WOLFF: Tell us how you see the link to fascism.
You know, the word fascism, the anxiety about fascism has become more explicit,
particularly in the United States, but elsewhere as well.
In the last few years since austerity
was a big reaction to the downturn in 2008
and nine, are we watching a kind of slow motion
process whereby the post
2008 austerity is moving us toward fascism?
Is that in some sense, what you're arguing?
MATTEI: What the Capitol order describes is the fact
that the emergence of austerity happened in a moment
of extreme
contestation of the capital order and moment
in which the majority of the workers, of the people
in the hub of Western capitalism at the time, so Britain in Italy,
after the First World War, were really demanding a different future,
were really rethinking the very foundation of how we organize
production and distribution through councils, through cooperatives,
through calls of economic democracy that would fundamentally overcome
wage relations and private property of the means of production all together.
And what you see is that thus austerity
becomes visible as a tool of reaction
to these calls for economic democracy and ultimately how
it still functions today to foreclose alternatives to capitalism.
So in this setting, fascism is very interesting because
you see that if you look at what Mussolini,
the founding father of fascism, was doing in the 1920s
and what his fellow colleagues were doing in Britain,
the cradle of liberal capitalism in the same years,
what you noticed is actually that these comfortable binaries
that contemporaries tend to use (by
which of course there's liberal capitalist democracy
on the one side and then we have these fascist
exceptions which are clearly the opposite of liberalism
that emerge historically) well this idea that
we're talking about polar opposite ideological,
institutional worlds crumbles if we focus on austerity.
And what you actually see is that fascism in Italy
strengthened its rule, became legitimate as
an authoritarian government
thanks to its capacity to implement austerity,
because this was allowing
fascism to look good in the eyes of the liberals,
both within Italy and the international liberal elite:
people like Montagu Norman at the Bank of England,
JP Morgan Chase, all the financial world in Britain and the United States
in that moment was applauding Mussolini because Mussolini
was the most efficient
student of austerity, being able to apply
privatizations, massive privatization, cuts
in wages by decree, cuts in social expenditures, layoffs
of the public employees, their money, all of the austerity trinity package.
So I think this is what's interesting is that the story that the capital order
tells is a story that has us wonder
how distant is supposed liberal capitalism
that we pride ourselves with with respect to these fascist tendencies?
Because actually what you see is it's a matter of priorities.
So austerity is
advanced and
advocated for by all of the economic experts,
our mainstream colleagues, as a necessary tool
to achieve economic growth and balance budgets and to tame inflation.
But really, what you see, if you adopt a class analysis lens,
is that what matters here is something much deeper
and something much more essential to preserve the very foundation
of the possibility to even have capitalism in place,
which is the fact that people cannot
try to overcome wage relations.
People need to accept their conditions of precarious
labor power to be sold on the market.
And this is something that
is more important than anything.
And that also shows how fascism is all about that.
Fascism has been about repressing wages, and this has also happened
in liberal democracies.
WOLFF: Wonderful Clara, this is really very, very helpful.