In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama published his famous essay declaring the “end of history.” Liberal democracy plus market capitalism, he argued, had decisively defeated all rival systems. No serious ideological competitor remained; humanity had reached the final form of socio-economic organization. History, understood as the grand struggle between competing visions of how society should be arranged, was over.

He was half-right, but for the wrong reason.

The real end of history did not arrive with the triumph of parliamentary procedure or the rule of law. It arrived when the worker was replaced by the consumer as the central organizing unit of society. When that happened, the possibility of an alternative future quietly died—not with tanks in the streets, but with shopping malls, credit cards, and Instagram filters.

Marx believed that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction because it would inevitably produce a conscious, organized working class that would overthrow it. After World War II, that almost happened. The working class in the West became powerful enough to force historic concessions: lifetime employment, strong unions, universal healthcare, virtually free higher education, rapidly rising wages. For three decades the system was forced to serve human needs rather than pure accumulation.

The elite learned the lesson. A society organized around workers is dangerous because workers can act collectively. They can withhold labor. They can vote as a bloc. They can imagine a world organized for something other than profit.

So the elite staged a counter-revolution in the 1980s—Reagan, Thatcher, deregulation, union-busting, the deliberate cultivation of debt, the transformation of citizens into consumers. The promise changed overnight: the state no longer owed you a good job; it owed you low prices and a wide selection of goods. Your political identity was stripped away and replaced with shopping preferences.

This is why history really ended.

A worker asks: “Who is with me, and who is against me?” A consumer asks: “What’s on sale, and how quickly can it be delivered?”

A worker sees another worker and recognizes a potential ally. A consumer sees another consumer and calculates whether their handbag is more expensive than hers.

A worker can go on strike. A consumer can only switch brands.

Once the population has been atomized into millions of competing, indebted, status-obsessed individuals, no alternative ideology can gain traction. Socialism? Communism? Mutual aid? These require solidarity, and solidarity has been made psychologically impossible. To choose solidarity now feels like choosing to be a loser in the only game everyone is playing.

Fukuyama thought history ended because liberal democracy had no rival. The lecturer’s darker insight is that history ended because the rival was deliberately murdered and its body hidden under an avalanche of lifestyle marketing. The masses did not choose consumerism over socialism; they were engineered, over two generations, to find the very idea of collective resistance incomprehensible and embarrassing.

That is the true end of history: not the absence of an opponent, but the creation of a population biologically and psychologically incapable of imagining one.