Imperialism ended the depression for short term, there was a lot of growth postwar because of the whole military industrial complex.the new deal was putting a band aid on a bullet wound, ww2 definitely brought us out of the depression.
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What ended the Great Depression in the US?
Most claim the war brought an end to it, but that doesn't really account for changes in the US economy.
Was the primer of the US as the supreme imperial authority in the world the cause of this?
Imperialism ended the depression for short term, there was a lot of growth postwar because of the whole military industrial complex.the new deal was putting a band aid on a bullet wound, ww2 definitely brought us out of the depression.
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"[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological, generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR—so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.”
--Carl Sagan
Keynesian stimuli (including WW2 spending and some New Deal measures).
World War Two! The greatest stimulus you could hope for. Which also destroys a huge amount of surplus production.
Great Depression was ended by massive increasing of money supply due to WWII which can be hardly called Keynesian stimulus but Keynes advocated building form printed money and not destroying.
"Property is theft."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"the system of wage labor is a system of slavery"
Karl Heinrich Marx
The war pretty much stifled unemployment for awhile. If you weren't sent overseas to fight or act as a field medic, chances are you were helping with the war effort at home. After the war, of course, Europe and Asia looked to the US for relief, as industrial competition abroad was annihilated.
The New Deal and the Keynesian economic policies made a slight dent in the domestic economy. It wasn't nearly enough to have a major impact on the economic damage done during the depression.
"Phil Spector is haunting Europe." - Karl Marx
The vast destruction of capital during WWII and the expansion of the global market following the war. This also led to the "Golden Age" of capitalism in the 50s and 60s.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or dreamed that one possessed. Yet, it is only when a man is able, without bitterness or self-pity, to surrender a dream he has long possessed that he is set free - he has set himself free - for higher dreams, for greater privileges.”
-James Baldwin
"We change ideas like neckties."
- E.M. Cioran
tend to agree with everyone here - keynesian stimulus/ww2. massive government spending basically. US budget was up to well over 100 percent of GDP during the war, financed primarily by the public e.g. via war bonds and higher taxes. government-financed capital spending went from like 10 percentish to ~70 percent of spending on industrial capital, utilising military demand to create whole new markets (e.g. aerospace and associated) which contributed to the post-war boom, along with US trade advantage, repayments, etc. raw material markets also came in handy, servicing booming car industry after the war. lots of reasons, obviously, but think that's the general gist of it
The Great Zoloft.
Well, aside from a period of aftermath following 1937 recession, the US economy had been recovering and growing throughout the entire pre-1942 FDR era. It is anathema for a certain type of US conservative/libertarian to admit, but FDR's policies, even before the massive investment in the US economy during the war itself, had, or at least were well on the way to, rescuing US capitalism.
http://www.economics-charts.com/gdp/gdp-1929-2004.html
As for the war itself, it undoubtedly had a transformative influence on the US economy. It didn't merely represent a salve to the Depression blighted US economy, it represented a complete shift in gear and allowed the US to achieve its industrial potential - which by the 1950s dwarfed anything seen during the "golden" boom years of the 20s.
And the fact is that it wasn't merely that the war forced a major rearrangement of the US economy to place it on a productive war footing, resulting in considerable industrial development and spending, it also saw an enormous cash injection primarily from the British, particularly in the first couple of years of the war in Europe. To suggest that the kind of investment we are talking about, be it by the US state, US capitalists and European investors, "doesn't really account for changes in the US economy" strikes me as farcical. Imagine how much the British alone paid for US military equipment, machine tools and natural resources. A lot, something like £5 billion (that's a guestimate, I can't remember how much they actually spent on C&C but it was a lot) on the cash-and-carry scheme before the advent of lend-lease.
And, of course, that money is not just going on military hardware, it is going to a huge variety of US industries and businesses. To give you an idea of the scale, a guy I know who works on this kind of stuff was telling me that a small British state communications agency spent a million pounds on importing American IBM machinery because the industrial resources in Britain to build them in that country. A million pounds doesn't sound like a lot of money, and it was indeed a drop in the ocean. But when you take GDP and inflation into account, and what you could actually buy and build with that kind of cash, it is the equivalent of around 100 Spitfire fighter aircraft. And they spent that kind of money to get business machinery from IBM. That's a huge investment in the 1940s.
And you don't think that kind of direct investment, be it by the British government, the US military, etc, in industry can account for changes in the US economy?
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- Hanlon's Razor
Probably the most important factor was the ending of The Gold Standard. With this dinosaur out of the way, money supply could expand as needed to accommodate increasing population. Before, more gold had to be mined to keep up with population growth, lest prices drop (resulting in massive unemployment--- as had happened in prior years) Of course, time has shown that the Gold Standard was completely unnecessary in the first place
(as an analogy, it's like removing the training wheels off of your kid's first bike; they are amazed that they really didn't need them at all.)
money is to politics as fertilizer is to garden weeds.
State Capitalist and "Military Keynesian" policies during WW2.
Jimmy Hoffa.
For the glory of socialism & love!
1. Destruction of capital during the Great Depression
2. Destruction of capital during World War II
3. War spending
4. New Deal spending
In that order IMO
"A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another." - Mao Zedong
Stalin vs H. G. Wells - Marxism vs Liberalism
The State and Revolution
The Critique of the Gotha Programme
I think all of the above are relevant points. The war-effort and its mobilization indeed partly revived the economy. But I think the 'suburbization' of the US after the war in a Haussman-like way also played a part in stabilising the US economy.
As David Harvey says in his book Rebel Cities:
"Fast-forward now to the United States in 1942. The capital surplus disposal problem that had seemed so intractable in the 1930s (and the unemployment that went with it) was temporarily resolved by the huge mobilization for the war effort. But everyone was fearful as to what would happen after the war. Politically the situation was dangerous. The federal government was in effect running a nationalized economy (and was doing so very efficiently), and the United States was in alliance with the communist Soviet Union in the war against fascism. Strong social movements with socialist inclinations had emerged in response to the depression of the 1930s, and sympathizers were integrated into the war effort. We all know the subsequent history of the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War (abundant signs of which were there in 1942). As under Louis Bonaparte, a hefty dose of political repression was evidently called for by the ruling classes of the time to reassert their power. But what of the capital surplus disposal problem?
In 1942 there appeared a lengthy evaluation of Haussmann's efforts in an architectural journal. It documented in detail what he had done that was so compelling and attempted an analysis of his mistakes. The article was by none other than Robert Moses, who after World War II did to the whole New York metropolitan region what Haussmann had
done to Paris.6 That is, Moses changed the scale of thinking about the urban process and-through the system of(debt-financed) highways and infrastructural transformations, through suburbanization, and through the total re-engineering not just of the city but of the whole metropolitan region-he defined a way to absorb the surplus product and thereby resolve the capital surplus absorption problem. Th is process, when taken nation-wide, as it was in all the major metropolitan centers of the United States (yet another transformation of scale), played a crucial role in the stabilization of global capitalism after World War II (this was a period when the United States could afford to power the whole global non-communist economy through running trade deficits). The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles and produced a whole new way of life in which new products-from suburban tract housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil-all played their part in the absorption of the surplus. Suburbanization (alongside militarization) thus played a critical role in helping to absorb the surplus in the post-war years. But it did so at the cost of hollowing out the central cities and leaving them bereft of a sustainable economic basis, thus producing the so-called "urban crisis" of the 1960s, defined by revolts of impacted minorities (chiefly African-American) in the inner cities, who were denied access to the new prosperity."
This also again proved (like it did originally in France) how true Engels' comments on the "Haussman solution" were. Engels noted that: "In reality the bourgeoisie has only one method of solving the housing question after its fashion-that is to say, of solving it in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew. This method is called “Haussmann.” "
He then gives his definition of this solution: "I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc. No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is everywhere the same: the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else and often in the immediate neighborhood".
In the US this solution for a while worked in stabilizing the economy and society, but it also reproduced the problems anew, which, as Harvey noted, exploded in the 1960.
Is this resistance or a costume party?
Either way I think black with bandanas is a boring theme.
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