Fukuyama Francis - Ends in sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawn/Anderson

ENDS IN SIGHT

Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson

Gregory Elliott

First published 2008 by Pluto Press
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Elliott, Gregory

Ends in sight : Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawn/Anderson / Gregory

Elliott.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-897071-40-3

1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei. 2. Socialism. 3. Capitalism. 4. Fukuyama, Francis. 5. Hobsbawm, E. J. (Eric J.), 1917-. 6. Anderson, Perry. I. Title.

HX73.E423 2008 335.4 C2007-906315-2

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Contents

Preface

The final decades of the twentieth century witnessed numerous sightings of a certain end of history or the end of a certain history; and if only implicitly the inception of another. (To sense an ending is invariably to scent a beginning.) Among them, at least three retain significance for the left, by virtue of the intrinsic interest of their subject matter (the past results and future prospects of capitalism and socialism), the force of their provocation and the breadth of their perspective. Moreover, Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson all in some measure took their bearings, if only to plot a contrary course, from Marx, the 150th anniversary of whose most widely diffused text in 1998 found him lauded as seer of capitalist globalisation.

Ends in Sight appraises these historical panoramas, offered from opposing standpoints (one neo-conservative, three variously socialist) and on contrasting scales (political manifesto, philosophy of history, account of the twentieth century, inaugural editorial). Relating them to other writings by their authors, each chapter may stand as a separate composition. But they are scored here as an unwitting quartet.

Taking the Communist Manifesto as a founding document of historical materialism, seeks to take the temperature of the anti-capitalist wing of that movement of movements, which would vindicate Marx and contradict Fukuyama, Hobsbawm and Anderson.

Written from the disadvantage point of an intransigent left, this opuscule is nevertheless unlikely to go down well with sections of it, old and new. This is perhaps especially true of the Conclusion, which, in tying together some of the threads of the arguments advanced in the first four chapters, states conclusions without premises on various of the wider issues raised. Necessarily schematic, even dogmatic, it largely upholds the sense of an ending articulated, in their different ways, by Hobsbawm and Anderson; and therewith ratifies the sense of a beginning implicit in it that is, of a historical epoch in which, for the first time in more than a century and a half, capitalism has not been haunted by its shadow: the spectre of socialism. This in no way grants eternal life to the complacent, globally unbound Prometheus of the new millennium (after all, as Hobsbawm maintains, capitalism may be in the process of devouring itself). Nor does it entail the enduring triumph of its US variant only one of the possibilities envisioned by Fukuyama. But it does imply the implausibility, in any foreseeable future, of the kind of systemic alternative to capitalism long represented by what, following Norberto Bobbio, must now be referred to as historical socialism.

Before proceeding, as someone who still calls himself a Marxist depending on whos asking, I am bound

Acknowledgements

The chapters below appear here for the first time, although I have occasionally drawn upon related publications. contains material from the Postscript to the Spanish edition of my Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (University of Valencia Press, 2004) and a reworked introductory paragraph from Velocities of Change. The Conclusion incorporates a few pages from the Brighton talk referred to above.

Thanks are owed to Anne Beech, the staff of Pluto Press and its anonymous referees for commission, production and publication; to Justin Rosenberg, Warren Montag and Tom Hickey for help along the way; and to Lekha and Emmanuel on the one hand, Ian Horobin on the other, for their respective grants of living and work space.

ONE

The Sorcerer and the Gravedigger: Karl Marx

The return of Marx: thus the New Yorker of all places, as the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto approached, hailing its main author as prophet of a globalised capitalism and its distempers.

For less overwrought commentators, wherein consisted the actuality of Marxs thought as epitomised by the Communist Manifesto? According to Eric Hobsbawm, introducing a re-edition of the text in 1998, it provided a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century Uniquely prescient as regards capitalism, a certain consensus might be summarised, Marx had been singularly mistaken about communism. But if the former, how come the latter? For the one message that unmistakably emerges from the text is this: communism is inherent in capitalism. Consequently, to vindicate the contemporaneity of the Communist Manifesto by recasting it as a non-manifesto without the communism might be reckoned a prime example of praising with damn, faint or fulsome as you will.

CONTRARIES

At all events, no such plaudits had been forthcoming from any quarter when the 23-page Manifesto of the Communist Party was originally published in German in London, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. While it scarcely fell dead-born from the press la Hume, it was unquestionably a premature birth. Over the next half-century, however, it achieved canonical status in the working-class labour and socialist parties of the developed world. Anticipating its fiftieth anniversary, the leading Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola opened his famous 1896 essay In Memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti as follows:

All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto. Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency towards socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.