chrom 🍉 - ELECTIO wishlist now!

Why is the US, and the West overall, seeing this crisis? Well, what happened after 1990? The USSR was overthrown, the first cold war ended, and the capitalist class went on the offensive in the West, dismantling the welfare states that they had only allowed because they feared the systemic alternatives represented by the Soviet-led socialist bloc, as well as by the socialist-led revolutionary anti-colonial national-liberation struggles across the Global South (in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Grenada, Indonesia, Korea, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Vietnam, etc.). In the 1990s and 2000s, neoliberalism was ruthlessly imposed as bipartisan dogma. Clinton and Blair continued where Reagan and Thatcher left off. Wall Street was deregulated. Glass–Steagall was repealed, accelerating the financialization of the US economy -- and setting the stage for financial crises like the Great Recession of 2008. Houses became speculative assets for investors, not places to live in. Homelessness skyrocketed as investors bought up homes across the country, hoping to make capital gains. The housing bubble temporarily popped in 2008-09, but the US government only reinflated it after, with easy monetary policy, super low interest rates, and Fed quantitative easing. Today the housing bubble is even bigger than it was before the 2008 crash! It is not a coincidence that the "golden era" of Western social democracy, especially in Europe, but also the weaker US welfare state, coincided with the height of the first cold war, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Western capitalists were genuinely afraid of a socialist revolution, so they made significant concessions to workers and allowed higher rates of taxation and stronger social services as an alternative. (The possibility of revolutionary change was even higher in Europe, as the labor movement and left-wing parties were stronger, which is why their ruling classes made more concessions and allowed a stronger welfare state.) Today, the rise of China is forcing some Western ruling classes to debate if they should make some more concessions again, but the Western labor movement and left are much weaker, and China has a strict non-interventionist foreign policy and does not export revolution like the Soviet Union did. Moreover, there are not nearly as many global revolutionary movements today as there were during the national-liberation struggles of the 1950s-'70s (with a few noble exceptions). Finally, the Western systems of bourgeois "democracy" are in severe crisis, with lots of infighting in the ruling class, and a far-right, fascistic segment of the capitalist class is gaining more power (represented by oligarchs like Peter Thiel), which thinks that they should simply dispel with the illusion of bourgeois liberal "democracy" and give capital total authoritarian control over society. Instead of making concessions to labor, like capitalists did during the first cold war, they want to take away the few remaining rights of labor. That fascistic faction of the ruling class is currently winning the internecine war.