War socialism destroyed capitalism’s taken-for-granted inevitability and exposed profit as contestable

Evidence

Capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy was born from its undressing during World War I: state interventions in national economies expanded the limits of what was possible, politically, and in doing so opened up spaces for greater political imagination around the organization of socioeconomic relations. Put simply, the very conditions created by state control during the war caused the breakdown of the commonsense rationality that had justifi ed the system up to that point. … Now we examine how the loss of legitimacy for capitalist governments went much deeper: it opened the question of the profi t motive— the core of capitalism— as well as its two fundamental pillars, private owner ship of the means of production and wage relations. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Mattei’s broader thesis about austerity as a class response; also echoes the book’s framing purpose (austerity as class weapon) by showing the legitimacy crisis austerity must answer. — connects to: State intervention during wartime made capitalist exploitation overtly political and vulnerable to resistance — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 173; State intervention made capitalist exploitation political and thereby threatened capitalism itself — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 173; State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 186 (+3 more)
• SEED: Angle: state wartime control as the ‘undoing’ of capitalist commonsense — the same expanded-state lesson that later austerity inverts to re-shackle the state.

Broader Connections

• State intervention made capitalist exploitation political and thereby threatened capitalism itself #corroborates (0.93) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 173
• State wartime intervention exposed the natural order of capitalism as a political choice #corroborates (0.93) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 169
• State intervention during wartime made capitalist exploitation overtly political and vulnerable to resistance #corroborates (0.92) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 173
• State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 186
• World War I collapsed the economic-political divide and exposed markets’ inadequacy #corroborates (0.88) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 104
• World War I’s socialist-leaning wartime economy was deliberately reversed by capital afterward #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 92