A Battleground to Produce Luxury Goods

Economic production became one way for the two sides in the Cold War to demonstrate the relative superiority of their systems. During the global depression of the 1930s, proponents of the communist system could point to the inability of western capitalist democracies like Britain, Germany, and the United States to provide for their citizen’s basic needs as evidence of the capitalist system’s inherent defects. To those proponents, the apparent success of the Soviet Union’s collectivist system during the global depression stood as evidence of communism’s intrinsic superiority over capitalism. The division of the post-World War II world into western capitalism and Soviet communism raised the stakes of that dispute exponentially.