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.
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.
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