The Twenty-First Century - the End of History?

This essay originated as the Chandrasekhar Memorial Lecture, delivered in Patna on September 20, 2000:

The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War are events of great magnitude. Because we are living through them, many of us do not appreciate fully the significance of what has happened - but as the new century unfolds it will become clearer. For certain liberal intellectuals these events signify the end of history itself - that is, history interpreted as the realisation of the idea of progress. Thus, Hegel’s celebration of the Prussian absolutist state is replicated in Fukuyama’s understanding of liberal capitalism as the final point of arrival of historical evolution. This ideologically coloured concept of history carries the implication that the future can unfold only as an endless vista of capitalist accumulation, and that there is a logical and natural connection between capitalism and democracy. Such theories are linked to classical political-economic notions of capital as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or an ahistoric “factor of production”. 

The same presumptions underlie the view that capitalism is an economic system which mysteriously combines greed and profiteering with the fulfilment of human interests through what Adam Smith named “the hidden hand” of the market. Contemporary history has also been witness to the ideological rise of monetarist triumphalism, and neo-liberalism, the politically inspired dismantlement of the gains of social-democracy, and an all-round crisis of vision that affects both left and right-wing political forces. It has heralded an era of identity politics and fragmentation, creating more and more barriers between ordinary people on the one hand, coupled with structural adjustments geared toward maximum freedom for MNC’s and speculative capital, on the other. After 9/11, it been engulfed in the first overt phase of an emergent world order, one of whose characteristics is a global assault on civil liberties and long-standing legal conventions on human rights in wartime. It is now a matter of intense debate whether this phase is the last gasp of American imperialism, or the first expression of a more global and esoteric empire, the Empire of Capital.

The idea that capitalism is a permanent arrangement is an assumption that we must challenge. But there is a problem here. Right-wing triumphalism may indeed be challenged when placed in historical perspective. However, radical theory cannot approach the gigantic historical events of the century gone by without performing a thoroughgoing critique of its own past. Is it capable of doing this? The traditions of the past weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, said Karl Marx - and the movement for social transformation is certainly living through a nightmare. To what extent is it of our own making? 
Read the full essay: http://www.sacw.net/article2368.html

See also:

A Finer Balance - An Essay on the Possibility of Reconciliation

Closing the Circle: Article on Revolution in Frontier, August 2012