A Marxist History of Capitalism by Henry Heller

Author:Henry Heller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Capitalism, Non-Fiction, Economics, Colonialism, Imperialism, Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Politics
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-07-25T23:00:00+00:00

World War II (1939–45)

The build-up of imperialist tensions exploded into World War II, the result of which was the collapse of all of the capitalist states except the United States, which emerged as the hegemon of the capitalist world. At the same time the war led to the victory of the Soviet Union and of a new revolutionary government in China (1949) removing most of Eurasia from capitalist control (Weiner 2002, Blanco 1971). Rising nationalisms and liberation struggles in the Global South after 1945 allowed most under-developed countries to achieve political if not economic independence from the West (Prashad 2007). In the aftermath of World War II the United States – the last hope of capitalism – assumed leadership of the capitalist world under the mantle of liberalism and multilateralism. The rivals of the United States for world dominance – England, Germany and Japan – were crippled while the United States emerged as the single economic and military capitalist power. There was, to be sure, the opposing economic and political system focused on the Soviet Union and a few years later Communist China, but the socialist camp based on Eurasia posed no immediate threat to American control over the rest of the world.

Monopoly capitalism and global imperialism were reinforced by United States dominance. It stabilized the capitalist world by organizing global political and military resistance to Communism, liberalizing world trade and overseeing sharp improvements in productivity, the establishment of the regulated welfare state and the spread of mass consumerism based on debt (1945–80). The intensified exploitation of under-developed countries was another feature of the period. In the United States permanent war mobilization and militarism became an ideological and economic alternative to socialism.

On this basis there was a massive increase in the forces of production and improvement in the standard of living in the advanced capitalist states in a wide trans-oceanic arc running from West Germany to Japan. Consciously using its naval and air superiority and overwhelming economic and financial strength the United States after 1945 created a new trans-oceanic framework for capitalism. It was based on its direct political control of defeated Germany and Japan and indirect control of other states through the primacy of the dollar and new institutions like the UN, IMF, GATT, World Bank, the NATO and SEATO military alliances and the European Common Market.

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