"What we may be
witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War,
or the passing of a particular period of post-war 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."—Francis Fukuyama
With the fall of the
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, capitalism’s prophets were quick to
sound the trumpet of victory. Francis Fukuyama quickly decreed an end to
history and the establishment of “Western liberal democracy,” or rather the
birth of neoliberalism—that insatiable beast, all claws and fangs—as the apogee
of human development. That description of the world and its history, a history
temporarily detained by the triumph of capitalism, was and still is somber and
sterile and corresponds to a society without debates or ideas, without answers
to questions and challenges that are in urgent need of solving. But what does
the triumph of “free-market neoliberalism” have to do with Marvel’s The Avengers?
Somewhere along the way I’ve
heard that it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than an end to capitalism.
To imagine the end of capitalism would imply to imagine an alternative to a
socio-economic form of development that requires infinite economic-growth while
depleting finite resources and which results in human and environmental destruction.
Capitalism is an animal that feeds on blood and oil alike; feeding it is an insatiable
problem. It will eventually succumb to hunger. And in the meantime while half of
Europe is on the verge of collapse and the planet continues its spiral fall
into environmental catastrophe, Marvel’s The
Avengers presents us with a now too seductive and familiar scenario: an apocalyptic
attack on Manhattan that threatens to destroy the world as we know it. But the
market’s invisible hand is a wizard of ingenuity that in a heartbeat can concoct
the next gadget-wielding one-percenter savior of the earth, Stark Industries’
playboy Iron Man. Even Thomas Friedman himself could not have come up with a
better savior for a system of economic development that is in serious need of
saving.
From an analytical point-of-view
The Avengers is an extension of
neoliberal thought which extends itself like a mantle of lead that seeks to
silence those voices demanding answers and alternatives to a model of economic
development that has sunk the world into crisis.
On the other hand the Hulk
still kicks ass.
