By Peter Rowlands

The end of history and the last man was a book written in 1992 by Francis Fukuyama. It asserted the final triumph of liberal capitalism against socialism and communism, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Since then Fukuyama has withdrawn his views, and the 2008 crisis has shown that capitalism has remained problematic, but nevertheless his original point was not completely unreasonable. The Soviet collapse, amazingly without any armed conflict, signified the end of the attempt to build a credible form of socialism, and although Gorbachev might have created a viable form of social democracy in its place, it was not to be.

The fragmentation of what it had been led to material decline for most people, particularly in Russia, partly the result of inappropriate privatisation, which also resulted in the biggest internal theft from its own people ever perpetrated, except possibly in Saudi Arabia. Those on the left who sought a democratic road to socialism could nevertheless  hardly regard it as anything but a defeat, while the moves to market-based reforms in China indicated a similar movement.

But this does not mean that a socialist perspective is unrealistic, although many would regard it as so. The left has continued, in different parts of the world, to promote itself, with some success in places. It might be worth a brief look at how that has gone.

The biggest success has been in South America, where from a majority of states being military dictatorships in the 1980s all are now democracies, many of them with left or leftish governments, particularly following the return of Lula to power in Brazil.  

However, it is difficult to see much by way of advance elsewhere in the world.

In Europe the two social democracies of the UK and Germany of the mid 1990s had  gone by the middle of the last decade, while the Socialists collapsed in France in 2017.There have been left upsurges in Greece, Spain, the UK and the US, but this has been manifested in government only in Spain, while social democrats have barely held on in Scandinavia. Social democracy in coalition has returned in Germany, but the centre-right and neofascism rule in France and Italy respectively, hardly an overall record of advance in Europe.

The ‘Arab Spring’ looked promising, but came to very little, with all the dynastic dictatorships still in place. The corrupt autocracies of Kazakhstan and its neighbours largely remain as they were.

There is little sign of radicalism in Africa, with establishment parties consolidating their hold, as in Nigeria. South Africa is hardly a good example of progress.

Perhaps the biggest decline has been in India, because of its size, with the continued dominance of Modi’s BJP, and the decline of Congress and most of the smaller left parties.

It is therefore difficult to argue that the socialist cause has made any overall headway in the last 30 years, although there are fewer autocracies, which is good.

But as they used to say in France after 1968, ‘La lutte continue’, and so it does today.

Peter Rowlands is a member of Swansea West CLP and Welsh Labour Grassroots Momentum.

Image: Francis Fukuyama. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/21475149@N05/3181930572/. Author: Andrew Newton, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.