ESCAPE FROM CAPITALISM

A clearly explained case for scrapping entrenched capitalism for a fairer distribution of the pot.

Mattei, an Italian economist who teaches at the University of Tulsa, offers a resounding proposition: “It is time to demand an economic system that does not flourish at the expense of humanity.” The author of The Capital Order (2022) writes that there’s a great deal in the “capital order” that needs to be thrown out, overhauled, remade, and rethought in order to arrive at a system that critics are likely to brand, immediately, as socialist. They wouldn’t be far off the mark, but hers is a humanistic socialism, one that insists on meaningful work and just compensation rather than the capitalist model on which profitability hinges on paying the lowest possible wages to the least resistant workforce. Against the reigning dogma that capitalism brings about free markets and therefore freedom, Mattei advances the “stark truth” that capitalism and democracy are incompatible: Democracy requires that workers have agency, something the capital order is loath to grant. Arguing further from the insight that “there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems,” the author argues that a step forward to creating true economic democracy is a political project that begins with building communities of resistance, one such being an organization founded in Mississippi in which neighbors exchange goods “without the intermediation of money.” Along the way, Mattei offers a crystal-clear explanation of how inflation relates with unemployment, with capitalists fearing full employment because, in tight labor markets, workers have a greater voice lest they move on elsewhere (as so many did in the “Great Resignation” during the Covid-19 pandemic); inflation rises because prices do, a phenomenon that, in her view, moves our focus from “what is really at stake”—namely, profit above all else—to the specter of having to pay more for eggs.

A forceful argument for an economic system that does not require the many to fill the pockets of the few.