"In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital"
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James is diagnosing a political boomerang: when the state takes over more of economic life under wartime necessity, the public’s anger doesn’t neatly land on “bosses” anymore. It ricochets. The very machinery built to mobilize society against fascism also becomes the most visible target for everyday frustration, rationing, bureaucratic choke points, and the blunt coercions that war makes normal.
The key word is “statification,” a cool, almost clinical term that smuggles in heat. It frames expanded government control not as heroic coordination but as a structural shift with consequences: the state starts to look like an employer, a landlord, a manager of scarcity. Under those conditions, resentment that might have been directed at private capital (wages, prices, profiteering) gets redistributed toward the government because the government is now the interface between people and the economy. James is pointing at a psychological and strategic problem for the left: if you celebrate state planning as inherently emancipatory, wartime experience can teach the opposite lesson. People learn to associate planning with queues, surveillance, and arbitrary power.
Context matters: James, a Marxist attuned to mass politics, is reading World War II not just as a military conflict but as an accelerant for administrative capitalism and centralization. The subtext is a warning against confusing nationalization with socialism. Wartime “public” control can deepen alienation rather than resolve it, because control without democratic power simply relocates domination. The line also anticipates a postwar landscape where anti-government feeling can be fueled not by laissez-faire ideology, but by lived experience of a state that has inserted itself everywhere and answers to no one in particular.
The key word is “statification,” a cool, almost clinical term that smuggles in heat. It frames expanded government control not as heroic coordination but as a structural shift with consequences: the state starts to look like an employer, a landlord, a manager of scarcity. Under those conditions, resentment that might have been directed at private capital (wages, prices, profiteering) gets redistributed toward the government because the government is now the interface between people and the economy. James is pointing at a psychological and strategic problem for the left: if you celebrate state planning as inherently emancipatory, wartime experience can teach the opposite lesson. People learn to associate planning with queues, surveillance, and arbitrary power.
Context matters: James, a Marxist attuned to mass politics, is reading World War II not just as a military conflict but as an accelerant for administrative capitalism and centralization. The subtext is a warning against confusing nationalization with socialism. Wartime “public” control can deepen alienation rather than resolve it, because control without democratic power simply relocates domination. The line also anticipates a postwar landscape where anti-government feeling can be fueled not by laissez-faire ideology, but by lived experience of a state that has inserted itself everywhere and answers to no one in particular.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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