After the collapse of the Stalinist systems in 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that we had arrived at the End of History, a term many people found to be odd. After all, can history really come to an end? At the same time as Fukuyama made his claim, the President of the United States of America, George Bush Snr., announced that the collapse of the Soviet Empire heralded a 'new world order', and one that would be dominated by a global capitalist mode of production.

Fukuyama, who was critical of Marx, used Marx's theory of historical materialism against him, in sum arguing while Marx's theory had validity in understanding human development from early man (primitive communism) onwards, Marx's conclusions were wrong. Marx attempted to understand how humans develop different systems or modes of production throughout the ages, from primitive communism to slave society, feudalism, and capitalism. For instance, how did the ideas of one epoch decline and another rise in its place?

In terms of the old feudal order, a new class arose with different ideas, and they were the merchant class, who overtime annihilated feudalism. New ideas emerged, Liberal philosophy, the rights of the individual and through industrialisation the capitalist mode of production was consolidated. Free Market ideology became the fashionable idea of the time, which allowed merchants to exchange goods with little regulation. 

But Marx understood that with the emergence of capitalism new social and political dynamics emerged that would threaten the new order. The migration of people from the countryside to cities where industrialisation arose meant that a new form of relationship would develop. Wages were paid to urban workers in exchange for their labour which industrialists exploited to make a profit. Marx called this Surplus Value. Conditions in workplaces were poor, housing was poor, poverty was rife, child labour abundant, no social health care, no universal education, and much more social inequalities arose within capitalist development. Marx concluded that conflict was inevitable because the system had created a new class structure, and that conflict was a consequence of the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself, and therefore a new mode of production would arise out of capitalism according to his theory of historical materialism, which would be Socialism/Communism.

Fukuyama argued that 1989 had proved Marx wrong, and there would be no other mode of production emerging from capitalism, and this is what he meant by the end of history. This was it! Fukuyama, turned to Hegel for his inspiration particularly Hegel's theory of 'recognition'. Humans, Hegel argued seek recognition in their lives in the pursuit of 'individualism', the true spirit of human nature according to him, and it was exactly this that Fukuyama argued was the reason that Marx was wrong and that the soviet systems had collapsed because of the spirit of individualism that people seek; in sum they had rejected the collective order of the soviets.

We don't need to look at the old soviet systems for a case study of the consolidation of capitalism to understand how it dominates our landscape. Take the United Kingdom for example. Five years prior to 1989, the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 signalled the defeat of the Labour Movement (including the Trade Unions), with Thatcher claiming it was time to produce a new psychology of the people, a new way of thinking, where the State is reduced in size and where individuals pursue their own self-interested goals. Her experiment was a disaster, but here's the thing, the Labour Movement has not recovered since 1985 and the left in the Labour Party are barely visible. 

So, here are my questions: what are the ideas to challenge the dominant order? And was Fukuyama right?