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Rising unemployment, increased military spending, and a decline in living standards for most people, including the middle class: the description fits both the 1930s and the 2020s. In the 1930s, it was a situation that morphed into the destruction and horror of the Second World War.
On Downstream with Aaron Bastani this week is Clara Mattei, professor of economics at the University of Tulsa, and author of ‘Escape From Capitalism: Economics Is Political and Other Liberating Truths’. Mattei’s PhD was on the relationship between austerity and fascism in inter-war Italy, and her book is a comparative study of Britain and Italy in that period.
What, they ask, is the relationship between austerity and fascism – both then and now? Is capitalism a ‘natural fact’, as its proponents would have you believe, or a contingent set of affairs designed and propped up by governments? And if capitalism is in fact a choice, how can we go about building an alternative?
00:00 Intro
03:15 What Is the Capital Order?
04:24 Capitalism Isn’t Natural
05:27 Global Inequality Statistics
07:58 How Capitalism Is Propped Up
11:05 Doesn’t the State Give Loads of Free Handouts?
17:08 The Relationship Between Austerity, Rearmament & Fascism
25:37 Austerity Works for Capitalism: Here’s How
36:02 Post WW1 Italy, Austerity & Fascism
39:51 British Monetary Policy, Italian Fascism
45:09 WW1: A Lost Modernity
47:24 Liberalism: Expelling History Is the Best Way to Preserve the Status Quo
52:50 Economists Around Mussolini
55:49 How Liberalism Has Sided with Fascism
1:03:25 Market Dependence and the Coercion of the Wage Relation
1:06:00 The Re-Politicisation of History
1:07:47 Capitalism & Democracy Can’t Co-Exist
1:11:53 Alternative Institution Building
1:17:01 China as an Alternative Model
Clara Mattei is a founder of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation: https://www.freefreeforum.org/
@freefreeforum
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