Re: Re: "The World We're In" by Will Hutton

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Burford:
>However the Marshall Aid programme after the war shifted capital back to
>western Europe and produced an increase in the use values available for the
>local population. Capitalism can continue even with a redistribution of
>capitalism and of the circulation of commodities. (Consider Marx's argument
>in "Wages, Price, and Profit against Citizen Weston")

The Marshall Plan was necessary to jump start capitalist expansion in
devastated post-WWII Europe. However, capitalism is flourishing throughout
the third world, so what is the point of a Marshall Plan? Perhaps you are
recommending something entirely different, like direct grants from G-7
countries to allow places like Jamaica and the Congo to build up health
care, education, public transportation, etc., since that's really what's
needed, after all. To expect something like this would be utter folly in
light of the tendencies in world capitalism since the early 1970s. There is
a drive to cut back on social spending throughout the world because of
intense competition between the USA and exactly those countries that
benefited from the Marshall Plan. So, to put it dialectically, the Marshall
Plan generated the conditions for its ultimate obsolescence as a policy
measure. Post-WWII prosperity leads to intensified competition, which leads
to neoliberalism, which leads to unemployment, hunger and war.



Louis Proyect
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