US occupation policy used decartelization to block rather than enable socialist measures

Evidence

The American military government, however, had ensured from the start that decartelization offered an alternative to socialization. Under pressure from the USA, the British Labour government, which had nationalized its own coal and steel industry, banned the parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia from carrying out socialization measures demanded not only by the SPD and KPD but also by the workers’ wing of the CDU. Wherever the works council laws passed by individual states gave works councils a say in business matters, the military governments suspended either the laws as a whole or the relevant sections of them. In addition, representatives of the former companies were entrusted with carrying out the decartelization, since this meant that the normal course of business would be disturbed as little as possible. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2055

Categorization

• XREF: Widely corroborated in scholarship on American occupation policy in Germany (e.g. by Carolyn Eisenberg and on the CDU’s Ahlen program).
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘reform’ vocabulary (decartelization) was weaponized to foreclose more radical redistribution — parallels to contemporary regulatory capture.