> SA: 'Granted, that's just what Washington was expecting him to do. But the alternative, as the Americans saw it, was to let the *west* go under, which they weren't prepared to do.'
>
> No, indeed. That's what the Marshall Plan, and the European Economic Community that was built upon it was, a system to save capitalism in western Europe whose condition was the abandonment of eastern Europe to Stalinism
True, in the abstract it was a system to save capitalism in western Europe. In practice, though, it was a system to save capitalism in western Europe from Stalinist absorption from within, which was the only plausible route out of capitalism at that time. There was no country in western Europe where a scenario leading to the expropriation of the bourgeoisie could be plausibly envisioned in 1946-47 without the local CP (and they were all Stalinist then) leading the way.
SA