Capitalism Has Entered Its Most Dangerous Stage | Radhika Desai and Clara Mattei

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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.

Edited by @freefreeforum for