The Greatest Trick Capitalism Ever Pulled

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled on humanity was convincing us that life under capitalism is the natural order of things. And when capitalism begins to fail the evil trinity of austerity comes into play to defend it. Clara E. Mattei, author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, joins the program to discuss austerity politics.

Watch the Majority Report live MondayFriday at 12 p.m. EST on YouTube OR listen via daily podcast at

#SamSeder #EmmaVigeland #MajorityReport #politics #news #progressive #leftist #democrats #liberal

SUPPORT the show by becoming a member

Download TMR's FREE app

CHECK OUT MORE from the MR crew:

Matt Binder DOOMED

Brandon Sutton DISCOURSE

Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

OTHER LINKS:

Check out more from the MR crew:

Matt Binder DOOMED

Brandon Sutton THE DISCOURSE

Emma Vigeland ESVN

Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING

Image Credit, William Murphy

Image has been cropped and color has been altered.

Let's talk about what you call the Trinity of austerity. The three elements that or I guess aspects of austerity. How they play out in our economics. yes definitely. So you pointed to a very crucial point in the capital order to say that austerity is depicted as a necessity as the only way forward. But it is actually the most political choice of all to build the false understanding that we live in the only way that is possible for humans to live, which is in a capitalist economy right? This is austerity as the protector of capitalism and when we talk about capitalism we need we mean the social economic system we're under by which the majority of us take at the given and as a necessity to go work for a very low wage and in precarious conditions to make a living. So the fact that we depend on the market for our survival, the fact that to eat, to sleep, to go to school to get medicine, we have to go and sell our labor power in return for very low wages. Well, this is exactly what austerity is aiming to protect. This is the reason for the title of the book The capital order. Capital meaning the wealth that our society produces presupposes Capital as the social relation by which we all accept our condition as wage workers. And this is something that again austerity builds as a necessity but what the book discovers is that if we look at what was happening a hundred years ago we see something that again incredibly is so obvious today which is that in a moment of social upheaval a moment in which people are saying no we are sick of actual conditions of not being able to get to the end of a month and being so precarious in our livelihoods in moments in which people want to participate in economic decisions to make a change a radical one well it is in this moment that austerity is crucial to defeating any alternatives to the current status quo. So what is austerity? austerity is fundamentally a trinity of policies that work together to silence working people. And what are these policies? Well, fiscal austerity is about cutting the social part of the budget. So cutting welfare measures. so cutting benefits unemployment benefits housing benefits Medicare Medicaid so on and so forth. This is when we hear politicians say shared sacrifice.