Ep 374 - Escape From Capitalism with Clara Mattei

Apr 4, 2026

Clara E. Mattei, professor of economics and founder of the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation, discusses building alternatives to capitalism through local assembly organizing and participatory budgeting. She explains how market dependence, austerity, and exploitation sustain elite power. Conversation covers MMT debates, global monetary differences, and practical organizing in Tulsa to create durable, non-electoral institutions.

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ANECDOTE

Founding FREE Taught More Than Academia

Mattei recounts starting FREE in Tulsa as praxis to learn more than academic reading could teach.
She emphasizes assembly participation taught her more about institution-building than decades of scholarship.

INSIGHT

Monetary Power Varies By Political Context

Monetary sovereignty differs by context: U.S. federal power is large, but cities and many countries remain financially constrained.
Mattei warns against universalizing U.S. MMT implications; global South and local governments are tied by interest and dollar dependency.

INSIGHT

Market Dependence Is Capitalism’s Hidden Power

Capitalism sustains itself by creating market dependence so people must sell labor to survive.
Clara Mattei explains this loss of subsistence (commons gone) makes exploitation invisible and normalizes wage coercion.

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Join our community on Tuesday evening as we listen to and discuss this episode. April 7th at 8pm ET/5pm PT. Use this link to register: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/nkkVRy2JQbW2Eh4VDtcNHQ

Clara Mattei and her first book, The Capital Order, were hugely important to Real Progressives as we began to expand our focus from Modern Monetary Theory and investigate the political economy of the capitalist system.

Now she joins Steve to talk about her new book, Escape from Capitalism. They discuss how capitalism maintains itself through market dependence, exploitation, and austerity, and why escaping it requires building alternative institutions rather than relying on elections or reforms within the capitalist state.

Steve and Clara are largely aligned in their critique of the system, but there are some disagreements. They debate aspects of MMT, including how interest rates, state spending, and monetary sovereignty function across different contexts. Their differences open up a deeper discussion about the limits of reform, the state's role, and what meaningful change would require.

There is a reason elections cannot deliver emancipation. The capitalist state is structurally designed to insulate elites from popular control. Clara describes her practical organizing work with FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) in Tulsa, building horizontal assemblies, participatory budgeting campaigns, community land trusts, and mutual aid.

Steve touches on the concept of de-commodifying basic needs (housing, healthcare, food), to break market dependence. But then, capitalism would be unworkable.

Clara E. Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the Founding President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. She was previously associate professor at The New School for Social Research Economics Department and has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. Her research contributes to the analysis and history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making.

Clara is author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and the recently published Escape from Capitalism (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, and Simon & Schuster, January 2026), which will soon be translated into multiple languages, including French, German, and Italian.

Learn more @ freefreeforum.org, where she hosts the weekly FREE podcast.

@claraemattei on X