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Tagged: austerity

New Avenues in Global History

Clara Mattei, Austerity, and the Soviet Union

By Michel Wong. Clara Mattei might not have set out to write a Global History of austerity politics, but as a student of Global History, I find her framework of austerity as measured by the wage share very useful and would like to apply it in my own history writing. I just have one problem with it. Mattei’s framework is a framework for analysing capitalist societies, but history – even just modern history – has many examples of societies that cannot really be called capitalist. What I want to know is: can Mattei’s framework also be applied to non-capitalist societies? In the sections that follow, I shall try to test the limits of Mattei’s framework by seeing if it can be applied to one of modern history’s more important non-capitalist societies – the Soviet Union. 

New Avenues in Global History

The Making of Modern Austerity: Insights from Clara Mattei’s “The Capital Order” and its Contributions to Global History

By Julie Birke. Clara Mattei’s book “The Capital Order. How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism” offers an important contribution to our understanding of austerity policies and the debate on the origins of neoliberalism by putting class challenges at the heart of her argumentation and linking it to monetary and financial policies of the 1920s. By comparatively analysing the economic policies of interwar liberal Britain and fascist Italy, the book shows how austerity worked as a set of fiscal, monetary and industrial mechanisms, with the common goal for economists in those countries to reimpose capitalist relations of production where they were gravely endangered. This essay will demonstrate how Mattei revives and updates the class interpretation of neoliberalism and to what extent it makes a compelling contribution to the field of global history.