Being late to the End of History

This weekend I've been re-reading Stuart Sim's outstanding little book Derrida and the End of History. Not only does its 80 pages effectively summarise Francis Fukuyama's original hypothesis and Jacques Derrida's reposte, it sets the whole question of 'the end of history' in the context of the trend of endism which gained particular currency at the end of the 20th century, and the second millenium.

Though Fukuyama's book The End of History and the Last Man was published in 1992, he first proposed the thesis that the fall of the Soviet system represented the end of ideological struggle in an essay for The National Interest three years earlier. The National Interest is an American international Affairs quarterly founded by Irving Kristol, a member of the American Enterprise Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations and attributed by some as the creator of American neo-conservatism, although he has been involved in some way with almost every ideology out there, and was a Trostkyist for some time in 1940s. Indeed, he once told the New York Times:

"Ever since I can remember, I've been a neo-something. I'm going to end up a neo, that's all: neo dash nothing." - NY Times

So we have the theory that the failure of Soviet Communism represents the end of ideology and the triumph of liberal capitalist democracy appearing in the publication of someone who is always moving on to new ideologies. The relevance of this is that in Derrida's critique of Fukuyama's book, Spectres of Marx his mission is to:

"prove that Fukuyama's claims amount to little more than an ideological confidence trick. For 'end of history' read, in effect, suppression of political opposition by the new powers that be." - Derrida and the End of History, p8

So, what is the nature of this ideological confidence trick? Broadly speaking, it is twofold, in that it differs in domestic and foreign policy. Domestically, in the West, the land of liberal capitalist democracy, we are meant to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, in terms of political-economic systems. However, it is only if we believe this that it becomes true, and only if we all believe it. The triumph of a single ideology is precisely that - when no-one believes anything different. In terms of foreign policy, it is the justification (to both the foreign and domestic publics) for invading whoever is on the list. Indeed, Tony Blair gave a speech in August 2006 in Los Angeles speaking at length about 'global values', and admitted:

"The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world.

The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually "regime change", it was "values change"." - Blair speech in full, BBC

In both domestic and foreign policy, people are deceived. We believe we live in the best world, so we don't demand any better and we don't object to the slaughter of whichever poor bunch of bastards are being subjected to cluster bombs and white phosphorous this week.

One might notice that this is a bit hypocritical - forcing other countries to accept our values at the barrel of a gun might call into question the validity of those values and whether it is self-evident that they represent the best basis for a society. After all, if it was so obvious then why are people so resistant to accepting these new values, to the extent they're willing to blow themselves up in a crowded marketplace?

Economically the case is even clearer. For all the failures of the political ideology that is liberal democracy, particularly when that 'democracy' is instigated by force, that failure is a spectacular second to the horrors of modern capitalism. The IMF and the World Bank are supposedly there to help countries develop and advance, and to prove that capitalism enhances the well-being of a society better and faster than any other economic system. Yet as John Perkins notes, since their instigation an already untenable wealth gap has expanded dramatically:

"Today we see the result of this system run amok. Executives at our most respected companies hire people at near-slave wages to toil under inhuman conditions in Asian sweatshops. Oil companies wantonly pump toxins into rain forest river, consciously killing people, animals and plants, and committing genocide among ancient cultures. The pharmaceutical industry denies lifesaving medicines to million of HIV-infected Africans. Twelve million families in our own United States worry about their next meal. The energy industry creates an Enron. The accounting industry creates an Andersen. The income ratio of the one-fifth of the worlds population in the wealthiest countries to the one-fifth of the world's population in the wealthiest countries went from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in 1995. The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services and basic education to every person on the planet." - Confessions of an Economic Hit Man p xii

Derrida pursued these arguments against Fukuyama's (and others') proclamations of the triumph of our way of life, summarising the case as follows:

For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth. - Spectres of Marx, p85

Since the publication of Derrida's book and the statistics Perkins refers to more recently, nothing has changed. The International Labour Organisation published a report a couple of months back that stated:

Between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s, in about two thirds of the countries for which data exist, the total income of high-income households expanded faster than was the case for their low-income counterparts (Chapter 1). Similar trends have occurred when looking at other dimensions of income inequality such as labour income vis-à-vis profits, or top wages vis-à-vis wages of low-paid workers. In 51 out of the 73 countries for which data are available, the share of wages in total income declined over the past two decades.

Likewise, during the same period, the income gap between the top and bottom 10 per cent of wage earners increased in 70 per cent of the countries for which data are available. - ILO World of Work Report 2008

And the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre within the British Ministry of Defence said in their 2006 Strategic Trends report that this was very likely to continue over the next three decades. So not only has the era of global capitalism proven a poor economic choice for the citizens of the world, even our own governments, the tools of global capital, are telling us this will carry on being the case.

It's probably fair to say at this juncture that Fukuyama's ideological confidence trick has failed, and failed in the way only such huge and ridiculous lies can fail. A few days after Blair's 'values change' speech in Los Angeles, Fukuyama published an article in the Washington Post trying to defend the criticisms thrown at his theory. The article takes the form of a hit piece against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and the arguments echo the ones found in his book of almost 15 years earlier:

Early on in Hugo Chávez's political career, the Venezuelan president attacked my notion that liberal democracy together with a market economy represents the ultimate evolutionary direction for modern societies -- the "end of history." When asked what lay beyond the end of history, he offered a one-word reply: "Chavismo."

The idea that contemporary Venezuela represents a social model superior to liberal democracy is absurd. In his eight years as president, Chávez has capitalized on his country's oil wealth to take control of congress, the courts, trade unions, electoral commissions and the state oil company. Proposed legislation that would limit foreign funding could soon constrain nongovernmental organizations as well. And people who signed a recall petition against Chávez in the run-up to a 2004 referendum on his rule later found their names posted on the Web site of a pro-Chávez legislator; if they worked for the government or wanted to do business with it, they were out of a job and out of luck.

Chávez's success in attracting attention -- cozying up to Fidel Castro's Cuba, signing an arms deal with Russia, visiting Iran and incessantly criticizing the United States -- has popularized the notion that Chavismo embodies a new future for Latin America. By preserving some freedoms, including a relatively free press and pseudo-democratic elections, Chávez has developed what some observers call a postmodern dictatorship, neither fully democratic nor fully totalitarian, a left-wing hybrid that enjoys a legitimacy never reached in Castro's Cuba or in the Soviet Union. - Washington Post

While some of Fukuyama's criticisms of the Chavez government are accurate, most are not, and regardless of them he's once again missing the point, perhaps deliberately. Whether Chavez's Venezuela represents a superior model for other societies than the US represents is irrelevant - the fact that it is a popular alternative, with some degree of legitimacy (an American criticising the elections in another country is always good for a laugh) shows that there is still an ideological struggle, there is still dissent. As Perkins points out:

"Beginning in 1998, seven countries in South America, over 300 million of the continent's 370 million population, had voted for presidents who campaigned against foreign exploitation." - The Secret History of the American Empire p 92

Indeed, Chavez provided his own reposte to Fukuyama's rather insulting attempt at an argument a month after the Washington Post article, in an address to the UN:

"As Silvio Rodriguez says, the era is giving birth to a heart. There are alternative ways of thinking. There are young people who think differently. And this has already been seen within the space of a mere decade. It was shown that the end of history was a totally false assumption, and the same was shown about Pax Americana and the establishment of the capitalist neo-liberal world. It has been shown, this system, to generate mere poverty. Who believes in it now?

What we now have to do is define the future of the world. Dawn is breaking out all over. You can see it in Africa and Europe and Latin America and Oceanea. I want to emphasize that optimistic vision.

We have to strengthen ourselves, our will to do battle, our awareness. We have to build a new and better world.

Venezuela joins that struggle, and that's why we are threatened. The U.S. has already planned, financed and set in motion a coup in Venezuela, and it continues to support coup attempts in Venezuela and elsewhere." - Hugo Chavez speech in full

The coups and coup attempts are possibly the most significant refutation of all. Fukuyama does accept that there are countries out there who don't embrace his vision of the perfect world. But he always puts this down to interruptions in these countries' progress due to war or economic problems or ethnic conflict or whatever.

While some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on. - The End of History

This is where Fukuyama's sleight of hand becomes most obvious, because he's not supposed to be defending the ideal of liberal democracy, but showing that it has triumphed. That he feels the need, in the introduction to his book no less, to try to defend the ideal shows that he realises it is still a contested and contestable issue. To me, this makes his duplicity in continuing with his end of history charade all the more contemptuous and pathetic.

The coups are important because all too often they involved the CIA, or some other covert institution of the Western empire, overthrowing a democratically elected leader and replacing them with a corporate or military leader of their own choosing. Mossadegh in Iran in '53 was democratically elected, as was Arbenz in Guatemala the following year. Sukarno a few years later while not elected as such, was the president of an independent nation. Then just after that, Nkrumah in Ghana and then Allende in Chile, also elected leaders, also ousted in CIA-sponsored coups. More recently Hugo Chavez, who is one of the most democratically supported leaders in the world, was briefly ousted and kidnapped in an overthrow sponsored by the US via the misleadingly named National Endowment for Democracy. Two locals headed the coup - Pedro Carmona, who assumed the presidency for less than 48 hours before the people of Venezuela turned out on the streets to demand the return of Chavez, and who now lives in the US - and Gustavo Cisneros, a billionaire friend of George Bush snr, media mogul and soft drink merchant and associate of David Rockefeller.

If liberal capitalist democracy as it exists in the West were such an axiomatically wonderful thing then it wouldn't feel the need to disrupt the sovereignty and democracy of other places and establish so many dictatorial regimes. Mossadegh was replaced by a theocrat, Arbenz by a military autocrat, Sukarno by a genocidal maniac, Nkrumah by a corrupt banker, Allende by a torturing fascist, and this isn't anything like a complete list.

Indeed, as Fukuyama was publishing his original End of History article, the US were engaged in a bloody invasion of Panama due to a long running dispute over control of the Panama Canal and surrounding Canal Zone, the latest in a long line of bloody plots and betrayals in that part of the world. A convenient thing to completely and utterly ignore? You bet. Particularly since the 'narcoterrorist' they were ousting was Manuel Noriega, a longtime CIA asset and himself the man who replaced Omar Torrijos after an assassination which bears all the hallmarks of a CIA hit. Torrijos was the man who somehow convinced President Carter to let the Panamanians own their own canal.





As a somewhat sad footnote to this debate, Fukuyama is now claiming that he never intended his argument to be the 'manifest destiny' excuse for Bush's foreign policy. This is not only naive and stupid, it's also patently not true. Excuse me, Francis, for pointing this out, but you did sign up to the Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, the thinktank which published the notorious 'new pearl harbour' document a year before 9/11. Furthermore, the guy who published your original End of History article is the father of the chairman of PNAC.