Thread by @BenjaminNorton

This "golden age" was only permitted because the US ruling class was genuinely afraid of a socialist revolution.

The USSR was growing, and socialist anticolonial movements were winning everywhere. So US capital was forced to make big concessions to labor to stave off revolution

https://twitter.com/as_a_worker/status/1289955644716417024

The 1950s, '60s, and '70s were the peak for national-liberation movements. With inspiration and support from the Soviet Union and communist China, they successfully overthrow colonial regimes across the planet.

The US and Western European ruling classes were seriously scared

The idea that the US (the global protector of capitalism) would win the cold war was not inevitable. So the US, frightened, invested huge sums of money in counterinsurgency. The CIA funded many "progressive" left-liberal groups, as long as they were anti-communist/pro-imperialist

We can't understand the so-called golden age of economic prosperity in the US without understanding it as a product of counterinsurgency

It's an old tactic to contain revolution, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, who often said "Reform is truly conservative"
thenewpress.com/books/cultural…

The CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 to fund left-liberal reformist *but anti-communist* groups all around the world, including socdems, feminists, anti-racists, artists, etc

It's not a coincidence this was then dissolved in 1979 when neoliberalism took over

Keynesian and the welfare state only became mainstream in W Europe and the US in the '50s-70s because the ruling class in these countries was afraid workers would look to the USSR and other socialist countries

There was a systemic alternative, so they had to make big concessions

Don't forget it was Republican Richard Nixon who famously said "We are all Keynesians now." The US knew that if it didn't adopt some mildly redistributive economics, socialism would look more appealing to workers

But by 1980, it was clear the US/capitalism would win the cold war