Wartime state control proved economies are politically moldable

Evidence

But these massive wartime interventions exposed an inconvenient fact. Economic forces never operate independently of society’s political dynamics. If the state could mold the economy to serve the needs of war, in peacetime it could mold it to promote the well-being of those whose sweat, muscles, and brains are the basis of national prosperity. The war had demonstrated “the profoundly political nature of the capitalist economy.” — Gary Mongiovi, Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy…, 29

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the argument that neoliberal austerity was a chosen political project, contradicting the notion of budget deficits as apolitical constraints. — connects to: WWI’s state economic control revealed the economy’s inherent political nature; World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174; State wartime intervention exposed the natural order of capitalism as a political choice — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 169 (+23 more)

Related

• WWI’s state economic control revealed the economy’s inherent political nature (similarity 0.92)
• War exposed the market’s self-regulating capacity as inadequate for total production (similarity 0.89)
• State wartime economic control exposed production relations as politically contestable. (similarity 0.88)
• Wartime state intervention exposed market arrangements as political choices, not natural facts (similarity 0.88)
• State wartime intervention exposed the natural order of capitalism as a political choice (similarity 0.88)
• World War I proved large redistributive state reforms were fiscally viable (similarity 0.88)
• Government wartime economic policy revealed state as instrument of class domination (similarity 0.88)
• World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed (similarity 0.87)
• War socialism destroyed capitalism’s taken-for-granted inevitability and exposed profit as contestable (similarity 0.86)
• War revealed markets cannot allocate labor efficiently without state planning. (similarity 0.85)
• Wartime administration forced doctrinaire academic economists to grasp practical economic complexity (similarity 0.85)
• World War I collapsed the economic-political divide and exposed markets’ inadequacy (similarity 0.84)
• State wartime intervention fused economic and political labor struggles. (similarity 0.84)
• State intervention during wartime made capitalist exploitation overtly political and vulnerable to resistance (similarity 0.84)
• State control of labor made capitalist surplus extraction explicitly political during the war (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• War forced comprehensive state economic control that outperformed laissez-faire. #corroborates (0.95) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 168
• Command economy and monopoly capitalism coexisted under Nazi rule #exemplifies (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 510
• Totalitarian political regimes are symptoms of deeper economic systematization #complicates (0.75)