WHILE conventional wisdom has it that capitalism triumphed over communism in the cold war, in 2019 the journalist Aditya Chakrabortty provided a more nuanced, largely ignored, analysis.

“Communism didn’t topple capitalism, but kept it honest — and so saved it from itself,” he argued in the Guardian.

“The very presence of a powerful rival ideology frightened capitalists into sharing their returns with workers and the rest of the society, in higher wages, more welfare spending and greater public investment.”

Historian Eric Hobsbawm made a similar point in 1990: “All that made Western democracy worth living for its people — social security, the welfare state, a high and rising income for its wage earners […] — is the result of fear,” he wrote.

“Fear of the poor and the largest and best organised block of citizens — the workers; fear of an alternative that really existed and that could really spread, notably in the form of Soviet communism. Fear of the system’s own instability.”

Of course, any examination of global and national histories is incredibly complex: there are many factors behind the political and economic settlement in each nation.

And while there have been mass killings and horrific human rights abuses in self-identifying communist nations, their global influence (both as competitor and role model), along with socialist movements more broadly, is often overlooked.

However, a number of studies provide evidence in support of Chakrabortty’s and Hobsbawm’s arguments.

A 2019 co-authored paper from the economists Andre Albuquerque Sant’Anna and Leonardo Weller — cited by Chakrabortty — investigated the question: “Did the threat of communism influence income distribution in developed capitalist economies during the cold war?”

Their conclusion? “We find a robust relationship between income inequality and the distance to communist events.”

They provide a brief survey of several case studies to illustrate their argument, including post-war Germany, Sweden, Denmark, South Korea and Japan.

“The results suggest … that the spread of communism fostered deals between domestic elites and workers that redistributed the gains from capital in favour of labour,” effects that “were reinforced by strong unions and the presence of relevant communist parties.”

A 2015 International Labour Office paper, also mentioned by Chakrabortty — echoes these findings.

“Inequalities in the 19th century were much higher than before the Industrial Revolution,” it noted.

“Following the rise of workers’ movements in the West and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of inequalities of the previous century was reversed for over half a century until the 1980s as the threat of the spread of communism inspired welfarist redistributive reforms, giving capitalism a more human face.”

Ferdinand Eibl, from King’s College London, and Steffen Hertog, from the London School of Economics, came to a similar conclusion when they analysed factors affecting human development in developing nations in a 2016 draft paper: “the provision of mass welfare … is strongly conditioned by whether ruling elites have faced subversive threats at critical junctures of regime formation.”

In particular, they contend “threats of bottom-up subversion that are accompanied by broader distributional demands are the key trigger for welfare-enhancing use of rents. In practice, these have almost invariably taken on a left-wing hue.”

For example, referencing British Foreign Office documents from the National Archives, they note: “At the time when oil was discovered in 1964, Oman was one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the whole Middle East region, with a largely illiterate population and almost no national infrastructure, ruled by a Sultan.”

A year later a leftist-nationalist insurgency emerged in the southern region of Oman, known as Dhofar, in the shape of the Dhofar Liberation Front.

In 1968 the group moved further to the left, transforming into the openly Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf.

“The rebels’ key grievance was Oman’s underdevelopment in the face of both growing local oil riches and rising standards of living in neighboring Gulf countries,” they note.

Circa 1968, Oman’s budget allocated 75 per cent of spending on defence, compared to 1.3 per cent on health and 0.8 per cent on education.

With the government’s war against the rebels going very badly, in 1970 there was a British-instigated palace coup, with the Sultan replaced by his son Qaboos.

Immediately after gaining power, Qaboos announced: “I promise that the first thing I shall dedicate myself to will be the speedy establishment of a modern government.”

Oman “quickly built up a national administration and public services, with particular focus on Dhofar,” Eibl and Hertog note.

“Provision of schools, health facilities and water distribution for the tribesmen of Dhofar was among the new Sultan’s first acts,” with the share of military spending dropping below 50 per cent and development spending rising to more than a third, despite the ongoing war.

The provision of key public services rocketed. The school population in the nation increased from 750 in June 1970 to 10,000 by the end of the year; the number of schools increased from three in 1970 to 68 by 1973 and the number of health clinics increased from 13 to 29 in the same period.

With Oman’s welfare services continuing to improve beyond the ’70s, the authors note the “archives are very explicit about the political rationale of development expenditure,” with notes taken by a British diplomat after meeting Qaboos confirming that the Sultan “fully realised the importance to the stability of the Sultanate of developing the country as rapidly as could reasonably be done.”

These studies highlight three basic conclusions for me.

First, while it is of course preferable, political parties or movements don’t necessarily have to win power to successfully push for significant positive change.

Second, those who oppose, or are indifferent to, communism, socialism and trade union power nevertheless benefit from all of the left-wing activism that has been carried out over decades and centuries to improve the lives of working people.

And third, the evidence presented seems to confirm Noam Chomsky’s oft-repeated dictum that a government’s primary enemy is its own population.

Which certainly goes a long way to explaining the elite-supporting propaganda continuously directed at the general public by the government, corporations and the mainstream media.

Indeed, I’ve always found Chomsky’s truism a paradigm-shifting analysis, which leads to a similarly revelatory conclusion: if a government’s main enemy is its own population, then conversely that means the public’s primary opponent is likely not some external bogeyman they have been conditioned to fear but their own rulers and its corporate backers.

Follow Ian on Twitter @IanJSinclair.