I grew up in the shadow of the Depression. For my parents, it was the defining event of their lives, rather than the Second World War. During their formative years in the 1930s and ’40s, no-one had invented what US TV anchors came to name “the Greatest Generation” (shorthand, I assume, for the twenty million Soviets who died in the War Against Fascism, and particularly those who passed away during the Battle of Stalingrad, which, last I looked, decided the War in Europe).
World War II saw my parents lose many people; but the Depression left a greater mark on them. My father was the only child in his elementary school who wore shoes, because his father worked in a bank and was not laid off. For her part, my mother left school at thirteen, never to return, because she could obtain work and hence support her family. Although my parents had class mobility in the 1950s, they never assumed it would last. My father was an agnostic social democrat, my mother an atheistic lapsed Communist. Between them they instilled in me what is of course a basic lesson of Marxism—guess what, capitalism breeds conflict and crisis as profits fall while the economy grows. I was forever being warned not about nuclear war, but about unemployment.
So when the oil crisis of 1973-74 met the coalminers’ class struggle in Britain, it almost seemed natural to live through a three-day work week, to have commodity shortages, for there to be no TV after the 10 o’clock news, to study by gaslight, to bathe weekly, and so on. This was what my parents had always told me would come to pass. When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it again seemed almost inevitable. The actual timing and nature of the event surprised me, but like the attacks of September 11 2001, the chaos and destruction did not, so apparent were their triggers.
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