The Capital Order Quotes

“In Italy from 1925 to 1930 there was a noticeable growth in share of total income garnered by the few, with the income of the top 1 percent growing by 9.6 percent, the top 0.1 by 29 percent, and the top 0.05 by 41 percent.26 Growth in income concentration continued, even through the onset of the Great Depression in 1929”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“Pantaleoni’s elitist view is inseparable from his Social Darwinist perspective, by which in his lectures on political economy he teaches his students that the economic qualities are innate and cannot be compensated for with education or external factors. Inequality is explicitly a natural fact, and a very healthy one for society. As he bluntly put it: “the most complex of social organizations does not require any other condition than freedom of action and choice in order to proceed with increasing virtue for the selective elimination of the incapable”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“Economists proclaimed the objective status of pure economics through a forceful, highly narrated separation of society’s economic and political realms. They drew a strict boundary line: the economic is transcendent, an isolated system in abstraction from other elements of the sociopolitical sphere. In this way, pure economists diverted their gaze from historical questions like the origins of property ownership or class relations; these things were understood as falling outside the economist’s domain, and considered naturally occurring givens.23 Economists’ claims of objectivity are fortified by their quantitative methods: numbers can’t lie, so how can economics?24”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“Indeed, theirs is a set of cases in which political and academic endeavors—two lanes that scholars usually evaluate separately—are in profound harmony. With these four economists as their ambassadors, austerity policies found useful means of dissemination in the communication of economic theory. Indeed, the dual motto of austerity—consume less and produce more—was driven by these economists’ will to implement and “make real” the ideal models of a virtuous, capitalist society that presupposes the subordination of the working class.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“interest not of one class of one nation but of the “world.” These thoughts should not come as a surprise, since they are indicative of the austerity logic that is still pervasive today—the underlying assumption that rationality itself coincides with the rationality of capital accumulation. There is nothing else as important.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“the state extracting money from the working classes was the key to capital accumulation.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“This spiral has a self-sustaining effect: peoples’ increased demand supports their own employment, since their purchases deplete the stock of goods; merchants thus place more orders, inducing producers to increase production by hiring more workers.34 In this sense, employment and higher wages are seen not as an achievement of economic progress but as a threat to the standard of value.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“austerity carried within it the principle of exempting economic policy decisions from democratic procedures, either through technocratic institutions or, as in the case of Italy, through a Fascist government. Austere”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“Austerity a) re-naturalizes the capitalist pillars of private property and wage relations; b) denies the political and economic agency of workers; c) vindicates the priority of top-down economic science; and d) reasserts the divide between the economic and the political.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“economic experts—in their high position within the state apparatus—constructed consensus through economic models that excluded capital (as a social relation of production) as a variable; instead it became a given. By embedding hierarchical social relations within their equation, these neoclassical models also replace the concept of exploitation as the basis of profit with an idea of “market freedom”;”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“The capitalist states and their economic experts secured capital accumulation through policies that imposed the “proper” (i.e., class-appropriate) behavior on the majority of their citizens. The three forms of austerity policies—fiscal, monetary, and industrial—worked in unison to disarm the working classes and exert downward pressure on wages.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“employees’ power came not as individuals but as a group. It is only as a member of a class, as a producer, that the worker can perceive the absolute indispensability and centrality of labor in the production process and in the construction of a post-capitalist society—a society where the majority is freed from wage labor and elevated to the position of self-governing producers.”
― Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

“Rescuing the structures of capital accumulation meant quashing all popular expectations for social emancipation following the sacrifice they underwent during the war. The prize of postwar reconstruction was no longer democratic control of industry, no "a home fit for heroes"; it was, in the words of the merchant banker R. H. Brant of Lazard Brothers, London, the "hard truth" of "labour and suffering" (League of Nations, Brussels International Finance Conference 1920, Verbatim Record).”
― Clara Mattei, A ordem do capital: Como economistas inventaram a austeridade e abriram caminho para o fascismo