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A crisis in the private property foundations of economic and social relations in the USA was evolving and deepening for several decades in the beginning of the 20th century and gave birth to a profound crisis in the ideology of private property. The decade
which began with the termination of World War I was the last in which ideology and politics were dominated by traditional Individualistic themes. In early March 1933, at the moment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration the economic and political situation in the country was extremely tense. On the heels of a new intensification of the industrial and agricultural crisis came the complete collapse of the banking system, which in effect ceased functioning. The banking catastrophe which occurred in February and March of that year paralyzed the US economy and entailed mass ruination of small depositors. Millions of working people were now directly confronted with the threat of starvation and death.
The Americans, who had already borne the burden of the crisis for several years, were no longer in a mood to tolerate a do-nothing government. Dissatisfaction and indignation were growing from day to day. As soon as it took up the reins of power the Roosevelt government set in motion an entire complex of extraordinary measures. On March 9, 1933 it summoned a special session of Congress, which worked for three months. Congress adopted a multitude of laws encompassing nearly all aspects of the country's economic and political life. In this space of the "first hundred days" of the Roosevelt's Administration, the policy known as the New Deal took its basic shape.
The theoretical underpinnings of the New Deal were found in the thought of the English economist John Maynard Keynes, a proponent of state-monopoly capitalism. Keynes and his followers argued that capitalism was no longer a self-regulating system and that energetic government regulation was required to ensure the normal course of reproduction. In conformity with these general theoretical propositions put forth by the Keynesians, the New Deal government set its fundamental socio-economic task — the restoration of the economy through active government intervention in the process of capitalist reproduction and through systematic government regulation of the economy.
After the crisis of 1929—1933 and the New Deal policy, as American monopolism turned, into its state-monopoly form, the ideology of individualism retreated before a variety of state-monopoly concepts whose foundations rested upon a combination of neo-liberalism, embodied in the two-party system of Republicans and Democrats. This ideology has been an inevitable component of all stages of state-monopoly development, for individualism is fed by at least three sources under the contemporary conditions. One is the small individual private holdings which, though incidental to the modern system and constantly on the verge of extinction, nevertheless evince a remarkable vitality and tenacity even under the seemingly intolerable dominance of monopoly conglomerates. The second is the state-monopoly complex itself, which, despite the negation of private property foundations in their primeval form, incorporates modified elements of private property.
The forces of individualism are greatly dependent upon the specific political situation inside and outside the country as well as upon the balance of forces in the class struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s American imperialism suffered no small number of defeats internationally and had to confront a multitude of domestic socio-political crises. This gave proponents of individualism cause to believe that the country's ills stemmed from pernicious collectivism and from the frailty of the once strong and healthy fibers of individualism.
