In recent years, the news media has often reported polls suggesting that majorities of segments of the American population–for example, Democrat voters or young adults–”prefer” socialism to capitalism. It is not completely clear how these poll respondents define the term “socialism”–but it seems likely that most envision the word to mean a capitalism subjected to substantial government regulation in the interest of the common good and heavy taxation on business and the wealthy to provide a generous welfare state. In other words a socialism of the sort advocated by Bernie Sanders.

Of course, there have been a long line of famous thinkers and activists whose socialist visions have been much more radical: persons like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Emma Goldman have called for the complete abolition of the capitalist system of private property and exploitative wage labor and their replacement by an economic system that produces commodities based on peoples’ needs rather than capitalist profit. 

The Marxists Lenin and Trotsky led history’s first anti-capitalist revolution: Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This revolution featured soldiers and workers across Russia establishing soviets (workers’ councils) with the goal of  expropriating Russia’s economic enterprises from their owners and handing them over to the democratic control of the enterprises’ workers. 

The Bolshevik party led by Lenin and Trotsky gained the support of Russia’s workers by promising to support worker control of industry through the soviets. However, soon after they assumed power, they crushed the soviets, reducing them to mere rubber stamp bodies and established what became a notorious totalitarian dictatorship: the Soviet Union. 

The Bolsheviks justified their dictatorship on national security grounds: they needed to centralize power in their own hands in order to defend their revolution from the subversion of the western imperialist powers which were backing the civil war launched against the Bolsheviks  by Czarist remnants and Russia’s bourgeoisie.  

This article does not intend to offer a full assessment of the justice ( or lack thereof) of Bolshevik actions under the circumstances they faced.  Suffice it to note that by the early 1920s, as Isaac Deutscher wrote in his magisterial biography of Trotsky: “if the Bolsheviks had permitted free elections to the soviets, they would have certainly been swept from power.” 

As Deutscher (an admirer of Trotsky) explained it, the Bolesheviks felt justified in holding power against the wishes of the vast majority of Russia’s population. For one, most of that population were illiterate peasants of extremely low culture. The peasants were so backward that they might support a return to Czarist feudalism. In the 1920s,  in Deutscher’s words, Trotsky conceived of the Bolshevik dictatorship as a “trusteeship” for the Russian people who would be eventually granted more democratic freedom once it was determined they had reached a sufficient level of civilization. 

The Bolsheviks saw themselves as the only progressive force in Russia, whose dictatorship was a thin line standing between the well-being of Russia’s masses and a return to power of monstrously oppressive czarist feudalism. Deutscher conceded that, among the Bolsheviks’ anti-capitalist rivals, “anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists…seemed far more popular” than the Bolsheviks among Russia’s working class. But Deutscher claimed that they had no coherent political program or organization with which to advance their ideas; in any case, the Bolsheviks were determined to keep them far away from political power. 

Escape from Capitalism 

Persons wishing to discredit communism or other forms of anti-capitalism often point to the failure of the Soviet Union. Indeed, for the most part, there was not much admirable about the USSR. It was a giant prison camp with good welfare benefits, as Noam Chomsky once put it. 

However a new book by a prominent academic does a credible job in attempting to rejuvenate the anti-capitalist ethos. In Escape From Capitalism: An Intervention, Clara Mattei, a Professor of Economics at the University of Tulsa, seeks to revive the spirit of democratic control of workplaces present at the outset of the Bolshevik revolution. She clearly seeks to transcend a definition of anti-capitalism that is limited by the experiences of “actually existing” communist societies like the USSR, Mao’s China or Castro’s Cuba: in fact her book has virtually nothing to say about such regimes except to note that they prominently featured the economic inequality and exploitation anti-capitalist revolution is supposed to transcend. 

Her previous book–The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the way to Fascism–focused in part on what seems to be her primary anti-capitalist lodestar: the so-called Red Biennium in her native Italy of 1919-20 when workers seized control of factories and peasants seized control of agricultural land in an effort to establish democratically run workplaces. The Capital Order–which was listed by the Financial Times as among its 10 best books of 2022–describes how Mussolini came to power with the support of Italy’s ruling class as an attempt to put down this anti-capitalist movement. 

Escape From Capitalism covers some of the same ground as The Capital Order: not just the 

Red Biennium but a favorite theme of the author: how professional economists see themselves as an elite class possessed of specialized knowledge who, ensconced in central banks and treasury departments in the US and around the world, exercise the levers of fiscal and monetary policy in order to maximize the conditions for capital accumulation.  This maximization of conditions for capital accumulation usually takes the form of fiscal and monetary austerity: the repression of union organization, the slashing of government spending on social welfare, deregulation, privatization of government assets and higher interest rates. Her description of how these professional economists, in post-World War I Europe and in the present day United States, see themselves as implementing policy for the well being of the masses (but without any democratic input from said masses) had echoes for me in Trotsky’s concept (in Isaac Deutscher’s words) of the Bolshevik Party’s “trusteeship” on behalf of the Russian masses. 

In the last part of the book, the author gives modern day examples of people around the world trying to advance models of economic development that replace capitalist exploitation with worker cooperation–but what is most interesting is her account of her personal activism in this vein:

“In my own efforts, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation (FREE), we hold monthly discussions with citizens from all walks of life to connect our daily problems to the economic structures that create them and envisage courageous alternatives. The Forum is structured as a council and is the product of a collective endeavor to spread economic knowledge, both locally and internationally, that fortifies the organization of effective systems of economic solidarity. It connects existing realities on the ground, such as Cooperation Tulsa, which, inspired by Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, collectively owns and organizes the production and distribution of food in a peripheral urban setting, and the Really Really Free Market, which organizes the exchange of essential goods without the intermediation of money. The path toward concrete transformation begins with real transformation and conversation.” 

Much of Escape from Capitalism contains useful statistics proving that capitalism is bad: for example that a majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and much of the world is impoverished and starving as a result of free market economics. She argues that starvation and misery in the third world is rooted in exploitation and robbery by advanced industrial powers: she devotes an interesting section on this theme to the case of Palestinian immiseration by Israel. 

It is not news to radical leftists of course, that capitalism is bad or that western imperialism has preyed on the Third World. But her combination of statistics proving capitalism’s perfidy and real world models that suggest ways of beginning to transcend it makes for an effective presentation of her viewpoint.