Francis Fukuyama and the ‘absent left’

2012-08-15 · first published in marxsite · 160 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only part of this piece survives. The capture it was recovered from is truncated, so the text below stops before the article did.

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Phil Hearse

Francis Fukuyama

Whatever the (well deserved) derision heaped on the head of Francis Fukuyama for his ‘end of history’ thesis, he has the merit of posing the big questions. In his ‘The Future of History’ article (Foreign Affairs, Jan-Feb) he poses two big questions that are vital for Marxists: 1) Is the neoliberal undermining of the social position of the employed working class and poorer sections of the middle class compatible with liberal democracy? 2) What explains what he calls the ‘absent left’ – the lack in theory or practice of a powerful left/populist alternative to neoliberalism in a period of such drastic economic collapse and moral bankruptcy of the dominant neoliberal model?

His answer to the first question is clearly ‘yes’. Such vast inequality, he argues, undermines trust and community and deepens social conflict – so much so that democracy is put in peril. He’s right about that and we’ll look more closely at its consequences later.