Review of Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention by Clara E. Mattei (Simon & Schuster, 2026)
In 2021, the United States was confronted with a challenge that it hadn’t seen in decades: inflation. Working-class Americans were assaulted by rising costs of living, likely leading to Donald Trump’s second term in the White House. But even as American workers were struggling to afford basic necessities, blame for inflation was pinned on them.
Harvard economist and close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Summers, blamed the bout of inflation on government stimulus checks. A rare instance of the American government providing non-means-tested universal financial support and “excessive” consumer spending were decried by the mainstream as the fundamental cause of rising prices. The solution proposed by the Federal Reserve was to raise interest rates to clamp down on wages and undermine a low-unemployment labor market favorable to workers.
The economist Isabella Weber was one of the few who challenged this narrative, identifying corporations that actually set prices as the real culprits behind inflation. But she was ridiculed by mainstream economists until evidence of her position became so overwhelming that it had to be acknowledged.
In Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, Clara Mattei dispels the anti-worker ideology that permeated mainstream economists’ analysis of Joe Biden–era inflation. Rather than treating macroeconomic challenges as technical problems with technical fixes, Mattei shows that economics under capitalism is fundamentally political in nature. While central bank technocrats present raising interest rates as a technical solution to inflation, the real effect is to raise unemployment and increase employers’ bargaining power over workers. The power of unelected technocrats to strengthen capitalist power reveals the class character and antidemocratic foundations of the capitalist economy.
Mattei extends her criticism of monetary policy to the…
Auteur: Daniel Cheng
