Tory welfare cuts dismantled the welfare infrastructure that enabled working-class popular modernism

Evidence

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)

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)

So what bothers me on a deep personal level is that if austerity is seen as the only way forward, then not only is it unfair to the current generation of “workers bailing bankers,” but the next “me” may not happen. The social mobility that societies such as the United Kingdom and the United States took for granted from the 1950s through the 1980s that made me, and others like me, possible, has effectively ground to a halt. Youth unemployment across the developed world has reached, in many cases, record levels. Austerity policies have only worsened these problems. Cutting the welfare state in the name of producing more growth and opportunity is an offensive canard. — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 19 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Fascist austerity dismantled welfare, cut taxes on capital, and banned unions — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193; Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 654; Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 19 (+4 more)

Related

• Fascist austerity dismantled welfare, cut taxes on capital, and banned unions (similarity 0.88)
• Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled (similarity 0.84)
• Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives (similarity 0.84)
• Fascist austerity dismantled social reforms to rebuild capital accumulation. (similarity 0.83)
• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics (similarity 0.83)
• Austerity was designed to reverse workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains (similarity 0.82)
• Austerity cuts aimed to permanently prevent welfare-state restoration in Britain (similarity 0.81)
• Fascism abolished the Ministry of Labour and Social Insurance in 1923 (similarity 0.81)
• Austerity-driven unemployment stripped organized labor of its political power in Britain. (similarity 0.81)
• Interwar austerity crushed class-based activism in Britain and Italy. (similarity 0.80)
• Welfare-state spaces indirectly funded postwar Britain’s alternative culture (similarity 0.80)
• Fascist social-spending cuts aimed to discipline labor, not just shrink deficits. (similarity 0.80)
• Postwar state support briefly enabled guild socialism before austerity funds were cut (similarity 0.80)
• Austerity directly reversed wartime gains in workers’ wages and bargaining power (similarity 0.80)
• Fascism reimposed the economic-political divide that workers had breached (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Austerity structurally dismantled the workers’ movement and its economic alternatives #expands (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 654
• Fascist austerity dismantled welfare, cut taxes on capital, and banned unions #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193
• Welfare-state cuts halt the intergenerational mobility they once enabled #expands (0.80) — Mark Blyth, Austerity, 19
• Modernism emerged from a specific industrial-capitalist conjuncture that postwar capitalism destroyed #complicates (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 562
• Neoliberal deregulation replaced social protection with credit and indebtedness #contradicts (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 746