HOW dramatically can political mood and ideological discourse change in a mere couple of decades! In January 1989 the New Yorker greeted the collapse and crisis of pseudo-communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR with an article titled “Triumph of Capitalism”. The theme was widely echoed in the print and electronic media, while more serious works like The End of History and the Last Man (1992) also appeared on the scene.In this widely discussed book Francis Fukuyama essentially says that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations, from which there can be no progression to an alternative system. Marxists like Perry Anderson have been among Fukuyama’s fiercest critics. Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) held that Fukuyama—and the quick celebrity of his book — was but one symptom of the anxiety to ensure the “death of Marx”. He strongly refuted Fukuyama’s celebration of liberal hegemony: “... it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.” The boastful assertion of TINA – There Is No Alternative (to capitalism) – rent the air.
