Clara Mattei has been having a remarkable few weeks. Her Channel 4 interview went viral, with viewers saying they had “been waiting their entire lives” for that conversation to reach mainstream television. Now a longer-form conversation with Aaron Bastani on Novara Media’s Downstream podcast has given her the space to lay out the full historical argument in detail.

The thesis of her book, Escape from Capitalism, is not simply that inequality is high and getting higher – it is that the current situation rhymes, in structural terms, with the conditions that produced European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Her PhD was on the relationship between liberal economics and the rise of Italian fascism. She is not making the comparison casually.

The numbers behind the argument

Mattei opens with the inequality data, which she argues is not background context but the central fact. Twelve people own more than the bottom 50% of the global population – four billion people. Two billion people are food insecure. In Britain, 157 billionaires now own wealth equivalent to 22% of GDP, up from 5% in 1990. One in three British children lives in poverty. A major Oxford study this year found more than a fifth of the austerity generation have been scarred by poverty. In the United States, 77% of workers cannot afford their paycheck to be delayed by a week.

This, Mattei argues, is not a series of unfortunate statistics. It is the system working as designed. “The system is never meant to have the majority win,” she says. “The system is constructed so the story we know is that if we don’t do well, it’s probably our fault.” The economic models that underpin mainstream policy analysis, she argues, are built on classist assumptions that attribute poverty to individual failure and wealth to individual virtue – hiding the structural relations of exploitation beneath a language of rational choice and market freedom.

Why austerity is not irrational

The conversation’s most substantial contribution comes in Mattei’s extended treatment of austerity – not as a policy mistake or a technocratic miscalculation, but as a rational tool of capitalist management.

Her argument, developed across both her books, is that austerity serves capitalism by maintaining what she calls “market dependence” – the condition in which people have no option but to sell their labour for a wage, because all other means of subsistence have been removed. The original act of enclosure – removing people from common land – was the founding act of capitalism in Britain. Every subsequent wave of austerity, from the Geddes Axe of 1922 to post-2008 cuts, has reinforced that dependence by stripping back the alternatives that welfare services and collective goods provide.

The implication is uncomfortable: a government or central bank that engineers unemployment and cuts public services is not making an error. It is protecting the conditions under which capitalism can function. The Bank of England raising interest rates to deliberately increase unemployment – as it did in April 1920, producing a 17% unemployment rate within a year and collapsing the strike movement – was not a mistake. It was austerity doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Bastani presses her on whether the parallel with George Osborne’s post-2008 austerity is fair. Mattei thinks it is almost cartoonishly precise. VAT up, corporation tax down, top rate of tax removed, local authority spending cut by 40%. The political consequences – Brexit, the fragmentation of the UK, the rise of Farage – she sees as the predictable result of what happens when a squeezed middle class is given no systemic explanation for its deteriorating circumstances and reaches instead for the one that mainstream politicians and media offer: blame the weakest.

The fascism argument

This is where the historical argument becomes most pointed. Mattei’s PhD examined Italy and Britain after the First World War – a moment when workers across both countries had been radicalised by the experience of state-directed wartime economies, had seen that central planning worked, and were demanding a say in how their workplaces and communities were run. The Italian factory councils of 1919-20, the British Sankey Commission proposing worker-managed coal nationalisation, the rural assemblies of peasants taking over and running land collectively – these were not fringe movements. They were mainstream political demands in the immediate post-war period.

The capitalist response in both countries was austerity. In Italy, that austerity was enforced by Mussolini – backed, Mattei shows through archive documents, by the Bank of England and the House of Morgan, who understood that Italy’s social mobilisation required someone with “the political courage” to implement austerity without democratic constraint. In Britain, the same work was done by the Bank of England and Treasury, using monetary and fiscal policy to produce unemployment, break the unions, and restore labour discipline.

The liberal economists who surrounded Mussolini were not fascists by inclination – they were neoclassical economists who found in fascism a government willing to implement their models without the inconvenience of democratic opposition. “Liberalism and fascism share a lot more than is usually said,” Mattei argues. “When the foundation of their belief system is questioned, liberals can’t be for economic democracy – and that’s when they side with fascism if they don’t want to end up with a post-capitalist economy.”

The middle class problem

Bastani raises what he sees as the left’s intellectual failure in the current moment: its tendency to focus on the most destitute as the natural agents of political change, while missing that it is the frustrated, downwardly mobile middle class that historically provides the social base for fascism. Mattei agrees, but pushes back on the framing. The “middle class” that is being crushed is, in structural terms, working class – people whose income comes primarily from wages, not from capital. The category of “middle class” is a social status marker, not an economic one. What matters is where you stand in the relations of production.

Her point is that the same austerity policies that gutted public services for the poorest are also slowly proletarianising those who thought they had escaped that condition – through housing unaffordability, through the privatisation of education and healthcare, through precarious employment. The squeeze is happening across the income distribution. The difference is that the squeezed middle is more likely to express its frustration through the political forms that fascism historically exploits: resentment, scapegoating, the demand for a strongman.

The relevance to now

Gary Stevenson’s analysis of Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune – that it represents an accelerating transfer of wealth from ordinary people to an untaxed billionaire class, growing at 40% annually in economies growing at 1% – sits alongside Mattei’s argument as a complementary warning. Gabriel Zucman’s wealth tax calculations provide the mechanism Mattei argues is needed: tax wealth rather than work, and use the proceeds to rebuild the social infrastructure that market dependence requires to be kept inadequate.

The YouTube comments on the Bastani-Mattei conversation are, in their way, as revealing as the interview itself. “Capitalism’s greatest achievement is convincing huge numbers of people that it is the natural order of things,” writes one viewer. “Austerity is often framed as an unavoidable economic necessity, but in reality it functions as a policy tool that safeguards elite interests,” notes another. “With the extreme inequality of today, the ‘middle’ class IS working class,” says a third. “We are all slaves to wages when compared to the Epstein class.”

Mattei’s response to all of this is not despair but practical organisation. She runs the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation in Tulsa, Oklahoma – assemblies, participatory budgeting, food sovereignty projects. “The only reason I can maintain my humanity is to say, well, let’s try it out,” she says. “You get out of an assembly and you feel alive. You feel like you’ve actually engaged in collective deliberation that we’ve completely lost capacity to do because our economic system does not want us to do collective deliberation.”

It is a modest answer to a large problem. But Mattei’s larger argument – that we are not watching an accidental breakdown of a functioning system, but the logical endpoint of a system working exactly as designed – is one that is finding an audience well beyond the academic left. The Channel 4 comments section and the Novara YouTube page are full of people who were not looking for a Marxist analysis of fascism and austerity, but found themselves nodding along anyway.

You can watch the full interview below: