Post-2011 austerity governance operated through a spreading fog of despair

Evidence

Alternatively, one might discern in its vaulting ambition the financial logic of the Structured Investment Vehicle used to hide crushing liabilities, only now being imposed on the state itself. In the meantime, as bond vigilantes conduct their attacks and government insolvency looms, states are forced by neoliberal parties and international agencies to engage in myriad forms of “austerity,” which include fire sales of viable legacy state assets and crude attempts to lower wages and renege on social insurance schemes. Indeed, this narrative that the crisis is all the fault of the government conforms so faithfully to the standard neoliberal script, trumpeted relentlessly from the think-tank shell of the Russian doll since early in the crisis, that it is hard to imagine that the tactical political economy of market-maker of last resort was not engineered to conjure this outcome. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950 (#expands, via linked claim)

When world leaders keen to legitimize the damage that they have already done to the lives of millions of their fellow citizens reach for examples such as these to vindicate their actions, applauding these countries for creating misery, it shows us one thing above all. Austerity remains an ideology immune to facts and basic empirical refutation. This is why it remains, despite any and all evidence we can muster against it, a very dangerous idea. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 613 (#expands, via linked claim)

Austerity— both in its material form as a coercive policy and in its theoretical form as a consensusbuilding set of theories— repudiated the workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains, especially those of the Ordinovista movement. Th e group’s practical and theoretical alternatives were the gravest enemy to the capitalist system, an enemy that originators of the austerity doctrine were determined to defeat. In fact, and as we shall further explore in the second half of the book, austerity smashes the Ordinovista methodological/institutional foundations. Austerity a) renaturalizes the capitalist pillars of private property and wage relations; b) denies the political and economic agency of workers; c) vindicates the priority of topdown economic science; and d) reasserts the divide between the economic and the political. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 654 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950; Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 654; A tiny economy’s crisis was weaponized as a metaphor for austerity — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 202 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• The crisis-as-government-fault narrative was engineered to justify austerity #expands (0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 950
• Austerity persists as an ideology that resists empirical refutation #expands (0.85) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 613
• Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 654
• The 2008 crisis replaced triumphalist free-market rhetoric with open-ended austerity #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 158
• Austerity framed economic crisis as caused by governments and workers, not capital #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 783
• A tiny economy’s crisis was weaponized as a metaphor for austerity #exemplifies (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 202
• Austerity was framed by its architects as redemptive sacrifice required for recovery #complicates (0.78) — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 113
• Neoliberal austerity expresses sadistic drives, not just economic calculation #qualifies (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1971
• The 2008 crisis paradoxically strengthened right-wing and austerity politics worldwide #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 9