especially if they were white and northern, and their conservative and racist
social views made them, for him, poor material for a proletarian uprising. He
was concerned for such status groups, but more because he felt they were
suffering afalse consciousnessin striving to satisfy needs implanted by the
media and advertising agencies in the interests of an inhuman and over-
materialist economy. Marcuse’s own hopes were for a new form of revolu-
tionary class forged out of those, blacks, students, ecologists, anyone who was
cut loose from the basic acquisitive economic structure, who would fight for
human liberation from both capitalist and state socialist systems. His own work
on Russia,Soviet Communism and Russian Marxism, had convinced him that the
Marxist revolution as practised in Eastern Europe was every bit as dehumaniz-
ing as capitalism, and this semi-anarchist position was perfectly fitting for the
Vietnam-anxious radicals of the period. In some ways his work is almost closer
tolibertarianismthan to Marxism and, despite the death of the cause that
made him famous, still stands close reading as an alternative radical critique of
high-technology society.
Marshall Plan
The Marshall Plan was the economic aid plan for the recovery of European
economies instituted by George Marshall when he was secretary of state in the
Truman administration in the USA. He first suggested the plan in a famous
speech at Harvard in June 1947. The idea was that a very large dollar
programme of aid would be provided for post-war reconstruction on condi-
tion that the European powers first started by indicating a serious intent to
collaborate rather than compete against each other. Warmly welcomed by
France and Britain the plan was bitterly opposed by the Soviet Union, which
saw it as an attempt to exert American influence on post-war Europe, and thus
as a threat to their own control. The Western European nations rapidly set up
the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC, which later
became the OECD) to allocate the funds, and by 1948 the dollars started
flowing in. In the four years between 1948 and 1952 over US $17,000 million
were given, with the United Kingdom and France, along with West Germany,
being the main beneficiaries. Though Marshall would have been prepared to
seek congressional approval for aid to Eastern European nations, Soviet
opposition precluded even this possibility.
As well as being the major single cause of the rapid economic recovery of
Europe, the supply of these funds during the early days of thecold war(the
Berlin Blockade, for example, coincided with the first payments) helped
cement the alliances that later becameNATOand theWarsaw Pact. The
UK would certainly have found the recovery even harder had it not been for
Marshall aid, especially as the initial post-war defence cuts had to be reversed
Marshall Plan