3 The Marshall Plan's Productivity Revolution

In spring 1952, the US administrator Everett H. Bellows declared at a Marshall Plan conference, “I hope to shock you when I tell you that our main purpose is to create a benign social revolution.”
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Bellows worked for the Marshall Plan's Productivity Program, which promised higher standards of living through higher productivity. Its goal was to lure European workers away from Communism and shape European economies after the model of US capitalism. To do this, the program tied political values to productivity, even though some of those political values—such as free enterprise and collaborative labor relations—contradicted each other. Officers of the Productivity Program wanted to create integrated markets with mass production and distribution; they wanted to dynamically expand European economies through higher wages and lower prices, and ultimately change social relations throughout Europe.