172/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!concessions to the working class; for the crisis of the colonial empires
and the liberation struggles of dominated Third World peoples; for the
relative successes of industrialisation by import-substitution in Latin
America; for economic dynamism in India (after it won independence
from Britain in 1947), Algeria (after it won independence from
France in 1962) and Egypt (under Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s)
until the 19 70s; and for economic progress in the so-called socialist
countries (Eastern Europe after the war, the USSR from the 1930s
onwards).
The period had a number of striking features. First, a large number
of private companies came under public control ('nationalisations'),
beginning in Western Europe in the wake of the victory over the Nazis
and extending into the Third World until the mid-1970s. Second,
social welfare systems were set up and expanded as part of what
became known as the Welfare State. Such reforms were also carried
out in a number of Third World countries, such as Mexico in the
1930s under Lazaro Cardenas. Third, the economic model in place
was 'Fordist' - that is, involving the development of mass
consumption of durable goods in the industrialised countries. Fourth,
a social compromise was reached in these countries between the
leadership of the labour movement (parties and trades unions) and
'their' capitalist class. This compromise took the form of agreements
on 'social peace'.
These features arose and prospered within a framework of
sustained growth - in the developed capitalist countries, the Third
World and the so-called socialist countries.
These wide-ranging political and economic developments also
included a worldwide renewal of non-dogmatic Marxism in the
developed capitalist countries (the works of Ernest Mandel, Paul
Sweezy, Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, to name but a few), and
in Cuba after the revolutionary victory (beginning with the works of
Ernesto Che Guevara in the 1960s). In Eastern Europe (Kuron and
Modzelewsky in the Poland of the 1960s, Karel Kosik, Rudolf Bahro
and others) a non-dogmatic Marxism emerged in opposition to the
ossified Stalinist variant.
It is also worth noting the emergence of the Marxist-influenced
dependency school of thought in Latin America (Theotonio Dos
Santos, Rui Mauro Marini, Fernando Henrique Cardoso). Finally,
there was the work of Samir Amin on de-linking.