By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Communism is dead! This is the fakest of fake news. Communism has never been more alive than it is in the world of today.
Many pseudo-intellectuals and para-academics have made a meal of the so-called death of Communism.
The time is nigh to stop them in their wobbly tracks.
The hot intellectual war is here: we and them in ideology. Communism is back with a bang of cliché!
Back in 1989, in the heady days of the commotion in the then Soviet Union and much of Eastern Europe, a hitherto unknown scholar, Francis Fukuyama, published an essay in the American magazine The National Interest entitled “The End of History?”
In his essay, Fukuyama celebrated the collapse of the Soviet Union and the reformation in Eastern Europe as “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea.”
Fukuyama stressed quite forcefully: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
Fukuyama’s voice carried in the wake of the ultra-rightist sweep of the regimes of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in Britain.
The market was seen as the god of all economies, and the erstwhile big government presence in the eastern hemisphere was made an ample mockery of.
Everybody started crooning about market forces as the only way. However, Fukuyama’s voice went dead quiet as per market forces when in 2008 the global financial system collapsed, and the state had to step-in in a communistic manner to save the economies of the world.
The then American President George W. Bush had to communistically organize a $700 million bailout plan for American industries and conglomerates such as Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Meryl Lynch, Fortis and Bear Stearns from total collapse.
Of course it must be remembered that America survived the Great Depression when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President in 1933 and he used “communistic” methods to put America back on track by telling his hapless countrymen and women that the only thing to fear was fear itself.
Just like in the old days of, say, Josef Stalin standing up to count in all matters, the leaders in the government houses across the globe are daily putting their fingers on the pulse of the economic life of the world.
The heads of the European Union governments had to meet in France then to plot the doing of business for their out-of-sorts businessmen.
Britain had to nationalize the Northern Rock bank and the mortgage lender Bradford & Bingley, somewhat doing away with the books on market economics and embracing the communist ideology!
Germans such as Karl Marx had theorized on communism over the years without their countrymen and women actually practising the ideology until now.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepped into big business by taking over the German giant Hypo Real Estate AG, because it will not let the failure of any company disrupt Europe’s biggest economy.
Time was when many would have pontificated that no responsible government should disturb the smooth running of market forces, a line of thinking aped to no end by such Third World sedulous types as ex-Military President Ibrahim Babangida who told Nigerians that there was no alternative to the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP).
The point really is that Fukuyama misread the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel whose ideas gave the pedestal to the “End of History” thesis.
Hegel who incidentally was the forerunner of Karl Marx asserted that the motor of history is the Idea. Of course the Idea in Hegelian dialectics is made up of Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis.
In Fukuyama’s misreading of Hegel, he thinks that Synthesis in any given application of things ought to be the end of the matter.
The fact though is that the Synthesis of an earlier stage inevitably forges the Thesis of current time in the endless cycles of history.
This way, the Synthesis of commotion in the then Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can only be seen as underpinning the Thesis and Antithesis we are now witnessing.
The dialectics of history can therefore not come to an end in the short-sighted manner
germane to impulsive thinkers like Fukuyama.
The truism “world without end” goes with the realism “history without end.” This definitely puts an end to the “endism” of Fukuyama and his fellow starry-eyed tinsel intellectuals!
History is theatre with all the climaxes and sub-plots.
Let’s end on the note of the Russians snookering the American presidential election – communistically!
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