Perfidious Albion : Tragedy and Farce, Marx and Nietzsche.

It was Hegel who first declared that history always repeats itself to which Marx added dryly and humourously in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852),

‘‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’’

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the tragedy were those forces unleashed by 9/11 and then the farce were the subsequent attempts to shore up the capitalist system during the financial meltdown of the last 5 years of that first decade which are still ongoing in the second decade.The historical event lurking behind these two repetitions can also be found in our recent past: it is the fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe that, according to Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man, signaled the twin triumphs of liberalism and capitalism.

How wrong could you be? Momentary the triumph and hollow the victory. For as we have recently witnessed in the second decade of our century liberalism and capitalism under its more colloquial name of neoliberalism has brought forth more tragedy and more farce both in politics and in the very daily existence of each of us.

We now literally face both tragedy and farce on a daily basis. America are still dealing with the Trumpian fall-out of his defeat in the recent Presidential election. Trump…