“the ultimate victory of the VCR,” what means VCR in the sentence? For the right, this was obviously a fact to be celebrated. The market and the West had won the battle against the “Evil Empire” and “eliminated any ideological alternative to free-market capitalism,” in the words of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.2 Republican President George Bush declared that the end of the Cold War represented the dawning of a “New World Order” of peace and global prosperity.3 An obscure State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, became famous for arguing that we had reached “the end of history.” Politics would no longer be defined by battles between socialism and capitalism; from now on, politics would revolve around how to tinker with capitalism. Discussing what he termed “the ultimate victory of the VCR,” Fukuyama declared that Western capitalism represented “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government.” We could now anticipate “accumulation without end.”4