Austerity & Imagination

A brief look at the origins of austerity, its effects on our leisure, and our imagination.

I don’t know, guys! I don’t know! I am not as sold on austerity as I once was years ago. It seems like we are sleep-walking, making a lot of assumptions on the stuff that impacts us so much on a daily basis. What compounds the problem is that we, and by “we” I mean mostly “I”, believe that just because something is too big of a concept that we shouldn’t at least make an attempt.

And like in most cases of sleepwalking, the reason for doing so is mostly because these big concepts we avoid, in this case “economic austerity”, are, and have been such a mainstay in our lives. In the case of economic austerity is has been around in various forms for a majority of the last handful of decades, and there is a case to be made that it’s even longer than that. Americans have seen austerity inflicted on them on every level in this time. The kicker is that the results over that time have been shoddy at best, but it is an ideology we keep turning back to again and again. The reasons for this are many, oen is probably because we lack imagination in how we can organize the world, and another reason is because that a vast majority of us believe it is the only game in town. And since its inception, austerity is the very water in which we swim. I am not here to dissect the micro- and macro-economics of something as complicated as fiscal policy, and I certainly can’t propose a set of policies. But we should at least be open about deconstructing this stuff? It’s truly a bummer how uncreative we are. It actually bums me out. We owe it to ourselves to peel the curtain back even just a tiny bit to see what exactly has been going on. Not only that, but why doesn’t this thing we all collectively believe in deliver the results we all believe it should?

Okay well what is austerity? You can google it and get a pretty good answer but it helps to refer to what Clara Mattei, in her fantastic book “The Capital Order”, calls the Austerity Trinity where you have the three ways that austerity can be implemented:

• Fiscal Austerity: This is all about slashing government spending, pulling back on public goodies like welfare, education, or infrastructure. Think of it as the government saying, “Sorry, folks, we’re tightening the purse strings.” Of course, taking away these services almost exclusively effects those you use them (hint; those who need them the most).

• Monetary Austerity: This is about jacking interest rates up and tightening credit which is all about making money harder to borrow and more expensive. It’s the central bank trying to get things to cool things down.

• Industrial Austerity: This is where the workplace gets hit directly—policies that keep wages low, bust unions, and make sure workers don’t get too lax and start asking for more. Think of it as controlling the factory floor.

These are talking points we hear politicians point to all the time when they tell us what they are going to do in order to bring prosperity to the nation.

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But the thing about austerity as we know it today is that it cannot be fully grasped without understanding the historical context in which it was born. In order to understand that it helps to have a good guide, in my case that is Clara Mattei’s work. Mattei transports us to the aftermath of World War I when some of the very first austerity policies were put into place by both England and Italy with similar ends in mind - albeit in different settings. In both countries, after WWI there was serious working-class mobilization and revolutionary fervor. Workers not only demanded greater economic democracy, they needed higher wages, better working conditions, and a say in production processes. These demands were threatening the established capitalist order and class relations. These same citizens who had just gained the right to vote for the first time, and yet little did they know it would be the last free election before Benito Mussolini's fascist coup d'état. Mattei contends that this surge in working-class power prompted elites, elites who were supported by economists, to devise austerity as a countermeasure. And this countermeasure was created specifically to be used as a political lever to keep capitalism and it’s inequalities in place, as Mattei herself states, in order to keep class relations in tact.

When it comes to the political motivations behind austerity measures it helps to look at just what policies Benito Mussolini put into place to maintain the status quo and to keep the lower class where it was:

• "Battle for Grain" (Battaglia del Grano) – This is where Mussolini promoted domestic wheat production to reduce reliance on imports, diverting resources from other agricultural sectors and leading to higher bread prices.

• Wage Cuts and Labor Controls – His regime froze wages and suppressed strikes to curb inflation and maintain industrial output.

• Consumer Rationing – During the 1930s, especially after sanctions from the League of Nations (1935), goods like meat, sugar, and coffee were to be rationed.

• Gold and Jewelry Confiscation – To bolster state reserves, Italians were pressured to donate gold and wedding rings to the government in exchange for iron tokens.

• Restrictions on Foreign Imports – High tariffs and bans on foreign goods were imposed to promote Italian-made products, this often reduced quality and availability.

(If this sounds familiar at all please stop me.)

Essentially, everyone is made to tighten their belts. The point is, austerity is a twentieth-century phenomenon that materialized as a state-led, technocratic project in a moment of never before seen political enfranchisement of citizens.

The next time you see any talk like this in the news or see any of these proposals come up from a politician, we would be wise to remember just exactly the social setting and historical context the Austerity Trinity came from and why.

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Mattei’s work prompts a deeper question we must ask ourselves a question we seem to be avoiding: how does austerity, as a systemic policy, affect our collective ability to achieve leisure on a broader more societal scale? Leisure: free time from labor, time for rest, creativity, and community—is a cornerstone of human flourishing, yet it is profoundly shaped by economic structures. Austerity, as Mattei and others describe it, undermines leisure in ways that don’t just effect us individually but these effects ripple across generations, and after a while a society gets entrenched where only the privileged few can enjoy time at full capacity.

At its core, austerity is about scarcity, and dare I say maintaining and preserving that scarcity. By deliberately imposing scarcity of resources, resources that don’t just include money, one’s own time is restricted. Because when austerity cuts public services like parks, libraries, and other cultural programs, which historically provided accessible leisure for working-class communities, there is an intangible loss as well as a material one. In 1920’s Britain, Mattei notes how budget cuts reduced social spending, forcing workers into longer hours to survive, leaving little time for rest, recreation and other obligations outside of work. Today, similar cuts—think of library closures or underfunded public spaces—echo this pattern, shrinking the infrastructure of collective leisure. Because whether we know it or not leisure requires a certain infrastructure, a certain king of agreement.

On a societal scale, austerity creates a leisure divide. Mattei’s proposal and the evidence provided spell out how the rentiers and creditors thrived under austerity underscores this redistribution: resources flow upward, and with them, the capacity for leisure. In the 1920s, British elites preserved their country estates and Italian fascists their lavish lifestyles, while workers saw their social clubs and communal spaces wither today with cutes.

This leisure disparity has obvious material ramifications for all of us, but the less harped on part are the cultural ramifications. Leisure is not just rest; it’s where art, community, and resistance are born. When Mattei talks about the Ordinovista movement in Italy, where blue collar workers seized factories and demanded economic democracy, it shows how leisure fosters collective imagination. Imagination that we so desperately need. And austerity, by crushing time, stifles these possibilities. In Britain, the halving of union membership by 1930 meant fewer workers’ associations, less communal singing, less communal debating, and because of this, a much less enriching cultural life. The parallels to today, 100 years later, are abound: austerity-driven cuts to arts, community centers, and the like, diminish the spaces where society and individuals can imagine a world beyond the current.

Yet, austerity’s impact on leisure is not a closed case yet. Resistance persists, as it always has, Mattei hints at this in her dedication to the “revolutionaries everywhere.” The post-World War I uprisings she describes were partly about reclaiming time. And the Keynesian era, which she critiques, offers a creative jumping off point worth considering: policies like the New Deal or Britain’s welfare state, expanded leisure through shorter workweeks and public recreation, suggesting that capitalism can be molded and customized to serve the ends we see fit. These initiatives seem like complete breakthroughs in human creativity and liberation. However, after looking at austerity a bit, and historically when austerity has been dominant, these liberating initiatives get reversed.

In reading Mattei’s work, what dawned on me was that I am finding it hard to discern where austerity ends and fascism begins. In the historical landscapes she lays out, both fascism and austerity seem to blend and dovetail seamlessly, almost to the point where they are both necessary and irreducibly part of one another.