...you can not only play; you can do whatever you darn please!

I would argue here that regardless of what one thinks of the merits or horrors of the two great revolutions that took place in the twentieth century, the mere fact of their existence forced capitalism to reforms that might otherwise never have taken place.

I would further argue that, because of the demise of the Soviet Union and communist China, we have entered a historical era in which capitalist states see a unique opportunity to tear up social contracts earlier agreed to, contracts that were only drafted in the first place largely to defend themselves against the existential threat that the USSR and China represented.

--excerpted from my writing in the previous blog.

That ideological dispute settled the argument over whether capitalism was the best economic system.

--from a recent David Brooks column in the New York Times referring to the Cold War.

Perhaps this is what Putin had in mind when he stated that the destruction of the Soviet Union was “a geopolitical tragedy.” Just as the scale of World War II allowed Western historians to evade dealing with the deeper implications of the only slightly less horrific first world war, a war that could not be blamed on Stalin, those same historians now have a hard time explaining why capitalism—newly unfettered by the threat of a communist monolith—now seems on the brink of collapsing.

This is not to say that we lacked our own, homegrown revolutionaries. Even before the Great Depression, working conditions were such that the U.S. produced its own Socialists, Communists, Wobblies and other left wing factions. May 1, or May Day, celebrated by workers around the world, in fact commemorates the Haymarket Square Riot that took place at a workers’ demonstration in Chicago on what was actually the fourth of May, 1886. By 1919, however, the success of the Russian Revolution elicited the Palmer Raids as a response here in the U.S., a government-sponsored reign of terror cited in history books as the period of the first Red Scare. When the U.S fell into the depths of the Great Depression, however, even scare tactics could not entirely suppress a renaissance of left wing organizing. It would only be due to the gearing up of the enormous war machine required to fight WWII that the labor of U.S. workers was once again in demand. Even so, the standard of living for most Americans would not rise until well after the war had ended, with the inception of the golden Eisenhower age, the template decade (1953-1963) for American prosperity (and, in retrospect, a singular event).

Guided by the patrician Franklin D. Roosevelt, (who was widely condemned by his fellow patricians as a traitor to his class), American capitalism was saved. On some very rare occasions, Socialists and Communists gained elective office, but for the most part, a real revolutionary movement never gained any momentum. In order to save the system, however, concessions had to be made. It was during this period that the U.S. labor movement grew in influence, often spurred on by Communist organizers in the big industrial cities of the North. Banking and Wall Street interests were compelled to give way to a spate of regulation designed to protect the ordinary citizen. In 1935, frightened by the prospect of an army of unemployed whose living conditions were often desperate, legislators created the Social Security act, (actually titled Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI)).

To this day, conservatives like to portray the Roosevelt era as responsible for creating Big Government with all of its evils. In fact, conditions had become ripe for reform much earlier, during what is called the Progressive Era, the era of the first President Roosevelt. When Ronald Reagan uttered the famous “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” he was repudiating not just the reforms instituted by the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt, but also those initiated by the Republican hero, Teddy Roosevelt. Both Roosevelts understood that if capitalism was to be saved, reforms needed to be put in place.
Just as the Progressive movement anticipated the more far-reaching reforms that would take place in a world made far more dangerous for capitalism by the success of the Russian Revolution, the move by Reagan conservatives to deconstruct those same reforms anticipated the demise of the Soviet threat and only began to come to flourish after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. So-called neo-conservatives essentially began a putsch against all government entities whose role it was to check the excesses of private enterprise. The other prong of the neo-conservative attack on government was an intense campaign to privatization across the board, even extending, most egregiously, to the privatization of the armed forces. The campaign continued unabated during the at least nominally Democratic administration of Bill Clinton.

Armed with the pseudo-intellectual credentials of such as pop-Nietzchean novelist Ayn Rand and the laissez-faire crowd nurtured in the nineteenth-century hothouse atmosphere of the University of Chicago, the so-called Chicago school, Republican legislators turned an intense beacon on every manifestation of perceived government interference in the free flow of cash. A strong impression arose that, for this political camp—from Milton Friedman to Newt Gingrich on down—the motto was carpe diem. The fall of the Soviet Union and the earlier “gains” made by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher during the crisis of the seventies and eighties mobilized the forces on the right. The sense was that the right had to take advantage of this unique historical opportunity not only to bury contemporary socialist tendencies, but to dig a series of holes so deep that—even were there to be a rebirth of such thinking—it would take a future generation forever to claw its way out, or, even better, make it impossible.