EXCERPT How are we to cope with the end of the End of History? From our current vantage point it is easy to dismiss Francis Fukuyama’s prophecy of unending Western liberal democracy, but the truth is that we have yet to fully extract ourselves from the horizon of expectations that made such a seemingly absurd pronouncement possible. We remain stuck in an historical frame that congealed at the close of the last century, when the sudden collapse of communism in the East and the gradual assimilation of countercultures in the West dissolved our popular images of the outside of global capitalism and opposition to mainstream liberalism. The result is what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism, in which our collective inability to imagine a post-capitalist or even post-neoliberal society leaves us with little choice but to plan for more of the same: incrementally improved consumer products, increasingly flexible working arrangements, and inexorable marketisation of public services. There is no alternative. The present will go on indefinitely. The future has been cancelled. Nevertheless, there are signs that this horizon is beginning to disintegrate. The indefinite present is cracking under stress, and the future is slowly seeping back, unbidden, into our collective imagination. This has little to do with the global financial crisis and its ramifications. If anything, the crisis exemplifies capitalist realism’s ability to render disruptive events normal. It has more to do with a network of self-reinforcing tendencies whose disruptive consequences are not simply difficult to predict, but impossible to normalise in the long run.…