Vivek Chibber | The Class Matrix

Class Unity recently spoke with sociologist Vivek Chibber about his 2022 book The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn and what a renewed materialist analysis can contribute to socialist politics. The discussion ranges across Marxist theories of structure and culture, working-class consciousness and resistance, class formation, bourgeois and professional-managerial ideology, and the organizational weakness of the contemporary left. It also addresses socialist demands, the role of the state, Israel and Palestine, anti-imperialism, transgender politics, the meaning of “the left,” BRICS, and the limits of claims about declining U.S. economic hegemony. Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University and editor of Catalyst, where readers can find his profile and essays. The original Class Unity conversation and the publisher’s page for The Class Matrix provide the recording and further information about his work.

Class Unity: Our political education program promotes materialist analysis of politics, economics, and social issues, and this speaker series forms part of that program. Today we are speaking with Vivek Chibber about his 2022 book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. The book offers a strong defense of materialist analysis against the cultural turn in the social sciences since the New Left’s heyday in the 1970s. Chibber rejects idealist interpretations, strategies, and goals in favor of a return to the kind of materialism Marx argued for. I will begin by summarizing the main points of the book that may be especially interesting to a group concerned with class politics rather than identity and culture, after which we will open the discussion to questions.

As I understand it, The Class Matrix intervenes in the debate between Marxist materialism and cultural theory. Marxist materialism explains society primarily by reference to its economic structure—in modern society, the structure of capitalism—whereas cultural theory explains society principally through culture. One of Marx’s most frequently quoted formulations of materialism comes from his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

The key terms here include “relations of production” and “forces of production.” The forces of production are the things with which things are made—buildings, factories, machinery, and so forth. Relations of production describe how people form into different classes that stand in different relationships to production. Together, these constitute the economic structure of society. Marx says this structure corresponds to definite forms of social consciousness, conditions social, political, and intellectual life, and determines consciousness. In a simplified version of this argument, the forces and relations of production determine social consciousness; more generally, the economic structure of capitalist society determines the rest of society.

Classical Marxism holds that capitalism divides society into two classes with different relationships to productive assets. Capitalists own those assets, while workers do not and must therefore sell their labor to capitalists for a wage. Classical Marxists expected workers to unite in pursuit of their material interests and overthrow the capitalist class, but that has not happened over the course of history. Many social theorists, including Marxists, responded by searching for the source of this failure. This produced the cultural turn, according to which classical Marxism had omitted a crucial factor: culture. On this account, workers did not rebel because they possessed a false consciousness, believed capitalism was legitimate, and consented to it. A new theory was therefore needed in which culture played a much more important role.

In the model Chibber presents, causal explanation still begins with economic structure, but culture functions as a mediating force. Structure alone is not sufficient to determine economic practice; society’s members must be socialized into an understanding of their roles within it. Workers and capitalists both require particular orientations toward the world. Culturalists drew, in part, on a particular reading of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, according to which capitalism arose from a distinctive entrepreneurial spirit in Europe. The implication was that capitalism would not develop in the same way—or would face much greater obstacles—in societies shaped by Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other cultural traditions. Yet capitalism spread throughout the world, and the cultures of the places into which it spread did not present an insuperable obstacle.

Chibber responds by accepting that capitalism requires its participants to adopt certain meanings and orientations, while arguing that capitalism’s economic structure itself compels them to acquire the outlooks needed for survival and success. Workers have to show up and accept the discipline of wage labor because otherwise they will lose their income and experience severe material deprivation. Capitalists must maximize profits and cut costs because any departure from the capitalist ethos appears as a competitive disadvantage. A capitalist who pays higher wages or offers better benefits risks being undersold by competitors. Structure remains the ultimate determinant of economic practice, but it first shapes a culture that supports the structure; culture and structure then work together to generate economic practice. Capitalism does not impose a complete culture. It selects for the attitudes it needs and against those that obstruct production, while leaving intact many other beliefs and practices that do not interfere with accumulation.

This revised materialism raises the question of why workers have not recognized their collective interests and organized to overthrow capitalism. Classical Marxists expected inevitable resistance, while cultural theorists often described workers as consenting to capitalism. Chibber argues that both views are mistaken. Workers do resist their situation, but they usually prefer individual to collective resistance because organization at work is costly and risky. Workers can be fired for trying to organize, and they often lack the savings needed to withstand unemployment, while capitalists possess far greater material resources. Workers need capitalists more immediately than capitalists need any individual worker. The result is not active consent to exploitation so much as resignation to conditions that workers do not possess the power to change.

That brings us to agency and culture. Structure does not suppress social agency, because people remain social actors, but it gives them reasons to act within the constraints imposed by their material conditions. Culture is also indispensable to resistance, since building solidarity is itself a cultural task. Workers cannot act in solidarity unless they develop shared commitments that enable them to accept some risk for the sake of collective struggle. There is much more to the book, but those are the main points as I understand them. Please correct or clarify anything I have misstated.

Vivek Chibber: I think you hit most of the important points. The one thing I want to make clear is that my theory is directly opposed to the classical-Marxist interpretation according to which economic structure determines literally everything else. My argument is that it determines only a few things; they just happen to be very important things. Apart from that qualification, I think you captured the other points quite well.

Class Unity: I have a question about that. In the diagram there is a feedback loop between structure and culture, and even after reading the book more than once I was uncertain about how a political group should understand that relationship. Structure is more important, and the relationship may be dialectical, but what implications does it have for strategy? Where and how can we intervene?

Vivek Chibber: I do not think the proposition that workers’ consciousness and cultural orientation must adjust to their structural position has any direct strategic implication by itself. The point matters because it is an argument against what Marx called idealism, in which workers’ cultures and ideas explain why they act as they do. If we are trying to understand the subset of their practices concerned with economic reproduction, their behavior is not primarily a consequence of socialization. It reflects the imperatives and constraints of their economic location.

This is a way of respecting workers’ consciousness. They believe what they believe because their ideas have had to adjust to the hard facts of how they sustain and reproduce themselves. If their ideas and socialization conflict with their actual economic constraints, they will do what any reasonable person would do: prioritize economic survival. Socialization must adjust to that requirement. It is an exceedingly simple point, but unfortunately it has to be rehearsed because of the intellectual environment in which we find ourselves.

Class Unity: Is the culturalist turn one way of understanding what Marxists once called bourgeois ideology? Many people on the left now treat the centrality of class as something reactionary. Does the category of ideology and power remain useful for analyzing that development?

Vivek Chibber: I certainly think there is such a thing as bourgeois ideology. Identity politics, for example, is a form of bourgeois ideology insofar as it presents an orientation toward social domination most commonly found among the upper echelons of dominated groups. It reinterprets social domination as it is experienced by the more elite members of those groups.

Culturalism operates at a higher level of generality than particular propositions about the root causes of gender or racial oppression. I would not describe culturalism itself as a form of bourgeois ideology; it is more a metatheoretical than a theoretical position. It did, however, assist and shelter the takeover of radical discourse by bourgeois ideology. If you believe that workers generally fail to understand their interests or what is good for them, it becomes easy to treat them as fools. That, in turn, encourages paternalism and condescension and produces an approach to social movements and organizing that does not respect workers’ agency or capacity to solve problems. Culturalism makes the slide toward bourgeois ideology easier for radicals, even if it is not itself an instance of bourgeois ideology.

Class Unity: Marxists often use the category of bourgeois ideology, but that can seem too undifferentiated for contemporary class structures. Capital includes industrial, commercial, and financial segments, while labor includes productive and unproductive workers, commercial workers, managers, and many other strata. Identitarianism and the cultural turn often look less like classical bourgeois consciousness than like professional-managerial class consciousness: timid, domesticated, passive-aggressive, and very different from the risk-taking entrepreneurial ethos associated with the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. If we are going to discuss ideological categories, should we not recognize a distinct middle-class consciousness, even if its contours are difficult to define?

Vivek Chibber: There is a great deal to that, but it depends on how you define ideology. Marxists once used what might be called a genetic theory of ideology. If ideology means a set of ideas expressed by a particular stratum, with the label attached according to the stratum that most commonly expresses it, then identity politics is—as you describe it—a natural expression of the worldview of the professional and managerial classes.

There is also a broader, functional way of understanding ideology according to how a constellation of ideas relates to the reproduction of the social order. If a set of ideas consolidates and stabilizes capitalism, you call it bourgeois because it functionally serves the interests of the ruling class. These are different but legitimate ways of understanding ideology. I define it somewhat differently in The Class Matrix, but in discussions like this, clarity about what one means by a term is more important than attaching the correct label. Otherwise, one gets caught in wordplay rather than substantive discussion.

Your definition works perfectly well if ideology refers to views expressed by and directly traceable to particular strata. If instead ideology means the relationship of ideas to the reproduction of a social order, then you essentially have an ideology that disrupts the order, which you might call working-class or peasant ideology, and an ideology that serves its rulers, which you call bourgeois. Identity politics is both: it originates in the professional-managerial strata and serves bourgeois interests. We have direct evidence of the convergence. After the uprisings following George Floyd’s murder, leading elements of capital gave the green light to the most vapid forms of identity politics. They saw a ready army of ideologues among professors, journalists, and media celebrities and told them to run with it. Identity politics almost instantly became an official state ideology.

Class Unity: Earlier you said that working-class people reject socialization when it conflicts with the demands of wage labor. What does it look like when someone’s socialization does not have to be rejected?

Vivek Chibber: It can take a thousand forms. All capitalism asks of you is that you show up to work every day and do what you are told. The cultural content can vary enormously: you can be a devout Hindu, a practicing atheist, or a fundamentalist Muslim. Capitalism does not select for one particular mental attitude. It selects against attitudes that get in its way and leaves the rest intact.

Class Unity: I want to ask about class formation, a subject that occupies one chapter but appears throughout the book. Some thinkers claim that the working class is not a class until it is organized as a unitary political agent for the collective interests of workers. Is that your view, or are you using the term differently?

Vivek Chibber: People who say the working class is not a class until it is organized are simply confused; they contradict themselves in the very sentence. If it is not a class until it is organized, what are they referring to when they say “the working class” is not yet a class? What they presumably mean is that the working class is not a political agent until it is organized. That is true, but it is also obvious. If they want to say something more portentous—that the class does not even exist until it is organized—that is plainly wrong.

How would you know whom to organize if the class did not exist before organization? That is a profound idealism: organize any group of people and, once organized, declare it the working class. But why that group? You cannot know where to direct organizing activity without first making a structural analysis and identifying people who work for a living as the relevant constituency, regardless of their existing consciousness or political organization. You identify them through their structural location and then organize them.

There are theories that distinguish “classes on paper,” identified through data analysis, from “real classes” that possess some degree of collective coordination. But even on that account, classes identified at the structural level establish the limits of what is possible for political entities. If people on the left truly believe that the working class does not exist until it is organized, then they are saying that we cannot know whom to organize. The claim is incoherent and is one of the things that happens when Marxism becomes the property of academic study groups.

Class Unity: I am glad we agree. Let me ask about class formation as a political process. Much of the debate around classical Marxist materialism concerns whether workers will organize to the point of taking political power and overthrowing capitalism. That framing assumes that meaningful economic restructuring requires the exploited class to recognize its position and organize politically—in theological versions of classical Marxism, that the working class is the revolutionary subject. The world today is very different from that of the early twentieth century, but do you still regard the working class as a revolutionary subject? Is the only viable path toward progressive economic restructuring the organization and empowerment of the working class?

Vivek Chibber: It depends on what you mean by “meaningful.” If you mean progressive, then yes. If you simply mean something that has an enormous impact, I see no deductive reason to believe that another class could not impose a different social order. That is an empirical question. I can imagine the professional-managerial class expanding its power and leading a movement to establish an autocratic, technocratic order. I do not think it is especially likely, but it is conceivable.

My view of the working class is essentially Marx’s: it is the class with both the capacity and the interest to impose a more humane social order. I do not like the theological language of “the subject,” because it is not clear what that means. I prefer language that is easy to understand. The working class is the natural constituency of socialists because it is the class most closely aligned with socialist goals. I certainly do not believe it is written somewhere that it will win. If you had to bet today, you would have to say it will lose. Whether it can regain momentum is a matter of political struggle, and right now it is flat on its back.

Class Unity: I work in the service industry and see the suffering of my fellow workers. Once you understand these things, it almost feels as though that knowledge demands that you do something. What in your own life brought you to these insights, and do you have any advice for people trying to make their coworkers’ lives better?

Vivek Chibber: I do not know that I have much advice. Working-class organizing today is essentially starting again from zero, and when you are starting from zero there are a thousand things you can do. The relevant advice is mostly about surviving and performing the basic tasks of organizing, which you probably know better than I do given your own circumstances.

As for my formation, it is very difficult to trace how people are formed. We usually end up inventing stories to explain why we became who we are. You may think your circumstances drove you to your current position, but tens of thousands of other people share similar circumstances without arriving at the same views or analysis. Who you become reflects a mysterious combination of circumstance and personality, and we do not yet have a science of personality. We do not understand how it emerges from the interaction of biology and social context. I could make up a story about why I believe what I believe, but it would basically be an invention, and I do not know how useful it would be.

Class Unity: The cultural turn is presented in the book as a response to the failure of socialism, working-class politics, and Marxism in the twentieth century. Going forward, is culturalism merely an academic concern—a wrong theory—or is it actively shaping the working class, left politics, and trade unionism? Has this intellectual change actually reoriented how people organize?

Vivek Chibber: I do not think the cultural turn has had much direct impact on workers’ consciousness. Workers simply go about their business. I thought it was important to write the book because culturalism has had a deep impact on what passes for radicalism among nonworkers. Historically, much of the initial work of forming communist and socialist parties has been carried out by middle-class intellectuals, and much of their strategic thinking has come from more educated workers or nonworkers recruited into their organizations. How radicals understand capitalism, class, and their own relationship to the working class therefore affects the ideas they bring into the movement.

It also has a large effect on scholarship. Whenever socialists organize, they have to read history, political economy, and social theory. They did so in the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s, and today. When the literature calling itself radical has been taken over by ideas from the cultural turn, that affects organizers’ understanding of issues they may not experience directly and orients them toward the class in a particular way. Since the 1990s, we have seen the hold that culturalist, ethnicist, and essentialist ideas exert over students entering Occupy Wall Street, the labor movement, and current debates about Israel and Palestine.

The effect is mediated rather than direct, and I do not want to exaggerate it, but it is not trivial. A project like this book may help the left regain its ideological and moral compass. The defeat of the left has brought with it a colossal loss of confidence. Marxists and socialists once believed that they possessed a theory that equipped them to understand the world and therefore to change it. The cultural turn attacked Marxism at its foundation by declaring materialism itself mistaken. Once you lose your bearings, it becomes easy for any con artist to fill your head with nonsense, and it is difficult to organize with your head full of nonsense.

The first constituency for a book like this is therefore organizers: people willing to leave middle-class settings, commit a kind of class suicide, and try to organize. Through a mediated chain of effects, it may help working-class organization by helping organizers recover their bearings. But I do not think the book bears directly on the class itself; its primary readership is the people who organize the class.

Class Unity: I enjoyed the book, and although it is aimed at organizers, it is written clearly enough for a nonacademic reader. There is very little jargon.

Vivek Chibber: Even when I am writing for organizers, I try to make everything accessible to any intelligent person who picks up the book. There was a time when Marxists wrote only like this. It was considered your duty: if you could not make yourself understood, you should get out of the game. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, so I am glad you found it useful and could engage with it. That was the goal. One amusing reaction from some reviewers has been that it is too easy—that the argument is so simple it is not really a work of theory. This is where we are.

Class Unity: I agree that we are starting from ground zero, which also means the possibilities are wide open. I have been thinking about issues around which we might organize that could deliver universal, concrete material benefits to working people. I have also been reading work on debt, banking, and the development of modern Western economics, as well as arguments that private technology companies and monopolies are displacing the state and coming to rule our lives. Do you have any thoughts on the work of Michael Hudson or David Graeber?

Vivek Chibber: I would read anything and everything. There is no golden path to wisdom; you read as much as you can and then discuss it. But finding the right book will not by itself solve your larger problem. The challenge is to become part of an organization with enough mass and weight to move events.

Class Unity: You may have heard that Class Unity was part of Democratic Socialists of America, but it is not anymore.

Vivek Chibber: Then your greatest challenge is that a group of a few dozen people cannot accomplish very much.

Class Unity: We are moving people one viewer at a time.

Vivek Chibber: I understand, and I sympathize, but I want to be honest with you. There is a process one might call molecular growth: twenty people become twenty-five, then thirty-five, adding one member at a time. But you have to find a way to become large enough actually to move events. Reading is worthwhile, but real learning begins when an organization becomes important enough to confront difficult practical choices. It is very hard to learn from small reading groups isolated from the hard decisions that come with doing politics.

You probably know this already, and I am only reaffirming it. After the 1980s, the American left became a collection of tiny groupuscules. Inevitably, they came to resemble therapy groups for small numbers of people—a way of surviving their unhappiness under capitalism rather than doing the heavy work of changing it.

Class Unity: How would you distinguish the working class from the middle class today? Many people called middle class experience considerable precarity. They struggle to afford homes, start families, or pay their debts. Is there still a relevant boundary, and how would you draw it?

Vivek Chibber: Let me begin by saying that precarity does not make anyone radical. Small businesspeople face enormous precarity; the vast majority of businesses fail within a short period. Part of the radical left’s confusion is the belief that proletarianization, the threat of proletarianization, or precarity necessarily makes someone working class or potentially aligned with working-class interests. You need a more concrete analysis of whom you are discussing.

The middle class consists of people in whom characteristics of workers and capitalists are mixed. A shopkeeper, for example, owns the means of production, which resembles the position of a capitalist, but may employ no workers and therefore exploits nobody. Such a person is an owner-operator, combining the autonomy of a capitalist with the labor of a worker. A salaried manager, by contrast, resembles a worker because that person works for a wage, but carries out many of capital’s functions. The middle class comprises people who possess either neither or both of the defining characteristics of labor and capital. This encompasses a very large number of strata. That is about all one can say at a high level of abstraction; after that, one must examine the actual occupations in question.

Class Unity: Is it rhetorically useful today to invoke “revolutionary socialism”? I also want to ask about the meaning of the left. Sahra Wagenknecht, for example, has often been declared outside the left precisely because she places class politics at the center. If serious class politics emerged but lost what is now called “the left,” would that concern you?

Vivek Chibber: If class politics became central and you lost the left, then those people were not the left. The left is defined by class politics. If the left is redefined so that it no longer means class politics, I would not want to be near it. Historically, the left was identified with socialism. If that is no longer true, we will need a new term for socialists, because meaningful progressive social change will come from socialist politics.

Class Unity: That is sufficient as far as the label goes, but it leads into conflicts over supposedly subsidiary issues such as immigration and foreign policy. Much of the existing left, caught in a paternalistic relationship to bourgeois parties, fights tooth and nail to relativize class and deny it any central role. Its position is often that making class central would itself be reactionary, because it regards the working class as a reactionary entity.

Vivek Chibber: You are absolutely right that this is the view of a large swath of the left today. I do not think you will ever win over those sections. If you establish a real class base and a genuine place within the working class, you will not have to conduct these debates in their present form. You will instead be engaged in much more meaningful arguments within the class about how to move forward.

Many of those conflicts will concern what we call identity, because the working class is multiracial and increasingly balanced between women and men. Questions of gender equity and racial justice will arise within the class, but workers will not necessarily perceive an opposition between fighting racial injustice and fighting for working people. These debates become intractable when they occur primarily within what we loosely call the middle class, since most of that class has little interest in the lives of workers. It likes the feeling of calling itself left-wing. In universities, radicalism has become a meal ticket for elements of the professional-managerial class, giving them a material interest in redefining radicalism so that it excludes workers’ interests.

The way out is to leave that intellectual setting and have these arguments where they belong: within the working class. If people who now call themselves left choose the other side, you are not really losing them; they are merely clarifying which side they were always on. The more important question is why the left was historically an organized expression of working-class interests—a party or a union—whereas today people shouting on social media are treated as a left. Much of the socialist left is trapped inside the culture of the middle class and its intelligentsia. You should expect many of those people to line up against you, and you will win only if you exit that class milieu.

As for whether it makes sense to call yourself a revolutionary, I do not think it does. What does “revolutionary” mean today—are you going to take up arms? It is often more an affect than a meaningful description. Call yourself a socialist. Perhaps there will be a revolution at some future point, but the difficult task now is not waging a revolution. It is organizing people around class politics, and that is what socialism means in practice.

Class Unity: Your comments about the contemporary cultural malaise raise the question of what kind of program you have in mind. We are far removed from the high-water mark of the left, and things we once believed we could count on are no longer present. If revolution is not an immediate prospect, what should our demands be, and toward whom should they be directed? There is a cultural problem, but there is also the state. To what extent should we make demands on a bourgeois state when we have no realistic plan for power within it? Are we organizing through unions, groups like Class Unity, a wider national movement, or an international movement? Are we appealing to the existing state, or trying to build a proletarian state? What does the next step look like?

Vivek Chibber: It is important to distinguish demands from aspirations. A demand is something you possess enough power to make. If it is not commensurate with your power, it is simply a hissy fit. A group the size of Class Unity cannot make demands because it has no power with which to enforce them. It can have aspirations. Those aspirations can be wildly hallucinatory—“we demand the end of the state”—or they can remain within the realm of reality: things that might become achievable in the near future if the balance of social forces changed by a plausible amount.

I thought the program Bernie Sanders put forward contained an excellent set of demands. Socialist demands should meet two criteria. First, they must be achievable. On that ground alone, 99.9 percent of socialist groups fail, because they have no conception of the difference between a demand and a wish list. Sanders’s program was, at least in principle, achievable with the social forces that exist today.

Second, achieving a demand should increase the probability of winning more ambitious demands later rather than closing the door on them. Medicare for All was a strong demand on those grounds. Winning it would have delivered a substantial blow to capital and dramatically increased working people’s confidence. It would have increased their confidence in government, which many workers now regard as an alien institution that never listens to them. That estrangement encourages a destructive individualism. It would also have increased workers’ confidence in themselves and reduced their dependence on employers, enabling them to make further demands at work.

That is one example of an achievable, transformative demand; there are many others. But all of them require a political coalition larger than anything currently on the left. Even Democratic Socialists of America, the largest organization on the American left, lacks the power to make demands worthy of the name. Part of the left’s maturation will have to be the realization that unless it becomes large, it will achieve nothing in our lifetimes. We have to discover how to generate the kind of explosive expansion that occurred around the Sanders campaign. There is no step-by-step road to class politics. It develops through large, explosive leaps.

Class Unity: When I read your critique of postcolonial theory, it makes me wonder whether many current movements around Israel and Palestine are too idealist. In particular, how should we understand descriptions of Israel as a white-supremacist state or as a settler-colonial state?

Vivek Chibber: Those descriptions are very much in the air. Israel is certainly a settler state; we can discuss what that means. But if every Palestinian were chalk white, Israel would still be doing the same thing. There is no doubt that Israel mobilizes racist tropes in its offensives, but we have to distinguish ideas that motivate an action from ideas used to justify it. How an action is rationalized can be very different from what actually motivated it.

Israel’s motivation is the desire for the land; it is not principally about the identity of the people on that land. Jews were not regarded as white for almost their entire history, so describing Israeli Jews as white is itself a recent invention. There is an ethnic supremacy at work—Jewish supremacy—but that is not identical to white supremacy. Even this supremacist outlook is a rationalization or justification rather than the primary motive. The central motivation has always been the attempt to establish a homeland in which Jews are ethnically dominant rather than one that is heterogeneous. It is therefore correct to call Israel a settler state, but misleading to reduce it to white supremacy.

Class Unity: I agree that we should stop trying to win back people who call themselves socialists or leftists but act as the shock troops of capital; they have already chosen a side. Yet there is still a reason to care about words such as “left,” “socialism,” and “Marxism.” These terms have been co-opted so effectively that a large part of the public believes Marxism or socialism means taking away people’s children and brainwashing them, preventing them from eating meat or driving cars, or imposing other outlandish restrictions. Gender ideology and panics about critical race theory have made it difficult for people who call themselves Marxists to connect with ordinary working people. How should we deal with that?

I also want to return to your distinction between demands and aspirations. Many left-wing sects make demands about Israel and Palestine despite having no power to affect events and no audience capable of enforcing those demands. It is not even obvious that this is specifically a socialist issue rather than a geopolitical one. How should socialists approach it?

Vivek Chibber: Those are both excellent points. On the first, do not misunderstand me: I am not advocating that we give up identifying as leftists or let others have the word. I was responding to the concern that we might lose sections of the existing left. Let them go. The best thing that could happen to some large left organizations would be for the members who have no interest in socialism and joined for fashion or self-expression to leave. But that does not mean we should surrender the label. We should fight for it for precisely the reasons you gave.

My view is that if socialists do not separate themselves in the public mind from what is called the woke left, they will go down in flames. The woke left is itself going to lose because it is reactionary and hostile to ordinary rights and the people attached to those rights. Its great confidence trick has been the takeover of the word “left.” Part of our mission must be to insist that this politics is neither left nor radical and is certainly not socialist. Nothing is more important right now. A strange authoritarianism has taken over left politics—censorship, the suppression of speech, denouncing anyone who disagrees as a fascist, and essentialism about gender and race. That is what many people now believe left-wing politics means, and we need to argue very clearly that it does not.

On Israel and Palestine, you are right that many groups make “demands” they lack the power to enforce, and many of those demands are detached from political reality. Consider the one-state solution. Who is it for if Palestinians themselves do not want it? It often functions as an expression of the speaker’s identity and virtue because socialists in an earlier period advocated it. Noam Chomsky has observed that many American leftists and liberals like to invoke the one-state solution precisely because they know it is impossible: nobody will take it seriously, and they can repeat it indefinitely. There is a great deal of truth in that.

Where I would caution you is in saying that Israel and Palestine is not directly a socialist issue. It does not immediately affect the lives of most American workers, but socialists should still care because American bombs and arms are killing Palestinians. Socialists in the United States have a moral responsibility to address that fact. How they do so is a separate question, but the American left should not become what Lenin would have called nationally chauvinist, caring only about events within its borders. That is not a workable socialist strategy in an integrated world, and it is especially inexcusable when this country is responsible for so much damage abroad.

We need to make anti-imperialism attractive to working peopleso they see it not merely as a moral vocation but as connected to their interests. That can be done. A slogan such as “schools, not bombs” shows directly that money spent on warfare could instead improve schools or health care. It gives people a concrete reason to support reducing the size of the war machine because doing so would benefit them domestically.

Class Unity: Building on the discussion of gender ideology, you said that the woke left often despises working people. Much of the right-wing response to woke politics is also hateful, especially toward transgender people. Is it possible to defend transgender people’s rights and criticize the right without falling into the trap of the woke left, or is that a dead end?

Vivek Chibber: I will be honest: the transgender movement may be the first movement in modern history to have been recognized by the state almost immediately. I cannot think of another movement that had to fight as little to gain institutional recognition. I am not especially worried about transgender people lacking elite support, because most of the liberal intelligentsia supports them. The movement’s problem may be that it received too much support too quickly. It never had to fight to win people over and moved almost immediately to using state and institutional power against anyone who disagreed.

That is dangerous for the movement itself. When a very small minority adopts a strategy of coercing and controlling people who disagree, it makes itself heavily dependent on centers of power for its freedoms and autonomy. Those power centers cannot be relied upon indefinitely. The movement needs to recover some of the moral commitments of the civil-rights movement: it should position itself as part of a broader movement for justice rather than making itself a litmus test for everyone else. Most people do not care enough about this issue to organize their lives around it in the way activists sometimes demand, and they will not all change their pronouns because a small minority insists on it. Authoritarian methods are a recipe for isolation. The danger is that the movement acquired institutional power too quickly and, like other identitarian movements that have been granted power, is becoming authoritarian.

Class Unity: When discussing whether to redefine or rename the left, I often say, “You are liberal, not left,” or identify myself as left rather than liberal. When I tell someone who identifies as Republican or right-wing that I am a Marxist or communist, the person may initially react with surprise, but then we often agree on many concrete issues involving banks, the Federal Reserve, economic power, and local control. At one level there is propaganda about labels, while at another there is the reality of agreement on the ground. Most working people do not care very much what you call yourself.

Vivek Chibber: Mike Davis used to say that when he was driving trucks, he could walk up to another trucker and say, “I’m a communist,” and the other person would respond, “Sure, I’m part of the Masonic lodge,” treating the two labels as being on the same level. These labels matter far more within the educated classes. Because so much of the left circulates within those classes, it becomes obsessed with them.

That does not change the fact that in public perception the left is now identified with some very backward ideas. Liberals took over the label because they liked the feeling of being called leftists, but they did not relinquish their traditional authoritarianism. The professional classes are behind much of this development. Radicalism now brings money and status within universities: ethnic studies, gender studies, race studies, and queer studies all present themselves as radical. These radicalisms have one thing in common—a hostility toward ordinary people. At best, they regard workers with deep skepticism. The stereotypical working-class man is described as heteronormative, misogynistic, racist, and everything else that is supposed to be wrong with the world. The working class becomes the enemy against which the professional classes can align.

But that supposed enemy is the socialist left’s constituency. If leftism is identified with hating workers, workers will hate the left in return, and once that happens socialists have nobody to organize. That is why I said earlier not to concentrate on winning over people who call themselves leftists but have no interest in the working class. They are part of the problem. We should concentrate on winning over workers, and if those nominal leftists depart, let them go. I did not mean that socialists themselves should stop using the label “left.”

Class Unity: That works for me. I will call myself whatever people want as long as we can improve working people’s lives. Let me end with a geopolitical question related to the distinction between demands and aspirations. Class Unity cannot make demands at present, but Russia, China, and Iran are developing alignments and alternative financial and balance-of-payments systems through BRICS. They may be capable of making demands on the United States and its allies. Could a major external change open an avenue for the kind of political explosion you described? The decline of American manufacturing and the need to confront the costs of U.S. policy may turn what once seemed like a distant foreign-policy matter into a domestic crisis.

Vivek Chibber: There are three things I would say. First, an alignment is developing among Russia, China, Iran, and other states, but I would not regard that as necessarily progressive. These are authoritarian and, in many respects, backward and reactionary regimes. Their coalescence is not itself a step forward for the left. It could create openings, but there is nothing inherently progressive about it.

There is a fascination in parts of the left with BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and the expanded grouping—but the idea that it constitutes a progressive bloc is a delusion. Brazil under Lula has some progressive impulses, but one should not rely on the grouping as a whole to advance socialism.

Second, always be cautious about the claim that if the United States is squeezed, conditions here will necessarily improve. They could become much worse. Whenever a crisis occurs, who emerges on top depends on who was best positioned to take advantage of it. In the United States today, the right is far better positioned than the left. If conditions deteriorate severely, the left could be wiped out—or, more accurately, the left is already so irrelevant that many people do not notice it, but the environment in which it operates could become much more hostile. I would not be optimistic about a scenario in which the United States is simply squeezed.

Third, there is discussion—including, perhaps, around Radhika Desai, although I do not want to put words in anyone’s mouth—that the dollar is under threat. I see no such threat in the conceivable future. Nobody is in a position to displace the dollar; it is not on the cards in your lifetime or mine. Do not assume that U.S. economic hegemony is presently in danger. Its political hegemony is in full retreat, but economically I do not think the dollar faces a real challenge.

Class Unity: One final question. How do you respond to people on the right who say that woke politics is Marxism? I worry that an anti-woke reaction could overcorrect and target people who are genuinely focused on class. A common argument on the right is that Marxism infiltrated the institutions through a “long march.”

Vivek Chibber: One illuminating fact about the accusation that woke politics is Marxism is whom woke ideologues spend most of their time attacking: Marxists. Like postcolonial theorists, they devote enormous energy to exorcising the ghost of Marxism. That is a strong indication that they do not see themselves as Marxists; they see Marxism as something they need to shed or overcome.

For their public self-presentation, however, Marxism does enter the story. The narrative is that they began as Marxists when they were young and naive, absorbed everything Marxism had to teach, overcame all its limitations, and now represent what Marxism becomes when it grows up. What we have to say publicly is that they cannot be Marxists when they spend so much of their time attacking Marxism and when their political program has nothing to offer working people.

Intellectually, the way to demonstrate this is through criticism, which is part of what we try to do at Catalyst. The next issue will include a long review article by Christian Parenti on woke politics that you may find useful.

Class Unity: That was a great discussion. Thank you very much for speaking with us.

Vivek Chibber: It was my pleasure. I wish you good luck.

Class Unity: Thank you.