Monday, June 20, 2005

Nobility of the Image 6

V.
At any rate, things have changed since the Cold War in two ways that have been little analyzed.
The first change has been Hegelian. Actually, it has been analyzed, first by Francis Fukuyama in 1989. Fukuyama wrote an article, and then a book, entitled The End of History, in which he argued that, with the end of the Cold War, history, in the Hegelian dialectical sense had come to an end. Naturally, he was ridiculed. Leftists refused to take him seriously, probably because he is a conservative. Many people, including many of us in the historical profession, sneered, “But that’s ridiculous! History hasn’t come to an end! Why we just elected a new President!” This was all quite embarrassing for the simple fact that, if anybody, historians should know that the Hegelian dialectic has little to do with actual events and so, if we have reached the end of history, it would not presuppose the end of events. Anyway, Fukuyama addressed this in his essay, writing:

This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.

What he was suggesting was quite simple really. Namely that Communism is no longer a viable alternative to capitalism and so there is no dialectical other to capitalism at all. Hakim Bey phrased it perhaps more crudely as “Communism has shot its load”, and suggested that anarchism could be a second way to capitalism. But, anarchism has a long way to go to constitute a way of thinking that can dialectically oppose capitalism. As it is now, there is not the same theoretical core to anarchism that there was to communism, which is part of the charm of anarchism, but also why it cannot really oppose capitalism.

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