The “we’re in latestage capitalism” is an optimistic position.
Liberal capitalism more or less as it was can reassert itself. After the war, Western Germany went back almost immediately. Eastern Germany took longer to get there, but it ended up in the same place. In Stalin’s 1924 lectures (condensed into Foundations of Leninism), he thought Germany was a in a prime position to have a Russia-style revolution in the near future. In hindsight, he was obviously wrong, but it does show that there was a strong push forming to move Germany to the left at the time.
The United States does not have nearly as much leftist organizing going on. There isn’t enough push to do anything different. What we may get is something closer to a European-style social democracy with a better social safety net, and a voting system that doesn’t all but mandate only two viable parties. That would be nice. It doesn’t mean capitalism will go away any more than the French Revolution dispensed with every noble in Europe within a decade.
But the power of the nobility was shattered, and is now a shadow of what it was. Paul von Hindenburg was a member of the Junkers, the German aristocrats. He gave Hitler the chancellorship. That was the last politically meaningful thing a Junker ever did in Germany.
The “we’re in latestage capitalism” is an optimistic position.
Liberal capitalism more or less as it was can reassert itself. After the war, Western Germany went back almost immediately. Eastern Germany took longer to get there, but it ended up in the same place. In Stalin’s 1924 lectures (condensed into Foundations of Leninism), he thought Germany was a in a prime position to have a Russia-style revolution in the near future. In hindsight, he was obviously wrong, but it does show that there was a strong push forming to move Germany to the left at the time.
The United States does not have nearly as much leftist organizing going on. There isn’t enough push to do anything different. What we may get is something closer to a European-style social democracy with a better social safety net, and a voting system that doesn’t all but mandate only two viable parties. That would be nice. It doesn’t mean capitalism will go away any more than the French Revolution dispensed with every noble in Europe within a decade.
But the power of the nobility was shattered, and is now a shadow of what it was. Paul von Hindenburg was a member of the Junkers, the German aristocrats. He gave Hitler the chancellorship. That was the last politically meaningful thing a Junker ever did in Germany.