I've been looking forward to reading Prof. Mattei's Escape from Capitalism now that a nearby library has the dead tree format.
Fingers crossed that there won't be any further reservations, but the book is in demand.

26 May 2026

The critique of capitalism is as old as the system itself as is the tradition of
resistance to it. In the early 16th century, Saint Thomas More's Utopia
criticized the already visible cruelty and harshness of a still nascent
capitalism. The tradition of classical political economy exposed capitalism's
ruinous tendency to gluts of both commodities and capital and its tendency to
create surplus populations. It's conviction that value arose from labour, and
labour alone, led to the emergence of strong currents of what has been called
Ricardian socialism well before Karl Marx produced his magnificently
comprehensive and conclusive critique. And even after Marx, though neoclassical
economics emerged in the late 19th century to provide the legitimation for
capitalism that the honest traditions of classical political economy could no
longer provide in the face of an expanding and increasingly organised working
class, it soon faced renewed an almost equally comprehensive critique at the
hands of John Maynard Keynes and many other writers, not only later generations
of Marxists but others, including Kalecki or Polanyi. Indeed the similarities
between Keynes's critique and that of Marx and Engels is rarely
acknowledged. Nor are those between them and Polanyi.

So, there has never been any shortage of critique. Yet, political currents
critical of capitalism have not been successful in the West.

Today, as capitalism takes ever more volatile, dangerous, destructive,
environmentally devastating, unequal, racist, mysogynist, exploitative, and
war-like dimensions, there has been renewed critique and, inevitably, it comes
from many directions.

In this Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika, who is among these critics, is
joined by a prominent representative of a different tradition of critique,
someone who has spoken about escaping from capitalism, underlined its
fundamentally anti democratic character, insisted on its fascistic tendencies,
and criticized the fairy tales of neoclassical economics that are decreasingly
able to camouflage the ills of capitalism, Clara Mattei, author of The Capital
Order and Escape from Capitalism, President of the Foundation for Real Economic
Emancipation (FREE) and Professor of Economics at the University of Oklahoma,
Tulsa.