This was, above all, the period in which income and wealth differentials began to shrink; it has been called ‘the great compression’.9 It is still not entirely clear when or how the compression began, but it certainly ended in the 1970s, when the ascendance of neoliberal economic policies threw the process into reverse, initiating what subsequent economists have called ‘the great divergence’ in incomes and wealth.10
Progressive taxation was adopted throughout the West – at far higher levels than had ever been contemplated before, and not always by left-wing governments. A proposal for a mere two-per-cent extra tax on the wealthiest had been howled down and dismissed out of hand in the France of 1914, but a rate of 50 per cent was successfully introduced as early as 1920 – by a reactionary rightwing government that sensed trouble otherwise.11 The US led the rise in top tax rates during the war until the 1970s. In 1972, the Democrat presidential candidate George McGovern even proposed raising the top rate from 77 per cent to 100 per cent, to support a guaranteed minimum income. He was defeated, however, by the incumbent, Richard Nixon.12
The Second World War obviously necessitated a great levelling simply so that warring nations could overcome the problems of supply – for example, during the U-boat war in the Atlantic. But a levelling tendency had already been visible in France in 1920, and in the US after the financial crash of 1929. Demand for large, luxury cars fell abruptly; labor historian Rob Rooke records that demand fell steadily from 150,000 sold in 1929 to only 10,000 a year by 1937. Perhaps this was because it no longer felt right to drive in luxury when people were starving, and perhaps, following rumored or actual attacks on wealthy limousine-owners, rich people suddenly felt ‘that ostentatious displays of wealth could cost them their lives’.13
This was part of a shift that prepared the moral climate for the New Deal reforms of Franklin D Roosevelt, who was elected by a landslide in 1932 while a socialist anthem, Yip Harburg’s ‘Brother, Can You Spare A Dime’, stood for months at number one in the popular music charts.
The change had an enduring effect even on hardliners like General Douglas MacArthur, who earned public vilification in early 1932 and helped turn the tide of US opinion in favor of Roosevelt when he used tanks to crush a protest in Washington by the ‘Bonus Army’ of destitute World War One veterans and their families. In 1946, MacArthur took charge of Japan’s occupation and reconstruction. This involved brutal suppression of leftwing forces but MacArthur also pushed through some surprisingly radical reforms, which have helped to maintain Japan’s relatively greater equality today: land reform; a massive unionization campaign among industrial workers (albeit preceded by suppression of radical unions); the breaking-up of financial, industrial and media monopolies; and even subsidies for minority media.
The levelling trend was also galvanized by the sheer fact of a large, powerful and widely appealing rival value system in the USSR and, after the War, a greatly expanded Communist bloc of countries. Whatever the conditions of life actually were in those countries, their vigor and resilience were unquestionable, and, however corrupt their governing systems may or may not have been, they were propelled by a cause for which people were prepared to suffer and die, and which also inspired millions of people within the capitalist world. Capitalism’s frontiers had become very close.
The Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, described in his personal diary how, in cinemas after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad in 1943,
[Stalin’s] appearance on the screen always elicits loud cheers, much louder cheers than those given to Churchill or the king. Frank Owen [editor of the London Evening Standard] told me the other day… that Stalin is the soldiers’ idol and hope. If a soldier is dissatisfied with something, if he has been offended by the top brass, or if he resents some order or other from above, his reaction tends to be colorful and telling. Raising a menacing hand, he exclaims: ‘Just you wait till Uncle Joe gets here! We’ll get even with you then!’14
Communist combatants did not always identify so readily with Stalin, especially those who had fought in the International Brigades for the Spanish Republic and seen Stalin’s brutal and counter-productive takeover of the anti-fascist forces. Stalin’s 1938 pact with Hitler had disastrously undermined French and German communists’ struggles against fascism at a critical time.
After the War the French Resistance was sidelined and belittled by the brusque and professional-looking government of General Charles De Gaulle but it was hard to ignore the fact that the unquestioned heroes of the situation had not been the men in the impressive uniforms, but those much more ordinary people who had faced and suffered hardship, torture and death in the Resistance, or who had saved others from deportation and murder.
The name of Jean Moulin, the Resistance co-ordinator tortured to death by the Lyon Gestapo in 1943, was given to thousands of streets, squares, public parks and schools. None were dedicated to Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister who had assured the Nazi bureaucrats that ‘our Jews are your Jews’, and enforced targets for roundups and deportations that put many of his German opposite numbers to shame.15 Yet thousands and perhaps millions of French people still regarded Laval as a responsible politician, and many of his colleagues continued to enjoy distinguished careers. Nonetheless, by the end of the Second World War, governments almost everywhere seemed to be embroiled in a conscious competition to occupy the ‘moral high ground’.
The greater equality prevailing in the Scandinavian countries and in western Europe in the post-War period has been attributed to the sobering effect on those countries’ elites of a well-armed communist country just over the border.16 World Bank researchers deduced that a similar phenomenon was at work in the countries known in the 1990s as ‘Asian Tigers’ (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia). In a 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle, the Bank’s economists described how these countries had achieved big reductions in inequality between 1960 and 1980, and concluded that the policies had been in response to ‘crises of legitimacy’, arising from the presence nearby of communist rivals.17
EGALITARIAN HOPES FOR COMPUTING
In various places, but notably in Scandinavia, this moral shift not only affected social organization but also influenced global computer development.
In 1946 Norway’s post-liberation government introduced a full-blooded regional policy not unlike the one adopted in 1959 by a very different-looking government in Cuba after the overthrow of the Batista regime: no community, no matter how small or remote, was to be denied the full range of public services or work opportunities enjoyed by towns; rural industries were to be protected. The computer pioneer Kristen Nygaard became national spokesperson for this policy in the 1990s:
After the last world war we… decided that Norway should not deteriorate into a few densely populated areas around the large cities. Norway should exist as an interplay between vital local societies scattered all over the country. [… We] must keep our scattered settlement pattern, with an infrastructure covering and linking together all populated areas in the country. We cannot ‘turn on and off’ the local societies at will. A population returning to depopulated districts after a couple of decades will meet a deteriorated infrastructure, and will suffer from the loss of very important ‘tacit knowledge’ accumulated about the use of the land and resources during centuries of uninterrupted use and transfer of knowledge.18
For Nygaard, this was part of a radical politics that began in his childhood under Nazi occupation and which informed his approach to computerization. He and Ole-Johan Dahl invented the now-standard technique known as Object-Oriented Programming in 1965 specifically to support that kind of policy. Their computer language, SIMULA, was the starting point for most of the computer languages in use today, but it was at first regarded with suspicion as the work
