Richard D. Wolff

Your guest is a very impressive thinker, any relation to Enrico Mattei?

Austerity leads to Capitalist control of government not fascism, and other mythical demons that have long left us. This is 2023 and its time to fix your clocks. The greatest shift in wealth today is into the pockets of controlling capitalist financial powers with the help of legislation. Then there are the enormous sums of our budget that go to elite upper middle class protected workers who earn more than their overcompensated jobs provide the greater society of poorer taxpayers. Finally there are the majority of 60 hour work week / 3 job people who just get by and are stripped to support all of the above.
Fascism exercised collective management by workers and owners under State authority for balance, and to prevent occupation by and for any singular interests (corporatism).
A larger part of American and western, and now eastern society, today has experienced greater privilege, luxury and comfort than any previous generation despite the drain in budget and unsustainable resources,, more so than any other generation in history.
Austerity is supposed to be APPLIED IN LEVELS, FROM ALL THOSE WHO TAKE TOO MUCH to the remaining feeders at lower levels. The problem is that it is not used to curb the incomes of our CAPITALIST AUTHORITARIANS who take the greatest sums. In France this month, it is being battled in the form of pensions because without proper government control in necessary balance (and appropriate taxation of financial powers or your existing “captains of industry”) these budgets are drying up and in 10 years there will be nothing left in their pension accounts. Austerity measures should also apply to today’s individual pensions exceeding 50,000 dollars annually. Your personal jet set life style or high income should not be the factor, as opposed to “Living with essentials” and provisions for that end.

On the other hand control or Fascism under Mussolini not only worked for Italy but for America under FDR. The “New Deal” was Fascism imported and renamed, And… it worked, with all its provided controls and social securities and provisions.

The difference of modern capitalism in America and that in fascist Italy was “that the fascist government controlled capitalism” and not the other way around. The fact that so much confusion continues to exist in understanding political ideologies is remarkable. All the western anti-fascist, and all the great anti-fascist Marxist (as opposed to the pro-fascist Marxist) would redefine fascism’s characterization continuously during its years as a government and after, to include Gramsci who himself was politically controversial.

Although your young guest is respectively intelligent, there are also the countless opinions of scholars, also built on studied analysis, around the world and throughout time.

“By the mid 1960’s, SOVIET MARXIST argued that fascism was only one political form that contemporary capitalism might assume. More than that, they granted that fascism was neither a creature nor a tool of finance capital. Nor was it a function of the ownership of property. Fascism, we are told, exercised power over Italy independent of whoever owned the means of production. More than that, rather than supervising the productive and technological retrogression of Italian industry [as in Russia under Lenin]… fascism administered its growth. By the beginning of the 1970’s we are told that rather than undermining productive output, “fascism really represented a development [under State authority] of capitalist forces of production …. It represented industrial development, technological innovation and an increase in the productivity of labor”. We were further informed that after the first world war, “fascist Italy’s industrial recovery….was the strongest in capitalist Europe” and after the great depression, its recovery “was quite spectacular”. – A. James Gregor