The dominant mode of socialist analysis of contemporary capitalism very often focuses on its corruption or decay through financialization, monopolization, deregulation, or corporate influence over politics. Financial parasitism, the extraction of rent by “technofeudal” overlords, and political corruption are seen as aberrations that have sapped capitalism of its competitive vitality, resulting in exploding economic inequality and working-class precarity and culminating in the present neofascist Trumpian nightmare.

At the same time, such accounts gesture toward a social democratic politics of class compromise, insofar as workers and “productive” industrial capitalists — that is, their bosses — are assumed to share an interest in “restoring competitiveness” by reining in tech monopolies or excessive financial speculation while expanding government spending. Socialist strategy, therefore, should be oriented around revitalizing American capitalism, albeit in a somewhat more progressive guise.

Clara Mattei’s Escape From Capitalism offers an important corrective to these perspectives. In many ways, it is the book we have been waiting for, providing an introduction to capitalism as well as a critique of neoclassical economics, while rejecting oversimplified populist framings targeting corporate greed, big finance, or monopoly power as the primary political problems to be overcome. Mattei insists the problem is capitalism itself: not a system that is broken and in need of repair but one that is functioning correctly and in need of being abolished.