The end point of mankind’s ideological evolution

The myth of transition is a myth that cuts across the logic of capitalist empire expansion generally speaking. The relationship of the (post-)Soviet states and the IMF, World Bank, EBRD, and later the WTO, has produced not only damaging policy prescriptions but also a hegemonic discourse of what those policies can and cannot be. Prescriptions based on marketisation set the parameters of right and wrong necessitated by the underlying hegemonic belief of neoliberal economists that there is a need to help the newly independent countries to the ‘correct path’ of social evolution based on the free market model.

One of the most (in)famous and influential manifestations of that sense of a historic necessity was Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. Fukuyama’s article, followed by the book, became a self-fulfilling prophesy for the new states that emerged not only at:

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.

Such vision left little room for alternative scenarios in the face of ‘liberal democracy’ as the form of statehood, neoliberal capitalist market as the economic system, and the culture-ideology of consumerism as the model of a societal consciousness.

—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).