Democratic and Fascist austerity achieved the same compliance through different coercive means

Evidence

Measuring austerity’s economic eff ects in Britain and Italy also corroborates one of the main claims of this book: that there is a profound parallelism between austerity in a democratic setting and austerity in a Fascist setting. In the 1920s, the repressive nature of British austerity primarily took the form of market coercion: workers were forced into compliance with the logic of capital accumulation aft er the Treasury and the Bank of England devised policies that triggered high unemployment and curtailed welfare rights. Increased economic necessity brought workers to their knees. Th e Italian version of austerity did not need to rely on unemployment as such, since it was accompanied by Fascist state interventions that slashed nominal wages by decree and annihilated genuine worker’s representation. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1474

Categorization

• XREF: This is the central parallelism claim of The Capital Order itself — interwar British democracy and Italian Fascism converging on the same class outcome. — connects to: Fascism’s founding political program was framed in austerity terms. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1037; Liberal austerity and fascist repression converged in a shared coercive project — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1070; Austerity needed strong government, which Fascism supplied — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1329 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the two mechanisms of the parallelism: market coercion (British) vs. state decree (Italian).

Broader Connections

• Fascist and democratic austerity both suppressed dissent in matching patterns #corroborates (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1475
• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics #expands (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193