Carryfast:
Firstly I don’t think we could really call pre WW2 US or UK economies Fordist Capitalist.With Ford’s ideas having long been crushed by the typical Victorian business ethic of his competitors by then.
I’m not really sure that makes any sense. The model T was a 1900s product, and Henry Ford died in 1947 (which might loosely be regarded as the beginning of the period when capitalism as a whole adopted a more paternalistic, managed form). The Ford Motor Company itself never went back to Victorian practices. Far from Ford’s ideas being crushed by competitors, it would appear that Ford’s mentality spread and became more popular!
I know that the British chemical industry was also openly stitching-up the market in the 1920s - they had realised that bitter, low-road competition was bad for profits and bad for the progress of the industry. Today, these practices would be illegal as monopolistic, because Victorian attitudes to business prevail once again and have been baked back into our laws since the 1980s (not just here but in fact neoliberalism has swept across Western capitalism at just around the same time as the Soviet ideological threat started to abate).
It is true that the whole economies of the US or the UK could not, pre-WW2, have been called Fordist, but that’s why in that era ‘Communism’ was running away with the prize, because the Soviets were doing to develop their whole society precisely what Western capitalist states would not do!
It is often noted by historians that Hitler made a great mistake in not appropriating the means of production from private hands, and turning to a command economy early enough (which Britain did immediately and extensively on the outbreak of war). But of course, his whole agenda (and the reason why the Nazis had such support amongst the German middle and upper classes) was precisely to stop that happening and reject the underpinning ideology of taking production into public ownership and management.
We see the same today, were we’re seeing the grievances of the working class against capitalism (and the concern of elites about left-wing solutions to it), transformed into anti-EU, anti-regulation, anti-socialistic solutions like Brexit, in which the grand plan of Farage is simply a return to the beggar-thy-neighbour policies of yore of trying to export and compete your way out of an international crisis of capitalism.
With the great depression and industrial strife on both sides of the Atlantic being the result.But no I can’t believe that living standards of the average Soviet worker was anywhere close to that of their US counterpart in the 1950’s/60’s.While agreed maybe that gap wasn’t always that large in the case of the sometimes less Fordist wage regime UK.IE I’d guess going home to the zb state supplied high rise flat after an equally zb day at the low paid job and having to use public transport to commute because they couldn’t afford a car was no different whether Soviet or UK worker.The important bit being that would have been the rule in the Soviet Union as opposed to the exception here in the day. 
But you can’t compare the two like that, because the Soviets had less-developed economic capacity to begin with - it’s like pointing today to an African capitalist state, and saying capitalism doesn’t work simply because they’re living in mud huts and shanty towns. The British suffered under capitalism the same conditions as the Soviets, but before living memory, and whenever capitalism started to run away with itself and tear society apart in Britain, the state could intervene, slow things down, and put palliatives in place (like with “outdoor relief” and measures to control the markets and protect the traditional economic claims of the poor, like secure agricultural tenancies and so forth). The Soviets were constrained in that any slowdown would have led to their being conquered imminently from outside, whereas Britain never faced that (the only impulse to Elizabethan and Victorian horrors were the bonanza profits it created for the ruling class, for the Soviets the impulse was to avoid military attack from outside).
Communal Living in Russia
The Soviet problems of housing were no different to our VIctorian problems of housing. I live today on ground that was previously occupied by squalid Victorian housing, which was knocked down in the 1930s by the council and replaced by a modern housing estate (which itself is far more luxurious than the shoe-box housing being provided by private builders in the market today). This is why I say it is important not to overstate the horrors of communism. If the Soviets had developed slower, the superb efficiencies of communism could have been used to protect Soviet people from the horrors of VIctorian capitalism, but then they’d have been militarily conquered by western capitalist states who were already far more advanced. The Paris Commune had showed what happened to communist projects that couldn’t defend themselves. Much later, there is the example of Allende (still the only ever peacefully and democratically elected socialist, who was quickly overthrown militarily by US-supported capitalists).
The threat for Western capitalism was never really that people would up-sticks and go and live in some Soviet industrial town 100 years behind the West (whether that town was squalid or not). It was that, using the same socialist ideology anywhere in the already-industrialised West, would have produced results that were clearly superior to any Western capitalist nation. It was only by preventing revolution in the largest Western capitalist nations that we never got to see this, and instead capitalism made large concessions to the working class that itself produced rapid economic development, and really a modern flowering of civilisation and popular prosperity, but has now been rolled back because there is no ideological threat on the same scale as the Soviets were.
By the 1970s, the Western rich had never been poorer and capitalism was faltering under the demands of it’s socialist-in-capitalist-clothing economic policies, but by doing so it had successfully bankrupted the Soviet regime by forcing colossal resources to be consumed for defence and national security purposes and break-neck changes needed to industrialise the USSR (from what began as a largely agrarian economy). A slower pace of change, and more resources dedicated to worker’s private consumption, would have been nicer, but then the West would have just conquered the USSR in the normal way with bombs and trade embargoes.
and who think that bringing the world’s population to live here will fix 1,allied to the cheap labour agenda of the bankers/CBI. 