Paean to Unoriginality: Seamus Milne "The end of the New World Order" (Guardian, Saturday 20th October 2012, pp42-3).

Milne takes up the neo-Fukuyaman and Badiou argument that there's a vacuum ready for the Left to fill - which is no mere fancy, but a political possibility of sorts. But his analysis of the demise of the New World Order is so fallacious, it does more to undermine than to undergird the rise of the Left.

The strategic defeat of neoliberal capitalism lies in the USA's failure to countenance the possibility that folk might fight back against the war on terror, and in Iraq and in Afghanistan; (as well as in the West's  stellar work in discrediting its own self-professed guardianship of human rights as a direct consequence of its leading role in killing, torturing and kidnapping during these wars).

Curious. In a preceding paragraph, Milne references the fall of Communism as presaging a new world order in which "political controversy would now be confined to culture wars". It's a rephrasing of Fukuyama's end of history thesis. The protest against the USA's wars are fully and precisely aligned with this thesis of twenty and more years ago, not merely because Fukuyama pointed it out to us but because the dominant discourse of post-colonialism and post-Communism is one of rivalling cultures and nationhoods. For the USA and its henchmen to fail to anticipate the fight-back against its wars - which were a war of Western culture against those of the Middle East specifically - suggests the White House was lacking the most basic analytical insights or it is a function of its utter arrogance that it should disbelieve the potential for articulated opposition against dominant Western culture and labour under the false impression that it is the irrefutable behemoth of a unipolar world.

The 2008 banking and economic crisis has unleashed a wider crisis of the Western-dominated capitalist order.

Yet, everywhere, the capitalist order is being saved again and again by the governments of Europe: aid goes directly to banks, while austerity measures disable the life of the average citizen. The people must live within their means, the capitalist elite ought definitely not.

Capitalism has been saved by the "greatest state intervention in history".

Yes. And no. Capitalism is  involved in the most grubby mutual back-rubbing relationship with political power - it is those ties that save the capitalist order. For the power that saves to be characterised in terms of state intervention implies an unlikely socialist knight in shining armour coming to the rescue of the bankers. For one thing, state intervention is not the sole purview of socialism, just as laissez-faire is a reduction ad absurdum of Adam Smith's economic thesis. For another, Milne has set out the fate of Communism in his opening gambit - so whence the sudden socialist resurgence? Must we believe that it has been lying low, a network of underground operatives and cadres hunched over, reciting their Das Kapital as religious liturgy, and rubbing their hands in glee at the great joke they've played on everyone since the fall of Communism? It's all too implausible, and all too embedded in lazy narratives that are too fond of false dichotomies: all hail capitalism until it hits a low, and well, then, here comes socialism to fill the vacuum that our lazy imaginations cannot be bothered to try and analyse with any degree of thoughtfulness.

The rise of China is an epoch-making change: a nail in the coffin of capitalism's new world order

Yes, agreed. But, shocking as it may be, Chinas has not risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of destroyed capitalism. Her growth is underscored by a long-term strategy of state-driven investment in Africa, the Pacific and elsewhere that has been operating since before we were treated to Fukuyama's treatise that history-making had come to an end. To validate China's growth into a position of world power solely in terms of its  juxtaposition to a declining West is so contemptibly Euro-centric: we refused to engage analytically or discursively with China's frankly unique application of Communism and its implications for world change and economics, instead weaving our narrative along folkloric lines of Communist oppression and terror, which is not for one moment to defend or mitigate the consorship, the mistreatment and false imprisonment of dissidents or the heartbreaking injustice and sadness of 1989's Tiananmen massacre.
 

Fukuyama and Badiou: the not-so-odd couple

Fukuyama famously recanted his End of History thesis some twenty years after publishing it to the kind of widespread applomb that I found fascinatingly depressing when it eventually pierced my twenty-something consciousness. 

The product recall went something like this: "Sorry guys, got it a tad wrong, capitalism is not in fact the zenith of human development." Thank goodness for Fukuyama. Without him, we might never have had the intelligence to struggle free from the concept of capitalism as nirvana.

In a reversal of the received wisdom that we all become more conservative as we age, Fukuyama appeared to have embraced anti-neocon sensibility; the saving grace is the February 2012 revelation that he isn't an ideological turncoat, merely a pragmatic observer of the need to run and save himself from the falling rubble of the Bush empire.

Here's the scenario: Capitalism is the boffin who strutted through his wood-pannelled school corridors with his nose raised to the ceiling, knowing that he was ordained to reach the pinnacle of life. Until, one day, looking out of his penthouse, he wonders what it's all been for: no friends to sit and put the world to rights with over a relaxing three-course meal, nobody to put him bang to rights when even he knows it's overdue, nobody with whom to flex his intellectual juices. As Jeeves to capitalism's hapless but flourishing Wooster, Fukuyama set out to make his master's life less lonely.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history.

His tactic? To exhume history and give it a future. Fundamental to which is baiting capitalism's interlocutors and critics. To cite them as empty and defunct, and accusing them for failing to rally around and keep capitalism's spirits up through simple good-natured opposition and dialogue.

For capitalism requires stimulation. And the Left should be present to provide it. The sole proviso being that it mustn't do so through socialist argument. Fukuyama pulls off a neat little trick here: the Left is colonised by socialism; socialism is ideologically non-viable; ergo, the Left is dead and has nothing to offer.

The Left must redeem itself through construction of a non-socialist identity and ideology, otherwise we run the risk of capitalism resuming its throne as nirvana of the world, and the concept of the future of history going the way of the dodo.

You cannot fault Fukuyama's conceit. It's breathtaking.

And yet....

What Fukuyama is saying, if you subvert his baiting of the Left, is that the Left is being gifted a set of circumstances to emerge as the leading political light. His assertion is that it cannot do so without a Big Idea; and here again you either have to ignore his baiting that the idea can't actually be socialist... or raise your eyebrows in a visual approximation of "what?!".

But baitings aside, Fukuyama is fundamentally corrrect: "we have to be bold enough to have an idea". The interesting thing is that the quote is from Alain Badiou, committed communist and author of The Communist Hypothesis.

Of course, there is tension. The (not quite so) reconstructed neocon Fukuyama reckons the Left lacks a viable Idea with which to displace capitalism, while Badiou exposes the "get rich now" phenomenon as itself a non-idea. What they seem to agree on, however, is that real politics begins with the conviction that we must live with an idea.

So, what idea will do? Badiou makes a convincing argument in favour of returning to the Big Idea of "an egalitarian society which, acting under its own impetus, brings down walls and barriers; a ployvalent society with variable trajectories". And he convinces too in refuting Fukuyama's logic that a failed past makes socialism a failed and defunct idea : for it is from the lessons of failure, such as those of socialist states, that we can begin to reformulate an emancipation hypothesis in contemporary terms.

What is decisive is that the Left clings to its old hypothesis of a world freed from capitalism, even while it feels like slumping forward with rounded shoulders and shrugging: that's just the way the world is. It must assert the world at present as non-necessary and refuse the inevitability of present configurations, in order to be able to see what is possible.
 

Democracy and Freedom: concepts of rights or methods for articulation

Liberal democracy – incorporating human rights, democracy and capitalism – is a Eurocentric concept and practice that has achieved a false universalism. It emerged at the interstices of the collapse of colonialism on one hand and of communism on the other: liberal democracy thus derived its neo-colonial aspect from the former and its parochial universalistic tone in response to the latter.

Given, as is often claimed, that the trident forms of liberal democracy are part of everyday discourse in the non-western world, is liberal democracy’s ubiquity a sufficient enough basis on which to justify the perpetuation of these western folk concepts and grant them normative status, against which other modes of governance and rights are assessed (and found to be wanting)?

Should liberal democracy not more accurately be perceived as a product of post-colonial blues among former rulers, aimed at enlivening Western modes of ‘ethnic’ dominance vis-a-vis non-western ethnic peoples; a crucible for precepts and practices tied to the vanity project of re-establishing a culture of west European domination?

If non-western states and peoples discourse on liberal democracy, that is evidence not of the term’s apparent universalism but of the non-western world’s maturity in embracing cultural relativism within which rubric liberal democracy most comfortably sits.

The knee-jerk reaction to such commonsense thinking may well be to cite the protests of the Arab Spring of 2011: a series of events apparently undergirded by the twin idealisation of democracy and freedom. In truth, though, as academics and history itself have demonstrably shown, the Arab Spring was forged through mass mobilisation in pursuit of the common denominator that was the removal of the ruling ethnic classes.

That is: it was a protest against the rulers of the Arab world and the linkages between ethnicity and differential access to power, status, resources that their rule epitomized. Yes, support for democracy and freedom was extremely vocal among the protestors, but these tenets are not in themselves meaningful in the context of the Arab Spring once disengaged from the basic aim of protesting against ethnic ruling elites that disempowered ethnic outsiders.

As the Western world has found to its sincere chagrin, the Arab Spring was not motivated by Western prescriptions of “democracy” and “freedom”, entailing as these do the corollary prescription of secular statehood among other things.
It was based on a wider, more inclusive, universalist, and non-culturally specific reading.

It understood that democracy and freedom are not concepts or ideals to be attained in themselves; rather, that they are methodologies for articulating polyvalent voices and realities, and establishing them as part of meaningful interaction and discourse with the powerful elite.

Whether that interactive and discursive space frames protest and revolutionary activity, or comprises electoral voting-off of one party for another, is irrelevant. The important matter is that this space is available, that the methodologies are available: the use to which they are put, the impulse in which they are harkened, are not the crucial elements.

It is time for the West to release its stranglehold over democracy and freedom, to accept itself and its colonising past as one culture among many, to overcome its satiated sense of entitlement as the bearer of civilisation and as representing the zenith – the end – of history.