The End of the “End of History”: A New Wave of Conflict in the World between a Liberalism That Is Becoming Conservative and a Socialism That Is Seeking Renewal

ABSTRACT

Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama in his article “The End of History?” formulated a thesis about the final victory of the neoliberal model of capitalism. But history does not stop. Two hundred years after the birth of Marx, The Economist wrote that the millennial generation chooses socialism, and the experts who prepared the report to the US president described socialism as the main threat. The author shows that the cause of these fears is the crisis of the existing system of economic relations and institutions of late capitalism. He systematises the evidence of this crisis and shows, that dominant political and economic elite is looking for a way out of the impasse on the paths of “neoliberal conservatism” that integrates further de-socialisation and deregulation in the economy with conservative-authoritarian trends in politics and ideology. At the end of the contribution, the author reveals a number of ways of socialisation, humanisation and ecologisation of capitalism, objectively conditioned by the progress of technologies and practices of civil society actors, which differ from the existing social democratic projects that have proved to be of little effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• End of history
• neoliberalism
• conservative liberalism
• socialisation of capitalism
• Marxism

Acknowledgements

This article is translated from Russian by Renfrey Clarke. Thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers and to Andrey Kolganov for providing critical feedback and helpful suggestions, and to Olga Barashkova, Ilya Dubrovin, and Olga Lemeshonok for help with preparing the article and seeking data.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here we may refer at least to the well-known books by Joseph Stiglitz (2013, 2016), Paul Krugman (2012), David Kotz (2015) and others. Summary and analysis of the Russian-language sources are included in the text.

2 For example, the IMF boss Inman Phillip says global economy risks return of the Great Depression. Kristalina Georgieva compares today with the “roaring 1920s” and criticises UK wealth gap (The Guardian, January 17, 2020, accessed December 1, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/17/head-of-imf-says-global-economy-risks-return-of-great-depression. Also see “World Economic Situation and Prospects 2020” by the United Nations, accessed December 1, 2021, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dpad/wp-content/uploads/sites/45/WESP2020_FullReport.pdf).

3 In distinguishing the “core,” the “periphery” and the “semi-periphery” of the world economy, we rely on the understanding of these groups developed by Amin and Wallerstein (for example, Amin 2004, 2010; Wallerstein 2004).

4 See, for example, “Millennial Socialism: A New Kind of Left-Wing Doctrine is Emerging. It is Not the Answer to Capitalism’s Problems” in The Economist, February 16, 2019, 11; and “Millennial Socialism: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property” in The Economist, February 16, 2019, 18–22.

5 For a theoretically and historically grounded periodisation of this era, see Buzgalin and Kolganov (2019a, 13–54).

6 In order to introduce Russian-language works into the field of English-language research, at least to some extent, the author in this case will indicate a number of articles in Russian publications that have English-language abstracts (see Kolganov 2019; Kuznetsov 2019; Khubiev and Tekeeva 2018).

7 Here, reference should at least be made to the fact that the number of industrial robots in the world at present amounts to 86 per 10,000 workers, and even in such a country as the US stands at 200, that is, two robots per 100 workers. This is despite the fact that the first fully automated production lines (that is, with no production workers) were constructed as early as the 1970s, while even in the USSR the number of digitally programmed machine tools (the analogue in those times of today’s industrial robot) was about 100 per 10,000 workers, with the ratio growing by a factor of 2.5 over 10 years. If the tempi that characterised the Soviet economy of the 1980s (“inefficient” and “crisis-ridden,” according to Western experts on the period) had been maintained, then the number of robots in our country would now be at least 1000 per 10,000 workers (the actual figure in today’s Russian Federation is 4 per 10,000 workers) (see Atkinson 2018; Aftershock 2019).

8 Author’s calculations based on BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis) data (see table 5a, “Value Added by Industry Group as a Percentage of GDP,” in BEA [2019]).

9 See, for example, figure 4.12 in Kotz (2015, 99).

10 More about the understanding of the creative class, which includes employees engaged in various types of creative activity, different from the understanding of Richard Florida (2012), see Buzgalin and Kolganov (2013, 2019b).

11 In Russia there is a popular joke: if from today’s food stores you were to take everything that had been topped up with extra fillers of soy, palm oil and additives “identical to the natural product,” the shelves would be emptier than during the times of the worst shortages in the USSR.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Buzgalin

Aleksandr Buzgalin, PhD in economics, is a professor at the Department of Political Economy of the Faculty of Economics, and the director of the Center for Modern Marxist Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU), Russia. He is also the director of the Institute of Social Economy of Moscow University of Finance and Law (MFUA) and a visiting professor at Hainan Normal University, China. Buzgalin is Editor in Chief of Problems in Political Economy (Russian bilingual academic journal). His areas of research include Marxism, in particular contradictions of the late capitalism, development studies, comparative analysis of economic systems, and nature of Russian economy. He has published in Cambridge Journal of Economics, Critical Sociology, International Critical Thought, Science & Society, World Review of Political Economy, and other journals. Buzgalin is one of the leaders of the Post-Soviet School of Critical Marxism. Among his most recent publication is Twenty-First Century Capital: Critical Post-Soviet Marxist Reflections (co-authored with Andrey Kolganov, Manchester University Press, 2021).