This Fleeting World

Our World: The Modern Era 77
Worth Debating
In 1935 Sinclair Lewis’s novel It Can’t Happen Here was published.
The plot dealt with how fascism could indeed happen here in the
United States. Other fictional works, such as Philip Roth’s 2004
novel, The Plot Against America, have posed similar scenarios. Do
you think fascism could ever win out in America? What factors would
have to be in place—or out of place—for that to occur?
in Japan) to incorporate within its ruling structures the entrepreneurs
who would be needed to make a success of industrialization. Eventually
the rapid growth of an urban proletariat (working class) and the impoverishment
of increasing numbers of peasants generated a social crisis that,
when combined with military defeat during the Russo-Japanese War and
the huge costs of participation in World War I, led to the collapse of the
Russian imperial state. Traditional elites reacted too passively to the crisis,
which allowed the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), to seize
power and hold on to it during a brutal civil war (1918–1920).
The Bolsheviks were radical Marxists, committed to the overthrow of
world capitalism and its replacement by a society in which productive resources
such as the land, banks, and all large enterprises would be owned
collectively. Under Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), the Soviet
government took decisive and brutal steps to build up a non-capitalist
industrial society capable of challenging the might of its capitalist rivals.
Employing methods of state management pioneered during World War I,
the Soviet government began to manage and co-ordinate the entire Soviet
economy, leaving no significant role to market forces. To manage rapid
industrialization and rearmament, the Soviet government created a huge,
powerful, and coercive state apparatus, willing and capable of acting with
extreme brutality where necessary. For a time people thought the new system
might match the economic and military power of the major capitalist
states. During the 1930s and again during the 1950s rates of economic
growth were more rapid in the Soviet Union than elsewhere (although the
lack of market prices in the Soviet command economy makes monetary