Workers’ wartime indispensability empowered postwar demands to transform the economic system

Evidence

No matter how much the capitalist class tried to deny it, there would have been no military victory without the workers who were exploited in the factories and massacred on the front lines. The most creative political thinkers of the period immediately following World War I were able to build workers’ awareness and then propose ideas of profound social transformation. Powerful economic systems could be invented, revised, and transformed by people. There was nothing natural or immutable about the economic system they had grown up in. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Wartime disruption generated a postwar window of optimism for liberal reconstruction — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 219; Postwar suffrage, planning confidence, and national treaties empowered politics against economy — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the…, 113; Working people embraced finance as resistance to capital since World War II — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 514 (+19 more)