Over the last month I have published several glosses reminding us that the West reached its civilizational peak around 1950-80, that there is incredibly little attention paid to this period, and that we should be thinking about key issues:
- What kicked off that amazing era?
- Why, after a relatively short period of time, did the collapse, the transition to a liberal system, and the rapid decline come?
Incidentally, this challenges the popular Marxist interpretation that since Lenin’s time everything is imperialism and everything is completely wrong. If you lived in any European country except Greece in 1975, you wouldn’t find it bad at all.
I also argued that the culprit of the collapse could not have been the neo-Marxists. They would have loved to have done it, but they never had the skills or resources to do it. After all, it wasn’t Frankfurt School philosophers who closed mines and factories, but financial investors and conservative politicians.
The role of neo-Marxism can be illustrated by comparing it to human health, or rather unhealth. We can see the forces of unregulated transnational capitalism as AIDS, and neo-Marxism as a banal virus that causes death. Fighting against neo-Marxism is a useless job, it solves nothing.
And how did Western societies succumb so easily? Perhaps because they were totally unprepared. Since the 1970s, the West has gone through a series of crises – the rise of the intellectual class, the useless and in every way botched Vietnam War, the oil crisis, later the shift of jobs to Asia, etc. It would have been logical for the Soviet communists and their allies to take advantage of this. The West was prepared for this. After all, Western European regimes were founded precisely with the assumption that the main danger was posed by the communists.
But no one expected the deadly attack to come from their own bankers. Only a few deranged leftists, whom no one took seriously, foresaw this. Yet there was the experience of the inter-war crisis of the enormous danger posed by financial speculators. But that experience was too quickly forgotten.