(kinda) A great website to share if you have no idea how to explain the downfall of the US economy.
Edit: Thanks to everyone who provided insight on this website. I’ve had this in my bookmarks for a very long time and was curious how it held up.
That is an utter shite, neoliberal website: https://wtf1971.com/reading-list/
Blah blah blah, just dimwitted libertarian propaganda. Who da F**k quotes the Capitalist priest Hayek for anything in 2024 !? What a complete and utter idiot doing this site…
Oh, and someone please remind these dimwitted market fanatic believers that Capitalism, Hayek and all the other fanatics are the CAUSE of our current collapse and 99.99% of all problems we have on any scale…
For an actual explanation for what happened in 1971, economically and monetarily at least, go ahead and read Michael Hudson’s Superimperialism and Global Fracture. Superimperialism was so prescient at its original publishing that the US government itself used the book and the theory as a manual on how to be better superimperialists right back around 1971, and hired Hudson as a consultant.
I won’t comment on the fascist economics presented in the linked website.
I just read Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and I was thinking how US hegemony kind of fulfilled Kautsky’s idea of ultra-imperialism, i.e. an imperial cartel of imperial powers that allows total international banking collaboration, but how Lenin was still proved right by the fact that war continued to happen even after the imperialists consolidated their financial empires. War isn’t just caused by inter-imperial conflict, imperialism itself requires war to generate superprofits and requires underdevelopment to partake in superexploitation.
Might have to check Superimperialism out.
From my reading Hudson’s Superimperialism is an more an extension of Lenin’s Imperialism, based on how material conditions had evolved over the interim fifty years and the lessons learned from (at initial publication) the first generation or so of US dollar hegemony. To simplify it maybe too much, it adds a monetary dimension to the already established framework of finance capital being the driving force behind imperialism.
Superimperialism is indeed the same English term often used for Kautsky’s Überimperialismus hypothesis. Yet apart from the initial parallel of a global cartel, ie. dollar hegemony, I don’t see much of Kautsky’s ideas represented in Hudson’s work, but I’m also not terribly familiar with überimperialism.
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Isn’t this when we switched from the gold standard, meaning that most charts are useless.
This is half bullshite
There’s some validity, but…
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When I saw the title WTF Happened In 1971? I thought of January 1st, 1970 the well-known and recurring date in the computer world,(Ken Thompson, UNIX and so on). And I kinda hoped this would be about how the mass production of computers and its use worldwide had introduced the first step of a collapse of planet Earth. But no, looking at the HN comments it appears to be about Nixon, money, economy and the USA.
It’s a libertarian crypto nonsense site.
Nixon; privatization of healthcare; greed
I have a theory which I just came by recently which I think makes a lot of sense:
In the 1968 Democratic convention, a good number of the rank and file of the left wing of the American politics got attacked by the police, beaten, gassed, thrown in jail, sent to the hospital, or otherwise told in direct physical terms that their “allies” within the establishment weren’t their friends. Before 1968, you could explain it away as one corrupt police force or local suburban society being the enemy, but maybe change was possible within the system at some level. After 1968, it was explicit: Not only are we not going to work for your goals, we might try to kill you if you try to work for your goals. Now please support us in the election, please.
It would be surprising if that led to anything other than a massive collapse in support for Democrats within the approved electoral system. It would be surprising if that led to anything other than a huge upwelling of momentum and success for the explicitly-fascist wing of American politics, that let them finally take action on their awful longstanding goals after they’d spent decade on decade losing ground.
And look, both of those things are exactly what happened. It took until 2008 until a Democratic president not named Carter held office and did anything even vaguely left-wing – 40 years. The corporate-death project made quite a lot of progress during those unrestrained 36 years.
I have no idea if the cause and effect worked the way I describe. But it would make sense to me if it did.
Computers?
