Was the Soviet Union good for the U.S.?

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The Soviet Union may not have been so good for the Soviet Union, but its existence was a great boon for the United States. America may not realize it, but she misses the Soviet Union - and not just to make the Olympics not suck. The spectre of international Communism served to keep the forces of Capital in check, which allowed workers in the U.S. to flourish to such a degree that the middle of Twentieth Century is already looked back upon as the golden age of the Great American Middle Class...

Without the counterbalance of the Soviet Union, Capital has increasingly run roughshod over the interests of Labor...

The Capitalists saw the soviet system, deformed excuse for socialism that it was, as a threat to their power and knew if they went too far the people would rise up as happened in Russia. Now they have no threats and are free to loot and plunder as they wish.

when there is no perceived pressure, in any way, from a leftward paradigm.

Cases can be made for both sides of the argument

was going to be a very bad thing for our country?
Wish I could remember the exact quote.

Now, we're mostly destroying our own and at war with ourselves.

...and now it's terrorists or "islamists" and even then it's not really working very strong. Other countries have similar "evils abroad."

We do better with a Big Bad Other like the USSR. Wars on Drugs (and everything else), "terrorism" just don't quite get us there. I'd say the threat of worker uprising was only one component. We also had a good opponent for everything from chess to ballet to tractor manufacture and grain exports. It ALL mattered, we had to be better at EVERYthing than THEM. I think it made the government and other entities to be more supportive of all fields: education, sports, arts, industry.... to a certain extent anyway.

in matters both big and small.

...and the labor movement which was heavily flexing it's muscle.

You may want to check out "Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States": http://www.amazon.com/Subterranean-Fire-History-Working-Class-Radicalism/dp/193185923X

The USSR was great for the US because it gave the US a nation it could look good next to. Now that the US has to be compared to the ADVANCED nations of the world in banking, health care, the economy etc., the US comes off as a second rate nation.

Here is how the US compares to an advanced nation:

Citizens who have zero or insufficient access to health care in their own nation: Canada 0% US 38%

Number of banks that have failed: Canada 0 since the end of the Great Depression US over 300 since January 1, 2008

Minimum wage in US dollars: Canada $9.89 US $7.25

Job Creation in 2011

________Unemployment rate_______Jobs Created____Jobs Created per million pop____Month__Population(million)_Job Creation Ratio CAN:US
Canada__________7.80_______________69200_____________________2050.98___________January____33.7399___________17.491:1
United States_____9.00_______________36000______________________117.26___________January___307.0066

________Unemployment rate_______Jobs Created____Jobs Created per million pop____Month__Population(million)_Job Creation Ratio CAN:US
Canada__________7.80______________156000____________________4623.61____________February____33.7399___________7.393:1
United States_____8.90______________192000_____________________625.39____________February___307.0066

________Unemployment rate_______Jobs Created____Jobs Created per million pop____Month__Population(million)_Job Creation Ratio CAN:US
Canada__________7.70_______________91000____________________2697.10_____________March______33.7399___________3.833:1
United States_____8.90______________216000_____________________703.57_____________March_____307.0066

________Unemployment rate_______Jobs Created____Jobs Created per million pop____Month__Population(million)_Job Creation Ratio CAN:US
Canada__________7.60_______________58300____________________1727.92_____________April______33.7399___________2.174:1
United States_____9.00______________244000_____________________794.77_____________April_____307.0066

________Unemployment rate_______Jobs Created____Jobs Created per million pop____Month__Population(million)_Job Creation Ratio CAN:US
Canada__________7.40_______________22300______________________660.94_____________May_______33.7399____________3.758:1
United States_____9.10_______________54000______________________175.89_____________May______307.0066

If the United States were highly unionized, had strict banking regulation, had a 30% higher minimum wage, and had a universal single payer health care system, it might come close to creating the proportion of jobs per unit of population like advanced nations like Canada do. So long as the United States is a second rate nation in every way which is important, you Americans will never be able to keep up with our advanced nations.

Keep in mind that the ussr vs usa conflict also allowed the "advanced" nations to avoid spending into their military, which allows them to have make those economies so "advanced", now we can see how the Chinese and the Russians deal with Canada. I admire some things about Canada (especially Quebec, aka the Canadians that actually have a national identity) but methinks some of you are too quick to polish the halo, especially since you could not even kick Stephen Harper out of office. Interesting times await, especially around the Northwest Passage where the Russians put their flag.

No fear of them getting there first, no Apollo program.

By extrapolation, if there is no Apollo program, the tech spun off in use today isn't invented and integrated in the same time frame.

There was also the perceived need of a military computer network that could survive a nuclear attack from the Soviets.

No scary Russian Bear, no internet.

Think of all the online fun we'd have missed!

As soon as WWII was over, the drumbeat to fear Communism in the guise of the Soviet Union began - so the US military build up for WWII never had much of a draw down.

Every dollar spent on arms is a dollar not spent on building a healthy society.



( having said that, if it was the Soviet Union, the US would have found a different enemy - same as we shifted to terrorism once the Soviets collapsed. )

The Soviet Union gave the U.S. an enemy to fight. It gave Presidents an excuse to push their anti-worker policies and send Americans to war so that they could stop Communism's encroachment on Capitalism's dominance around the world. The Soviet Union didn't force America to keep the forces of capital in check. America didn't need to do that. Unfortunately, most people here didn't truly understand Communism, they believed it to be a terrible ideology which was focused solely on limiting people's freedoms. If people (I'm speaking of the majority of Americans, not all) had understood the differences between Capitalism and Communism, if they had been able to form a detailed critique of Capitalism, then Capitalism would have had to toe a very specific line. Since most people couldn't do that, America and Capitalism was protected. If, however, a critique of capitalism ever did arise and gain popularity among the general populace, the critique could be brushed aside by simply denouncing it as Soviet propaganda and declaring its authors to be "defectors".

The middle class has deteriorated because of the policies that were implemented during the Cold War, namely Reaganomics. Although the Soviet Union disintegrated shortly after Reagan, it was still very much a factor during his administration and it gave Reagan more ammo to fire up support for his policies.

...then Russia's democratic workers socialism would've prospered, and the workers in the United States would've had genuine allies overseas. As it stood though we were fighting on two fronts, one, against the capitalists here, and two, against the overall authoritarian tendency over there. In many ways the workers revolution was completely crushed by a pure kind of isolation, we had no one to support us politically abroad, and therefore no real pressure to help us attain our goals.

--has been awful for people unterneath our bombs and drones, but Latin America has greatly benefitted from imperial attentions being elsewhere. When the Eye of Sauron is on the Precious, the little hobbitses have much more freedom to scurry around unnoticed.

a whole lot easier for Americans at the time.

And I have posted a little here before about capitalism maybe needing an "alternative sphere of influence" to keep the capitalists honest and engaged in trying to "win people over" by treating people "better than the other guys"--i.e. some competition. Totalitarian capitalism may end up being no better than totalitarian communism.

But I don't know what that "alternative sphere of influence" would entail, maybe some kind of socialism in which corporations were not considered human beings and psychopathic greed was punishable. :shrug:

It will prove to be MUCH worse. There are no social ideals to live up to in capitalism. At least the deformed worker's state of the USSR had ideals of egalitarianism. Capitalism doesn't even have that. Just profit and concentration of wealth. Think of capitalism as a Monopoly game. There's ultimately only one winner.

Recced.

Not only was it another example of the triumph of labor over capital, but Mao's Little Red Book and the Cultural Revolution were inspirational to young liberals in that era.

Plus Mao kept China out of the world economy for the most part. About their only export was revolution. After Mao's death China's entry into the global economy changed how economies in every other country operate. Since Mao prevented that from happening during his rule (though no one would contend that his main goal was help the American middle class), a case can be made that he was a very important factor in "the golden age of the Great American Middle Class".

The Soviet Union was good for the world

(somewhat) progressive secular state -like Turkey. Our dread that Iran's 1953 revolution would put them too close to the Soviet sphere would never have occurred, so the coup may not have happened.

> Cuba's 1959 revolution would have been put down militarily (by the US), and by now would be an overdeveloped tourist hellhole surrounded by privately owned beachfront property -kind of a cross between Cancun and Tijuana.

> Reagan may never have had a chance at the White House.

So many possibilities. Alternative history is really interesting.

worldwide. Even if it was just as an IDEA and the Stalinized bureaucratic USSR WAS just an idea. But even an idea is helpful at times.