Establishing the Global Economic System: 1945-1955

World War II provided the United States with an unexpected opportunity to escape from the deep crisis of the 1930s, to speed up the modernization of its productive system through diffusion of the Fordist model (begun in the 1920s), and to acquire a leadership role in all fields, sadly symbolized by the exercise of its nuclear monopoly in the August 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

However, the European and Japanese social fabric was sufficiently strong to avoid a recurrence of the revolutionary radicalization of 1919. On the contrary, Europe under the Marshall Plan and Japan under the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco underwent speedy development on the Fordist model. The historic compromise between capital and labor that formed the basis of ideological regulation was still audible in 1919, although the ideological underpinning had been achieved through the massive recruitment of working classes by their imperialist bourgeoisies since the end of the nineteenth century and especially since 1914. Accordingly, what I call ‘‘Socialism I” was certainly over by then. In 1945 everything was set for speedy implementation of Fordism. Rapid modernization came within the framework of a U.S. hegemony that was accepted without reservation in the 1949 creation of NATO, despite some rhetorical rearguard actions fought by the old colonialists. The system was fully in place by the mid-1950s with the Japanese economic takeoff and the 1957 Treaty of Rome.

Sovietism crystallized in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution faced contradic­tory demands from the outset.

Sovietism subsequently underwent a baptism of fire. It emerged victorious from its confrontation with Nazi rule and played a decisive part in defeating it. Despite massive losses in the war, the Soviet Union enjoyed enormous prestige in 1945 and was able to cross the first threshold of the Cold War declared on it by the United States. The USSR was on the defensive in 1945 and did not reach military parity with its American rival until the end of the 1960s. Hence I maintain that the bipolar international system was in place not under the Yalta Agreement, as is often too readily said, but after the Potsdam Conference. At Yalta the United States did not yet have nuclear weapons and was therefore obliged to accept the Soviet Union’s demand for a protective flank in Eastern Europe against a possible recurrence of German militarism; at Potsdam, the United States, confident of military supremacy, decided to impose a debilitating arms race on the USSR.

Until Stalin’s death in 1953, postwar Sovietism was on the defensive. In subsequent years it launched a counteroffensive by uniting with third world nationalism and supporting the Bandung front established in 1955. For complex reasons related to differences between Maoism and Sovietism and a divergent view of third world revolt, a split between the two great powers of the Eastern world occurred after 1957.

At the end of World War II the African and Asian countries on the periphery of the world capitalist system were still subject to colonial rule. From 1800 on, the center—periphery polarization took the form of a contrast between industrialized areas and areas linked to colonialism and deprived of industry. The peoples of Asia and Africa, inspired by half a century of ideological and political redefinition around a new nationalism, burst into revolt after 1945. In the ensuing 15 years, first Asia, then Africa regained their political independence. Everything was set for what Bandung called new ‘developmentalism’: independence, modernization, industrialization. The strategic alliance between this movement and the Soviet Union enabled the latter to escape isolation.

A dialogue was opened between the Afro-Asian movement and that in Latin America, which was not faced with the struggle for political independence and the affirmation of a non-European culture but was concerned with the demands of modernization and industrialization of the continent.

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