Now automate. We no longer need the labor of millions to run the machine (country's industry). We need only a million. Then only a hundred thousand. Then none. What happens to the 'laborers'? They are dropped out of the bottom of the machine as scrap.
Its this 'means of production' that gets us into trouble - when a few folks squat on it and call it 'theirs', the rest of us are reduce to marginal participants in the machine, expendable.
Automation is happening in the US at an explosive rate. Heard about a factory coming back from China? Only because now even Chinese labor is too expensive, if you can automate. There are insignificant jobs 'coming back'. And there never will be any more, again.
No, the age of labor is nearly over. And what will the millions of us do then?
Actually the USA in 1910 was the richest society the planet had ever seen. This was why half of Europe was busy trying to move there, to start at the bottom. (It was poor by today's standards, of course.) It's a lie to claim they got rich "because of socialist policies".
The depression was a brief dip in the growth of the income of the average guy, over let's say 1870-1970. Things went backwards by the equivalent of about 15 years or progress (on average! it was rough for some). The effect of the new deal on ending this, or perhaps prolonging it, is a confusing issue. Certainly it paid some people's wages, and hit some rich people hard (and had non-economic implications too), but my understanding is that there's a serious argument that, without such action, the depression might have been sharper & shorter, like the 19th C ones.
Besides differences in government response, the other big difference was that employment had become more secure, more long-term, more Henry Ford and less Charles Dickens. You could indeed argue that this made it more serious. Compare a 20% drop in employment which meant 4 days a week for everyone (because they were all casual, factory or farm) vs 1/5 of workers (who thought they had jobs for life) being unemployed for years.
I am not claiming nothing of this. But everyone knows the huge toil of the great depression on poor workers. The only reason why the new deal was enacted is that people were on the verge of revolt. If the recession had been any worse, there would be blood on the streets and even more people would starve to death, and possibly the US government would be overthrow by communists who were very active at the time. That's the fundamental reason why these silly ideas pushed by conservatives never come to fruition: a completely free market is guaranteed to lead to revolution sooner or later.
I'm just dubious of claims that it was economically a great idea, especially in the long run. This seems to be unclear from the data, looking back from a safe distance.
Second, wealth inequality is a direct threat to the democratic system. In a country that has extreme levels of wealth concentration as we see here in the US and elsewhere, it is very easy to enact policies that harm society in general in benefit of the minority that holds economic power. This in fact was the downfall of capitalist society in the 1920s. In such a society, there is big turmoil among the general population, which frequently leads to revolutions and economic disasters. We are just starting to see this pattern happening the the US, with increasingly big economic calamities such as in 2008 and political turmoil such as the election of Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if the US and similar countries are heading towards a popular revolution as we saw in the 19th and early 20th centuries.