5fish
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Clara E. Mattei. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. She wrote a book showing that austerity attacks the masses and protects the capital structure. Austerity was invented in the 1920s and led to the rise of Fascism.
Mattei marshals an impressive array of British and Italian sources to trace the profound disruptions to the economic order during the First World War. Total war upended traditional economic policies. Government budgets bulged as never before. The gold standard was abandoned, prices administered, trade controlled. Mattei argues that this unprecedented shift in management vividly demonstrated—most notably to workers—that the old way of organizing economic relations was not the only way. Their blindfolds removed, workers in Britain and Italy began revolutionary agitation to control the means of production and upend the capitalist order. This “struggle for workers’ control,” Mattei writes, “peaked in 1919-1920 with the objective of self-government to secure the emancipation of the majority.”
According to Mattei, the powers that be viewed this revolutionary moment as unacceptable and connivingly set on “austerity” as the means to muzzle workers and return to the prewar order. “Austerity as we know it today,” Mattei writes, “emerged after World War I as a method for preventing capitalism’s collapse: economists in political positions used policy levers to make all classes of society more invested in private, capitalist production.” By returning to the gold standard and shrinking the budget deficit, policymakers slowed economic growth, thereby “enforc[ing] a public acceptance of repressive conditions in economic production.” Economists contributed to this policy program by justifying these choices as natural, as well as insulating the decision-making process in technocratic institutions, such as independent central banks. As for the connection with fascism, Mattei argues that Mussolini garnered support—domestically and internationally—by imposing austerity.
Mattei marshals an impressive array of British and Italian sources to trace the profound disruptions to the economic order during the First World War. Total war upended traditional economic policies. Government budgets bulged as never before. The gold standard was abandoned, prices administered, trade controlled. Mattei argues that this unprecedented shift in management vividly demonstrated—most notably to workers—that the old way of organizing economic relations was not the only way. Their blindfolds removed, workers in Britain and Italy began revolutionary agitation to control the means of production and upend the capitalist order. This “struggle for workers’ control,” Mattei writes, “peaked in 1919-1920 with the objective of self-government to secure the emancipation of the majority.”
According to Mattei, the powers that be viewed this revolutionary moment as unacceptable and connivingly set on “austerity” as the means to muzzle workers and return to the prewar order. “Austerity as we know it today,” Mattei writes, “emerged after World War I as a method for preventing capitalism’s collapse: economists in political positions used policy levers to make all classes of society more invested in private, capitalist production.” By returning to the gold standard and shrinking the budget deficit, policymakers slowed economic growth, thereby “enforc[ing] a public acceptance of repressive conditions in economic production.” Economists contributed to this policy program by justifying these choices as natural, as well as insulating the decision-making process in technocratic institutions, such as independent central banks. As for the connection with fascism, Mattei argues that Mussolini garnered support—domestically and internationally—by imposing austerity.
