Maintaining exploitation, Mattei argues, requires specific policies — namely austerity, through which the state disciplines workers by imposing material insecurity. The formation of mainstream economics, she shows, was inextricably bound up with its ability to legitimate austerity by cloaking capitalist interests behind pretensions of neutrality. Such claims to objectivity, along with reliance on complex mathematical models, depoliticized economic questions, facilitating their placement in the hands of unelected “experts” and reinforcing forms of authoritarian governance.

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Echoing Karl Marx’s analysis of “so-called primitive accumulation,” Mattei emphasizes that the historical emergence of capitalism bore no resemblance whatsoever to the comforting neoclassical myth of the peaceful expansion of markets alongside rising productivity. The consolidation of absolute property rights took place through widespread, violent expropriation at the hands of the state — events “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire,” in Marx’s powerful formulation. Far from markets displacing states, Mattei insists that the coercive laws of competition and state power have worked hand in hand to uphold the capital order.

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Mattei’s critical point, however, is that austerity is not a mistaken attempt to generate growth, nor has it in fact failed. Its implementation is not the product of technical misunderstanding or erroneous theory; it is a profoundly political mechanism for maintaining the capital order. And far from being contingent, austerity is a necessary structural imperative for sustaining the class discipline that underpins profitability.

Austerity is thus “not a neoliberal aberration” but an enduring feature of macroeconomic governance, forming the framework within which all public spending must operate.

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But it was the end of the postwar boom and the 1970s crisis that really brought down the hammer of austerity. Falling profits demanded increasing exploitation through cuts to real wages and social expenditures. Suddenly, the corporatist mechanisms that had anchored distributional bargains as well as class discipline became instruments for securing wage restraint as social democratic regimes embraced the “new reality” of global competitiveness. Having long accepted the constraints of capitalism as fundamental political limits, these parties had neither the imagination nor the capacity to forge an alternative to neoliberal austerity and market reform.