The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Capital Order How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara E. Mattei

Episode Date: November 25, 2022

The Capital Order How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism by Clara E. Mattei A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below. Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign-trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.

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Anyway guys, that's the ramble. That's the best I got for improv. It's Monday. What do you want from me, people? Jesus Christ. Anyway guys, welcome to the big show. We certainly love to have you on. Remember, the Chris Foss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your uncle does. Because we all know your uncle has a special place in his heart for it, but we won't get into that. But just think of that and remember that at Thanksgiving. Stay away from that guy. Anyway, guys, welcome to the show.

We have an amazing author on the show. She's the author of the newest book that's just come out. You guys are going to be really freaking amazed. You're going to learn a lot and you'll just be so much better looking. The smarter you are, the more better looking you are. That's actually a scientific fact that I just made up. Anyway, guys,

be sure to further show your family and friends and relatives. Go to youtube.com Go to goodreads.com Chris Voss I've sworn enough for the show. I think we've done the swearing on the show. YouTube's Go to Goodreads.com for us. Chris Voss, Gersh Durnit. I've sworn enough for the show. I think we've done the swearing on the show. YouTube's going to ding us for that, I guess, whatever.

See all the crap on LinkedIn, and we're trying to get TikTok going. It's going pretty well, but we're trying to get better over there, so check out what's over there as well. And we're not on Snapchat because we're not going to send you DMs. Stop it. The show doesn't do that. Anyway, guys, she is the amazing author of the newest book that's come out November

17, 2022. I'm so far behind this year I thought it was in the future, but actually it was a couple days ago. It has just hit the market. Claire Matai is on the show. Claire Matai is on the show with us today. She's going to be talking to us

about this amazing new book that she's got out, The Capital Order, How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. We just barely dodged fascism recently here, at least on the train that we're on here in America. So this will be very interesting to learn about. Claire is an assistant professor at the economics Department of the New School for Social Research. She has a PhD in economics from Santa Ana School for the Advanced Studies and MA and BA in philosophy from Pavia University. Did I pronounce that right, Clara? You did.

There you go. Welcome to the show. How are you? I'm very well, thanks. Glad to be here. Awesome sauce. It's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the show. How are you? I'm very well, thanks. Awesome sauce. It's wonderful to have you. Congratulations on the new book. Give us a.com wherever you want people to

maybe go find you on the interwebs or order up the book. Order the book. You can order it on our Amazon or on the Chicago website. If you go on the Chicago website, there's an author discount with the promo code CAPITAL, all in capital letters, and it's $18 with the author's discount all in capital letters and uh and and it's 18 with the

author's discount so it's not bad oh that's pretty good deal so uh what motivated you want to write this book um i started writing this book researching for the book quite a long time ago, let's say around 10 years ago, when Italy was in the midst of a big austerity surge after the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. And now, you know, given that austerity is kind of structural to how our society works, we are back at it.

Austerity is back with a vengeance everywhere, really. In the UK, we are back at it. Austerity is back with a vengeance everywhere, really. In the UK, it's hitting particularly hard. When I talk about austerity, what I'm talking about is the hikes in interest rates that we've been seeing happening all over the globe, Fed leading the line, and combined with cuts in the social sector. So we know that, for example, the Chancellor of the Exchequer

just announced that they're going to cut on health care, on schooling. We know that the Republican Party has already made it clear that they want to cut back on Medicaid and Medicare. We are back at the usual norm. And this is combined, of course, with industrial austerity, which is all about directly attacking labor unions, repressing wages, and especially privatizing, opening up to the market. And so you study this over what time period do you cover in the book? Because I think you go back a little bit in history, don't you? idea here is that historical insights are interesting when they expose certain connections,

certain logics that are still clearly functioning today, but just are just more normalized or just a little bit more concealed. So what I look at is the period immediately after the First World War, so we're talking about the years 1918-1920, in which we were experiencing, similarly to today, very high levels of inflation that were triggering social upheaval and the breakdown of the common narrative by which our economic system is the most efficient and the only possible one. So in that historical moment, I look at especially Britain and Italy, but this was true also for the United States and many other countries in the world. What was happening is that people from the bottom were organizing to imagine an alternative future for our society. From the bourgeoisie to the

workers, everyone thought capitalism was over. So it was a real existential crisis of the system. And why? Well, because people were fundamentally disputing the capital order. And by the capital order, I mean the fundamental social relation that governs all of us by which the majority is forced in order to make a living. So in order to eat, sleep, go to school, get cured at the hospital, is forced to have some money in their pockets that comes from getting paid as a wage worker. So selling one's labor power return for a wage. This, which is normal for us, we rarely dispute it, right? Sometimes I tell my students, you even recognize that this

is happening it's just part of our lives um it's not a natural fact and at that historical moment people realizing that it was actually a quite of an exploitative trap and we could think about a society that was actually um run by sovereign work sovereign producers self-management of industry. And this came with the dispute of the other big pillar of our system, which is the private property of the means of production. This also said that inflation triggers demand for social change. And that was happening very robustly then. And what happened was that it was actually then that austerity, as we still know it today, was invented in order to tell everyone, we're sorry, this cannot happen.

You have to just accept the status quo as it is and foreclose alternatives to our system. Experts in power were well aware that while they have us think that wage relations and private property of the means of production are natural givens, they know it's not the case, that it's a social construction, that it needs protection. And this is where austerity played a huge role since 100 years back up to the present in kind of forcing us all to imagine no alternatives for ourselves, but to get paid low wages in precarious conditions. And the austerity motto is consume less, produce more. In fact, everyone in this planet, except for a tiny minority of inhabitants, is forced to accept this motto,

which has become completely part and parcel of how we live our daily lives. There you go. So let's establish a few things, because hysteria is a big word for most people. You know, it is for me. In fact, I had to look it up because I went to public school. The definition of hysteria that you're using in the title of the book, difficult economic conditions created by government measures to reduce budget,

especially by reducing public expenditure uh does that sound like the the right definition that we have for austerity there yeah and i would say though to not focus just on reduction in public expenditure because here the problem is that if you look at the aggregate you know in the united states we're spending a lot of money and this money is going for example in the military States, we're spending a lot of money. And this money is going, for example, in the military sector. So the United States are spending in 2021. So even prior to the war in Ukraine, we were spending $800 billion, which is 3.5% of the GDP. On schools, K through 12, federal government spends only $66 billion, which is 0.26% of our GDP. So we see that the problem here is not like how much money is spent in the aggregate. The problem is where

resources are spent. So I would say that austerity is, fiscal austerity is about shifting resources from the social sector, the benefits, schooling, housing, you name it, to the saving, investing minority or to specific, you know, the military industrial complex is an industry that benefits the usual suspects. So austerity is about where you spend. So it's about taking away money from what entitles us as humans beings and where you take the money from. And actually, the case is that the United States has structural austerity there because we are a country governed by regressive taxation. And by regressive taxation, I mean the fact that in relative terms, workers are taxed more than the

higher brackets. So this is something that happens through increases in consumption taxes, which of course, we all pay the same, notwithstanding our income. And of course, thus, it weighs more on people who have lower incomes and cuts at the top, for example, cuts in corporate taxes, which was one of the big reforms, of course, of the Trump administration. So that's a fiscal austerity. But I talk about austerity as a trinity. So it's not just fiscal austerity. It goes with monetary austerity. So, again, making money more expensive, interest rate hikes, which is typical policy right now of all central banks in the world. And then industrial austerity, once more about privatization, which increases our dependence on the market, and wage repression, deregulation of the labor market to make labor more precarious and more subject to the laws of supply and demand. Wow.

So we're going through an interesting time right now. With austerity, I mean, is there a person behind this? Is it just something that comes out of the patterns? I mean, is the central banks around the world, the Federal Reserve in our case, responsible for promoting austerity? Is there an intent there where like, hey, we're going to for promoting austerity? Is there an intent there where like, Hey, we're going to create some austerity or is the, is, is, uh, how,

how does, how does it work? Is there, is there, it's like some guy behind the, you know, some Illuminati, don't believe in people stop it. Uh, but you know what I mean? Is there somebody, you know, that's, that's really kind of in control of this that has maybe some evil intent or, or is the intent good and the result is bad, you know, as intents go? That's a very important and complex question. So, first of all, it is important to point out that austerity is really, I think, the emblem of how non-democratic advanced capitalist countries are in the sense that citizens, normal citizens, don't make decisions that regard the macroeconomic management of the economy, especially monetary decisions, because it's left to independent central banks that are not democratically elected.

And these officials keep decisions all to themselves. And of course, this is not something, again, that we should accept as a fact. It was once more constructed institutionally. And it was constructed exactly starting from 100 years back when once more after the First World War people were demanding greater say in how to run the monetary question and they were always blocked out of the decision making

process with the idea no central banks will not be nationalized we will keep them independent why because only if they're independent can central banks, as one of my protagonists put it, Ralph Hotchley, a big economist at the Treasury, can central banks never apologize, never regret and never explain, which is exactly what we're seeing today. So about intentions or not intentions, clearly austerity is, my argument in the capital order is that austerity is structural to the system. The system only can function smoothly in delivering

economic growth and capital accumulation if the majority accepts hard work and low consumption while accumulation happens at the top. Now, it's structural to the system, but it's, again, not something that just happens. You need institutions and people that, in a way, implement austerity and also defend austerity through sophisticated technical jargon and certain economic models, which, once more more are of a certain type. There's a lot of different economic theory, but only a certain type becomes dominant. And the dominant economic theory, which is the one that the experts at the Federal Reserve, the expert at the Treasury in the United States all take for granted, are, of course, coming

from the neoclassical framework, which is a model that immediately sees the economic machine as driven by the saver-investor few. So the idea is that it's the individual virtuous entrepreneurs and savers who are guiding our economic prosperity. So if they gain, everyone else gains as a consequence. This is a very different framework from the one that many people after the First World War were espousing,

which was instead a framework that saw not harmony, but class conflict, and didn't see the center as being the entrepreneur and the saver. They saw the entrepreneurs and the saver, they saw the entrepreneurs and the saver as benefiting from the general exploitation of the majority of the working class. So we see here how a specific economic doctrine was wielded in a very specific moment and lasted throughout today in order to justify certain theory now about intentions intentions are difficult historians

cannot really deal with intentions what you can deal with is the structural effect of certain actions right because how do you reconstruct intentions what you can reconstruct is what people believe their models are doing and certainly here is the great power of ideology is that the capital order as a historical reconstruction is not trying to blame the economists as being evil people. It's trying to see the role economists play in producing certain results in our society. So at this point, it's about figuring out that these economists really believe in the beauty of their models, really believe that society is run by the saver and best of few. And so in a way, their policies are meant to incentivize this elite about the fact that now what the problem is that we're facing is that the labor market is too tight. The labor market being too tight means that it's a very interesting data point. for every two job openings, there is one person that is...

So for every one person who's unemployed, there are two job openings. While 10 years ago, there were four people fighting for one job. So we see here how we are in a historical moment in which workers have the upper hand because there's a lot of demand for labor and little supply of labor. And why is there little supply?

Because we're in a moment in which people are kind of giving up on participating in this classical wage relation. People think that potentially they can find other ways to make a living. And or in general, they're fed up about getting such low wages. So the workforce participation is extremely low. It is in this moment that his that experts are clear about the fact that the reason why we need to increase interest rates is because we need to slow down the economy. This will produce a higher unemployment rate. And higher unemployment rate will mean that workers will be disciplined to go back and accept working for lower wages and generally speaking, participate in the labor force. So I think this is something economists will know.

So while they think their models are the best ones for society as a whole, they're also very explicit about the fact that certain sectors of society need to suffer the pain of the Fed's decisions much more. And actually, the Fed's decision to increase the interest rate are done purposefully to cool down the labor market, meaning that people will get laid off. And in this way, all these strikes that are happening right now, all these demands for increases in wages, that's the problem with inflation, right? Because people are demanding higher wages and they're getting higher wages. Even if real wages are not mapping onto inflation, nominal wages are going up.

So actually people's checks are higher and they're actually quite substantially higher. In just one year, they've gone up 4%, 4.7%. The average hourly earnings go up 4.7% from October 2021 to October 2022. Just this month from September to October, wages climbed of 0.4%. So here we're seeing once more that this,

combined with the labor militancy, there's a lot of strikes going on in the United States, even if people don't like to talk about it. My school, the new school, for example, part-time teachers are on strike now. They got a good offer actually now after days of strike. And there's a great indicator. There's a labor action tracker that you can find from Cornell University that tracks real-time all the labor struggles that are going on in the United States.

And right now there are 621 labor actions in 949 locations. So it's a very cool map. And you see that the hub is the California area, the Chicago area, the New York area. And this, I think, is interesting to figure out that the intentions here is clearly that of cooling down the heated labor market, which means that in a way we need to silence the workers. Okay. A lot to unpack there. So let's see here where I had a million questions. So do you think the intent, and we're getting a lot of mic clipping, Claire, if there's something you can do with that mic to keep her from getting hit. Please.

Is the intent, you know, how much of this is attached to what we call neoliberalism? We don't have a mic now, Claire. I think you need to change your settings. I was muted. I was muted. Now you can hear me. Yes. There you go.

Great. I took away the headphones. So hopefully the sound is better. So how much is it to do with neoliberalism? So the reason why I wrote the capital order was also to try to question a little bit the overuse of the term neoliberalism. Why? Well, because there's somehow intrinsic in the idea of saying it's about neoliberalism, there is a sense by which neoliberalism is a phase, an exception to a potentially virtuous norm, which is capitalism in general. So in this sense, the idea in the capital order is that we

can talk about austerity capitalism rather than focusing on neoliberalism, which supposedly is a phase that starts from the 1980s up to today. So the idea is that austerity is much more structural to capitalism, and it's not just about the neoliberal phase, and that we need to thus start rethinking, I think, in these terms, the potential for reform of the system itself. I think capitalism has, and not just me, a lot of other economists think that capitalism has intrinsic limits. It's not as flexible as many progressive-minded people have us think. There's a very big limit to how much welfare expenditures can increase. Why? Well, because if you increase welfare expenditures, A, people start consuming

more, and this will, in fact, impact inflation. And we know that monetary stability is a very important point for our economic system. It cannot the market can't function if money money is unstable. As we're seeing today, it's a big problem. Inflation. Secondly, if the welfare state is too big, then again, people might start questioning as they kind of did during the pandemic, they just received checks in their mail and they could live off of money given to them just as being entitled as human beings. At this point, of course, they might start questioning, why should we, in fact, go work for such low wages and participate in the labor force. So we see here that historically, the welfare state has functioned to, in a way, let's say the word is subsidize private investments. So what the private employer was not willing to do because it was too costly, then the state came in and, for example, offered education to the workers, infrastructures in the forms of roads and healthcare. There's a big scandal about how many employees at Walmart are living on all the state benefits. So the state has been, in a way, subsidizing the private sector,

but the state cannot just expand this function too much because it might instead imperil the private investment. Because people might, if they realize that it's a political choice to give them or not give them resources, they might start questioning the very foundations of the society we're in, which is actually founded on wage labor by which people go work for a private employee. So there's a clear limit to that. And I think the idea that we should not just be critical of neoliberalism,

we should be a little bit more critical about how our system runs generally as part of the message in the capital order. Okay. So we live in almost an oligarchy and we've seen our march towards fascism. I mean, we saw the same rise of what leads to fascism in Italy, in Germany and other places, Pinochet. You look at any sort of either a populist rise of fascism, authoritarian, or whatever. And it usually leads from the struggle of the middle class or the struggle of the class of people that are the common people. Let's just call them that, I guess, everybody who isn't rich. And the embracement of fascism is the blowback from the quashing of that. Do I have that correctly in analogy?

So I think we can distinguish, correct? But I think we could be more precise in the sense that there's cases and cases. The case I go through in the capital order is the founding moment of fascism. Mussolini's Italy, Benito Mussolini was actually the Duce, the man who founded the very idea and word fascism. And in this case, what you saw is that actually he came to power to implement austerity. He gained justification for his regime and strengthened his rule thanks to being the best student of austerity. So he comes to power in 1922. In that moment, he undertakes the most widespread privatization campaign uh lays off 65 000 public employees slashes public expenditures in the social services does their money

curtails unions and so on and so forth and this makes it such that he achieves this industrial peace quote unquote which is something that the whole liberal establishment, both in Italy and in the Anglo American world are very proud about. So they are very supportive of Mussolini's rule to the point that he gains the possibility of becoming a dictator for 20 years, thanks to the initial support of his economic policies that was happening throughout the world. So this is similar to what happens, as you were mentioning, the case of Pinochet, in which Pinochet actually strengthened his rule because very renowned economists like Milton Friedman go and publicly hail his government because he's called all these Chicago boys to work at his side

in order to reform the Chilean economy according to an austerity template. So there are cases like this. There's the case of Suarto's dictatorship in Indonesia with the Berkeley boys. So I would say this coupling of fascist authoritarian governments with economic expertise and the fact that economic experts in these historical contexts find the best possible opportunity

to directly implement their economic models without having to, you know, to deal with any public rebate or public opposition. Now, this is one case. And this is where, sorry, I think this is important. We see similarities with the supposed democratic representative democracies, because actually at the same time when Mussolini was in power,

doing austerity through an authoritarian state, Britain, the cradle of parliamentary liberalism, was doing the same through the means that we're seeing right now today in the United States. How? Well, tweaking the dials of macroeconomic management, which were still in the hands of these economic experts, Bank of England, British Treasury, same as the Fed and the Treasury in the United States, in a way, are organized through bureaucrats, economic experts who stay in government, stay at the head of these institutions, and are able to fundamentally do whatever it takes to get the economy back in order,

according to an austere framework. So this is one type of fascism, the austerity fascism that is always very popular with the liberal elite. Then, of course, we have other forms of fascism. Like, I mean, again, we don't even want to use the word too widely, I believe. But of course, like Nazi Germany, Hitler came to power because people were so fed up about austerity that had been wielded for the 1920s, throughout the 1920s, also in Germany, as a response to the hyperinflation of the post-World War I, that Hitler was voted in office because of his supposed social programs, right? And it's actually interesting. So the Hitler case is a

case in which people thought, how are we going to get out of this horrible social crisis in which we are so impoverished? Well, there's this guy who's claiming he's going to do so much for us, let's vote for him, right? And this is actually something that we see a lot in right-wing populist governments today, including in Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who now is directly, I mean, priding itself of her descendants, her party's descendants from Mussolini, actually came to power because people thought she was going to finally

oppose the European Union in their austerity diktats and kind of give a little bit more to the people. Now, as soon as she's in power, it's clear that she's hired once more this usual neoclassical economist who was already working for Draghi. And again, she's going to do austerity. But I think we can kind of distinguish, right,

how fascism can be popular because people are hoping that a fascist government will do something different from austerity. And those fascist regimes that are actually widely popular because they're capable of implementing austerity when people are, in a way, demanding for a different socioeconomic future that is potentially post-capitalist, like in the case of Chile and Italy in the 1920s. Oh, wow. Okay. So very interesting. Very interesting. So is it normally where these folks promise that they're going to, you know, hey, we're going to give you all this free crap and we're going to support better social systems

and then when they get in power, they protect the rich and the oligarchy. Yeah, I guess that's part of it. I mean, you know, again, I think the point is that of the role of the political economist. So I'm, you know, I'm a historical political economist. The role of the political economist is also to say, you know, sure, intentions of those in power matter. And of course, agency matters. But at the same time, there are constraints, clear constraints, because if you want to participate in a global capitalist economy, you are in a way you will need to keep your wages competitive. What does keeping wages competitive mean? It means that you are going to have to repress wages in order to export at better prices, right? Or in order for capital flight to not happen, if you start taxing capital like crazy in, for example, I don't know, in the United States, of course, we know that while labor has constraints in moving around the world because migrants are not very welcomed, capital can move all around the world.

So as soon as governments raise taxes, of course, capital flights happen and investors go somewhere else to invest. So here we see that in a way, a system that is based on the profit motive and on private investment for the sake of greater profit with respect to the money you invested in, and this is just the definition of what capitalism is, there are very clear limits to what governments in power can do in terms of their economic policy. This is why it's an austerity

capitalism that reign is that even if, you know, there's people in government with good intentions for the people, either you decide to break away from it or you will have to accept clear disciplining of your people and the ultimate priority of uh you know of um abiding of of boosting the market confidence that's all we hear right we need to maintain market confidence and this is clear for any um elected government in power pretty amazing stuff there in the thing and i think inside the book you got access to some records in italy and i think britain yes uh that was kind of interesting and you were able to open those up or or interpret them for the first time tell us a little bit about that yeah sure so um the the historian works

through primary sources so uh a historian does an interpretative job, right? That's why it's important to not only base one's understanding of history through the work of other people, so secondary sources, but go directly to the documents because you might see something that others before you have either not noticed or purposefully ignored. So what scholars have not noticed so far, and that's the capital order does show, is that in the archives of, for example, the Foreign Office in Britain, or in the archives of the Bank of England in Britain, and in the archives of the National Archives of the Italian government in Italy,

what you see there is that there is a commonality of intents. So I think that's very interesting is how these primary sources disclose the clear class war in which all of the elite and especially the economic experts were participating in after the First World War and how they were very well aware of the threat to the capital order and they were acting explicitly to protect capital as the foundation of our society. And in this protection, they were willing to, you know, go hand in hand with fascist regimes or, again, make their own population suffer, like in Britain, by increasing the unemployment rate

so that the majority was forced to accept the austerity motto, which still speaks to us today, which is consume less, produce more. In order for the system to work, the majority has to accept to consume less and produce more. We see that as soon as people start consuming too much, then we say, oh, the inflation is going up. As soon as people decide, you know, maybe to break away from labor force participation, oh, the system is in crisis again. So what's cool is that if you look at primary sources, you're not making things up. And you're but you're also not relying on other historical accounts that may be have put into

place in order to justify our current society. A lot of historians, like a lot of economists, tend to justify this status quo by telling a narrative about the history that is functional to the present. The ambition here in the capital order is to tell a history of the past that can instead help us look critically at the present. And especially give us also imagination for alternative ways of organizing production and distribution. This is why the first part of the book is all devoted to these different experiments that emerged after the First World War, practical cases of how you can think about our world run differently. And the second part, instead of the capital order, shows how, of course, there is immediate counteraction. There's immediate call to arms of the experts and state elite to wield the state in favor of austerity and kill the ambitions for an alternative future. There you go. There you go.

Well, this is very interesting. People should definitely check out your book. Anything more you want to plug in the book before we go out? I think about, I just would like to send a message to the general American audience, which is try to find critical sources that avoid giving you a sense that we are stuck in society as it is. There is a lot of potential creativity.

There's a lot of people that put effort in trying to change society from its foundations. And I did a little part of this collective project, which is to give a sense of how history can speak to the present. But I think every one of us can actually collaborate. And these podcasts, the Chris Voss show, for example, is one other opportunity for people to like, reach out to information that is not, you know, completely subject to the mainstream censorship, which is why they have us all just kind of sit back and accept what's going on. I think there's more and more thirst. I've been presenting my book all over the UK last week, and the new generations are so just excited to hear new thoughts, are so proactive

in thinking about a better future for us all. And this is even more, ever more necessary, given the climate disaster that we're going to face. I don't think capitalism is reformable, is more utopian to think of reforming capitalism than actually trying to rethink the foundation. This doesn't require a bloody revolution, as it's always thought. You can have revolutionary ends through constitutional means and through collective engagement at all levels, starting from neighborhood councils or just in general engagement with small participation in how we lead our economic lives. There you go. There you go. There you go. So order of the book, folks, it's called The Capital Order, How Economists Invented Austerity and Paid the Weight of Fascism.

Clara, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for the opportunity here. There you go. And give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. I have Twitter, Clara E. Matei, and otherwise I'm trying to put together my own website, but it's not yet out. But you can find it then Googling my name, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.

There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Go to YouTube.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. Go to Goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. Go to goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisFoss. All those places on the internet that you can find, we're there. Thanks for tuning

in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. Thank you.