Name: Book Launch: Escape From Capitalism, w/ Clara Mattei
Start: 2026-02-11T17:00:00Z
End: 2026-02-11T19:00:00Z
Location: Pelican House

Book Launch: Escape From Capitalism, w/ Clara Mattei

Centre for Commons Organizing, Values Equality & ResilienceThe centre aims to create a pioneering and global agenda for studying the theoretical and practical possibilities of how commons values based on principles of cooperation, collaboration, and open knowledge sharing can foster more egalitarian, inclusive, and participative 21st century economies, communities, and organisationsWe explore how cooperation, collaboration, and open knowledge sharing can radically transform organisations and societyOur research investigates how principles of cooperation, collaboration, and open knowledge sharing can foster more egalitarian, inclusive, and participative 21st-century economies, communities, technologies, and organisations.

COVER

Escape From Capitalism: Economics is Political, and Other Liberating Truths (Penguin House, 2026).

Pelican House

Join us for an evening of discussion with Clara Mattei, author of <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468201/escape-from-capitalism-by-mattei-clara-e/9780241742181" title="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/468201/escape-from-capitalism-by-mattei-clara-e/9780241742181" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Escape from Capitalism: Economics is Political &amp; Other Liberating Truths</a> (Penguin House, 2026). Clara will be in conversation with Peter Bloom (University of Essex), Camila Vergara (University of Essex), and Olimpia Burchiellaro (University of Essex).Economics is sold as pure and apolitical: scientific, neutral, exact. This urgent book exposes its true role: to convince us there’s no alternative to capitalism. We live in a world dominated by the dogma that austerity is necessary, unemployment natural, endless wars inevitable and central banks all-powerful. It doesn’t have to be this way. In her bold, ground-breaking manifesto, economist Clara E. Mattei tears the mask off our economic system. She unpacks key concepts like growth, inflation, unemployment and balanced budgets to show how they’re weaponized to enforce market dependence, not freedom, stripping us of the power to shape the democratic decisions that govern our daily lives. Enduring problems such as poverty and inequality are not accidents or bugs in the economy, but core features – justified with pseudoscientific models to support a system that unfairly rewards people with the most resources. Why should we accept this? Capitalism, Mattei argues, isn’t inevitable, scientific, or natural – it’s a relatively young system thatcanbe replaced. Inspired by a lineage of political resistance,Escape from Capitalismcalls for us to challenge the broken economics of our times, and pave the way towards liberation.Clara Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the President of <a href="http://freefreeforum.org" title="http://freefreeforum.org" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">FREE</a>: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. <a href="http://freefreeforum.org/" title="http://freefreeforum.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">FREE</a> continues the activities she formerly directed through the Center for Heterodox Economics. Learn more @ <a href="http://freefreeforum.org/" title="http://freefreeforum.org/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">freefreeforum.org</a> Clara 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 history of capitalism, exploring the critical relation between economic ideas and technocratic policy making. She recently published her first book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press 2022). The book was praised in the Financial Times as one of the ten best economics books of 2022, is now being translated in over 10 languages, and has won the 2023 Herbert Adams Baxter Prize of the American Historical Association. In November 2023, Mattei published her first book written directly in Italian, L’economia è politica: Tutto quello che non vediamo dell’economia e che nessuno racconta (Fuori Scena publisher 2023). The book will be released soon in English under the title Escape from Capitalism, with Simon &amp; Schuster and Allen Lane (Penguin). Her current book project critically reassesses the Golden Age of Capitalism (1945-1975) and its Keynesianism through the lens of austerity capitalism. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, The Nation, and Il Fatto Quotidiano - an Italian national newspaper that she contributes to regularly. She also writes a monthly column for the Swedish national paper, Dagens Etc.Peter Bloom is a Professor of Management at the University of Essex. His research critically explores the radical possibilities of technology for redefining and transforming contemporary work and society. It focuses on better understanding the human aspects of organizational existence and the potentially for constructing more empowering cultural paradigms for organising the economy and politics. Specifically, his research originally reveals the strong relationship between economic marketization and political authoritarianism, the “dark side” of workplace empowerment discourses and the role of technology for changing organisations and processes of organising.His books include Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (Edward Elgar Press), Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits (Rowman and Littlefield International, November 2016), The Ethics of Neoliberalism: The Business of Making Capitalism Moral (Routledge, 2017), The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Radical Promise of Existential Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and The CEO Society: How the Cult of Corporate Leadership Transform Our World co-written Carl Rhodes (Zed Books).Camila Vergara is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex and a critical legal theorist, historian, and journalist from Chile writing on the relation between inequality and the law, and the possible institutional solutions to systemic corruption. She is Editor of Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and organiser of the the Venice Multidisciplinary World Conference on Republics and Republicanism. She is the author of Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic (Princeton University Press 2020), and her work on constitutional theory, republicanism, corruption, and populism has been featured in leading international journals such as the Journal of Political Philosophy, History of Political Thought, and REVUS: Journal for Constitutional Theory and Philosophy of Law. She is also a global public intellectual —with her articles and interviews featured in outlets such as New Left Review, Jacobin, Politico, Revista Plebeya, and Il Manifesto Inret— and an activist advising and collaborating with grassroots organisations on rights, deliberative democracy, and community-based forms of governance.Olimpia Burchiellaro is s an anthropologist and senior lecturer at the University of Essex, where she teaches modules on ethnographic methods, social economies, and community organizing. Her research is on queer political economy, LGBTQ+ activism, gentrification and homocapitalism. She is the author of The Gentrification of Queer Activism (Bristol University Press, 2023) and has conducted research on corporations and queer value in cities such as London, São Paulo, Nairobi and Buenos Aires. Her work is published in journals including Antipode, Review of International Political Economy, Sexualities and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Olimpia is the incoming co-Chair of the LGBTQA Caucus at the International Studies Association (ISA). Since 2022, she sits on the Management Committee of The Friends of the Joiners Arms, an award-winning cooperative opening London’s first community-owned queer pub.The event is organized by the <a href="https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience" title="https://www.essex.ac.uk/centres-and-institutes/commons-organising-values-equalities-and-resilience" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">COVER</a> Research Centre.

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Book Launch: Escape From Capitalism, w/ Clara Mattei

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