Americans using the Marshall Plan to belittle Europeans - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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'Cold war' communist versus capitalist ideological struggle (1946 - 1990) and everything else in the post World War II era (1946 onwards).
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#14082926
What is with Americans using the Marshall Plan to belittle Europeans. Always telling them that is wasn't for the great, benevolent Americans and their Marshall Plan Europe would be in ruins to this day.

How can Americans believe this crap. I've heard it from to many people. Germany actually paid more out after the war then they received in Marshall Plan Aid.
#14086523
Care_Bear wrote:How can Americans believe this crap.

It tends to be what educational institutions teach, and it requires little understanding of 'domestic' European politics in the post-war era. The Marshall Plan may also be memorable as a narrative because it's so similar to the orthodox narrative for Lend Lease ie. there was something wrong in Europe, the US gave them heaps of stuff, problem solved.

Care_Bear wrote: Germany actually paid more out after the war then they received in Marshall Plan Aid.

Also don't forgot that Germany's economic recovery was drive more so by changes in government policy and deals done with other nations in Western Europe than by Marshall Plan aid. I'm less familiar with the examples of France and Britain but it wouldn't surprise me if their stories of recovery were similar.
#14136259
No need for hyperbole, but I wouldn't underestimate it either. The Marshall Plan and associated schemes propped up Western European governments at a desperate time when their public began to sway towards communism. The extra money also facilitated trade which was probably more important than anything else. Add these to Germany's decision to abandon price controls and voila: Europe is on the road to recovery.
#14183997
The Marshall Plan and associated schemes propped up
Western European governments at a desperate time


Yes, particularly to prop up the Right wing collaborators with the Nazis.
Any passionate anti-Nazi is disgusted with the Marshall Plan, which was
above all a military intervention, not some financial blank cheque given
to European governments as it's portrayed.
#14185590
redcarpet wrote:Yes, particularly to prop up the Right wing collaborators with the Nazis. Any passionate anti-Nazi is disgusted with the Marshall Plan, which was above all a military intervention, not some financial blank cheque given to European governments as it's portrayed.

Assisting Western Germany against a highly-militarized socialist block is evil. Okay...

I guess you have nothing to say about America propping up so-called democratic governments run by ex-communists in Eastern Europe then, because hey, they're goody two-shoes communist ponies.
#14408685
Smilin' Dave wrote:Can you give some examples of this?


When it came to suppressing French trade unions, the Americans needed an influx of strike breakers. Therefore they re-constituted the Mafia, under the paper-trail absent trail of the drug racket. I'm sure that helped, indirectly, to aid the Right in the first post-WW2 election.

Haven't got the file anymore, but I can look for it online for you if you want?
#14408722
This is I think the best assessment of what they did:
The making of an Atlantic ruling class, 'The Marshall offensive and capitalist restoration in Europe', Kees van der Pijl, 1984 (emphasis added) wrote:The Marshall Plan announced in June carried the new offensive further: by injecting purchasing power for innovating production into Western Europe it represented the first important step in exporting American accumulation conditions. This aspect of the Marshall offensive catered to the corporate-liberal fraction which likewise moved closer to power in the course of 1947. In early 1947, Averell Harriman succeeded Wallace as Secretary of Commerce, and the eventual Harriman Report on the implementation of the plan announced by Secretary of State Marshall in June was crucial in determining the Economic Cooperation Act of1948. With Clayton, Harriman, and such members of the Harriman Committee as Paul Hoffman, back on centre-stage, corporate-liberal internationalism resumed its tenure in Washington. [38]

The establishment of American hegemony in the North Atlantic area was directed simultaneously against the spread of planned economy and social revolution beyond the Soviet-controlled areas in hope and against the national, self-contained reconstruction programmes pursued by most Western European states in the immediate postwar period. These programmes, in which local Communist Parties participated, were judged unsuited for maintaining capitalist rule in the long run. 'Europe would have been Communistic if it hadn't been for the Marshall Plan', Marshall Aid administrator Paul Hoffman claimed in February 1950.[39]

At the same time, the Marshall Plan aimed at laying the material foundations for an Atlantic economy based on the generalization of Fordism. Through the Technical Assistance and Productivity program, the complete inventory of Taylorism and Fordism, like merit rating, job classification, shift labour in continuous processes, and so on, was exported to Western Europe. The key component of Marshall Plan hardware deliveries in this context was the technology continuous wide-strip mills for the steel industry. These advanced means of production were capable of producing large quantities of cheap sheet steel for automobiles and household appliances, and, thus, were instrumental in subordinating the traditionally reactionary steel industry to the system of relative surplus-value production, while at the same time consolidating the subordination of the steel industry to the powerful automobile groups by cheap imports. [40]

[...]

Raising wages with these connotations required that in participating in the new mode of accumulation, the European working class limit itself to purely economic demands. Thus, in the context of a general confrontation with the Soviet Union; the Marshall offensive aimed at the elimination of revolutionary and anti-systemic ideologies in the Western labour movement. In this aim, the Atlantic corporate- liberal bourgeoisie found its privileged partner and relay in the Social Democratic parties, which under the impact of the American offensive would themselves undergo major transformation.

[...]

Yet, between 1947 and 1951, neither the international situation nor the domestic American class struggle were such as to generate a full-scale offensive. The social-imperialist aspect of the Marshall offensive was correspondingly disjointed; its constitutive elements were scattered over the four years in which, by leaps and bounds, the expansion of the American economy proceeded. A formal intervention aimed at preventing the trade unions from reaping the fruits of labour scarcity even was more or less avoided during the Korean War. In late 1950, a Wage Stabilization Board was installed to deal with pressures arising from war-induced full employment. In January of the next year, a wage and price freeze became effective. This time a slight increase of wages relative to cost of living did bring benefits to the workers, but then, in retrospect, controls hardly affected the trend of wages in the first place. [43]

As far as the two main American trade-union organizations were concerned, the offensive context in which they undertook their foreign activities contributed to the gradual convergence of their respective positions, even if important contradictions remained. Because of the McCarthyist witch-hunt, the CIO gradually divested itself of its radical heritage and democratic procedure. The CIO's eventual decision to withdraw from the WFTU, and its joint action with the AFL to establish the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1949, were largely the initiatives of leaders trying to claim a place for the industrial unions within the Democratic Cold War consensus. Opposition to this anti-Communist turn within the CIO was met by the abrupt expulsion of thirteen class-conscious unions at the 1949 Convention. As to the AFL, a sympathetic observer writes that since the bulk of the membership and leadership were not interested in or informed about international labour problems, 'a handful of AFL leaders, assisted by several of their staff, constituted the AFL foreign-policymaking elite'. [44]

Extending their own brand of economic unionism to Europe was a concern of both organizations, but as support activities in Europe were largely uncoordinated, a welter of trans-Atlantic connections was the result; through which unresolved conflicts between the two US unions became part of a wider set of political struggles. In the American zone in Germany, a conflict erupted over the issues of de-Nazification and anti-fascist trade-union organization between the AFL and the CIO, and between them and the 'New Dealers' in the American military government (OMGUS). German labour leaders in the United States had formed a German Labour Delegation in exile and obtained official recognition from the AFL. In April 1945, a Free German Trade Union Committee was launched in American- occupied Frankfurt. Due to the restrictions on political activity decreed by the Americans, this organization failed to be effective in moderating the influence of radical elements at the local and plant levels.

The initial willingness of the New Dealers in OMGUS to allow radicals to support their de-Nazification effort was soon overruled by the American business cronies of General Clay. The AFL likewise exerted its influence to thwart the grassroots democratization movement, although it took a visit of AFL Vice-President Doherty to Germany to ensure that the American military authorities heeded the organization's wishes. As a result, the CIO and the WFTU were denied facilities in the American zone altogether. [45]

Thus anti-fascist elements in the German working class and their sympathizers among the New Dealers in OMGUS were effectively frustrated at an early stage, but the mass basis for a 'moderate' alternative was not yet available. To remedy this situation, individual trade-union bureaucrats like Markus Schleicher, the president of the Free Trade Union Committee in the American zone, and Blockler in the British zone, were parachuted in by the military authorities to negotiate directly with the German employers.[46]
These men took the lead in propagating the American pattern of trade-union organization. Upon his return from a trip to America, Schleicher told German workers' audiences in 1948 that they should be ready to discard the traditional German idea of workers' councils. Only then could they benefit from the type of national political influence that had so impressed him on his American tour.

The German labour movement's traditions could not be discarded with so easily, however, and the consolidation of economic trade- unionism in Germany was forced to absorb the council idea to a considerable extent. Indeed, it was precisely in order to stave off the dangerous socialization demand of the German Left, that the AFL began giving qualified support to the council idea. Eventually, the AFL formed a truly Atlantic bloc with the DGB to force the German employers' organizations and the US National Foreign Trade Council to accept the introduction of co-determination (Mitbestim- mung) in heavy industry, and in 1952, on terms much more un- favourable to labour, in the rest of German industry. [47]

As the Marshall Plan got under way and the de facto partition of Germany became permanent, AFL intervention was also extended to supporting specific activities of the SPD, like the latter's undercover work in the Soviet zone. Significantly, the AFL already in 1947 had endorsed German rearmament. [48] The predominance of the AFL over the CIO ingredient in American trade-union intervention in Europe was based upon intransigent anti-Communism and this dovetailed with indigenous factors determining the resurrection of the German trade-union movement. The reformist tradition of the German trade unions, as well as the effectiveness of Free World ideology in a partitioned country, were complemented by AFL activity, not created by it. The claim of one of the AFL organizers, David Dubinsky, that the German trade unions would have 'gone Communist' in the absence of AFL intervention was an exaggeration; unless he meant that in the event of a series of developments linking the Greek Revolution with a popular front modification of one of the national coalition governments somewhere along the Mediterranean coastline, the weight of Atlantic liberal capitalism in Europe might have been critically reduced, ultimately involving Germany as well.

Such a critical juncture might have materialized in France, where the AFL was by all means an outsider. Given the resistance record of the Communist-led general trade-union organization CGT, AFL organizer Irving Brown considered the French situation to be 'not very encouraging'. Yet several contacts had been made with anti- Communist elements in the CGT, in particular with the Force Ouvrière (FO) group. Brown's strategy of encouraging opposition within the CGT still backfired at the 1946 CGT convention, but the Communists' growing difficulties in getting the French workers to support the 'battle for production' without compensating political gains tended to create a more favourable climate for stirring the opposition forces. Brown eventually succeeded in establishing fruitful contacts in Socialist circles, which had been supported by various American labour organizations since the end of the war. [49]

The radical tactics of the Christian trade unions, on the other hand, which persisted as long as the Communists were in the government and which had a distinct agent-provocateur quality, did not attract AFL support. The AFL's concern was not to promote just any anti-Communist working-class agitation, but rather to build 'AFL-type unions that would not only guide trade unionism in a stable craft direction, but would work to gather support for US foreign-policy objectives among European workers'. 51 The Christian unions therefore by default became the object of CIO attention, and relations between the CFTC (today's CFDT) and the CIO unions persisted well into the 1960s (and after the merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955).

The cleavages in the CGT had deep local roots, but were aggravated by the Marshall offensive and the machinations of the AFL. What the AFL contributed notably was the militant anti- Communism often lacking among older reformist trade-union leaders like Jouhaux, who were still committed to what Irving Brown derogatorily called the 'myth of working-class unity'. The AFL, therefore, expressly supported the forces working for a split, by-passing the leadership around Jouhaux which hoped to regain a majority within the CGT. The AFL wanted a rupture, not just with Communism, but with any form of class perspective. As in Germany, the break therefore was not just with Communism, but with indigenous working-class tradition in general. The Americans sponsored avowedly Atlanticist leaderships that were ready to discard the national heritage of the labour movement. The results of this strategy varied greatly. The split in the CGT, formal in November 1947, brought only a minority into the pro-American camp, a minority which moreover had not succeeded in divorcing itself from the old reformist leadership, of whom several, but not all, followed Jouhaux into the CGT-FO.[53]

Although hardly a weak link, American influence in the British Labour Party was reorganized and made more effective in 1947. In the autumn of that year, the editorial board of the journal Socialist Commentary, which had been the organ of the non-Communist German Left exiles in Britain, welcomed Oxford lecturer Anthony Crosland, Allan Flanders, a former TUC official, and Rita Hinden, who had set up the Fabian Colonial Bureau. While AFL organizer Jay Lovestone recruited many of his agents from the former exiles around Socialist Commentary, the journal in its new set-up became the mouthpiece of the right-wing of the Labour Party and developed a close collaboration with the New Leader, an anti-Communist American magazine which from 1950 on was sponsored by the CIA. Flanders, who was in the United States studying the American trade-union movement, contributed anti-Communist articles to both publications, while Denis Healey, the future Labour minister became London correspondent for the New Leader in 1954.[54]

The TUC leadership not only played a critical role in splitting the WFTU, but also propagated the American methods of scientific management that its representatives had become fascinated by in the course of Washington-sponsored junkets. [55] The ruling Labour Party, apart from playing a major part in shaping the institutional framework of Atlantic integration, complemented TUC activities on the European continent by supporting the pro-American split-offs in European Social Democratic parties.
On the other hand, rank- and-file Labourist support for the Nenni majority Socialists in Italy in 1948 was vigorously suppressed. [56]

[...]

I've placed highlights on the parts that I assume someone who is speed reading would want their eyes to land on, but I recommend just reading the full thing. Although mafias and stay behind groups played some part in the American-Soviet partition of Europe around that time, it's clear to me that the majority of the heavy-lifting for anti-communism was actually carried out by the AFL, the CIO, various reformist trade unions, and an array of social democratic parties.

It seems they had to do that, otherwise the Soviets would have been taking over everything.

The injections of money from the Marshall Plan allowed Europe to develop the infrastructure that - I guess - would later become the basis of the European Coal and Steel Community, and would later be used by European visionaries as a stepping stone toward the creation of the European Union which exists today.
#14412313
Got it again, here's a broader outline of the suppression of the anti-fascist resistance under the cover of 'reconstruction', etc.

For studies of the post-World War II U.S. campaign to destroy anti-fascist elements internationally and to return traditional ruling groups to power; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. These books were the first major scholarly efforts to document this history, and remain extremely valuable and unique in their scope and depth despite the flood of new scholarship since -- although, because they do not adhere to approved orthodoxies, it is considered a violation of scholarly ethics in the American academic community to refer to them.

Also; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, especially ch. 4.

On operations in Japan; Joe Moore, Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power, 1945-1947, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, especially ch. 7, (pp. 188-189, 191):

S.C.A.P. [the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers, i.e. the post-war U.S. administration in Japan,] had become convinced of the necessity of putting limitations on the workers' freedom of action after coming face to face with the power and radicalism of the working-class movement in spring 1946 and having to make the decision that even the maintenance of an unpopular conservative government was greatly preferable to allowing the left-wing opposition to come to power. . . . S.C.A.P. henceforth put its emphasis upon the building of a healthy labor movement that would avoid politics and radical actions such as production control, while encouraging business and government leaders to resist such worker excesses. . . . The Yoshida cabinet was only too happy to return to the anti-labor policies of the past, and encourage union-busting tactics including use of the police to suppress disputes to a degree that would have been unimaginable even a few months before. As if to underscore S.C.A.P.'s approval, on several notable occasions even U.S. military police participated. The new policy was called, in a cynical phrase current among S.C.A.P. officials, "housebreaking" the labor movement. . . .

[The Civil Information and Education Sector of S.C.A.P.] suppressed whole issues of left-wing publications, and the censors riddled many others with their blue pencils. Henceforth, left-wing writers could no longer count upon freedom of the press to ensure that unpopular opinions got into print. On 18 May, [U.S. General Kermit] Dyke had already seen General MacArthur [the U.S commander] and secured his consent to clamp down on the press unions. Two days after that, [the chief of the C.I.E., Major Daniel] Imboden issued a strong warning to the press, threatening to close down "irresponsible" papers as General Hodge had done in Korea. He stated that "labor unions had no right and could not dictate the editorial policy of a newspaper" for "that was the right of the owners and men who are nominated by the owners."


Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, especially pp. 44-51; Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989, especially ch. 4 and pp. 62-64; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 21. Another political bomber is Bruce Cumings' The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II ("The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950"), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Quotation (pp. 56-57):

Only Japan held [U.S. State Department planner George] Kennan's attentions in East Asia, and his new notoriety and strategic placement in 1947 made it possible for him to author the "reverse course," or what we may call the Kennan Restoration. . . . The operative document for the reverse course, developed in draft form under Kennan's aegis in September 1947 . . . envisioned a Japan that would be "friendly to the United States," amenable to American leadership in foreign affairs, "industrially revived as a producer primarily of consumer's goods and secondarily of capital goods," and active in foreign trade; militarily it would be "reliant upon the U.S. for its security from external attack." The paper reserved to the United States "a moral right to intervene" in Japan should "stooge groups" like the Japanese Communist Party threaten stability. Leaving little to the imagination, it went on: "Recognizing that the former industrial and commercial leaders of Japan are the ablest leaders in the country, that they are the most stable element, that they have the strongest natural ties with the U.S., it should be U.S. policy to remove obstacles to their finding their natural level in Japanese leadership." Thus Kennan called for an end to the purge of war criminals and business groups who supported them.


On operations in Thailand; Frank C. Darling [former C.I.A. analyst and Thailand specialist], Thailand and the United States, Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1965, chs. II and III, especially pp. 65, 69 (the dictator of Thailand under the Japanese, Phibun Songkhram, who had in fact declared war against the United States, was reinstalled in an American-supported military coup in 1948 and thereby became "the first pro-Axis dictator to regain power after the war").

On operations in Indochina; Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

On operations in French North Africa, the first area liberated by U.S. forces in World War II; Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, ch. 2, especially pp. 54-66. Quotation (pp. 55-59):

The United States took the view that one could do business with Vichy [the pro-Nazi government in southern France during World War II]. Much in Pétain's [the Vichy chief of state] program appeared to Roosevelt and Hull [the British Prime Minister] to represent the best hope for France, especially those parts that stood for work, patriotism, and stability. . . . The President did everything in his power to stop de Gaulle's rise, primarily because of his fear that the French people upon liberation would, as they had in the past, run to an extreme. . . . What made [de Gaulle] even more dangerous was the way that he flirted with the forces of the left, especially the communists in the Resistance. "France faces a revolution when the Germans have been driven out," the President once said, and he feared that the man most likely to profit from it would be de Gaulle.

Roosevelt spent much time searching for an alternative to de Gaulle. He might have wanted to turn to Vichy, but Pétain was too thoroughly brushed with the tar of the collaborationist. Roosevelt's best hope was the French Army, which represented the forces of stability and conservatism without appearing to be pro-Nazi. . . . By accident, Admiral Jean Darlan was in Algiers when the [Allied] invasion hit. Darlan was bitterly anti-British, author of Vichy's anti-semitic laws, and a willing collaborationist, but he was also the Commander-in-Chief of Vichy's armed forces and he was ready to double-cross Pétain. He agreed to a deal proposed by Clark and Murphy, which required him to order the French to lay down their arms, in return for which the Allies made him the Governor General of all French North Africa. Within a few days the French officers obeyed Darlan's order to cease fire, and a week after the invasion Eisenhower flew to Algiers and approved the deal. . . . The result was that in its first major foreign-policy venture in World War II, the United States gave its support to a man who stood for everything Roosevelt and Churchill had spoken out against in the Atlantic Charter. As much as Goering or Goebbels, Darlan was the antithesis of the principles the Allies said they were struggling to establish.
#14418956
Yes, all of those things are true. The Americans realised pretty fast that if they wanted to prevent a communist takeover of everything, they would need to put back into a power a sizeable number of people who they had previously kicked out of power after the end of the Second World War.

For those whose families fought on the side of Axis, it was an ironic and hilarious development which everyone did their best to try and capitalise on.
#14419114
But thats only one part of what happened during that time. The amount of technology, patents, scientists and engineers which were ripped off as part of the WW2 surrender were fully comparable with those on the communist side. They (France set aside) however did not take away that extreme amount of industrial machinery. That far outnumbered the Marshall plan.

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