The Misery of Austerity with David Fields

Austerity is a potent weapon of class warfare. Political economist David Fields talks with Steve about the ways austerity serves to discipline labor, as it has been doing since the Bolshevik revolution. They touch on the reasons capitalism cannot risk full employment, as explained by both Karl Marx and Michal Kalecki.

David wants people to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations or The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Even Smith, the father of the “invisible hand,” said government is instituted for the security of property — for the rich against the poor.

The discussion touches on the current inflation, comparing the true causes to the mainstream narrative.

“There's been a very coordinated, calculated campaign with well-known economists. Call it neoliberalism. Call it what you want, financialization... The concepts, terms, economic principles that we take for granted are not value-neutral.”

We are embedded in a system of winners and losers and we’re meant to believe there’s no other way. Workers must be prevented from understanding the trifecta of austerity – fiscal, monetary, and industrial.

Bio: David M. Fields, Political Economist, Utah. From a critical realist & genetic structuralist ontology & epistemology, David's scholarly work centers on the intricacies concerning the interactions of foreign exchange & capital flows with economic growth, fiscal & monetary policy, and distribution, whereby attention is paid to the nature of money and international political economy. He has published in the following journals: Review of International Political Economy, Review of Political Economy, American Review of Political Economy, the Review of Keynesian Economics, and the Review of Radical Political Economics. Additionally, he has provided book chapter contributions to The Encyclopedia of Post-Keynesian Economics, The Encyclopedia of Central Banking, and the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization. David received his graduate degree from the University of Utah; his bachelor's from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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