"Lenin loses big time in thinking that world war leads to world revolution, underestimating the capacity of workers to use their military service as justification for getting bigger social welfare from the state (Kolko THESIS"
I don't know who Kolko is, but he got it partly right. My theory has long been that the Europeans develop substantial welfare states and the US did not because the euro-civilian population kept getting stuck in the middle of the capitalists wars. Military service was a subset of this. In the US only the GI's got any class boosting benefits. Of course at that low a level their really was a trickle-down effect. Between that and the fact that we had competitive advantage, by default, things must have felt pretty good for awhile. If US capitalists hadn't been so stupid and arrogant about why they became the big dogs, that advantage could have been turned into something really amazing, capitalistically speaking. Instead we ended up with, say auto corps playing catch-up after years of sanctimoneous know-it-all-ism for which American workers paid dearly. For further discussion of my speculative theory see N.E. Daynow's "Real Trends in Dialectic Conjecture".
BTW isn't it a hoot that US's global leadership has been greatly diminished by our winning of the Cold War.(from the "Book of Obvious Truisms", see also I.Kant Findit's "Who Put The DUH In Diplomacy".)
Paula Marie LaFlamme Institute For The Detection Of Tribal Echos