War-era state labor regulation revealed wages as political decisions, not market outcomes

Evidence

Meanwhile, a second fundamental boundary was also broken: the states began to heavily regulate the labor market (including facets like labor mobility, working conditions, and wages) across all key war industries, even those that it did not directly control. In doing so, the state threatened the second capitalist pillar, wage relations. In the face of these developments, workers facing lower wages and harsher discipline were shown that their burdens were the result not of impersonal market forces, but of explicit governmental decisions. Th e political intervention on industrial relations, a necessity of the war, exposed how relations of production could be a front for political activism and historical change. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 108

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s austerity-as-class-weapon frame: the politicization of wage relations is the precondition for austerity as a deliberate class instrument. — connects to: Wartime state wage controls kept wages lower than free bargaining would have — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 179; State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 186; Government wartime economic policy revealed state as instrument of class domination — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 204 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: ‘Wages as political decisions, not market facts’ — the war-state precedent for why austerity is a choice, not an inevitability.

Broader Connections

• Wartime state intervention exposed market arrangements as political choices, not natural facts #corroborates (0.95) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 34
• Wartime state wage controls kept wages lower than free bargaining would have #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 179
• State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 186
• Government wartime economic policy revealed state as instrument of class domination #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 204
• Postwar social reforms repoliticized private property and wages that war had decoupled from markets #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 224