[Campaignforrealdemocracy] Fwd: [oh15] The year 2011 marks the end of the End of History

[Mark Barrett]

From:
http://roarmag.org/2011/10/the-year-2011-marks-the-end-of-the-end-of-history/
The year 2011 marks the end of the End of History
by Jérôme E. Roos on October 23, 2011

*When the system forces ordinary people to become revolutionaries, you know
you’re no longer at the End of History. You’re at the very edge of it.*
*
*
The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. The Arab Spring. The looming Greek
default. The increasingly likely breakup of the eurozone. The second coming
of the global financial crisis. The return with a vengeance of the systemic
critique of capitalism. The resounding worldwide call for *real* democracy.
The dramatic rallies against austerity, inequality and neoliberalism in
Spain, Greece, Chile and Israel. The riots in Athens, London and Rome. The
occupation of Wall Street and the spreading of the movement throughout the
US. The mass protests<http://roarmag.org/2011/10/global-revolution-mass-protests-in-1000-cities-in-videos/>by
millions of people in 1,000 cities and 80 countries on October 15.
Even
the death of Muammar Gaddafi.
All of it points in the direction of a simple but unmistakable truth: 2011
marks the End of the End of
History<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history>. Beyond
the flat horizon of liberal democracy and global capitalism, the events of
this year have not only opened up a whole new chapter in the unfolding saga
of mankind, but they have laid the very foundation for an endless procession
of chapters beyond that. What is being shattered is not so much the
democratic capitalist system as such, but rather the Utopian belief that
this system is the only way to organize social life in the eternal pursuit
of freedom, equality and happiness.
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Egyptian-Revolution-Tahrir-aerial.jpg>
Almost twenty years ago, following the total collapse of the Soviet Union
and the final discrediting of state communism, the American political
scientist Francis Fukuyama conjectured that “we may be witnessing … 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.” Two decades after the publication
of *The End of History and the Last
Man<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man>
*, Fukuyama’s thesis seems more shaky than ever before.
This is not to repeat the endless Leftist cliché that neoliberalism is dead
— as Slavoj Žižek pointed
out<http://books.google.com/books/about/First_as_tragedy_then_as_farce.html?id=HRX4DSJuGtUC>,
the ideology already died two deaths, first as tragedy following the 9/11
terror attacks, and then as farce following the global financial collapse of
2008 — but rather to point out that neoliberalism as such has finally been
revealed for what it always already was: a zombie ideology wrapped around
the face of humanity, just like Matt Taibbi’s famous vampire
squid<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405>,
“relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like
money.”

*The Neoliberal Emperor Has No Clothes*
While 2001 and 2008 marked, respectively, the political and economic deaths
of neoliberalism, 2011 marks the End of the End of History. For it is only
now becoming clear to the people of the world that, for the past twenty
years, we have simply been living a
lie<http://roarmag.org/2011/09/eurozone-endgame-all-that-is-solid-melts-into-air/>.
Indeed,
the implicit popular consent that once legitimized democratic capitalism now
appears to be coming unraveled faster than the financial Ponzi scheme that
sustained the illusion of its moral superiority. After twenty years of
stagnant wages, rapidly growing inequality, rampant youth unemployment and
widespread social alienation, the bursting of the global credit bubble has
finally laid bare the naked essence of the system.

Democratic free-market capitalism is not what we were told it was: as recent
years have amply demonstrated, it is neither free nor democratic. Wars have
been waged in the name of Big Oil despite overwhelming popular opposition.
Tax cuts have been made in the name of Big Money despite an overwhelming
budget deficit. And now, failing banks are being
rescued<http://roarmag.org/2011/10/more-bank-bailouts-coming-what-are-we-fucking-stupid/>and
draconian budget cuts pushed through in the name of Big Finance,
despite
both overwhelming popular opposition *and* incontrovertible evidence that it
is only making the deficit worse. The system has ceased to make sense. Its
internal contradictions are eating it up from within. And humanity is
finally waking up to this reality.
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Wall-Street-bailout.jpg>
So today, an entire generation of young people, deprived of hope and
opportunity, is rising up to contest the absurd notion that this disastrous
state of affairs<http://roarmag.org/2011/08/could-this-be-the-terminal-crisis-of-western-capitalism/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+roarmag+%28Reflections+on+a+Revolution%29&utm_content=Twitter>somehow
constitutes the culmination of “mankind’s ideological evolution.” Is
this really the best we can do? Is this the Utopian world order that
Fukuyama envisioned when he decried the eternal victory of liberal democracy
and global capitalism over its invisible enemies? With failing banks,
bankrupt states and runaway private debt, Fukuyama’s ideal world has
certainly started to look a lot more bland now that the credit-fueled
consumption spree that underpinned it has crashed headlong into its own
inevitable finality.

The magic is gone. The spell is broken. And what the people of the world are
trying to make clear to those in power is that we
know<http://roarmag.org/2011/09/why-we-are-marching-in-paris-on-september-17/>.
We *know* that the system is rotten at the core. We *know* that its alleged
successes do not hold up to scrutiny. We *know* that most of its grand
achievements — from global capital markets to the European single currency —
were built on financial and institutional quicksand. And we *know *the whole
damn thing is about to collapse like a house of cards. From Tahrir to Times
Square, from Madrid to Madison, from Santiago to Syntagma, we *know *that
the neoliberal emperor has no clothes.
*
*
*Gaddafi and Fukuyama: On the Wrong Side of History*
One of the most graphic portrayals of the end of the End of History is the
bloody demise of Muammar Gaddafi. While skeptics are entirely right to be
disgusted by NATO’s imperial
campaign<http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/03/201132472924305721.html>in
Libya, many on the Left still fail to see the enormous symbolism
behind
the fall of the Brother Leader. Gaddafi, in a way, was the ultimate
embodiment of the End of History. Having come to power as a pan-Arab
socialist revolutionary in the late 1960s, he ended up as one of the world’s
most successful capitalists. While he continued to rhetorically lament the
evils of Western imperialism, he appeared more than willing to offer his
country’s spoils to the same neo-colonial powers he so avidly derided.

According to a 2008
report<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ba59235a-7849-11dd-acc3-0000779fd18c.html#axzz1bMgn89du>in
the
*Financial Times*, Gaddafi “extolled the virtues of capitalist reforms”.
Treating Libya like his family business, he cozied up to Big Oil, doling out
lucrative contracts to Western corporations like Eni and Shell. He then let
the profits accumulate into his privately-owned “sovereign” wealth fund
while enlisting Wall Street to recycle this capital surplus for additional
profit. In the process, while the Libyan people remained crippled by chronic
underdevelopment, Gaddafi siphoned $168 billion of the nation’s riches
abroad. No wonder the West was suddenly so happy to be his friend.
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Gaddafi-Blair.jpg>
Yet what is most revealing about Gaddafi is not his sudden conversion from
socialist liberator to capitalist oppressor, nor his close ties with the
neoliberal establishment of the West. What is most telling is his *personal
*connection with Francis Fukuyama. Back in 2006-’08, Fukuyama was part of a
select group of world-leading intellectuals who were enlisted — and
generously paid — by the Monitor Group, a US-based PR firm advised by former
MI6 and CIA<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/04/mark-allen-mi6-libya-profile>directors,
to help polish Gaddafi’s image in the West as part of a massive
charm offensive designed to help legitimize Libya’s foray into the End of
History. According to secret
documents<http://libya-nclo.com/Portals/0/pdf%20files/Monitor%203.pdf>leaked
by former Libyan officials, “Fukuyama made two visits to Libya (14-17
August 2006 and 12-14 January 2007).”

He delivered a lecture at the Greek Book Centre in Tripoli and taught a
class on Libya at Johns Hopkins University. He also offered a lecture,
entitled “My Conversations with the Leader”, which marked “the first time
that The Green Book has been required reading for students at one of the
leading public policy schools in the world.” Apparently, not just us, but
Fukuyama *himself *believed Gaddafi to be the embodiment of the End of
History. His overthrow<http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111022132758300219.html>,
therefore, even if it would never have succeeded without the military might
of the imperial West, completely undermines Fukuyama’s thesis. After all, if
we had truly arrived at the End of History, how could the author of this
thesis so blatantly end up on the wrong side of History himself?

*The Collapse of the Eurozone as the End of the End*
But Gaddafi was not Fukuyama’s only historical “mistake”. In response to
allegations that the End of History was a purely Americentric argument,
Fukuyama in 2007 wrote an
article<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/apr/03/thehistoryattheendofhist>for
the
*Guardian* retroactively claiming that “The End of History was never linked
to a specifically American model of social or political organisation … I
believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will
look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States.”
Judging from the fate of the European Union, it turns out that Fukuyama,
ironically, ended up being right in the wrong way.
As the *New York Times*
wrote<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/world/europe/euro-meant-to-unite-europe-seems-to-be-dividing-it.html?_r=1&ref=global-home>the
other day, “the euro was a political project meant to unite Europe
after
the Soviet collapse in a sphere of collective prosperity that would lead to
greater federalism. Instead, the euro seems to be pulling Europe apart …
[t]here is a tension in the political system and doubt about democratic
institutions that we have not experienced since the fall of the Soviet
Union.” Europe’s deep economic integration, fully in line with the End of
History philosophy, produced a situation so crisis-ridden that the future of
the world economy now hinges on the fate of a single EU member state — one
that only makes up 2 percent of the Union’s total GDP: Greece.
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/48-hour-strike-Greece-crop-09.png>
But Greece is only the canary in the coalmine. It is a symptom, not the
cause, of Europe’s crisis. When Greece defaults, it will only be a matter of
time before investors lose faith in Italy and Spain. Both are considered too
big to fail — but also too big to bail. The European rescue fund is not big
enough to save them, and Germany and France are stuck in a deadlock over how
to enlarge it. At the same time, Europe’s insolvent banking
system<http://seekingalpha.com/article/293882-insolvent-banks-the-real-threat-facing-the-eurozone>is
on the verge of collapse. A Greek default will tip countless banks
into
bankruptcy, forcing the governments of the core to dole out massive bailouts
once again. This, in turn, will further aggravate their sovereign debt
levels and hence their credit ratings, bringing the “Greek” debt crisis
right into the very heartland of European capitalism.

The bottomline, in other words, is that there is no easy way out of this
crisis – not even the oft-lauded eurobonds, as Martin Wolf recently pointed
out<http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d09c8910-f972-11e0-bf8f-00144feab49a.html#axzz1bG2FUZjL>for
the
*Financial Times*. The euro, that grand elite project that was meant to be
the very pinnacle of European integration, is faltering. In the process, the
EU’s post-ideological technocratic institutions have lost the last shreds of
legitimacy they had left. The edifice is falling apart, and frankly
speaking, our leaders do not even have a clue what to do about it. Europe’s
crisis, at the end of the day, is the world’s crisis. And it is far from a
merely economic one: at rock bottom, we are facing what Joseph Stiglitz has
called the ideological crisis of
capitalism<http://roarmag.org/2011/07/stiglitz-on-the-ideological-crisis-of-western-capitalism/>.
This is obviously a far cry from the “end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution”.

*The Crisis of Capitalism and the Return of the Repressed*
It is no surprise, therefore, that 2011 has seen the comeback — with a
vengeance — of the systemic critique of capitalism. In recent weeks, leading
free-market publications like the *Wall Street
Journal<http://online.wsj.com/video/nouriel-roubini-karl-marx-was-right/68EE8F89-EC24-42F8-9B9D-47B510E473B0.html>
*, the *Financial
Times<http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2011/08/22/659001/finance-more-progressive-than-policy/>
*, *Business Insider<http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-19/news/30020289_1_political-economy-karl-marx-eurozone>
*and *Fortune<http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2011/08/15/u-k-riots-global-class-war/>
* have all admitted that Karl Marx might actually have been right about
capitalism’s tendency to self-destruct. The reason for this sudden revival
of the Marxian critique of political economy is twofold: first, the dawning
realization among elites that we are about to spiral into another Great
Depression. And second, the systematic repression of the radical imagination
that Fukuyama’s post-ideological world brought about.

In this respect, a direct line can be drawn from Margaret Thatcher’s
conversation-killing slogan, “there is no
alternative<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative>“,
to the neoliberal policy response to the financial crisis. While the bankers
have been doling out record bonuses, the rest of the population is being
told that there simply is no alternative to draconian austerity
measures<http://www.nasdaq.com/aspx/stock-market-news-story.aspx?storyid=201106290827dowjonesdjonline000311&title=greek-finance-minister-no-alternative-to-austerity-plan>.
The
ideological narrative is the same everywhere: “we’re all in this together;
we all need to tighten our belts,” but the implicit message is really: “do
not dare to imagine an alternative.” Yet as Matt Taibbi recently
pointed out<http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/my-advice-to-the-occupy-wall-street-protesters-20111012>,
a tiny 0.1 percent tax on all trades in stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent
tax on all trades of derivatives could pay for the entire US bailouts,
rendering much the “necessary” belt-tightening unnecessary. That is a
credible alternative right there. Why is it not being discussed?
<http://robinhoodtax.org/>
Back in 2009, Fukuyama published an article in *Newsweek* with the
triumphant title “History is still
over<http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/12/06/history-is-still-over.html>“,
in which he asserted that, despite the fact that “the crisis began on Wall
Street – the heart of global capitalism — … the legitimacy of the global
system may have been bruised, [but] it did not break.” Fast-forward two
years and witness the burning streets of London, Rome and Athens; the
peaceful occupation of Wall Street, Puerta del Sol, Syntagma, and hundreds
of other squares around the world; the unprecedented global day of action on
October 15, with protests in almost 1,000 cities in over 80 countries.
Witness the anger. The frustration. The indignation. It is here. The
legitimacy is breaking. Fukuyama, it appears, was cheering just a wee bit
too soon.

In a Freudian sense, we are witnessing the return of the
repressed<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_repression>.
If you tell people for two decades that there is no alternative to the world
in which they live, and if in the meantime you take away their income, their
rights, their public services, and their last-remaining shreds of dignity,
you can expect that psychological repression of revolutionary potential to
come out in some other form sooner or later. If you repress the coherent
emancipatory ideology of the masses, as the End of History was meant to do,
you literally end up with the incoherent and a-political London
riots<http://roarmag.org/2011/08/london-calling-a-haunting-glimpse-into-our-future/>.
In this respect, the most important thing the Tunisian and Egyptian
revolutions could have done was to help remind humanity that there actually
*is* an alternative to the status quo — that there does exist some
“outside” to unfettered global capitalism.

*The Rise of the Indignant and the Crisis of Democracy*
The Arab revolutions emboldened the alienated youth of Europe and America to
start dreaming again, to reclaim their radical imagination in the face of
one of the greatest legitimation crises in the history of liberal
democracy. As a critical consciousness makes its way back into the
mainstream discourse, the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism finds itself
under threat anew. The first signs of this emergent critical consciousness
began to appear in Madrid on May 15. A few days later, the BBC reported that
an Egypt-style rally<http://roarmag.org/2011/05/egypt-spain-tahrir-madrid-m-15/>was
growing in Spain. Over the next couple of weeks, hundreds of thousands
of people from all walks of life rallied on a nightly basis around the
country as the *indignados *movement spread throughout
Europe<http://roarmag.org/2011/08/london-calling-a-haunting-glimpse-into-our-future/>
.

On September 17, the Spanish 15-M movement culminated into a global day of
action against the banks and the occupation of Wall Street, called for by
the Canadian anti-consumerist magazine
*Adbusters<http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/occupywallstreet>.
*The Wall Street protest subsequently helped catalyze the next global day of
action, called for by the Spanish protesters on October 15. Under the common
banner “united for global change”, the worldwide resistance grew to truly
unprecedented proportions, with simultaneous protests taking place in 1,000
cities in over 80 countries. With his naive declaration that “the legitimacy
of the global system did not break,” Fukuyama once again finds himself on
the wrong side of history.
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Puerta-del-Sol-indignados.jpg>
After all, if liberal democracy is really the culmination of human
ideological evolution, how come millions of people are taking to the streets
all over the world demanding something different? If representative
democracy is the very pinnacle, why are these young people chanting “they do
not represent us!”, and why do they cry out for a real
democracy<http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/05/20115267575844603.html>instead?
As the massive movements in Israel and Chile demonstrate, the
phenomenon cannot be reduced to the crisis alone, for even their booming
economies could not stop the tide of indignation from flooding into its
streets. In truth, the problem runs much deeper. As the *indignados* like to
chant, “it’s not the crisis, it’s the system.”

Zygmunt Bauman put his
finger<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2011/sep/01/zygmunt-bauman-terrorism-video>on
the crux of the problem: while politics has remained national, power
has
all but evaporated into global flows. Technological change and neoliberal
reforms have conspired to create a situation where democratically elected
governments no longer have the power to transform their promises into
policies. We end up with a situation where voting is no longer about what
policies our governments should put into practice, but rather about who
should put into practice the policies demanded by the financial sector. To
call that democracy seems preposterous. The rise of the indignant is nothing
but the collective realization that liberal representative democracy, under
the conditions of deep economic integration, is not really liberal or
representative at all. The End of History, rather than solidifying democracy
as the final form of human government, has completely undermined it.

*The Edge of History and the Return of Contentious Politics*
The End of the End of History is not the same as the end of neoliberalism.
As we saw before, zombie ideologies have their way of roaming about beyond
their expiry date. As long as there are capitalists (or wanna-be
capitalists), there will always be one form or another of capitalist
philosophy. The End of the End of History is not so much about eradicating
capitalism’s individualist worldview, which is impossible without resorting
to the type of repressive state tactics we are trying to overcome, as it is
about the *return of contentious
politics<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contentious_politics>
*as the defining feature of social life. In other words, the End of the End
of History is not so much about overcoming political struggle as about the
realization that we can, by definition, *never* overcome political struggle.
As long as there is injustice, there will be struggle — and since there will
always be injustice, there will always be struggle.

The End of History, therefore, is neither possible nor desirable. The
longing for a final stage of institutional and ideological development, in
which disagreement and conflict have been banished from the realm of social
reality, is either purely totalitarian or purely Utopian. While certain
Utopian longings may inspire us to soar to ever greater heights as a
species, we always have to remember that no social order is given forever.
Our Utopia must forever remain the spiritual desire that propels us to
action, but we have to embrace the fact that it can never become a reality.
History simply never ends. As the neo-Gramscian scholar Stephen Gill
put it<http://www3.sympatico.ca/marcus.pistor/MPistorAgencyStructureandEuropeanIntegration.pdf>,
“history is always in the making, in a complex and dialectical interplay
between agency, structure, consciousness and action.” Or, as Subcomandante
Marcos worded <http://es.wikiquote.org/wiki/Subcomandante_Marcos> it
slightly more poetically, “the struggle is like a circle: you can start
anywhere, but it never stops.”
<http://roarmag.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Wall-Street-End-of-History.jpg>
In an excellent op-ed in the *Guardian *the other day, Jonathan Jones looked
at a picture of Occupy Wall Street and makes a striking
observation<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/18/occupy-times-square-global-consensus#>
:

This is a photograph of a turning point in history, not because the Occupy
movement will necessarily succeed (whatever success might be) but because it
has revealed the profoundly new possibilities of debate in a world that so
recently seemed to agree about economic fundamentals. Occupy Wall Street and
the global movement it is inspiring may yet prove to be an effective call
for change, or a flash in the pan. That is not the point. Nor does it even
matter if the protest is right or wrong. What matters is that unfettered
capitalism, a force for economic dynamism that seemed unassailable, beyond
reproach or reform, a monster we learned to be grateful for, suddenly finds
its ugliness widely commented on, exposed among the lights of Times Square.
The emperor of economics has no clothes.

“This is an unbelievable moment,” he continues. “Pinch yourself.” For 2011,
with all its crises and revolutions, marks what Slavoj Žižek, in his
speech<http://roarmag.org/2011/10/zizek-at-wall-street-protest-dont-fall-in-love-with-yourself/>in
Zuccotti Park, called “the awakening from a dream that is turning into
a
nightmare.” It marks the return of contentious politics. And, as such, it
marks the End of the End of History. Not that History ever stopped — we just
got confused for a while by the collapse of capitalism’s arch-nemesis, and
thought it did. But the fact that History is still in-the-making is being
captured in newspapers headlines, in powerful photographs, and in the
words<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/europe/protesters-gather-in-athens-on-second-day-of-strike.html?ref=global-home>of
a simple middle-class lady in Greece during the 48-hour strike of
October: “I have never been a leftist,” she said, “but they’ve pushed us to
become extremists.” When the system forces ordinary people to become
revolutionaries, you know you’re no longer at the End of History. You’re at
the very edge of it.
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