Postwar state support briefly enabled guild socialism before austerity funds were cut

Evidence

Beginning in 1922, Mussolini’s fascist regime imposed austerity policies that enabled the restoration of old power relations. It implemented fiscal austerity by systematically dismantling the popular postwar gains, severely cutting welfare spending, and abolishing inheritance and super-profit taxes, while simultaneously increasing taxes on workers. Monetary and industrial austerity followed: the fascist government raised interest rates and banned unions and strikes, using legal force to suppress wages and consolidate control. To establish these policies, Il Duce astutely surrounded himself with economists who reestablished the barrier between the economic and the political that workers had dared to break. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

In chapter 4, we investigate the prehistory of austerity, first as an absence in early liberal economic thought, and then as a definite policy in early to mid-twentieth-century economic theory. Austerity was not a policy consistently argued for from the seventeenth century onward, since the conditions of its realization—big states that spend lots of cash that can be cut—do not arise until the twentieth century. Rather, austerity emerges over time as a derivative consequence of other shared beliefs—a sensibility—concerning the nature and role of the state in economic life that sit at the core of liberal economic thought. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 268 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: British guild socialism aimed to eliminate private profit as the driver of production — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 433; Building guilds secured large public housing contracts amid postwar expansionary policy — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 438; Guild socialism had to survive inside capitalist markets it sought to replace (+3 more)

Related

• Withdrawal of state funding under austerity killed off the guild socialist housing program (similarity 0.86)
• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics (similarity 0.86)
• Fascist austerity dismantled welfare, cut taxes on capital, and banned unions (similarity 0.86)
• Fascist austerity dismantled social reforms to rebuild capital accumulation. (similarity 0.83)
• Fascism reimposed the economic-political divide that workers had breached (similarity 0.83)
• Austerity unified Fascism’s laissez-faire and corporatist economic periods. (similarity 0.81)
• Austerity was designed to reverse workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains (similarity 0.81)
• Austerity, not corporativism, was the thread uniting Fascism’s laissez-faire and corporativist phases. (similarity 0.80)
• Post-WWI austerity was deployed to block moves toward economic democracy. (similarity 0.80)
• Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism (similarity 0.80)
• Austerity originated after World War I as a counteroffensive against working-class unrest (similarity 0.80)
• Austerity as a rationale emerged specifically to answer revolutionary workers’ councils (similarity 0.79)
• Austerity’s chief purpose was to depoliticize the economy after war dissolved that boundary. (similarity 0.79)
• Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives (similarity 0.79)
• Interwar austerity crushed class-based activism in Britain and Italy. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193
• Guild socialism had to survive inside capitalist markets it sought to replace #expands (0.75)
• Austerity emerged only once states became large enough budgetary entities to cut #complicates (0.72) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 268