Amid financial crisis, pandemic and war, Capitalism seems invincible. Professor of Economics at the University of Tulsa, Clara E Mattei illustrates its fragility and restores hope that everything could be different Yanis Varoufakis. Economics is sold as pure and apolitical: scientific, neutral, exact. This book reveals the true role: to convince us there’s no alternative to capitalism. Mattei rips the mask off our economic system, and unpacks key concepts like growth, inflation, unemployment and balanced budgets to show how they’re weaponized to enforce market dependence, not freedom, stripping us of the power to shape the democratic decisions that govern our daily lives. Enduring problems such as poverty and inequality are not accidents or bugs in the economic superhighway, but core features- justified with pseudoscientific models to support a system that unfairly rewards people with the most resources. This invisible order we are gulled into seeing as inevitable, built on coercion, class war and injustice.

The very act of working for rather “selling our labour” is exploitative. Despite ballooning welfare budgets, modern society is the victim of endless austerity devised somehow for the enrichment of the elites.

The constant pressure pf competitive forces is painted in brilliant colours, no central plan can match the anarchic, unthinking workings of the market.

Capitalists are no more free, under capitalism than workers with no choice, but constantly battle one another. To fans of free market  this feels more love letter than condemnation.

Escape from Capitalism is a case study in the extreme possible when a thinker is too determined on their conclusion. The modern service driven digital economy, the labour theory of value is clumsy tool.

The building blocks of a good society, decent healthcare, education and treatment of the less well-off. But the message that it is only possible with the sort of tax rises normally only seen in a war  is as much a counsel of despair, but Mattei suggests that first we must overthrow capitalism. 

Why should we accept this? Capitalism, Mattei argues, isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural – It’s a relatively young system that can be replaced. Inspired by lineage of political resistance. Escape from Capitalism calls for us to challenge the broken economics of our times, and pave the way towards liberation.

We live in a world dominated by the dogma that austerity is necessary, unemployment natural, endless wars inevitable and central banks all-powerful. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Escape from Capitalism: Economics Is Political, and Other Liberating Truths by Clara E Mattei, Allen Lane £22/ Simon & Schuster $25, 224 pages.