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Left Fukuyamaism: Politics in Tragic Times

1. With deep thanks to David Camfield, without whom this article would have been impossible, and Charlotte Heltai, without whom it would have been worse. I am grateful, constantly, to Jonas Marvin for encouraging me. The mistakes are all my own.

2. I take this term from Slavoj Zizek, who uses it to name the Third Way. Since Blair's 'war on terror', Clinton's 'war on crime' and Schroder's Hartz IV war on the poor more than confirmed their sometime self-designation as forces beyond the left, I think Zizek's appellation is inappropriate: these were simply Fukuyamaists. The tendency named in this article is a better candidate for the descriptor. There is a continuity between the two worth stressing, though. When Gordon Brown entered the British Treasury with an immediate plan to hand great power to the unelected Governor of the Bank of England, he did so on the explicit basis that a Labour government could only invest in saving the welfare state if it had the confidence of 'the markets', avoiding a run on sterling. This was, briefly, a sort of Left Fukuyamaism: a claim about the narrow possibilities for effective political action at the End of History, and an attempt to chart that narrow course against leftwing idealists who still dreamed of a world without bankers. Campism says the same of idealists who dream of a world without censorship and prison camps.

3. It is worth remembering, though, as testament to the complexities of the twentieth century — where dreams of freedom became bound up with its opposite, because the road to socialism was so strewn with obstacles that illusions or clear-eyed bargains seemed to many necessary to avoid despair or fatalism — that Angela Davis could call for the abolition of prisons in the US and then praise the prison system in East Germany. And yet: as the Soviet Union dissolved, Davis was an anti-Stalinist dissident inside the Communist Party.