Exaggerating capitalism's successes: The end of history?
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
The End of History and the Last Man
Written by Francis Fukuyama Chatto and Windus, £20
US STATE Department policy adviser Francis Fukuyama became an instant celebrity when he published his 1989 article The End of History? in 1989.
Although published in an obscure right-wing foreign policy magazine, The National Interest, Fukuyama's thesis, coinciding with the collapse of Stalinism, struck an immediate chord.
His new book elaborates the thesis in more detail. The collapse of Stalinism represents the final and definitive victory of capitalist democracy over all forms of totalitarianism. History, far from being indecipherable as weak-minded postmodernists say, has a direction and logic. The logic is towards economic growth, which represents the great Mechanism of history. But Marx was wrong to imagine that socialism provided the basis for sustained economic growth; actually free market capitalism is the answer.
But human beings do not live by economic advance alone. They demand 'recognition', a feeling of personal worth and esteem. Only liberal democracy can provide this. Democracy is the must functional system in providing the best framework for capitalist economic efficiency; and, fortunately, liberal democracy gives human worth and dignity as well.
Fukuyama openly adheres to the theoretical framework of Hegel rather than Marx. The end of history, or rather human pre-history, is not socialism but the liberal constitutional state. Thus the dawn of the end of history can be said to have been the battle of Jena in 1806, in which Napoleon's bourgeois republican army defeated the Prussian Junkers.
Fukuyama at least has the merit of trying to interpret history and discover its underlying logic and patterns. For this he has been roundly attacked by French right-wing 'new philosopher' Bernard Henri-Levi as 'the last Marxist'. But can his ideas be sustained against the evidence?
In fact the basic idea is old hat – that advanced capitalism more or less automatically gives rise to liberal democracy; Seymour Martin Lipset was making his intellectual reputation saying the same thing in the 1950s. Empirically, Fukayama can point to the fact that all the main advanced capitalist countries are liberal democracies.
But he makes several assumptions without which his propositions begin to collapse. First, that liberal democracy is based on a more-or-less stable capitalist economic system, and thus democracy is secure. Second, that democracy is an automatic product of advanced capitalism. And third, that all the countries of the 'third world' can become advanced countries provided they adopt a rigorous free market economy.
Wrong struggle
Democratic rights under capitalism are not simply the product of the bourgeoisie's struggle against pre-capitalist classes. On the contrary, there is a mass of historical evidence that the key class in securing the establishment of democratic freedoms is the working class and its struggle.
Constitutional democracy is far from having conquered the world after the collapse of Stalinism. There are about 25 states which can be reasonably said to be liberal democracies. There is no guarantee that, for example, the ex-Soviet Union and China are headed in that direction.
The era of liberal democracy after world war two coincides with the long post-war economic boom. Bourgeois democracy is much easier for the ruling class when there are big concessions to be made to the working class. But once economic crisis and massive class struggle set in, the bourgeoisie itself moves against democratic rights, and anti-democratic movements with big support among the bourgeoisie start to emerge.
Fascism emerged in Germany (ironically Hegel's own country) after constitutional democracy had been established in a revolution against the liberal democratic Weimar republic. There is no proof that capitalist democracy is absolutely secure; the rise of Le Pen's Front National in France shows that it could face short-term threats.
Fukuyama's assumption that the economic development of Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong shows that free-market capitalism is the answer for the whole third world is preposterous. Thatcherism in the Sudan or Bangladesh boggles the imagination!
Idealism
Equally, Fukuyama's picture of the advanced capitalist countries as being a big friendly 'Sweden' (or Sweden as it used to be) with bored consumers, massive health and social security provision, and general affluence is also highly idealised.
US voters abstain in huge numbers not because they are satisfied affluent zombies, but because there is no real choice on offer from the main parties. Crisis-free affluent capitalism is another Fukuyama myth.
There is a correction, or rather a deeper speculation, introduced in the book as opposed to the 1989 article. Fukuyama wonders whether the satisfied citizens of liberal democratic capitalism ('the Last Man') will be content with their lot. Will they be prepared to put up with a life, which involves no further challenge than choosing the next consumer goodies, with no challenges, no struggles? Might they not rebel against the 'end of history'?
He has a point here. Even assuming his idyll came true, the victory of the commodity spectacle would be a crushingly boring and stifling affair. But in any case it is highly unlikely ever to come about.
Francis Fukuyama has the great merit of posing the big questions. He is a coherent opponent of Marxism, who takes history seriously, unlike the nihilistic postmodernists. Much of the hostility to him in the British academic establishment is backward, a refusal to debate generalising and historical theories.
But to make his extravagant claims he is led to systematically exaggerate capitalism's successes, most obviously in the third world. Part of the reason he can get away with it is the relative weakness of the left and the labour movement, and the disorientation which the cold war victory of the US had caused.
Refuting Fukuyama is in the end a practical task. Swatting capitalist ideologues won't matter much if a serious socialist challenge is not built in the advanced capitalist countries.