Ends and Odds: The Ravings of An Old Man by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Six of 'Why Feminism Didn't Lead To Socialism'.

  Why Feminism Didn't Lead To Socialism' . Chapter Six by Dave Jaffe






        As said before, Jackie told Dick in the early 1970's, "Capitalism can't survive the coming of feminism." Yet back then in the early 1970's, both of these left wing activists may have not known about past Canadian history. If they'd looked back about 25 years, both of them wouldn't have been so optimistic about the future.
    In the 1940's a left wing wave swept the world during and after the Second World War. Communist revolutions erupted in China, Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Support for communism surged in both Italy and France. A hard core communist party  emerged in Greece. Soviet troops smashed the German Nazi army in Eastern Europe and imposed a harsh top down rule in Romania, Czechoslavakia and other Eastern European countries.
    In Britain, a democratic Labour Party won the election of 1945 and nationalized large parts of the economy. "Socialism was on the march,"an old line socialist said years later. Yet capitalism survived and by 1959 was thriving in large parts of the world. For in the late 1940's, the United States led a world wide counterattack against communism and the Soviet Union. The era of the Cold War had begun. In Canada for instance, the ruling Liberal Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation ganged up on the communist party and sidelined it. Communists were thrown out of leadership positions of unions they'd helped organize. Communist influence shriveled everywhere in Canada.
      In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy waged war against communists. Over 18,000 Americans were fired from their jobs on the grounds that they were communists. The Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. State Department funneled millions of dollars into Western Europe and turned the tide against communism and other left wing ideas.
      "Attitudes of social complacency," wrote social critic Irving Howe, "would dominate the 1950's, the years of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, spreading even to segments of the liberal community."
In the 1950's the assault on communism and even democratic left wing movements around the world turned back the left wing wave of the 1940's. Capitalism survived and prospered.