“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” the late Mark Fisher proclaimed in his 2009 book Capitalism Realism, a brief but harrowing portrait of how capitalism has captured our imaginations. The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What to do About It Understanding the political motivations behind austerity is necessary to identify and combat its imposition, and Mattei’s book offers a compelling roadmap for navigating our current political moment. Mattei’s book is particularly timely given that monetary austerity - i.e., the Federal Reserve’s sharp rise in interest rates - is in full swing right now. Austerity, at its core, is about disciplining labor, and, as Mattei shows, it has been immensely successful at accomplishing that task - undermining workers’ challenges to capitalism in the process. In Mattei’s view, the fact that austerity seldom achieves its purported goal of strong economic growth and prosperity for all is beside the point. As Mattei convincingly shows, austerity - though presented as “necessary pain” that the masses must endure as a means of ensuring economic prosperity for all - is, in reality, a means of diverting resources from the many (workers) to the few (the investor class). I cannot, in the space provided, take a deep dive into each of the three forms, but for our purposes, the first, monetary austerity, is the most relevant. There are, according to Mattei, three types of austerity, all of which political and economic elites impose to maintain the basic class relations of society and, as a result, the capital order: monetary austerity, fiscal austerity, and industrial austerity.
During such times, political elites must devise ways to maintain the most indispensable component of capitalism: a large, exploitable labor pool. Capitalism, as Mattei argues, is prone to economic crises that, when bad enough, incite contestation among the masses. In The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, Clara Mattei excavates a term that has largely fallen out of fashion but continues to shape economic policy: austerity. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism With that in mind, here are a few books that helped me make sense of our current political moment while also sharpening my thinking on how alternatives to capitalism might be realized. In Cox’s view, social scientists had a moral responsibility to make legible a system that is often anything but, with the aim of charting a path to a more just world. Cox, who once said that understanding how capitalism works should be the top priority of the social scientist.
2022 is out, and what a year in politics it was.
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