Wartime state intervention forced private property to bow to national-interest priorities

Evidence

In sum, in all the ways discussed above— from industrial production to land cultivation and pricefi xing— the British and Italian states barged into the realm of the economic. For the fi rst time, capitalism witnessed a threat to the inviolability of private property. Private property had to subordinate its prerogatives to a political and national interest and even to people’s basic needs. In this way the state shook one of the supposedly unshakeable pillars of capital accumulation. Th e tremors in laissezfaire capitalism did not stop here, however, reverberating to another fundamental pillar: wage relations. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 149

Categorization

• XREF: This is the mechanism by which wartime necessity broke the laissez-faire consensus that earlier chapters established as interwar orthodoxy; connects to the reader’s core thesis of austerity as class weapon. — connects to: Postwar reconstructionists reversed the priority of fiscal economy over political aims — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 181; World War I dissolved the public-private boundary that protected capitalist property — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 112; Capital rights were repackaged as individual rights from 1945 onward — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 906 (+10 more)
• ADDENDUM: The state overriding private property for a national interest directly parallels how later chapters presumably show austerity re-asserting that private-property pillar — worth watching for the book’s arc.