Every economic order is a political order.
— Clara E. Mattei
In her book The Economy Is Political, Clara E. Mattei performs a critical operation that goes far beyond a mere academic contribution: it is a political gesture, an act of ideological unmasking, an epistemological rupture with the dominant narrative that separates economics from social conflict. Against the claim of economic science’s neutrality, Mattei brings to light its social foundations—its role as a technique of governance, a symbolic and ideological apparatus serving class domination.
Far from being a discipline that “describes” reality, economics—in its mainstream form—reveals itself for what it is: a practice that decides, that normalizes, that intervenes in collective life to reproduce existing power relations. As the author writes, “the decisions of economic institutions are never neutral”; what is presented as a technical necessity is in fact a means of neutralizing dissent, of restoring social docility whenever capitalist equilibrium is threatened.
The genealogy of austerity, which Mattei reconstructs starting from postwar experiences in Italy and the United Kingdom, shows how such logic is not emergent but structural. Far from being a shared sacrifice, austerity emerges as a long-term political project: an architecture of inequality, a form of structural violence masked as fiscal discipline. As Mattei states, “the bitter pill is always swallowed by ordinary people,” because the goal is not budgetary balance, but the governability of working bodies.
In this sense, Marx is a constant presence in Mattei’s work: from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, where the naturalization of social relations is denounced, to Capital, where “the accumulation of capital is, on one side, accumulation of misery for the proletariat.” Bourgeois economics thus becomes a form of cognitive and political alienation, a secular religion—dogmatic, invisible, immutable—that constructs the cultural hegemony of capitalism.
Mattei positions herself within a critical tradition that spans from Marx to Gramsci, from Foucault to Wendy Brown. Just as Gramsci denounced the capacity of bourgeois hegemony to gain consent even against the interests of the subaltern classes, Mattei exposes a capitalist technocracy grounded in passive consent. Economic language—efficiency, sustainability, structural reform—becomes an instrument of discipline, a lexicon of domination that strips the masses of their political imagination. As Marx reminded us in The German Ideology, “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
The book’s most radical thesis emerges powerfully: true democracy cannot exist under capitalism. The democratic form is hollowed out, reduced to a ceremonial gesture. Fundamental decisions—on labor, public services, and life itself—are handed over to “independent,” “neutral” bodies. But neutral with respect to what, if not to the very possibility of deciding together how to live? “Capitalism and democracy are incompatible,” Mattei writes. Every collective decision-making process is subordinated to the logic of accumulation. Voting, parliament, public debate—all become empty shells, while real power is exercised through accounting language, numbers, and bond spreads.
Quoting Kalecki reinforces the Marxist reading: “under a regime of full employment, the sack would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure.” Wage labor, as Marx had already written in Wage Labour and Capital, is a modern form of slavery: the worker exists solely to satisfy the needs of capital.
Yet The Economy Is Political does not stop at diagnosis. It is also an invitation to desert: from the single-mindedness of economic thought, from the rhetoric of inevitability, from cognitive subjugation to numerical reality. To repoliticize knowledge, for Mattei, means to re-democratize the economy—to restore to citizens the right to decide the fundamental rules of their own existence. “To reclaim control over the most important choices that govern the very foundations of life” is the implicit political aim of this critique. The point is not to reform the paradigm, but to dismantle it. Not to fix the system, but to break its universalist pretensions. Not to better understand the world, but to overturn it.
As Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Programme, “right can never be higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society.” And again, in the 1844 Manuscripts: “Political economy does not disclose the source of wealth. It merely reveals how it is appropriated.” It is precisely this source that Mattei asks us to return to.
In conclusion, The Economy Is Political is a necessary text for anyone who believes that struggle is not only a social matter, but also—and perhaps above all—an epistemological one. It dismantles the language of efficiency, rigor, and respectability, revealing their normalizing and disciplinary function. It is not only critical thought—it is transformative thought. Thought that dares to imagine alternatives, that is not afraid to interrogate the present using the tools of history, theory, and politics. A book that speaks from within our time, but with its gaze fixed on what can still be collectively imagined and built.
Capitalism and democracy are incompatible.
— Clara E. Mattei
