Workers rebuff ed the core assumptions of capitalism. As the British report put it, they were "no longer prepared to acquiesce in a system in which their labour is bought and sold as a commodity in the labour market" (Cole 1920a, Appendix 1, 250), and once put to work they demanded to be treated "not as 'hands' or part of the factory equipment" but "as human beings with a right to use their abilities by hand and brain in the service not of the few but of the whole community" (ibid.)

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 377