Robin Elfsberg, U6R.
Both Karl Marx and Francis Fukuyama are guilty of one of the highest sins in historiography, (the study of how history is chronicled): historicism. Historicism is the practice within the study of history that believes that social and cultural phenomena are determined by prior historical events, to the point that it can be regarded as the most basic facet of human existence. By studying phenomena as a collective and deducing the process of a phenomenon's existence, one can use history to characterise a narrative for a purpose, by providing a clear starting point and thus a possible ‘end’ might then be created to the chronology. This is exactly what Marx and Fukuyama have done in both of their books, reappropriating historical developments as a means to describe the triumph of socialism and liberalism respectively (although the former is eventual for Marx). However, the actual approaches that Marx uses are comparatively simpler and with less evidence behind them as opposed to Fukuyama.
Marx phrases his ‘process of history’ as progressing from a form of ‘primitive socialism’ (referencing the common ownership within Stone Age tribal societies) onto slavery-based societies, feudalistic societies, bourgeois societies and finally the current industrial societies. From these, Marx predicted the proletariat would rise and drive history into a socialist period (where the seized means of production are used to redistribute wealth) and finally into communism, where each would be able to work as he wished in a stateless world. However, Marx’s view of history is woefully Eurocentric, almost more so than Fukuyama with his Western bias. For example, the idea that the Classical period was dominated by societies that had slavery as their primary means of production focuses entirely on the civilisations of Greece and Rome and negates other comparable societies with more ‘socialist’ economic practices, which Marx was unlikely to know of. For example, the theocracies of Ancient Egypt, due to their extensive temple system, controlled the granaries so that relief could be provided in times of famine. The Inca empire was able to successfully control labour and regulate the resources from their regional tributaries enough that it was able to construct wonders like Machu Picchu and give free food and healthcare to all citizens in return for service. The Mauryan Empire under its founder Chandragupta in the 3rd century can be regarded as the very first welfare state too, as all land was held in common ownership by the king who supplied the labouring class of Shudras with public infrastructure and the products necessary for work. The existence of such societies at the time of the supposed ‘slaver stage’ of socioeconomic development undermines the credibility of the Marxist historical narrative and reveals the flaws of a less holistic view of human history for supporting a point. Even the linear progression of Marx’s stages in the West can come into question, as whilst he asserts in the Manifesto that events like ‘the discovery of America … opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie’, there is the issue of the slave trade as fuelling the economic growth of empires like Britain and Portugal on the world stage. If such a return to a previous stage of history is what caused the economy to ‘leap’ into the bourgeoisie and industrial stages, then Marx’s historicism sounds less concrete and more like very loose categorisation.
Naturally, the obvious Marxist criticism of the ideas of prior socialistic governments would be that these weren’t ‘real socialism’ as the ancient states’ ideologies described might all be described as ‘theocratic socialism’, all relying on a relationship between state and king that has divine licence to it. These criticisms do reflect the ideological purism which Marxist socialism has had since the beginning in spite of adaptations, as in the Manifesto, Marx proclaims ‘Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.’ Ironically, much of Marxism itself can be compared to a religion such as Christianity, with its focus on overcoming the antagonised bourgeoisie to create a classless society without alienation from labour or wealth disparity being comparable to the eschatology of the Book of Revelation promising a ‘world yet to come’. Friedrich Engels in helping to write the Manifesto even included a section called ‘Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith’ that confidently boasts that ‘communism is that stage of historical development which makes all existing religions superfluous and supersedes them’. Obviously, this is because the Manifesto was intended as a literary rallying cry that would overcome societal means of control like religion and unite the proletariat, although later 20th century scholars like Manfried Spieker felt that Marx’s criticisms came from his dislike of the state-supporting Protestantism of Prussia. For this purpose (and so to avoid the ideological infighting like in the French Revolution) it would need to be kept ideologically pure and as a set of internalised values that a revolutionary could remember and carry out. Still, this has not stopped new thinkers and in the present day more than a thousand permutations of Marxist thought exist, from the social democracy employed by Tony Blair’s New Labour, the weird ufological Posadism (which believes that nuclear war will attract aliens to uplift us to communism) and even Christian socialism of a sort. It perhaps does speak to the balance between abstraction and analysis in the Communist Manifesto that has kept it so timely and intriguing to many a reforming mind.
On Fukuyama, we find historical analysis that, whilst still tinged with the lens of ideology, is sounder because of its wide-ranging and greater scope of history. Fukuyama does not proclaim that ‘history’- the occurrence of events which shape and are shaped by humankind- will actually end, rather that the ‘purpose’ of history in deciding the superior political system, which is liberal capitalist democracy, has been achieved. He does this by the beginning with the claim that ‘strong’ states, like the Soviet Union or the ever-popular Nazi Germany, fail because of their unsuccessful reconstitution of society, as ‘totalitarianism sought to destroy civil society in its entirety, in its search for ‘total’ control over the lives of its citizens.’ In this, Fukuyama concludes that the premier fault of the then-current collapsed Soviet Union was, aside from the obvious economic factor, ‘Soviet citizens, as it turned out, had all along retained an ability to think for themselves’ and the glasnost reforms introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev allowed them to express anti-Soviet nationalist grievances that could no longer be stemmed without burning up in the hypocrisy, as they did when attempting to cover up Chernobyl. While Fukuyama tries to take a more personalist narrative in explaining why people rebelled against the Soviet order, one would argue that the economic factors behind it were what combined and catalysed this revolt. Brezhnev’s reign heavily subsidised food, electricity and water for the average inhabitant of the SSRs and when this eventually resulted in financial stagnation along with a gerontocratic leadership, the complaints of the non-Russian SSRs (particularly Ukraine, whose culture and people had been repressed brutally since the Holodomor of 1932) were let loose by a newer leadership that hoped that liberalisation would not crack Lenin’s foundations. They were wrong, but Fukuyama’s analysis of the situation is not particularly bad; merely myopic for honing too far onto the abstract rather than the pragmatic in a recent shake-up in the world order.
Another of Fukuyama’s key examples of the successes of liberal democracies is how many dictatorships have, to various degrees, peacefully transitioned into liberal democracy, attempting to show the inevitability of such a system. Along with the obvious examples of the Warsaw Pact countries and their revolutions in 1991, one can also cite the twin Iberian dictatorships of Antonio Salazar and Francisco Franco, which transitioned Portugal and Spain respectively from outright fascism to democracy with relative peace (barring the attempted counter-revolutions). There are numerous examples from South America to draw from (from the Peronist government holding democratic election in 1983 to the constitutional referendum of 1989 which brought down General Pinochet) and Fukuyama triumphantly waxes on at length about how in 1990, only one semi-important nation in the all the world did not hold elections: namely Lebanon. To him, it seemed like all political development was all coming to a democratic head, but there is careful neglect of two countries where democracy have barely touched the countries and perhaps might be said to be better off for it. Singapore and Bahrain are two nations that are both massively rich, the former managing to have the highest GDP per capita in the world with record-breaking statistics like lowest level of corruptions and high quality of life and the latter achieving the first post-oil economy of the Arab states by attracting foreign investors in ventures like Formula 1. Yet both, despite being outsized on the global market for their size, consistently violate human rights to a large degree. Singapore is ranked 129th of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index and its dominant People's Action Party has a hegemony more unchecked than any other place in the world, able to limit individual rights by its choice. Bahrain, meanwhile, continues to persecute its Shi'ite Muslim majority under the helm of a Sunni monarch, to the point that the Arab Spring in Bahrain in 2011 ended in the deaths of 80 civilians and thousands of the arrested systematically tortured.
And simultaneously too, these two repudiations of Fukuyama still uphold some of his liberal ideas- Singapore has within its constitution racial and religious integration as ideas to be preserved, while Bahrain after the 2011 crackdown did open up to three parliamentary elections and did sign the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights. Whilst it might be very easy to point and say that these are exceptional cases, born out of the two's isolated geography and quirky political systems, the success of these island-nations is a clear repudiation of the idea that economic freedom and success goes hand in hand with political freedom. But this is not just a trend confined to small states, as will be discussed in more depth later.
After discussing the historical analyses of both Marx and Fukuyama, we shall then go on to examine how either of their ideas about developments in the world have been fulfilled. To certain degrees, both have been correct about how the world has changed in its geopolitical makeup. The Communist Manifesto shattered the stagnant class system and through its guidance and re-interpretation, brought about two of the most economically successful states of the modern age, at least for a while. While Fukuyama’s book itself was nowhere near, as he astutely notes in ‘The Weaknesses of Strong States II’ in Part II, the late 80s and early 90s were seeing an unprecedented level of liberalisation from the ‘Second World’, from the Chinese leadership allowing capitalism back into to South Korea being forced into holding elections for the first time since 1948 by the UN. The subsequent strength of such new countries, like the 'Asian Tiger' nations, led many liberals like Fukuyama to show that political freedom caused greater economic success and thus the ideas of Marxism, particularly the Marxist-Leninist dictatorships, However, the Communist Manifesto has had its predictions nowhere near fulfilled. Not only have the most successful ‘socialist’ regimes nowadays had to adapt their economic systems to include capitalism (even Cuba ‘passed’ a resolution in 2020 which included small free enterprise, although this is yet to be fulfilled), but one would argue that via its very publishing the Communist Manifesto’s aims became harder to achieve. What would be viewed as a piece of sedition in a time of class divisions would naturally produce a counter-reaction, and whilst some might double-down and control the working class more harshly (as occurred in Tsarist Russia to the conclusion of the Bolshevik Revolution), other more liberal states put measures in place to allay these fears and keep them near the status quo simply with more state funding. We can look to the slow improvement in British workers’ conditions entering the early 20th century as done by Liberal Prime Ministers such as William Gladstone and H.H Asquith- the Workmen's Compensation Act in 1906 allowed for all employees to receive compensation for injuries sustained at work from their employers, while the 1911 National Insurance Act gave compulsory health insurance for workers earning under £160 per year, all of which can be said to have gone some way to keep the dominant two-party structure between Conservative and Liberal until 1929 began to turn it towards Labour and democratic socialism with the election of Ramsay MacDonald. Even Bismarck’s Germany put in place prototypical welfare as a means of control, turning the labourer-run pensions fund into a state-controlled body which forced continued loyalty away from the ever-present spectre of communism, which Marx said would come in either Germany or Britain and to this day has not credibly materialised in either.
Again, the paradox of the revolution is solved by making the people less demanding of mass change through violent revolution and this idea has been noticed by socialists in the modern day- Anthony Giddens, a sociologist closely linked with Tony Blair's New Labour, argued that 'Fordist' capitalism (which was heavily industrial and labour-intensive) had allowed for the growth of communities united by a shared profession, supporting Marx's idea of communal human nature, only actualised through capitalism. It was only with post-Fordist capitalism and globalisation that this community was lost and neoliberal individualism put an end to this community, making it the state's job to follow a 'Third Way' that corrected inequalities within society, marrying capitalist deregulation and privatisation with social democracy's intervention and egalitarianism. The success of the Third Way in the 1990s across Europe and to some degree North America (in the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien) can be said to support the continued presence of socialism within formal political discourse, but one which Marxists everywhere might shake their heads at, for in the achieval of aims like universal healthcare and social security nets like the minimum wage, it still requires collaboration and collusion from the selfsame bourgeoise whose systems are designed to exploit the proletariat. To Marxist, social democracy and those who combine socialism with capitalism merely apply red paint to institutions that will always be black with corruption and the bourgeois elite's manipulation.
And yet, one would argue that Fukuyama’s failings as a predictor of things to come are so much more fallacious because his predictions would be proven wrong so immediately. In the same way that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘unforeseen’ by the Western world, 9/11 was a black swan that might have been seen to be coming, if American intelligence were more focused on the ramifications of their Middle Eastern activities. Nevertheless, the deadliest attack on American soil struck and the resultant military intervention in the Muslim world, the subsequent instability and extremism on both sides and the increasing interference of the Bush administration through the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA and the Patriot Act reduced civil liberties, with the effects of the War on Terror continuing to polarise the parties across the 50 states. Then the 2008 financial crash came and put a dent into how success a free market could be, with the bailing out of banks and impositions of austerity raising populist critiques from all sides of the political spectrum. The critics of the free market had their fullest expression in the return of 'old' socialism to the West, from the Corbynism of late 2010s Britain, Eurosceptic socialist parties such as Syriaza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and even the massive grassroots support for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary elections. Likewise, populism has turned to the right-wing much more too, as 'men of the people' like Boris Johnson, Juan Bolsonaro and of course Donald Trump captured the imaginations of many voters with their pledges to regenerate their nations back to a better time, often by using distinctly uncapitalist policies like 'Levelling Up' the North of England or pleading with US car manufacturers to not sell their factories for construction in China. Equally, their actions challenge the status quo of liberal democracy through corruption, disregard for ideas like the environment and human rights and even attempted coups in two cases, actions which threaten the framework of liberal democracy previously thought universal and suggest the growing possibility of illiberal democracies becoming the norm with the widespread nature of right-wing populism.
But perhaps the most damning thing for Fukuyama's idea of the end of history is that in some senses, the Cold War and the conflict between East and West never truly ended- geography has not changed, only ideology. Russia, once hoped after the Soviet Union's collapse to fully democratise its political and economic system, instead fell into cronyism and Brezhnev-era oligarchy that has resulted in the election of a democratic dictator, a former KGB agent inspired by the Christofascism of Ivan Ilyin (who wrote that the special 'innocence' that the Russian people had as the true chosen people of God means that any action they commit is moral because they are Russian). Putin's conduction of annexations into Georgia, Crimea and now Ukraine, all of which threaten a global balance of power as the West continually funds Zelensky's millitary in a bid to stop ultra-nationalist ambitions reaching further than they have, with the effects Gazprom and Russian espionage have had in the West. The greatest threat of all to Western security, liberalism and Fukuyama's end of history, however, is definitively the People's Republic of China, thanks to a system which Stein Ringen called in his eponymous book 'The Perfect Dictatorship.' The authoritarian control the CCP has over the Chinese market has allowed for success not just most obviously in mass industry (which has allowed to have a stranglehold on a world that still needs commodities while transitioning to a primarily service economy) but in the ability to invest elsewhere, most successfully in the Belt and Road Initiative funding infrastructure projects across Africa in countries with questionable track records on human rights, such as Egypt, Rwanda and Kenya. These are programs which the other dominant superpower- the United States of America- have done before, but all of which have not resulted in China becoming any more open and democratic. Xi Jinping's reign has seen more power granted to a Chinese premier since Mao himself, with a refocus on Han nationalism leading to actions like the Hong Kong crackdowns, the constant insistence upon reunification with Taiwan and the ongoing Uyghur genocide, all while the population remain generally content with a system of democratic centralism that gives them employment and trust in the state, but with more of a focus on China as a national entity than as a socialist one. The current state of the world- with populists scare-mongering about a radical left-wing that conflates progressivism for communism, economic recession and massive nationalist states dreaming of revanchism and traditionalism- is in some ways eerily close to the state of affairs in the previous century's early decades (beyond the similarities I have cherry-picked here) and the repetition of such things should prove the end of the idea of Fukuyama's end of history.
Finally, while we have much discussed the divergences of both writers in their views, it is perhaps key for a moment to speak on the similarities which both writers end up sharing. For one thing, both did not invent the idea of the ‘end of history’, but instead co-opted it from the Prussian philosopher Hegel. More specifically, Fukuyama and Marx co-opt different aspects of Hegelian thought in their historicism- Marx took the idea of historical inevitability and formed his historical materialism and the dialectic by which all societies progress, while Fukuyama drew more from Hegel’s original idea of history as being a progress towards freedom. Indeed, Fukuyama derives so much from Hegel that in Part III (‘The Struggle for Recognition’), he takes exclusively from Hegel’s concept of thymos (which, to heavily summarise, is the desire to be recognised and noticed), which he feels only liberal democracy can achieve through its equal representation and ability to participate in. Ironically, this idea (likely influenced by Hegel too, although it can be derived from the more current liberal ideas floating around in 1848) of individuality was of concern to Marx and Engels also. After all, both write that ‘Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.’ Their vision of socialism is one where all of man is able to live in security and comfort, unalienated from their labour and satisfied with their lot so that it “thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."
Moreover, the ‘end of history’ for either is not an ‘end of the world’, but instead the continuation of history at the end of sustainable politico-economic development, where human lives will continue on but politics and its development will ‘stop’. Fukuyama himself is ambivalent about such an outcome, since it reduces our lives down to "economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands." Even if is comments reflect the more pessimistic philosopher Mark Fisher, who in ‘Capitalist Realism’ despairs of the political order being dominated by capitalism, he is nevertheless acceptant that liberal democracy will be the fulfilment of thymos in its best form. Marx and Engels are instead convinced of the total superiority of their system over all others.
In conclusion, Fukuyama and Marx's ideas about the end of history are ones with certain amounts of history to prove or disprove such ideals about the utopic way that all present political developments and struggles could lead to liberalism or communism. Marx's own historical theory relies on flawed grounding and the implementation of it has been less than successful, even current socialist success usually relies less on pure Marxism than those married to capitalism, such as social democracy or democratic socialism. Fukuyama, however, has less of a reason to be spared as much criticism as Marx- his liberal ideas on history, while correct for a decade, have been disproven near utterly over the course of this century, to the point that in an interview with the New Statesman in only 2003, he said that ‘At this juncture, it seems to me that certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true. He talked about the crisis of overproduction… that workers would be impoverished and there would be insufficient demand.’” The combination of the socialism Marx formulated and the liberalism that Fukuyama championed appears to have been most successful in a 'Third Way' triangulating the two but certainly continue to live on and shape political developments even as I write.
In the end, none of us will probably know what the end of history actually will be. That's why we have writers like Fukuyama and Marx to structure and present history and politics in such a digestible formula, driven by thymos or class conflict or any other abstract principle that allows us to understand it. That is the point of historiography- to examine past events through a certain lens and through this manner gain a better, more comfortable arrangement of history that allows us to better understand it. Karl and Francis have merely been some of the purveyors of this for an ideological purpose, but their ends of history are guides for how we might see and shape it in times to come. In the end, there just might be two possible beginnings.
Credit for image goes to UVA Today.