1992 to 2008: The End of an Era
Back in 1992 Francis Fukuyama announced 'The End Of History.' The Cold War was well and truly over, the Berlin Wall was down, the Eastern Bloc was no more and Yeltsin was stood on a tank defending the elected White House against a military coup. Soviet power and empire was no more and Fukuyama wrote influential books and articles proclaiming that US Liberal Democracy is the zenith of Sociocultural Evolution.
*
Yet this leading Post Modernist was actually following "Post" theory models first created by intellectual Western Communists in the 1980's. Splits in the British Communist Party led to the formation of the most influential Martin Jacques faction. I attended the launch of the New Manifesto here in Norwich circa 1988. It was a meeting of the defeated who had but words to fall back on. They believed, like zealots, that Stalinism's USSR had in someway been Socialist or that workers there had platforms in the constitution that they could use to reform the Soviet System.
*
In the 1980s all this was beginning to be swept away by the USSR's need for glasnost and perestroika - restructuring society along more overtly Western Capitalist Lines.
*
Some on the Left had for many years accepted that the USSR was State Capitalist, acting like a giant company in the global sea, and that Gorbachev's reforms were required to break up this exhausted machine. There was no revolution as the USSR dissolved into Western Capitalism. Indeed, only the military, secret police and a few oligarchs on high opposed the reforms. Eastern Bloc workers embraced the prospects of liberal democracy, so the Western Communist project had to reform itself too.
*
'Post' theories were suddenly everywhere. We had Post Fordism, Post Industrialism and, of course, Post Modernism. Internationalism was replaced with Globalisation, and Theory was the ideological champion over Practice. For me, involved in the anti-poll tax campaign at the time, my own side (The Labour Party and union leaders) had suddenly switched sides. Gone was 'us' and 'them;' and gone was any sense that history and practice makes and informs theory.
*
Francis Fukuyama gave the green light to the Left, including the Labour Party, to step up its move to the Right. Unfortunately, history doesn't wait on wise men's words: this Slump has only one parallel - the 1929 Slump followed by The Depression. These two historic events are very similar, where both began around 'bubble' stock market trading. Now factories, offices and shops are closing world wide, dole queues are lengthening and wages are being forced down. And we're paying for this again?
***
In art the whole Post Modernist ideology has led, in my view, into some cul de sacs of Conceptual Art. The lack of a Modernist sense of irony means we suffer "in house" meanings, references, communications - a sort of cerebral sudoku at best. At worst, there is just an embarrassing space between art and audience, posing as something far more important.
