known or unknown competitor.
Fukuyama’s essay, “The End of History?” was first published in the conservative magazine “The National Interest,” and later in 1992 as a book to become a standard text in course material for students studying the so-called “collapse of communism”, which in reality was the rapid collapse of the USSR and its Empire during the last two decades of the 20th century. Fukuyama argued that the victory of “Western liberal capitalism” closed any political debate about the merits or otherwise of different social systems, particularly between capitalism and Socialism. Western Capitalism and its economic and political institutions, he believed, was a portent to how the rest of the world would develop and evolve. Such was the optimism at the end of the “Cold War”.
Fukuyama wrote:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Although the “universalization of Western liberal democracy” as he called it, was not taken by Fukuyama to mean the United States, his end of history doctrine was seized upon by a policy group known as The Project for the New American Century (PNAV), of which Fukuyama was a member. Victory in the Cold War against the USSR meant the triumph of the US –“God’s own country” and “the land of the free” – and the imposition of its economic and political will onto the rest of the world. The conservative historian, Niall Ferguson, a true believer in the politics of the PNAV, believed that the torch of Empire has now been passed from Britain to the US as a force for good. At the recent 2011 Hay Festival in which he gave the Barclay Wealth Lecture, “The West and the Rest”, he said that “the rise of Western domination of the world” was the “big story” of the past 500 years. A “big story” for whom, we might ask? Not for “the rest”; the millions of men and women enslaved, pauperised and killed since the early seventeenth century as a consequence of “Western domination”.
However, the optimism about US capitalism stamping its image on the rest of the world was, of course, all before 9/11 and the rise of global radical Islamism, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq by US and British forces with its subsequent plunder, torture, death and destruction, the collapse of market fundamentalism after the economic crisis of 2008, and the rise of China as a dominant economic and political force in its own right, forcing the US military to turn its attention to potential future conflict in the Pacific Ocean area.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since 1989, and Professor Fukuyama also appears to have lost some of his earlier optimism that history has ended with the “universalization of Western liberal democracy”. In a recent Guardian interview, he was not so sure Western Capitalism would be the final political site for his original “End of History” pronouncement. In a new twist on history, he believed “liberal democracies” could in fact decay and he viewed with dismay the growing forces of nationalism and fascism in Europe.
As he told the Guardian journalist who interviewed him:
I don’t think there’s any particular reason why, if you are a liberal democracy, you can’t decay. Your institutions can get too rigid; your ideas can get too rigid. I think right now a lot of developed democracies are going to have to renegotiate their basic social contract, because a lot of the welfare state arrangements are just not sustainable, and that’s something democracies are really not good at. They aren’t good at persuading people to pay higher taxes and accept cuts in benefit for the sake of something that’s going to happen a generation from now (Guardian 23rd May 2011).
What of Fukuyama’s own understanding of Marx’s conception of Socialism and a classless society? Of Marx’s political concept of class.
Fukuyama made the following observation in “The End of History and the Last Man”
‘But surely the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojeve, (among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisaged by Marx.’
The Russian philosopher, Alexandre Kojeve, (whom Fukuyama mentioned in the above quotation), when writing in the 1950’s at the height of the Cold War, argued that history had ended with the French Revolution and the coming to power of Napoleon, a view he mistakenly attributed to the philosopher W. G. Hegel. Kojeve believed that since the late 18th century there had been no political or economic reason to establish any new social system because the universal application of the ideas of the French Revolution expressed in the phrase “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” had rendered any further revolutionary politics unnecessary. Kojeve even claimed, without an ounce of irony, that the United States of the 1950’s with its racial segregation, poverty and class exploitation, had reached the end of history by realizing Marx’s conception of communism.
However, Both Kojeve and Fukuyama misread Hegel’s philosophy of history and misrepresented Marx’s Communism; a case of the blind leading the blind. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man)
In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel never actually mentioned the “end” of history attributed to him by both Kojeve and Fukuyama. Writing within an, albeit, idealistic conception of history, he wrote: “… the length of time is something entirely relative, and the element of spirit is eternity. Duration […] cannot be said to belong to it“. (http://www.hegel.net/en/faq.htm#2.1).
Hegel’s “spirit of consciousness” – moving and unfolding (entfaltung) through history had no termination point, neither in the Prussia of his own day, nor in the US of today. In his lectures, Hegel often considered the possibility of a further evolution of the “spirit of consciousness” within human history.
What of Marx? Marx dealt with the shortcomings of Hegel’s philosophy of history; a shortcoming completely overlooked by Fukuyama. In the Postface to the Second Edition of Capital, while acknowledging his debt to Hegel, Marx stated that Hegel had erroneously begun with thought and ideas and then proceeded to the material world, while Marx had started with the material world and then with its interrelationship with human thought. In short, Marx turned Hegel on his head.
Yet, Marx’s critical engagement with Hegel was passed over in silence by Fukuyama. What of class and the class struggle? Has “the class issue” been successfully resolved in the West? And what is the reality of Fukuyama’s claim for “the egalitarianism of modern America”.
The facts of life in the US do not accord with Fukuyama’s poliical spin from the privileged position of his university professorship. In fact a recent study of inequality in the US undertaken by academics at the Faculty of Education at Stanford University where Fukuyama currently teaches showed the movement of inequality increasing during the period Fukuyama was celebrating “the end of history”. We learn, that: …the ownership of wealth among households in the U.S. became somewhat more concentrated since the 1980s. The top 10% of households controlled 68.2 percent of the total wealth in 1983 and 73.1% of the total wealth in 2007 (http://www.stanford.edu/group/scspi/cgi-bin/facts.php).
In 1989, the US was becoming even less equal and this trend has continued ever since; for by 2011: The combined wealth of American billionaires grew from $1.91trillion to $2.06 trillion. The median wealth of American households is about $77,000. This means the nation’s 480 billionaires control as much wealth as 26.6million average American families (Daily Mail 18th September 2011).
Of course Fukuyama was not alone in trying to trivialise and distort Marx’s Socialist ideas. The end of the Soviet Union saw a concentrated effort by opponents of Marx to uproot his Socialist ideas altogether from working class politics.
Tony Blair’s New Labour went for “partnerships” between capital, labour and the State while keeping on the statute book all the previous Tory government’s anti-trade union legislation. Capitalist Class, Working Class and class struggle were to be obliterated from the political lexicon.
‘Hard working people’, yes; ‘working class’ no!
In this context the “End of History” doctrine was seen as a chance by a group of conservatives in the US to end the political nightmare which had haunted the capitalist class since 1848. For over two centuries a Marxian critique of commodity production and exchange for profit had unsettled the conviction of politicians and economists alike that capitalism was “the best of all possible worlds”. Marx demonstrated that capitalism was and is not the last social system in human history by focussing attention on a revolutionary subject; the working class. He contrasted the working class as it exists now, tied to capital, and how it could become as a conscious and revolutionary historical force; “storming heaven”, as he once remarked to his friend, Ludwig Kugelmann.
Never has any one critic of capitalism put so much fear into the capitalists and their supporters. Engels remarked on this fear at Marx’s funeral: “Marx was the best-hated and most calumniated man of his time”. The political hatred towards Marx has continued unabated with the words “Marxism” or “Marxist” used by politicians to vilify their opponents. What of Fukuyama’s own critique of Marx? If someone sets out to attack Marx’s theory of history then surely that person should read what Marx wrote and not what he thought Marx wrote. The first requirement of anyone engaging in an intellectual debate is that he or she should be able to give a proper account of the opposing position but in the case of Fukuyama and his engagement with and critique of Marx and his theory of history such a proper account is not forthcoming.
Fukuyama is in a long line of intellectuals (Berlin and Popper are two others who spring to mind) who produce useful intellectual sound bites for the ruling class; “Individual Liberty from the State” in the case of Berlin and capitalism as an “Open Society” in the case of Popper. Political rhetoric, misrepresenting your opponent’s ideas and Ad hominen attacks are always useful political tools for shallow politicians or academics that have no sound and valid case to offer against Marx’s Socialist critique of capitalism. Fukuyama’s starting point is not a critique of Marx’s theory of history at all but instead the Leninist doctrine which he had encountered during the Cold War which justified the policies of the ruling class dictatorship in the USSR. However, what took place in the USSR from 1917 to 1991 and what Marx wrote on capitalism during his own life-time are two different things altogether. They have no connection; Marx no more led to Lenin than Darwin led to Hitler.
State capitalism or nationalisation was not the same as the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. A totalitarian one Party State was not an association of free men and women. And the buying and selling of labour power, which predominated economic relations in the Soviet Union, was not “the absence of buying and selling” (The Communist Manifesto) or “The abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit). Marx was well aware in his own day that defenders of capitalism wanted to portray capitalism as a natural and final social system in human history. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx compared defenders of capitalism with theologians. Theologians claimed all other religions were historical and social constructions except their own religion which was natural and emanated from God.
Defenders of capitalism see all other social systems as transitory except their own which they hold as natural, omnipotent and everlasting. In many respects, “The End of History” was more theology than politics. Marx said that for defenders of capitalism to suppose it was the final social system in human history was a comforting fiction by which apologists of the capitalist class could flatter their employers:
“They all want the impossible, namely, the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions. None of them understands that the bourgeois form of production is historical and transitory, just as the feudal form was. This mistake arises from the fact that the bourgeois man is to them the only possible basis of every society; they cannot imagine a society in which men have ceased to be bourgeois”.
(Letter to P. V Annenkov, December 28th, 1846 in Marx: Engels Selected Correspondence Moscow 1975 p, 37).
The working class, for Marx, was and still remains the revolutionary political force in society necessary to replace capitalism with Socialism not a group of professional revolutionaries imposing what they believed to be “Socialism” on the rest of society. The working class has not gone away; it still exists and the social problems it faces cannot be resolved by “political democracy”. Democracy, to have any real meaning has to be extended into production and distribution; not as co-operatives, nor as wider share ownership, nor as private pension funds, nor as “worker’s shares” nor as workers on boards of directors but as a pre-condition to enable production and distribution under common ownership to be organised to directly meet human need.
The “The End of History” and “The Triumph of Capitalism” are just empty rhetorical slogans. How can capitalism’s politicians permanently silence any dissent, questioning and political struggle for an alternative social system? To believe capitalism would last forever shows no understanding of capitalism; the problems it creates and the underlying contradictions which force these problems to the surface in the form of periodic economic crises and the class struggle.
(photo: Francis Fukuyama. ICP, Colombia. 2012)
