Moral Economy?: Popular Demands and State Intervention in the Struggle over Anti-Profiteering Laws in Greece 1914–1925

This article examines the popular mobilization against high prices in Greece during World War I and Greco-Turkish war, and the legislation against profiteering which was adopted in the context of the rising state intervention in the economy. It focuses on the workers’ action, which has been argued that was informed by perceptions of moral economy. I argue that we should keep a narrow definition of moral economy, in which necessary is the presence of views that are based on customary practices of market regulations. This is not our case: the Greek discourse about “shameful profit” was not the product of the meeting of a traditional society with the capitalist market, as indicates the important role played in its development by the educated lower middle class. I attempt to interpret it in terms of a combination of traditional representations of the merchant, its dialectic relationship with the emerging statism, as well as strategies of the young labor movement towards workers’ unification and widening of its appeal to popular strata.