The capital order How economists invented austerity and paved the way to fascism

Clara E. Mattei

Book - 2022

"For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity-cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits-as a means to regain solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: what if solvency was never really the goal? In Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei traces the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital-and indeed capitalism-in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces m...odern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies "succeeded," relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity-and of modern economics-at the levers of contemporary political power"--

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Subjects
Published
Chicago : The University of Chicago Press 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Clara E. Mattei (author)
Physical Description
452 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 409-437) and index.
ISBN
9780226818399
  • Introduction
  • Part I. War and Crisis
  • 1. The Great War and the Economy
  • 2. "A Wholly New School of Thought"
  • 3. The Struggle for Economic Democracy
  • 4. The New Order
  • Part II. The Meaning of Austerity
  • 5. International Technocrats and the Making of Austerity
  • 6. Austerity, a British Story
  • 7. Austerity, an Italian Story
  • 8. Italian Austerity and Fascism through British Eyes
  • 9. Austerity and Its "Successes"
  • 10. Austerity Forever
  • Afterword
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

The capital order asserts the primacy of capital over labor in the hierarchy of social relations within the capitalist production process. That primacy was threatened after World War I in what Mattei (New School) claims was the greatest crisis in the history of capitalism. War collectivism revealed alternatives to the supposedly natural capital order. In Italy, labor's factory occupations and other forms of self-organization demonstrated workers' aspirations for a better postwar existence. Gramsci's newspaper, L'Ordine Nuovo, proclaimed the emergence of a new economic order. In Britain, guilds and cooperatives revealed alternatives to traditional capitalism. To counter these trends, Mattei argues, unelected technocratic elites "invented" austerity as a means of re-naturalizing the capital order. Spearheaded by the newly strengthened treasury department, Britain tightened monetary and fiscal policy, taming both postwar inflation and, with the assistance of complementary industrial policy, workers' efforts for economic democracy. What Britain's technocrats accomplished through the market Italy's fascists accomplished through Mussolini's edicts. Postwar conferences in Brussels and Genoa, in the author's view, provided the intellectual underpinnings for this new austerity agenda, though arguably austerity has long been a fundamental principle of the dismal science. Summing Up: Recommended. Undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Roger S. Hewett, emeritus, Drake University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.