Alvarez
For the rest of us, neoliberalism has embedded itself so thoroughly in
the organization of human life around the globe that any of our quixotic
attempts to challenge its dominance will be overwhelmed, neutralized,
extinguished, or absorbed. In other words, we are not necessarily born
again and remade by the world order at the “end of history” to be any
more convinced that this is how things were supposed to be, that this
is where history was always supposed to end up. Rather, in our daily
subjugation to the dominant world order, we are materially and soul-
fully incentivized to believe that, as the deathly adage goes, “there is
no alternative.”
At base, then, it is clear that Fukuyama is describing a world-
historical scenario in which one people’s history has permanently dom-
inated that of all others—the end of history by fiat. Again, ours is not
the first imperial age to declare itself the ultimate inheritor of the mantle
of history itself. And the history we have inherited is littered with the
bones of empires that inevitably crumbled, receded, and were usurped
by some challenger. In the absence of a totalizing system of global
control, the territorial empires of old were always susceptible to threats
from beyond their own borders, always vulnerable to rot and revolt from
within. What allegedly distinguishes our time from others, though, is
the fact that the violent spread of market capitalism has “territorialized”
nations and states around the globe, brought them into the collective
fold, to the point that there is no “outside” anymore—no external threats
to be vulnerable to. Thus, with every state on the planet being made
functionally dependent on the global circuits of capitalism, every point
of disruption from within will be swarmed and brought to heel under
the sheer heft of the whole.
Whether or not we want history to keep moving toward something
else, something better than this, the suffocating reach of market capi-
talism and the legion of liberal democratic outposts and extranational