Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production.

Evidence

The “strikomania” that spread across Italy and Great Britain in 1919 drove an unusually large number of workers to put down tools and to fight for fewer working hours and higher wages. As an official British communiqué explained, workers were “no longer prepared to acquiesce in a system in which their labour is bought and sold as a commodity in the labour market,” and demanded to be treated “not as ‘hands’ or part of the factory equipment” but “as human beings with a right to use their abilities by hand and brain in the service not of the few but of the whole community.” — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

No matter how much the capitalist class tried to deny it, there would have been no military victory without the workers who were exploited in the factories and massacred on the front lines. The most creative political thinkers of the period immediately following World War I were able to build workers’ awareness and then propose ideas of profound social transformation. Powerful economic systems could be invented, revised, and transformed by people. There was nothing natural or immutable about the economic system they had grown up in. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Postwar German workers expected their factory to provide social belonging, not just wages — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2082; Postwar workers explicitly rejected the treatment of labor as a commodity — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185; Postwar social tension forced state officials to concede citizenship rights to workers (+13 more)

Related

• Postwar workers explicitly rejected the treatment of labor as a commodity (similarity 0.89)
• Postwar British and Italian strikes demanded workers’ control of production. (similarity 0.89)
• Postwar social tension forced state officials to concede citizenship rights to workers (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar labor unrest aimed at revolution, not just wages. (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar British and Italian strikes aimed to build democratic production relations (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar strikes were political demands for workers’ self-government, not mere wage disputes (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar labor claims turned political out of hostility to capitalism itself (similarity 0.87)
• Postwar German workers expected their factory to provide social belonging, not just wages (similarity 0.86)
• Postwar Italian labor leaders recast the worker as indispensable and rights claims as settled (similarity 0.85)
• Postwar labor resistance ranged from reformist unionism to revolutionary council occupation. (similarity 0.85)
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system (similarity 0.84)
• Workers’ control of industry climaxed as a core demand in 1919-1920 (similarity 0.83)
• Interwar workers rejected the commodification of their labor outright. (similarity 0.83)
• Postwar reconstruction committees voiced working-class demands for communal living and cooperative trade. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production #corroborates (0.88) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185
• Postwar strikes were political demands for workers’ self-government, not mere wage disputes #corroborates (0.84)
• Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174
• Postwar labor unrest aimed at revolution, not just wages. #corroborates (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 375