Measuring austerity’s economic eff ects in Britain and Italy also corroborates one of the main claims of this book: that there is a profound parallelism between austerity in a democratic setting and austerity in a Fascist setting. In the 1920s, the repressive nature of British austerity primarily took the form of market coercion: workers were forced into compliance with the logic of capital accumulation aft er the Treasury and the Bank of England devised policies that triggered high unemployment and curtailed welfare rights. Increased economic necessity brought workers to their knees. Th e Italian version of austerity did not need to rely on unemployment as such, since it was accompanied by Fascist state interventions that slashed nominal wages by decree and annihilated genuine worker’s representation.

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1474