Austerity— both in its material form as a coercive policy and in its theoretical form as a consensusbuilding set of theories— repudiated the workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains, especially those of the Ordinovista movement. Th e group’s practical and theoretical alternatives were the gravest enemy to the capitalist system, an enemy that originators of the austerity doctrine were determined to defeat. In fact, and as we shall further explore in the second half of the book, austerity smashes the Ordinovista methodological/institutional foundations. Austerity a) renaturalizes the capitalist pillars of private property and wage relations; b) denies the political and economic agency of workers; c) vindicates the priority of topdown economic science; and d) reasserts the divide between the economic and the political.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 654