1945–1955: Launching Global Capitalism — The Marshall Plan and the U.S. Recovery of Postwar Europe

The decade following World War II marked not merely the reconstruction of the European continent, but the active reconfiguration of the global capitalist system — one orchestrated, engineered, and sustained by American power. Far from an organic recovery, the postwar order emerged from a deliberate effort to stabilize international capitalism under U.S. hegemony, through mechanisms both economic and institutional. Between 1945 and 1955, the American state transitioned from an ad hoc global actor to the architect of an enduring geopolitical and economic framework — one that would define the remainder of the 20th century.

The centerpiece of this transformation was the Marshall Plan (1948–1952), officially the European Recovery Program. It distributed over $13 billion (roughly $150 billion in today’s dollars) in aid to Western European countries, ostensibly to rebuild economies shattered by war. But the deeper purpose, as Robert Heilbroner would note in The Worldly Philosophers, was not just economic rehabilitation — it was the ideological consolidation of market capitalism. The U.S. had emerged from the war as the only major power with intact industrial capacity, and it sought to use that advantage not simply to revive commerce, but to enshrine a global capitalist order — one in which private markets, liberal democracy, and U.S. capital would reign supreme.

Yet the Marshall Plan must be understood not as a unilateral act of generosity, but as part of a broader geopolitical project. Here, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s analysis in The Making of Global Capitalism is indispensable. They argue that the United States did not inherit an empire in the traditional colonial sense, but rather constructed an “informal empire” rooted in economic institutions and state capacities. The postwar American state fused financial resources, diplomatic power, and military security guarantees to underwrite capitalist stability abroad. The Bretton Woods system — with its fixed exchange rates, dollar convertibility, and the creation of the IMF and World Bank — institutionalized U.S. dominance while preserving the illusion of multilateral cooperation.

This arrangement served a dual function: it restored Western Europe as a viable market for American goods, and it immunized those societies against the spread of communism. As Panitch and Gindin emphasize, the U.S. actively embedded itself within the domestic policy spheres of allied nations, conditioning economic aid on fiscal discipline, open markets, and anti-communist alignment. The reconstruction of Europe, therefore, was not merely a return to prewar capitalism but the launching of a new phase — global capitalism, centered around U.S. institutions and interests.

Eric Hobsbawm, writing in The Age of Extremes, situates this transformation within a broader historical arc. For him, the postwar recovery inaugurated the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” but only after the system had faced an existential crisis. The world economy, he notes, had nearly collapsed under the weight of interwar depressions, fascism, and war. What emerged after 1945 was capitalism in a new form — one no longer left to the invisible hand, but tightly managed by nation-states, particularly the American state. This was capitalism with planning, oversight, and social pacts — what Hobsbawm called “governed capitalism.”

But this governance was not equally distributed. While Western Europe experienced recovery through public investment and social democratic compromise, much of the Global South remained structurally dependent on raw material exports, marginalized from the new international monetary system. And beneath the surface of prosperity lay contradictions: capital accumulation increasingly relied on U.S. consumption, dollar liquidity, and Cold War militarization. The very success of the postwar model carried within it the seeds of future crisis — a point Hobsbawm presciently saw in the declining profitability and rising inflation that would explode in the 1970s.

So, between 1945 and 1955, we do not simply witness “recovery.” We witness a systemic re-founding — a world where capital was globalized through American statecraft, institutions were designed to preserve market discipline, and social forces were mobilized or suppressed in service of geopolitical stability.

This was the launchpad of global capitalism. Not an inevitability, not a natural evolution, but a political project — constructed, contested, and maintained with extraordinary power.

And if you trace the fault lines of today's world — financial volatility, austerity regimes, imperial overreach, democratic erosion — many of them lead back to that first blueprint, drawn in the rubble of Europe, inked with American dollars, and signed under the shadow of Cold War anxiety.

LLM