I've got a host of opinions on blogospheric orientation towards presentism, triumphalism, and belief in progress. But I want to make this point with as little provocation as possible, so let me narrow myself to a particular point: I believe we have a postcapitalist future due to a simple inductive vision of history.
I'm inspired to write this by this Dave Roberts post on the limits of economic growth. It's a rare bird in that it does not assert that our current system is essentially healthy and will exist into perpetuity. There is a cottage industry online of a kind of "everything's great and will only get better" essay. It's notable both for its frequency and its cross-ideological flavor. I read essays online that assert the basic health of our system and the inevitability of progress nearly every week, and I read them written by people who identify themselves as liberal, conservative, and libertarian. Many people are very dedicated to the idea that this globalizing liberal capitalism is, while not a perfect system, the best possible system, and one that is here to stay.
The existence of this trope is, in its own way, self-troubling: why do so many people who claim to be so confident in the state of the liberal democratic capitalist system spend so much time announcing that confidence? The repetition of these ideas itself suggests a profound unspoken dissonance. Those who are genuinely confident generally have little cause to say so. You can accuse me of a psychoanalytic reading here, and it's a fair criticism, but I tend to find these arguments pregnant with anxiety.
In any event, rearticulations of Francis Fukuyama's general thesis from The End of History are common and popular. Some prominent resistances include the (numerically tiny) orthodox Marxists, who believe in the classically Marxist or Troskyist notions of overproduction and exhaustion of markets of exploitation, and the inevitability of proletarian takeover; environmentalist critics, as one of half of Dave Roberts argues, who contend that capitalism depends on the consumption of material resources which can be exhausted and which despoil the planet in their collection and use; and a revanchist Christian conservatism which holds that Western civilization and its attendant strengths are the product of a divine moral framework that is expressed in the Christian bible, and that our turn away from that worldview dooms us to collapse.
I'm not going to articulate an argument for the mechanism by which capitalism will be replaced. I won't articulate what I think the next order will be. I'm only going to offer a weak inductive claim: human systems of political and economic organization are temporary. Human beings have declared their systems the final system, the truth of humankind, for the entirety of human history. One of the odd things about how people talk about Fukuyama is that they act like it is somehow unusual or even unprecedented. And yet people have assumed that their system would be perpetuated forever throughout history. (Well, absent religious belief in literal apocalypse, that is.) The Roman system, complete with such ugliness as slavery and rigid castes, was the right and sensible system of governance and resource distribution. Feudalism comported not only with divine law but with natural reality. The Catholic church was the most powerful human force in the world and would always be. Chattel slavery underwrote the Anglo-Saxon domination of the world and was supported by the widespread belief that those enslaved where inherently inferior and thus ineligible for liberty. Explicit and unapologetic imperialism by great powers was the inevitable result of inequities in national character or human capital. On and on: people believe that their way is the way that it will always be.
Here in the post-Marxist world, we enjoy an intellectual tradition that has a vocabulary of ideologies, economic systems, and sociopolitical orders. Yet we don't seem to enjoy the fruits of that sophistication. Premodern peoples tended not to think in terms of social or economic orders but rather simply of "the way things are." Here, we are aware that social orders change and that the human project has been marked by permanent impermanence, and yet the consensus view is that we have transcended change. I don't feel that way. I think that, since humankind is constantly declaring one system or the other the endpoint, and constantly being proven wrong, it is sensible to believe that the capitalist system we now live under will itself be swallowed by a new order.
Constitutionally, I'm not an optimist. Unlike what some people assume, I don't believe that a socialist system is inevitable or near. Predictions are hard, particularly about the future, and history is filled with events that were not only unpredicted but essentially unpredictable. I don't pretend that the next stage will be in keeping with my political or moral preferences. Nor, incidentally, do I think that the next stage will be the final stage; that too will pass. And you'll note that I haven't said anything about my various disagreements with the present age.
Like I said, it's a fairly weak claim; just because things have always happened doesn't mean they will always happen. I'm definitely not arguing with as much certainty as the other side, who are very, very certain. Like their forebears in every other era of history, they believe completely in their ability to assess the present and predict the future. I just think that history and human life teach us to expect change.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
8 comments:
"It's a rare bird in that it does not assert that our current system is essentially healthy and will exist into perpetuity."
Really? Some examples?
I'll buy the first part, many argue that things are going to get better in the future; but the system exist into perpetuity? This is kind of unfair here. I wonder how many of these other siders would take a strong stand against your claim that "things will be different sometime in the future." I could be convinced, maybe I am just not reading these people.
Have you not read Fukuyama or his many supporters? The argument is obviously not that nothing will change but that the essential liberal democratic capitalist social order found in first world nations will endure in perpetuity.
Yglesias: "I’m struck by the extent to which the past couple of years have vindicated Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History thesis."
Money Illusion: "It would be difficult to find any other prediction in the humanities or social sciences that has proved more accurate."
That kind of thing, Anonymous.
Some would argue that we have a postcapitalist present:
"In the contemporary world of the New Feudalism the particular oppressive forces are supplied by the dominance of private (corporate) control over ever increasing spheres of life. These oppressive forces have taken hold in the state, broadly construed, as it serves to promote the private interests of the few profiteers as they seek to expand their disproportionate share of socially produced wealth. The state, in other words, has succumbed to the proliferation of private power at the expense of society and the meaningfulness of the lives that constitute it. The state has cut itself off from the essential needs and interests of the many and, in so doing, has betrayed its own (purported) purpose, which must be to cater to the interests of the public and, as it does so, to the interests of those who constitute the public sphere of life...."
"The multiplicity of corporate 'nations' has colonized the state, in other words, and any sort of lived sociality that may have existed as liberalism evolved has now melted away. We are now merely consumers rather than citizens, vassals in the replicated 'lands' of our corporate lords."
-Tim Duvall, St. Johns
http://faculty.kutztown.edu/richards/380/Futures/New%20Feudalism.PDF
No blockquote in Blogger?
By your own lights, then, you shouldn't be surprised that people enthusiastically forecast the durability of their cultures. It's only human: indeed, it's as human as human cultures' impermanence.
Without being Christian, I believe in human nature. I believe there are human constants that are expressed in the contingencies of culture.
Yglesias, apparently, has read Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond's books changed my concept of the world. The century's worth of archaeological and palaeontological research distilled in them ranks as one of the great human accomplishments. I can't understand how Yglesias could have read them receptively and yet hold the view of the world embodied in his Fukuyama post.
/yawn
Fukayama is wrong. Its not the end of history, its just the end of westerncentric history.
I very much doubt that Fukuyama's thesis is unquestioned. In fact, it is usually ridiculed.
Things have always happened. But there hasn't always been history. In a sense, you get it with Thucydides. In a different sense, you get it with Christianity, particularly as understood by Augustine. Certianly after the Reformation, you have History. But most societies most of the time have done quite well without it.
Responding directly to this post, David Hume explained why it was wrong over three centuries ago. It simply does not follow from the fact that something has happened in the past that it will happen in the future.
So just because pre-capitalist societies changed their modes of production and political systems as they modernized does not mean that further modernization will result in new modes of production and political systems. That was the essence of the Marxist claim. Of course, eventually the heat death of the Sun will mean the end of everything, and of course we could have ecological collapse, world war or a collision with an asteroid.
The quesiton is whether there is some more modern system than liberal-democratic capitalism. Fabians and Marxists alike thought there would be. Schumpeter thought there would be. Some fascists thought there would be. Fukuyama said no -- although he later thought that genetic engineering might change this.
Post a Comment