Postwar workers explicitly rejected the treatment of labor as a commodity

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

Categorization

• XREF: The British communiqué language echoes the exact commodification critique at the heart of Polanyi and of Mattei’s overarching thesis about wage labor. — connects to: Works councils failed to dominate as workers’ representatives by the late 1950s — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2072; Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 185; Interwar workers rejected the commodification of their labor outright. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 377 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Postwar workers rejected labor as a commodity and demanded democratic control of production #corroborates (0.96) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 185
• Postwar workers demanded meaning and agency in production. #expands (0.90)
• Interwar workers rejected the commodification of their labor outright. #contradicts (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 377
• Postwar strikes were political demands for workers’ self-government, not mere wage disputes #expands (0.85)
• World War I’s state interventions emboldened workers to reject a return to capitalism #complicates (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 455