Balancing budgets and curbing inflation primarily reasserts the wage relation and private property.

Evidence

Th e circular blueprint we have just detailed makes an important point in the story and history of austerity. Upon closer inspection, governments’ austere fi xations on balancing budgets and curbing infl ation serve the main goal of making sure capital (as a social relation) is indisputable, and that its pillars of wage relations and private property remain strong. For example, the main achievement of fi scal and monetary austerity was identical to that of industrial austerity: the subjugation of the working class to the impersonal laws of the market. Indeed, all three forms of austerity served to recreate the divide between economics and politics that war collectivism had temporarily suspended. Once the state stepped down as an economic actor (and as an employer), wage relations would again be subjected to impersonal market pressures. Austerity ensured and facilitated this retreat to the norm. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 647

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s modern-austerity reading: fiscal ‘soundness’ piety as class weapon connects to later Thatcherite and Troika-era justifications. — connects to: Austerity comprises fiscal, monetary, and industrial policies that jointly repress wages to benefit capital. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 45
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that all three austerity forms converge on a single end — subjugating labor to impersonal market laws — is a dense, unifying thesis worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Austerity comprises fiscal, monetary, and industrial policies that jointly repress wages to benefit capital. #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 45