Welcome back to the Homefront. I'm your host, Reid Yalin. Today, I am joined by Clara Mate.

She is a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa and president of Free, the forum for

a real economic emancipation. Free continues the activities she formerly directed through CHE.

You can follow all of their activities at Substack at freeform.org.

Clara was previously associate professor of the New School for Social Research in the

economics department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.

Her research contributes to the history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between

economic ideas and technocratic policymaking.

She recently published her first book, I should say a couple of years ago now, The Capital Order,

How Economists Invented Austerity and Pave the Way to Fascism, from the University of Chicago Press,

available where all fine books are. The book was praised in the Financial Times as one of the 10 best for

2022 and has now been translated into 10 languages. She also won the 2023 Herbert Adams-Baxter

Prize of the American Historical Association for her book. Clara, welcome. Thank you for having me

with you. So you're Italian.

Where in Italy are you from?

My family is originally from Turin.

I've been all over.

I didn't really have one specific place.

And yeah, I did my PhD in Pisa, but I definitely am very attached to Torino because of its history of radical struggle with the factory council movement.

Antonio Gramsci, I just had a child and I named him Antonio in honor of Gramsci, who is an intellectual and a, you know, a thinker and a comrade who's been very important in my own intellectual and political

development.

Well, and I want to get to that.

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