Kristóf Szombati reviews Clara E. Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention (Simon & Schuster, January 2026; published in the UK by Allen Lane as Escape from Capitalism: Economics is Political, and Other Liberating Truths), 224 pp.
In Washington, the president has spent the winter browbeating the Federal Reserve: demanding rate cuts by decree, musing aloud about removing its chair, treating monetary policy as a personal prerogative. In Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spent the better part of a decade wresting monetary policy from his own central bankers, until a currency crisis forced him to hand it back to the orthodox technocrats he had spent years denouncing. The complaint that unelected experts hold too much unaccountable power over the economy, that a technocratic caste has placed the most consequential decisions beyond the reach of ordinary people, is in our moment voiced most loudly not on the left but on the authoritarian right. It is worth keeping that fact in view while reading Clara Mattei’s Escape from Capitalism, because the book arrives from the opposite pole of politics making a structurally similar demand.
Mattei, who teaches economics at the University of Tulsa and now directs the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation, made her name with The Capital Order (2022), a scholarly history of how interwar economists manufactured austerity and, in doing so, helped clear the road to fascism. Escape from Capitalism is a different kind of book: shorter, trade-pressed, addressed not to specialists but to the millions squeezed by rents, wages and the diffuse sense that nothing can be otherwise. Its introduction is titled, flatly, “Economics Is a Political Act,” and across four lenses (austerity, unemployment, Western dominance, and democracy) Mattei argues that the TINA (‘There Is No Alternative’) doctrine is not a description of reality but a manufactured one, and that the mask of technical neutrality conceals a machinery built to keep working people dependent on the market. The reception has been warm and, in places, adoring. This review takes the book seriously enough to press the question its admirers have mostly let slide.
Let us begin with what is genuinely strong. Mattei refuses the moralized register that dominates so much left commentary: the language of greed, of billionaires, of a system corrupted by bad actors. Her wager is that inequality, unemployment and inflation are not bugs or betrayals but load-bearing features of a functioning system, and that naming individual villains obscures the structure that would reproduce the same outcomes with nicer people at the top.
Her fundamental intuition, as she puts it, is that “there are no economic problems that are not inevitably also political problems” (Introduction). The most lucid passages show how the ostensibly technical (a rate hike, a balanced budget, a ‘natural’ rate of unemployment) encodes a distribution of power. On its own terms, this is bracing pedagogy, and it is the reason the book will be read.
It is also, as Mattei’s sharper reviewers have noticed, a deliberate correction to the reigning idioms of anti-capitalist critique, and here we should give her the credit and then test the claim, because the correction lands unevenly across the field it means to supersede. Against the neo-Brandeisian revival, with its focus on monopoly and its implicit faith that a more competitive capitalism would be a more just one, Mattei’s essence-not-aberration cut is decisive: breaking up big firms leaves the wage relation untouched. Against the financialization literature (the story that a productive capitalism was hijacked by a parasitic financial sector) the cut is more arguable than decisive, and I will come back to why. Against the technofeudal thesis advanced by Yanis Varoufakis, the notion that platform rentiers have carried us out of capitalism into something new, it is sharpest of all, since that framing lets capitalism-as-such off the hook precisely as Mattei wants to indict it. One wrinkle worth flagging: Varoufakis, technofeudalism’s most prominent theorist, supplied a jacket blurb. The disagreement Mattei is staging is among allies, not across enemy lines, which makes it more interesting.
Now the question the book’s title dares us to ask and then declines to answer: escape to where? Even Mattei’s most sympathetic readers concede the point. The strongest notice in Jacobin grants that the book is superb at anatomizing capitalism’s injustices and thin on the exit, with the discussion of anti-capitalist politics compressed into its final pages; a companion piece in the same magazine makes the observation in a sharper key, noting that the planning question “escape from market dependence” logically requires is raised and then dropped. This is fair, though it undersells the actual point. Mattei’s closing pages are not empty but crowded, a catalogue of existing experiments offered as proof that another economy is possible: Cooperation Jackson and its Tulsa offshoot, Brazil’s Landless and Homeless Workers’ Movements, recuperated factories in Argentina, the social-housing drive of Sheinbaum’s Mexico. The trouble is not that she gives us nothing, but that she gives us existence proofs in place of a theory of transition. How a patchwork of cooperatives and land occupations displaces the capital order (rather than surviving, as such experiments always have, in its interstices and on its sufferance) is the question the book raises by its very title and does not answer.
This is not merely an omission to be scored; it follows from the shape of the argument. Mattei’s frame is intentionalist in its diagnosis and leans toward a voluntarist politics: austerity is a weapon wielded by a class that understands its interests, so the remedy is to seize the levers and reverse it. If that is the whole story, then “choose otherwise” is a coherent program: seize the levers, reverse the policy, and the domination ends. Yet the story is incomplete, and the clearest way to see its incompleteness is to read Escape from Capitalism against a book that works the identical terrain from the opposite methodological instinct: Martijn Konings’s The Bailout State (Polity, 2024/25), which is, not incidentally, the financialization literature at its most serious, and so the strongest form of the position Mattei means to correct.
Konings describes the same machinery, central banks, austerity, the insulation of monetary decisions from democratic pressure, but tells a structural rather than an intentionalist story. In his account, the modern state runs a “dance of bailout and austerity”: it backstops asset prices and rescues finance whenever the system wobbles, then manages the inflation its own generosity produces by tightening the screws on everyone else. Austerity, on this reading, is not first of all a weapon aimed at labor; it is the state rebalancing what its own interventions unbalanced. And its benefits flow to a broad middle-class base: homeowners, pension funds, everyone whose modest security is now lashed to asset prices. Mattei is not blind to this machinery (she describes the Fed, during COVID, risk-proofing corporate debt and redirecting public resources to capital holders while spreading the costs), but she reads it as the state consciously serving capital, where Konings sees a structural monetary logic with a mass constituency. That difference matters: if insulation is a structural lock-in with a broad material stake in the asset-escalator austerity protects, then “return these decisions to the demos” is where the hard analysis begins, not ends. Konings does not finish that analysis either, but he shows why Mattei’s last chapter feels weightless: the escape is underspecified because the trap is deeper than her theory of it allows.
Here it helps to concede exactly what Mattei has right, because the critique grows stronger, not weaker, when we do. She is correct that central-bank independence is never politically neutral: the separation of monetary policy from democratic contestation is a way of insulating capitalist social relations from challenge, dressed as technical necessity.
The question her book does not confront is the one that follows immediately: whether breaching that insulation actually democratizes anything. And it is here that the binary structuring the argument begins to fail.
To her credit, Mattei does not pretend the authoritarian right is absent from this terrain. Her final chapter chides well-meaning liberals for treating Trump, Orbán and Meloni as aberrant bad actors, and argues that the parallels between fascist and liberal economic policy dissolve “the reassuring distinction between right-wing authoritarian governments and liberal democracy” (‘Democracy Is Anti-Capitalism’). The right, in her telling, is not the opposite of technocratic capitalism but its enforcer by other means: authoritarianism deployed to impose austerity and protect the capital order, from Mussolini to Pinochet to Yeltsin. The “oligarchy of knowledge, founded on pseudoscience” (‘Democracy Is Anti-Capitalism’) she sees in every independent central bank is, on this account, always pulling in the same direction.
The trouble is that this template, the right as austerity’s shock troops, cannot digest the most instructive cases of authoritarian monetary politics of the past decade. For much of Erdoğan’s rule, Turkey did the opposite of austerity. Convinced that high interest rates cause rather than cure inflation, and that interest itself is un-Islamic, Erdoğan bent the central bank to his will, forcing rate cuts as prices soared and financing a credit-and-construction boom of wage rises, tax amnesties and subsidies that helped return him to office in 2023. As Özgür Orhangazi and Erinç Yeldan argue, this was less a heterodox break for the working class than a new phase of Turkey’s dependent, financialized development, its monetary discretion concentrated in the person of the leader. Its costs, when inflation passed eighty-five percent and the lira collapsed, fell hardest on the workers Mattei champions. Then, after the 2023 election, he recalled the orthodox technocrats, and the policy rate climbed back toward fifty percent. The oscillation is revealing: monetary authority in the real world is neither insulated nor de-insulated but selectively autonomous, switched between plebiscitary loosening and technocratic discipline as it suits the ruler. Here is a breach of insulation that was popular, expansionary and anti-austerity: a machinery of domination all the same.
Hungary makes the point sharper still, and is the more original case, because there the binary does not so much fail as become unaskable. Viktor Orbán did not abolish the independence of the Magyar Nemzeti Bank; he kept its formal autonomy, its orthodox instruments and its staff of economists, and changed its purpose. Reflecting on this topic, the political scientist Miklós Sebők and his colleagues, the bank’s de facto “operating mission” shifted beneath a stable formal mandate: under György Matolcsy the MNB became at once a monetary authority, a development bank channeling cheap credit to favored ‘national capitalists,’ a financial-nationalist instrument for re-nationalizing and then re-privatizing the banking sector, and, through its lavishly funded foundations, an extraordinary machine of patronage and rent extraction. This is neither a central bank returned to the people nor one insulated from politics. It is what Gábor Scheiring calls an “accumulative state” in miniature: the technocratic machinery captured and repurposed, an alternative equilibrium, not a deviation from Mattei’s script.
What Turkey and Hungary share is what Mattei’s framework cannot quite see: that the opposite of technocracy is not democracy. Between the insulated expert bank and the self-governing demos lies a whole family of really existing arrangements (plebiscitary, oligarchic, clientelist, developmental-nationalist) in which economic decision is wrenched from the technocrats without ever being handed to the people.
Her conceptual architecture leaves too little room for control over the economy that is neither technocratic nor democratic. She demonstrates, convincingly, that insulation serves capital; what she does not supply is any account of the institutional conditions under which de-insulation becomes democratic rather than authoritarian, which, in an age when the revolt against the experts belongs mostly to the nationalist right, is the question that matters.
None of this diminishes what Escape from Capitalism achieves. It is the clearest recent statement of a proposition the liberal center still resists and that deserves defending: that our economic arrangements are political all the way down, and the neutrality of the experts is a fiction serving particular interests.
Mattei has written the book we needed for the diagnosis. What she has not written is the book that specifies when de-insulating the economy emancipates and when it merely re-houses domination under a new landlord.
That is what the moment demands, and what a critical political economy worthy of the name will have to supply. Until it exists, the escape has destinations its author would not choose, and from Ankara to Budapest we can already see them.
Kristóf Szombati is Editor of the ‘Political Economy and Inequalities’ section.
