World War I’s socialist-leaning wartime economy was deliberately reversed by capital afterward

Evidence

Th e scale of the First World War reshaped Europe’s capitalist economies. Many private industries became public ones, and governments suddenly functioned as both buyers and sellers in economies that were designed to meet basic needs at home and drive the war eff ort abroad. Whatever the old social order was, it appeared to be changing. … With the end of the war, these same capitalist nations moved swift ly to revert their economies to their earlier states: topdown, capitalist, private. Wartime sentiments of egalitarianism were smothered; the power of organized labor was diluted. Capitalism was back. … If the war served as a brief, uncomfortable dalliance with the basic tenets of socialism— including a planned central economy and strong organized labor— then the postwar attempt to reverse all of that was a testament to the power and infl uence of capital over modern nations. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 92

Categorization

• XREF: Stages Mattei’s core thesis which the rest of the book will develop: the postwar austerity turn was a deliberate reassertion of capital over the wartime interlude of labor power. — connects to: Postwar social reforms repoliticized private property and wages that war had decoupled from markets — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 224; War socialism destroyed capitalism’s taken-for-granted inevitability and exposed profit as contestable — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 337; World War I collapsed the economic-political divide and exposed markets’ inadequacy — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 104 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• World War I proved production relations could be deliberately changed #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 174
• Austerity was designed to reverse workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 654
• World War I collapsed the economic-political divide and exposed markets’ inadequacy #corroborates (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 104
• World War I’s state interventions emboldened workers to reject a return to capitalism #complicates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 455
• World War I shattered working-class belief that capitalism was immovable. #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 112
• World War I dissolved the public-private boundary that protected capitalist property #corroborates (0.78) — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 112
• Austerity needed economic theory to justify unpopular cutbacks after World War I #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 874