Clara Mattei is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity & Paved the Way to Fascism, published this month. Steve Grumbine, who uses the Twitter display name “Austerity is murder,” was drawn to her position that austerity is not just bad economic theory prescribing bad economic policy. That is a simplistic framing that ultimately depoliticizes austerity.

Many on the left tie the birth of austerity to the birth of neoliberalism – which some identify with Reagan/Thatcherism, while others say it goes back to Jimmy Carter and the 70s. Clara traces it back a full century, to the years immediately following the First World War, when capitalism was in crisis. It’s no coincidence that WW1, the Bolshevik revolution and the dawn of fascism all occurred during this period. The post-war period was full of socialist stirrings in Europe and the US. Squashing them required a brutal economic response.

US and British capitalists openly celebrated the defeat of labor at home and expressed admiration for Mussolini. The head of the Bank of England wrote to Jack Morgan (son of Pierpont), "Fascism has surely brought order out of chaos over the last few years. Something of the kind was no doubt needed if the pendulum was not to swing too far in quite the other direction.” The alliance of liberalism and fascism in its diverse forms should not be a surprise; they are achieving the same ends. To understand austerity, don’t look to the form of government. Look to capitalism itself.

We are reminded there are class antagonisms between countries as well as within. When the US exploits and plunders other nations, it is acting on behalf of the ruling class – the same ruling class that is exploiting American citizens and plundering our communities.

Clara says, “If you look at austerity just as a tool to manage the economy, which is a typical stance that most Keynesians take, then you cannot really understand why austerity is so persistent and present and structural to our societies.” Austerity is required to enforce society's organization by class divisions, based on wage labor and exploitation. Destabilizing the economy in terms of economic growth is necessary to preserve the capital order.

Clara E. Mattei is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research and was a 2018-2019 member of the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making.

@claraemattei on Twitter

John Holloway (born 1947) is a lawyer, Marxist-oriented sociologist and philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. It has also been taken up by some intellectuals associated with the piqueteros in Argentina; the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa and the Anti-Globalization Movement in Europe and North America. He is currently a teacher at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Autonomous University of Puebla.

John Holloway author of Crack Capitalism and Changing the world without Taking Power speaks of the role of the individual in perpetuating a system based on capital and consumption. As John puts it, the question we should be asking is Not how do we defeat capitalism but Why do we keep reproducing it everyday

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Dealing with an aging population is one of the big topics at this year's China International Important Expo in Shanghai. A report prepared by China's State Information Center and released at the Expo finds more economically advanced areas in China are in general better prepared to cope with an aging society.

Are Chinese policy makers responding fast enough to an aging population? What are their plans for a silver economy? Host Liu Kun is joined by Zheng Zhenzhen, Professor of Population and Labor Economics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Dr. Yao Shujie, Chueng Kong Professor of Economics, Chongqing University; Andy Mok, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization.

Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding deadly new variants of anxiety and danger. It’s a polycrisis when you feel the old world you knew is undergoing not change but transformation. It’s symptomatic of the polycrisis that the three giant military powers in the world today sit apart and aloof, each one suffering its own identity crisis, each one on the defensive about looking and acting so aggressive. You’re feeling this polycrisis when you realize you can’t go home again, because home’s not there anymore.

Adam Tooze.

Adam Tooze is our rat-a-tat talker on the tightrope, our English-American historian of this age of waking nightmares: pandemic, mega-storms, migration, inflation, grain war, energy war, “war war” in Ukraine. He’s our polymath in what he has just decided to call the polycrisis. The “poly” part refers not just to many crises but to the variety of shapes and sizes and origin stories that come with the disruption. Together they are transforming the world faster now than ever in history, he says. But they are not together, meaning that no common remedy will treat them. One more key thing about the polycrisis, Adam Tooze will tell you, is that nobody really has a handle on this monster: not the bankers, or the military men, or the experts, not even Adam Tooze.

This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. The Quincy Institute and the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord recently hosted a discussion with Ambassador Jack Matlock, Svetlana Savranskaya, and Tom Blanton from the National Security Archive on the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The full discussion is available on quincyinst.org— but here are some excerpts.

Richard Kozul-Wright describes the current state of global economic disorder, as presented in UNCTAD’s Trade and Development Report, and discusses the possibility and limits of effective regional responses. Lynn Fries interviews Richard Kozul-Wright on GPEnewsdocs.

Is work just a way to pay the bills, or is it fundamental to what it means to be human? And with technological change, do we need a new kind of work ethic?

Today I'm joined by philosopher of work Jean-Philippe Deranty to reflect on our cultural, societal and philosophical attitudes to work.

4.48: Neoliberalism's Paradoxical Relationship with Work

23.30: Cultural attitudes to work: UK vs France

26.20: A New Kind of Work Ethic

33.40: Neoliberal attitudes to current changes in the labour market

41.30: What is the centrality of the work?

52.20: Psychological and social centrality of work

57.40: What the pandemic taught us about the significance of work

The Work Repository: https://onwork.edu.au/

Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it so difficult for working people to organize around common interests? How do we begin to build a more equal and democratic society?

In Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It (Verso, 2022), Vivek Chibber provides a clear and accessible map of how capitalism works, how it limits the power of working and oppressed people, and how to overcome those limits. The capitalist economy generates incredible wealth but also injustice. Those who own the factories, hotels, and farms always have an advantage over the people who rely on that ownership class for their livelihoods. This inequality in power and income is reflected in the operation of the state, where capitalists are able to exert their will even under relatively democratic conditions. The most important reason is that states depend on the employment and profits from capitalist enterprise for both finances and legitimacy. Every meaningful victory for working people has been won through collective struggle but collective action is very difficult to coordinate. In the final section of the book, Chibber walks the reader through some of the historical attempts to build socialism and presents a vision of how we might, perhaps against the odds, build a socialist future.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter.

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On shared-labour socialism.

Political theorist Alex Gourevitch talks to us about his critique of post-work thought, and how it presupposes the very labour it seeks to free us from. We start of by distinguishing post-work socialism (e.g. Fully Automated Luxury Communism) from various propositions for a Universal Basic Income, and discuss why these ideas are popular today.

Part 2 is here: patreon.com/posts/73765804 

Readings:

• Post-Work Socialism?, Alex Gourevitch, Catalyst

Listenings: 

• /149/ It’s Not Robots, It’s Capitalism ft. Aaron Benanav / Liz Pancotti