Slavoj Zizek has declared that for those of us living at the centers of capitalism: "it is easier to imagine the end of the world then it is the end of capitalism." Our art reflects this fact, much of it is governed by what Mark Fischer has called: "capitalist realism" a firm ideological conception that not only is there no possible alternative, but that it isn't even imaginable. The abbreviation TINA litters texts of critical accounts of "neoliberalism". However dogmatically and slavishly this statement by Thatcher has been taken as lens to interpret current events in the capitalist system, we can see there is a certain truth to the notion as it shows up in art. For instance, a video game series like Dead Space shows the absurdity of the continuation of the capitalist system, with its deleterious social and environmental effects, into an age of high technology and interstellar travel but conceives of no alternative solution. The examples can be easily multiplied but one wonders how far technology, history, and society must progress in the future (dating from anywhere from 5 years from now to thousands of years) until humanity realizes that the capitalist system that arose in the British Empire during the 17th century is outdated and obsolete. No simplistic ideological factor can explain this attitude, such as the anti-communists control the media or the right-wing neoliberal capitalists have prevailed over center-left Keynesian capitalists. In capitalist countries, anti-communists have always controlled the media.
But to illustrate the difference, I'm reminded of the story of a McCarthyite I came across while wiki-surfing who had been a communist prior to the end of WWII and became an anti-communist afterwards. He maintained the communist conviction in the imminent and inevitable victory of communism simultaneously with the position that the victory of communism would be a horrid thing. This isn't so strange, many fascists and anti-communists of the past portrayed communism as an imminent threat, one that could only be overcome with the most vigorous action or in more pessimistic moments, actually in the end could not be overcome at all. I'm reminded of the post-war Neo-Nazi position that Germany took a brave stand against Judeo-Bolshevism but in the end it was a lost cause, like the neo-confederate lost cause, the deck was stacked against her from start. This attitude also emerges from America's anti-communist wars in Asia, while they were ongoing the entirety of Asia (even including occupied Japan) was in danger of being consumed by communism. The enemy constantly vacillated between being too weak to overcome US power to being too powerful for the poor tiny US to oppose alone. In the immediate aftermath of those wars, US defeat became inevitable and the wounds of those wars was softened by the balm of truisms and non-sequiturs like: "Never fight a land war in Asia". The official conspiracy theory actually reaches monumental proportions with the rise of America's own "stabbed-in-the-back" myth with the war in Vietnam being defeated from the inside by privileged students who spit on working class American soldiers. This idea is actually implicitly accepted by many, including hippies who believe that they deserve responsibility for the ending the war. The absurdity of the narrative is obvious from any critical perspective, the Vietcong hardened by 20 years of war were no challenge for the mighty American army; we were actually on the verge of victory! What really defeated America were white pot-smoking students who had read one too many left-wing books in the college library and listened to too many beatles records. Living breathing revolutionary communists in Vietnam are reduced to an issue of no concern, while the influence left-leaning liberals whose identities are bound up in decadent capitalist commodity culture grow to an influential force of enormous proportions. Absurdly, it only takes a few protestors infused with crypto-marxist ideas to bring the world's greatest super-power to its knees. If any internal force was responsible for the collapse of America's Indochina wars, it was actually the soldiers themselves as well as the revolutionary energy of America's long-mistreated oppressed nations. But even taking this line gives Americans too much undue credit.
So its apparent, that there was a time even among anti-communists when the future of capitalism and bourgeois rule even in their own propaganda seemed far from secure. But now its quite the opposite, communism was doomed to fail from the beginning because Marxism is a flawed ideology, so the liberal anti-com line goes. The idea that the victory of communism in Vietnam would lead to communist victory all over Indochina is dismissed as a crackpot theory that caused the loss of many American and Indochinese lives. The victories of Communist Peoples Armies which performed deeds (often against superior forces) that would've awed the Caesars are dismissed as inconsequential and such victories would've been even far more spectacular if those armies had been led by bourgeois officers instead of communist cadres. Sustained rates of growth of 10-14% in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China are depicted as communist mismanagement of the economy and the failure of Marxism, despite economic achievements that had never been seen in history; or it is more frequently seen as fudged communist numbers. Such numbers can be denied when it comes to total economic growth but cannot be denied when it comes to industrial growth. So the rapid growth of heavy industry is reduced to a communist economic fetish which failed to really improve the lives of people. Funnily enough, China's Vice-Premier admitted that modern China's GDP figures were "man-made" and "for reference only" and recommended steel & cement production as well as electricity and oil usage as a proxy for China's growth. Recalculating on this basis makes Chinese growth lower and far more volatile than the Mao period, but I have argued in any case that high rates of industrial growth on the one hand; as well as excepting the single anomaly in world bank data (even still the growth rate is quite high at 6.4% per year) leads to the conclusion that at the very least the Mao period was no slower than the Deng period. Now there are received ideas that the rise of Deng Xaoping or the fall of the USSR were inevitable. It's also quite interesting that a widely recognized fact at the time that the USSR had become capitalist or was moving in a capitalist direction after Stalin's death and the institution of Kruschev's "reforms" was magically discarded in favor of the idea that at the time it was still a socialist nation. The cynical liberal realism of the cold war was magically replaced with triumphalist liberal idealism. In that narrative, blue jeans and cassette players ensured that the triumph of capitalism was inevitable. In truth, America's anti-communist offensive was hardly ideologically coherent and it's a miracle that it won at all, as America's propagandists seemed unsure whether to appropriate Maoism and say that the USSR was more capitalist than the capitalist nations or to argue that it was a pure communist gulag-hell with communal toothbrushes. Was democracy in the Third World a great bulwark against communism? Or did it open the pathway to communism that needed to be opposed with the cynical cooperation with hard-right Third World strongmen?
Anything that would stick seemed to be the attitude. It's doubtful America would've won "the Cold War" which had become more an inter-imperialist contention then an actual conflict of ideology, if it had not been for Nixon's realism in opening relations with China. In the next post we will explore the history of threats to the system, why they occur, some reasons why things have "stabilized" and what new threats have materialized in the period since 1973. We will also discuss the theme of a potential return to fascism or "authoritarian democracy" in popular science fiction and other art, especially in light of capitalist realism. We will also extrapolate on what it could tell us about the global rise of the far-right at this moment.
