Austerity, Fascism, and the Order of Capital
An Interview with Clara Mattei
October 22, 2025
POLITICAL ECONOMIST CLARA MATTEI has published a stunningly original account of the relationship between austerity and fascism in the twentieth century. In her highly acclaimed book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way for Fascism, Mattei shows that austerity—policies to reduce wages, boost unemployment, break union power, and cut social services—was a deliberate strategy of European governments to defeat insurgent working-class and socialist movements in the period from 1919 to 1945. Mattei further demonstrates that Italian fascism was intimately tied to this project of imposing austerity.
Today, as the austerity policies of the last two generations (the neoliberal period) give rise to new right-wing authoritarianisms, Mattei’s analysis has enormous contemporary resonance. In the following conversation with David McNally, Mattei explores the links between austerity and fascism then and now. She also discusses her own family’s history of antifascism in Italy and the crucial relevance of Antonio Gramsci’s socialist theory and practice. This is a vital discussion for mapping left strategies for our times.
In the Afterword to your powerful book, you describe it as “a historical enquiry into the relationship between pure economics, austerity, and fascism.” Could you start by giving us an overview of the connection between those three terms and the historical context in which you explored them?
The book centers on the turbulent aftermath of the First World War—a moment often neglected by historians, yet rich with radical political possibilities and visions for a post-capitalist future. It also brings to light the economic foundations of fascist policies, a dimension too often sidelined in historical accounts. By shining a light on this neglected terrain, the book exposes how the omission of austerity dynamics distorts our understanding of both the rise of fascism and the workings of capitalism today.
Benito Mussolini, the founding figure of fascism, consolidated power in Italy not through a violent coup but by demonstrating his effectiveness in implementing harsh austerity measures—wage repression, privatization, cuts in social expenditure, and regressive taxation. His rise was enabled by bourgeois and liberal institutions that, facing the deep crisis of postwar capitalism, willingly transferred authority to a regime they believed could restore order.
Rather than resisting fascism, these elites embraced it as a solution to what they saw as an existential threat: the wave of workers’ self-governance that had destabilized markets and triggered the sharp depreciation of the lira [the Italian currency]. In this context, Mussolini emerged as a reassuring figure to international capital. The Times of London hailed his regime as a “government against waste” and praised his finance minister, Alberto De’ Stefani, as an “Oxford Don” whose team was steeped in British economic orthodoxy and committed to breaking strikes and courting private investment.
Mussolini surrounded himself with prominent economists—Alberto De’ Stefani, Umberto Ricci, Maffeo Pantaleoni, and Luigi Einaudi—half fascists, half liberals, yet all united by a common methodological creed. They were pioneers of what came to be known as “pure economics,” the forerunner of today’s dominant neoclassical framework in economics. This strategic rebranding replaced the older term, “political economy,” presenting the economy as a neutral, self-regulating system divorced from power relations.
There is nothing more political than the effort to separate economics from politics and to erase the social relations of production from economic theory.
In this new guise, economists claimed the authority of the hard sciences, producing abstract models too complex for the general public to scrutinize—models that, in practice, excluded social struggle and class dynamics. Historical research, however, reveals that there is nothing more political than the effort to separate economics from politics and to erase the social relations of production from economic theory.
In fact, these economists legitimized austerity policies through classist models that replaced the labor of workers with the actions of entrepreneurs and supplanted the labor theory of value with the theory of abstinence. ref1 Mussolini’s regime offered them a rare opportunity to pursue their technocratic ambition: to “tame men” into conforming to the demands of the capital order.
In this way, fascism, austerity, and pure economics worked hand-in-hand to naturalize capitalism—affirming the logic of profit over the logic of need. Their alliance helped depoliticize economic life, casting inequality and exploitation as inevitable, even scientific. The book’s historical inquiry exposes the enduring ways in which our economic system defends itself—strategies that persist today, only rendered more invisible through normalization.
Your main comparison involves the way in which capitalist power was reconstituted in Britain and Italy during the 1920s and 1930s. Describe for us what these two projects of capitalist reconstruction shared and where they differed.
The Italian fascist regime and British parliamentary democracy shared a clear and urgent common goal: to resolve the existential crisis of capitalism that emerged with force after the First World War. The war shattered the two core pillars of capitalism: wage labor and private control over investment.
To sustain the war effort, capitalist governments had intervened in the economy on an unprecedented scale, revealing that economic relations were deeply political. Exploitation was no longer hidden beneath the veil of markets—it had been enforced by the belligerent states. Across Europe, not just in the East but at the heart of the West, citizens demanded a democratic transformation of the work process to put humanity before capital.
From Britain’s Sankey Committee—calling for the nationalization of coal and worker participation in production—to the Guild Socialists, and to the Factory Council movement in Turin led by Antonio Gramsci and L’Ordine Nuovo [The New Order], capitalist institutions were under siege. The postwar moment was charged with revolutionary potential.
In response, both the Italian and British governments deployed heavy doses of austerity to break the back of worker resistance and reassert what I call the capital order—a term I use to make visible what mainstream economics seeks to obscure: the antidemocratic organization of the relations of production.
While the instruments of austerity varied slightly between the two nations, they operated under a shared logic. The “trinity” of fiscal, monetary, and industrial austerity was applied in different combinations. Both governments enacted regressive fiscal policies—scrapping taxes on war profits while raising taxes on consumption and labor—and dismantled the newborn welfare measures introduced after the war.
In Britain, the system’s victory came primarily through monetary austerity. In April 1920, the Bank of England and the British Treasury raised interest rates dramatically, leading to mass unemployment in 1921 as businesses stopped borrowing for future investment projects. The result was the demobilization of strikes and the collapse of alternative visions of capitalism. Unemployment had succeeded in disempowering the majority.
In Italy, the same goals were pursued through more direct political repression. Although Mussolini also raised interest rates in 1926, he relied primarily on overt force—outlawing strikes and unions, compressing wages by law, and undertaking the largest privatization campaign in the capitalist West up to that point.
Britain, too, pursued industrial austerity: it privatized key industries, banned solidarity strikes, and curtailed workers’ rights. But while Mussolini depended on the physical suppression of opposition, Britain relied on the supposedly apolitical authority of technocratic institutions—particularly the central bank. As the inhouse economist Ralph Hawtrey proudly declared, the Bank of England’s guiding principle was: “Never explain, never regret, never apologize.”
This comparison between 1920s Britain and Italy is crucial for understanding the present. The mainstream narrative maintains that liberalism and fascism are worlds apart—liberalism champions individual rights and checks on power, while fascism promotes the nation above all and concentrates authority.
But when we examine their economic policies, the distinction begins to crumble. Both regimes, in practice, shared a core commitment: to restore and defend the capital order by suppressing democratic demands for economic transformation. In this light, today’s supposedly democratic economic institutions begin to look far less benign—and far more continuous with a deeper tradition of capitalist discipline.
Throughout your book you discuss how “pure economics” was constructed so as to remove economic policy from popular, democratic input. Economic policy was defined as a realm confined to so-called “experts.” How does this dynamic lay the groundwork for authoritarianism, even fascism?
This is where the study of fascism’s economic “solutions” to the democratic upheavals after the First World War can illuminate the continuities in bourgeois ideology today. To handle austerity efficiently, Mussolini handed full powers to his team of economic experts—technocrats who moved swiftly to dismantle newly won social reforms and labor rights.
Once people were removed from the decision-making process, the models of pure economics could reassert the primacy of the market, letting it function as it should— that is, unabated and free from worker demands. In the experts’ view, economic freedom was more important than political freedom—especially the political freedom to manage the economy democratically.
In fact, these economists understood economic freedom not in the Gramscian sense, whereby economic freedom meant emancipating the majority from exploitation, but rather as the protection of the saving-and-investing minority. In other words, economic freedom meant the operation of capital accumulation, which required the economic coercion inherent to wage relations and thus the unfreedom of the popular classes. The technocrats’ conception of economic freedom was incompatible with any empowerment of the majority.
In Britain, fascist violence was unnecessary—because economic discipline was administered through the cold tools of technocracy. Treasury officials and central bankers wielded interest rates and budget cuts like weapons, deliberately engineering unemployment and insecurity to subdue the labor movement. Economic experts jealously guarded the levers of macroeconomic management, crafting complex policies that remain hidden from public view.
This insulation of decision-making—particularly through central bank independence—remains a core feature of austerity politics today. A vast literature praises the “social desirability” of excluding citizens from monetary policy, advocating instead for institutions governed by unelected technocrats who are, in the words of Alesina and Summers, “more inflation-averse than society’s preferences.” ref2
The Federal Reserve now operates as a state institution largely exempt from democratic oversight.
Nowhere is this logic more visible than in the United States. The Federal Reserve, founded in 1913, is widely considered one of the most autonomous central banks in the world. Its independence was solidified during the New Deal via the Banking Acts of 1933 and 1935, which removed the Treasury Secretary and the Comptroller of the Currency—both politically accountable officials—from the Board of Governors. That autonomy was further entrenched by the 1951 Treasury–Fed Accord, which decisively separated monetary policy from congressional control and placed hard limits on fiscal intervention.
The Federal Reserve now operates as a state institution largely exempt from democratic oversight, empowered to control inflation while deprioritizing social redistribution. Since the 1980s, its power has only grown—reaching unprecedented levels during the Covid–19 crisis. In 2020, the Fed asserted the authority to lend unlimited funds to industrial corporations, regardless of their creditworthiness, effectively socializing their risk while privatizing their profits.
At the same time, the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program, ostensibly designed to help small businesses, ended up funneling $1 billion to large publicly traded companies—including airlines, cruise lines, and hotel chains. Once again, the state shifted resources toward capital holders while socializing the costs—another clear affirmation of austerity.
Make no mistake: the antidemocratic nature of economic institutions doesn’t stop at central banks—nor is it limited to the United States. Since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has embraced austerity policies and empowered technocrats to propose institutional reforms that undermine democracy.
Our contemporaries call for electoral reforms aimed at reducing proportional representation (to favor stronger governments) and rewriting the constitutions of local and national governments to include the obligation of a balanced budget. Italy, like many other countries, passed both recommendations in the 2010s, removing the political guardrails that were erected to mark the distance from its fascist past.
To fully answer your question, I would say that if we look deeper, a smooth functioning of capitalism requires antidemocratic economic structures that protect the pillars of the system. Different historical moments call for different strategies in this regard, each shaped by the strength of popular opposition.
One consistent pattern, however, is the invocation of expert authority. This strategy has proven so effective that, today, many of us no longer feel entitled to question the very experts who make the most consequential decisions affecting our daily lives.
Another fascinating theme of your book is how austerity requires imposing “proper” market behavior on the working-class majority. There is, in other words, a “moral” or “cultural” dimension to austerity, an attempt to reshape working-class sensibilities, practices, and expectations. This, of course, is something we also see today with a variety of right-wing “culture wars.” How are we to understand this focus on behavior? What drives it from the standpoint of the capitalist class?
It’s striking to observe how Ralph Hawtrey—celebrated as one of the founding fathers of macroeconomics and a key influence on both the Treasury and the Bank of England, not to mention on Keynes himself—explicitly stated that monetary and fiscal policies could only be effective if they could shape the behavior of workers.
In particular, controlling inflation meant persuading people to “consume less and produce more.” This wasn’t just a technical fix; it was a moral-economic directive. “Unproductive consumption” on basic necessities like food had to give way to “productive consumption”—that is, business investment.
While the models suggested that everyone could be an investor, the reality was far more lopsided: the state’s role was to reallocate resources away from the working classes and toward the saving-and-investing elites. Once again, austerity policies were the expression of neoclassical principles—principles that clearly delineate who deserves protection in the name of capital accumulation.
This one-sided class warfare that was required to get the capital order back on its feet had also to attract popular consensus. Cloaked in the appearance of objectivity through rigorous calculus, these models masked a deeply moralistic, or rather classist, foundation. They promoted the idea that only a select few were truly equipped to fulfill the system’s economic prerogatives, while the rest could aspire to improve—but ultimately deserved—their lower social station.
Italian economist Maffeo Pantaleoni put it bluntly: “all considered, it seems obvious that the classes with lower incomes are significantly deficient in qualities with respect to others. So that this deficiency is the cause of the lower income and not the lower income the cause of the deficiency.” ref3 Members of the working classes were such because they suffered from incurable vices, such as wasteful consumption, and were mere hangers-on to a more perfect economic system driven by savers. Being poor or working-class was seen as a choice and a pathology.
From the height of their privilege, economic experts discussed inflation as a matter of imbalance between demand and supply in the economy, ultimately boiling down to peoples’ moral deficiency. Having fought for and obtained higher wages, workers were unable to control themselves and indulged in extravagant behavior, evidenced by “conspicuous increases in unnecessary consumption of alcoholic beverages, sweets, chocolate, and biscuits,” as economics professor (and later Italian president) Luigi Einaudi sneered.
With similar disdain, Pantaleoni, blamed inflation on workers who “live like pigs in their homes in order to waste the greatest part of their income in wine at the tavern.” Today things have not changed one bit. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and his colleagues have refined their technical language, but the antagonism toward the working classes is no less acute. Powell proclaims that to “restore price stability,” economic experts must use their tools “forcefully,” and this “will also bring some pain.”
The pain is for the culprits of inflation, namely those who are ostensibly consuming too much and working too little. As Powell explains, we are in an “unhealthy” or “tight” labor market, where there are more job openings than there are available people, making it difficult for employers to find employable workers.
The goal of raising interest rates is precisely to “have less upward pressure on wages,” thanks to the disciplining effect of unemployment. Similarly, in 1996, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen wrote in a memo to then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan that unemployment “serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss to motivate workers to perform well without constant, costly supervision.”
The capital order is inherently fragile. It depends on people accepting their subordinate place within the structure of production.
To go back to your point, the so-called “culture wars” aren’t just a right-wing phenomenon—they’re very much alive within liberal technocratic circles too. However, this also leaves a space for hope and empowerment. At the end of the day, our economic system—the capital order—is inherently fragile. It depends on people accepting their dependence on the market and their subordinate place within the structure of production.
That’s why it’s so important for technocrats to convince us that this hierarchy is not only justified, but also natural—just how things are, and how they have to be. The truth is that these economists aren’t just “wrong.” Rather, as Marx reminded us about bourgeois economics, they speak the language of an upside-down world, and they deliver the policies needed to keep the system going.
You point out that austerity was not particularly good at stabilizing economies and restoring growth. Instead, its success was “in stabilizing class relations.” Please elaborate on this insight. And how does it relate to the neoliberal period through which we have been living since the late 1970s?
Historical research allows us to acquire some conceptual clarity about the meaning and role of austerity in the history of capitalism.
First, it is absolutely worthless to understand austerity, as many Keynesian economists do, as a policy mistake or a form of irrational policy. It can only be dismissed this way once we fall into the ideological trope of “depoliticizing the economy,” namely once we take our social relations of production for granted. Indeed, what might appear economically irrational in the sense that it damages economic growth is actually very rational for capital because it guarantees the survival of capitalism and its relations of production.
Regarding my case study, G. D. H. Cole put his finger on the essence of the austerity counteroffensive: “The big working-class offensive had been successfully stalled off; and British capitalism, though threatened with economic adversity, felt itself once more safely in the saddle and well able to cope both industrially and politically with any attempt that might still be made from the Labour side to unseat it.” ref4
The economic downturn was a price worth paying—not for all, but for capital. It was a short-term loss in exchange for a far more significant structural gain: austerity reasserted capitalist dominance, disciplined labor, and reignited the profit engine. By spring 1921, the British coal industry had entered a state of permanent depression. Miners quickly lost the material gains secured during the war, including the wage increases once guaranteed by the Sankey Commission.
The nationwide miners’ strike that began on April 1, 1921—nominally in defense of a national wage—was, in truth, the last heroic stand of those years against deepening precarity. But the strike collapsed when, on April 15, the leaders of the railway and transport unions withdrew their support, leaving the miners isolated. This betrayal would be remembered as Black Friday—the moment the British labor movement was decisively pushed onto the defensive.
Soon after, coal markets returned to interdistrict competition, and with it, the full brutality of private enterprise. By 1922, miners who remained employed were earning half of what they had earned in 1919—a staggering 46 percent drop in nominal weekly wages in just two years.
This historical analysis reveals that neoliberalism was not a rupture or exception within capitalism—it was an intensification of its longstanding, structural logic. Neoliberal austerity did not invent something new; it merely accelerated the deep-rooted tendencies of a system that has always relied on disciplining labor and constraining alternatives. In short, without austerity, capitalism risks unraveling—because in its absence, people begin to imagine and pursue different ways of living.
As my current research investigates, austerity was a permanent, if often overlooked, feature even during the so-called “Golden Age” of capitalism—particularly in the United States, and even more so in Europe and the Global South. The rise of the Volcker Shock and Reaganomics in the US, along with parallel trends in Europe, were not spontaneous policy shifts but strategic reactions to intensifying social mobilization of the 1970s. Keynesian stabilization efforts had failed to resolve class conflict; they had merely deferred and, in some cases, deepened it.
Austerity becomes most visible in moments of heightened social struggle, when the capitalist order is openly questioned. But the argument I am making goes further: this is not just a reactive mechanism—it is a structural necessity. Even in quieter periods, austerity must operate in the background, continuously weakening collective strength, undermining social solidarity, and constraining political imagination.
The capitalist order should never be taken for granted. It must be actively reproduced—and austerity is one of its most enduring instruments.
In this sense, historical analysis reveals how deeply misleading the mainstream definition of austerity truly is. Austerity is not simply about “less state, more market.” It’s not a zero–sum game between public and private. On the contrary, austerity is a form of active state intervention—one that deliberately shifts resources from the many to the few in order to preserve the dominance of market logic and to ensure that the capitalist order remains the only game in town.
More precisely, austerity isn’t about shrinking the state; it’s about ordering state priorities. It means slashing social spending while generously subsidizing asset managers, pumping billions into the arms industry, supporting genocide, and enacting massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” enacted on July 4, 2025, captures the violent arithmetic of austerity: historic cuts to the social safety net will be used to bankroll a staggering expansion of military and border control spending. The nearly $200 billion stripped from food assistance—leaving two million poor Americans hungry—will now fund detention centers, border surveillance, and next-gen military tech, all to secure profits for private shareholders.
The bill also cuts Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion, which is estimated to cause sixteen million people to lose health insurance coverage. Meanwhile, those earning over $500,000 a year will receive $168 billion in tax breaks.
And far from reducing the national debt, the bill is projected to drive it up by more than $3 trillion over the next decade. As Trump’s recent policies have once again made clear, austerity isn’t frugal—it’s expensive.
Since the global economic crisis of 2008 to 2009, we have seen an upsurge of far-right and neofascist political forces. Trumpism in the United States is one clear expression of this trend. But so is the Italian government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the Orban regime in Hungary, the Modi government in India, among many others. In light of your historical studies of an earlier wave of austerity and fascism, how do you understand the current ascendance of far-right movements?
These regimes are not anomalies; they are the concrete outcomes of austerity’s “success.” As I have said, austerity has nothing to do with balancing the budget and all to do with creating social vulnerability and a lack of economic opportunity for people. People feel the frustration for a system that constantly fails them but have very little means and tools to organize as a class. Decades of relentless social spending cuts and labor precarization have devastated the material conditions of the majority, leaving people less capable of resisting authoritarian turns.
With our daily lives consumed by survival, there’s little time or space to participate in class-based organizing or to imagine different futures. Instead, we become susceptible to dominant narratives that distort our understanding of systemic injustice. Rather than challenging the power structures that exploit us, we are encouraged to turn our frustration against those even more marginalized: immigrants blamed for “stealing jobs” or poor people vilified as undeserving beneficiaries of public aid.
The history of Nazi Germany is a case in point. More than a decade of punishing austerity policies imposed by Germany’s liberal governments—under pressure to meet the austerity mandates of the League of Nations—had the effect of crippling working-class movements in Germany, thereby opening the door for the far right to seize control and blame social problems on Jewish people and other minorities.
If Mussolini gained support through his promise to eradicate economic democracy and dismantle organized labor, especially via austerity, Hitler’s militarized and genocidal version of the austerity regime—repressing wages and labor rights to favor accumulation in the arms industry—was itself a direct consequence of the “success” of previous austerity. This is the true power of austerity: it reinforces itself. It generates popular backing for authoritarian, fascist-leaning governments that, once in power, intensify the same policies that caused the crisis.
The case of Argentine president Javier Milei illustrates this cycle well. Within ten months of taking office, his administration had privatized essential sectors—energy, water, sewage, and transportation—echoing Mussolini’s early embrace of largescale privatization in the 1920s. The result? While private capital gained lucrative new markets, ordinary Argentinians were left with soaring utility costs, declining service quality, and diminished public accountability.
When working-class people lose, our economic system wins. The austerity trinity supports capital, attracting wealthy investors through subsidies and state incentives, negligible taxes, low wages for workers, and minimal labor protections. Austerity ensures the best possible conditions for profits to skyrocket. In a sprout of sincerity that is often lacking in mainstream economics, renowned investor Warren Buffett once said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
In the face of austerity and fascist tendencies today, what conclusions can we draw from the historical examples you have studied? What pertinent lessons from the experiences of fascism and antifascism in the first part of the twentieth century would you emphasize for the socialist left in our times?
First, we must be clear-eyed: austerity and fascism are enduring features of capitalist society. Our socio-economic system cannot endure without deliberate efforts to maintain the capitalist order through the active construction of economic precarity, market dependence, and unwavering support for private profit expectations.
Technocrats do not require fascism to protect these pillars; austerity often operates on its own, in a more subtle, seemingly technical form. However, when economic technocrats align themselves with openly authoritarian governments—as is happening now in many countries—the repressive nature of both austerity and capitalism becomes harder to disguise. Once the liberal ideological veil drops, the courageous voices that rise up can begin to pose a real threat to the current social order.
Italian fascism, for example, was not defeated by the American army landing in Sicily. It was defeated by the partigiani movement [or partisans], by courageous young men and women risking everything for freedom. It is not by chance that the anticapitalist brigades were the strongest: there was widespread awareness that defeating fascism meant confronting capitalism head-on.
This is also a family legacy for me. My grandfather Camillo’s siblings, to whom I dedicate my book, fought fascist oppression. His sister Teresa Mattei, with the battle name Chicci, was the youngest woman to sit in the 1946 Italian Constituent Assembly after the fall of Mussolini’s regime.
It was thanks to her that the words “de facto” were included in Article 3 of the Italian Constitution: “It is the duty of the Republic to remove the obstacles of an economic and social order, which, by limiting de facto the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent the full development of the human person and the effective participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social organization of the country.”
A free spirit, Teresa did not succumb to the violence of the SS Nazi guards when, during the Resistance, they took advantage of her body while she carried messages to her partigiani comrades and did not hesitate to distance herself from the Communist Party when it betrayed its ideals. Her brother Gianfranco Mattei, a twenty-seven-year-old chemistry professor and member of the antifascist resistance, was captured on February 1, 1944, while building bombs to be used in the fight against the Nazi occupation.
After a few days of continuous torture, Gianfranco hanged himself with his belt rather than betray his comrades. The last words of my great-uncle, written on the back of a check secretly handed to his cellmate, were for his parents: “Be strong, knowing that I have been strong too.”
Mussolini was defeated in 1945, but the economic and institutional continuities with the fascist past largely prevailed. Luigi Einaudi, who had supported fascist austerity, became the first president of the Italian Republic and went on to impose heavy doses of austerity on his fellow citizens in the decades that followed.
The great twentieth-century Marxist figure who runs throughout your study is Antonio Gramsci, whom you situate in the struggles of the Italian revolutionary left after the First World War. What lessons could we draw from Gramsci’s legacy for our struggles today? How might Gramsci help inform our strategies for fighting austerity and insurgent authoritarianism?
Studying Antonio Gramsci’s writings and the issues of his Ordine Nuovo journal has profoundly shaped my understanding of the world. Gramsci’s groundbreaking theoretical insights did not emerge from an ivory tower. Born into a modest family in Sardinia, he was studying philosophy at the University of Turin when the Great War broke out.
Exempted from conscription due to health conditions, he was able to participate directly in workers’ mobilizations in the factory councils. His theoretical intuitions grew out of this active engagement. In his own life, Gramsci embodied the key concept of praxis he further develops in his prison notebooks—the unity of theory and practice, each informing and strengthening the other to advance transformative change already in motion.
Radicals grouped around L’Ordine Nuovo journal, known as Ordinovisti, reconciled the dichotomy between thought and action through study groups, assemblies, collaborative discussions, and “mutual education” between workers and intellectuals. As Gramsci himself wrote, “the articles of L’Ordine Nuovo were almost like a ‘recording’ of real events, seen as moments in a process of inner liberation and self-expression on the part of the working class.”
This concept of praxis is also the foundation for our current experiment in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation—FREE. Rather than keeping theoretical insights within the confines of academia, we have created a community-based institution that organizes public events on pressing economic issues, empowering people to realize that the economy is theirs. Another crucial insight of Gramsci’s was that the powerful agency of workers is revealed to them through collective endeavors.
At FREE, an open assembly process sets discussion priorities through co-participation between community members and scholars. We work to catalyze and connect groups building solidarity-based economic initiatives on the ground—such as the Really Really Free Market and Cooperation Tulsa. While FREE is still in its early stages, we aim for it to become a successful model that can be replicated in other communities. All our activities are also accessible online at freefreeforum.org.
Gramsci taught that the economic and the political are only separated in bourgeois society. To fight austerity, we must break market dependence, and this can be achieved by operating alternative economic models to the wage-relation system. Doing so is already a political act—one that demands collective, conscious mobilization.
I want to close by recalling Gramsci’s famous words from 1917, when the brutal connection between militarism and capitalism was on full display during the First World War: “I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent… Indifference is the deadweight of history.”
With the unspeakable genocide against Palestinians unfolding before our eyes, we cannot remain silent—even in the face of censorship and repression. My aunt Chicci spoke out against the racial laws that banned Jewish students from schools in fascist Italy and was permanently expelled from every school in the kingdom. Many of us share that courage today, but more is needed. The reason repression against Palestinian solidarity is so fierce is that it is, in essence, an anticapitalist struggle: demands for divestment strike at the heart of the corporate ecosystem that profits from genocide. This is not the moment to step back—it is the moment to fight harder. ×
Notes & References
- Editor’s note: According to the so-called “abstinence theory” in economics, capital is created not from the labor of workers but through the savings of entrepreneurs, that is, via their “abstinence” from consumption.
- Alberto Alesina and Lawrence H. Summers, “Central Bank Independence and Macroeconomic Performance: Some Comparative Evidence,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 25, no. 2 (1993): 151–62.
- Maffeo Pantaleoni, Bolcevismo Italiano [Italian Bolshevism] (Bari: G. Leterza, 1922), 36.
- D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought: Volume 4 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958), 419.