Einstürzende Überbauten
A conversation with Vivek Chibber
The main argument you make in your new book The Class Matrix1 is, in contradistinction to a substantial legacy of postwar, mainly academic Marxism, that the key to understanding why the working class does not overthrow capitalism - or let alone organizes - is not primarily to be found in culture and ideology, but rather in the class structure itself. How must we understand this?
Chibber: The postwar Marxist tradition tradition, but also some critical theories outside of it, conceptualized class structure as a source of conflict. And that was its main role, and it was supposed to induce workers to organize themselves and defend their interests against capital, and indeed in certain situations, to overthrow it.
So the fundamental role of the class structure was twofold: it creates conflict within capitalism, and then it enables workers to organize themselves against it. This naturally raised the question, then why don’t they do it? Why has the system become stable? And the answer was: it must be because something outside of the class structure gets in the way of workers organizing themselves. It must be ideology, culture, or something like that. For decades this notion has been gaining momentum, and by the nineties it was a very common view among Marxists that the reason why workers don’t organize themselves, why capitalism survived, why it was so stable, was: culture.
It was a very ambitious theory that placed culture in a central role to understanding the reproduction of capitalism. Now my problem with this is: is it really possible that the intellectuals see that workers are oppressed, are being treated badly, but somehow the workers don’t because they’re duped by ideology? The left was in the awkward position of saying that the very people subjected to exploitation and domination are somehow not aware that they are being dominated.
I argue that the class structure does in fact create conflict and antagonism. But the absence of collective action is not because of an external factor like ideology. The class structure also has another property, and that is that the antagonism it generates is channeled into manageable forms by the very class structure itself. Now what is that manageable form? The class structure makes it more appealing to workers to fight and resist in an individual basis than on a collective basis. The class structure creates the conflict and it also creates the form in which this conflict plays out.
How does the phenomenon that has become known as “the great resignation“ - people leaving their jobs en masse - fit into this framework?
Chibber: That is one instance of individualized resistance. Instead of fighting with other workers to change the conditions of the job, they simply opt out. There are others, things like going slow at work, not doing what the boss tells you to the full extent. Absenteeism is a very common form. Sometimes even sabotaging the workplace. These are some of the ways in which you can defend yourself, but by defending yourself this way, you also leave the power of the employer intact.
A materialist approach respects the agency and the intelligence of the workers instead of treating them like dupes, like people who don’t understand their situation. It’s not that I totally dismiss ideology, but it’s not that ideology sets the motivation of the workers and the absence of collective resistance, those are set by the class structure, but it provides the discourse for the rationalization of the decisions already made. So ideology’s function is to help people live with the decisions they’re making and not to direct the decisions themselves, as the cultural argument would have it.
Your argument in the Class Matrix is very much revolving around the binary antagonism of workers vs. capital. Which role do intermediary strata like the PMC (professional-managerial class) play, and what is their relationship to ideology?
Chibber: The PMC has to be understood as one stratum of the middle class. But the middle class encompasses other strata as well. It shouldn’t be called a class, it should be named the professional-managerial stratum. It refers to salaried positions, white collar employees with a college degree. Their jobs are not wage-labor jobs, they’re career jobs. They enter at a certain level and then climb up the ladder.
Managers are different. What managers do is manage other people’s labor and it’s a bit confusing to lump these two together. We’re talking about quite different dynamics here. Managers are always and everywhere at the service of somebody else. When we’re talking about the private sector, managers are the servants of capital. They direct labor for capital. Now there are variations within managers. Some of them are extremely powerful, actually make decisions on investments, hiring and firing - they’re the proxies for capital. The lower levels of management are just glorified workers - supervisors, foremen etc. These are highly paid workers with the power to direct people’s labor. Managers’ role is simple: they help extract value from labor. Professionals’ role is quite different.
So on the question of the place of ideology: when people talk about the PMC, they usually talk about the “P“, professionals .We should think of professionals as a segment of the middle class and a - more ephemeral - segment of the working class who identify with power and capital. Their instinctive ideology is a kind of a liberal, market-oriented ideology. Now the reason why this ideology has become identified as leftist is that that the left no longer consists of workers, of proletarians but of this upwardly mobile, university educated stratum.
So the PMC left would be found very much on the side of what you call „active consent" in your book.
Chibber: Yes, pretty much. Look at left debates today. The discourse of the left today is overwhelmingly a discourse along the lines of discrimination. In this worldview, what makes a distributive or a social issue unjust is if rewards or punishments are given out in a discriminatory manner. And the way this is expressed is through the language of „proportionality“. So policing is bad if the people arrested are „disproportionally“ black; poverty is bad if the poor are „disproportionally“ immigrants. Poverty itself is not brought up. It’s the fact that it’s distributed unevenly. I like to joke that if the CIA just waterboards and tortures people in the correct racial proportion, the PMC would have no problem with it. Their problem with capitalism is that it disproportionally damages certain groups of people, and so, of course, justice simply requires that the damage was proportionally meted out. For the PMC left, discrimination is the worst sin. The worst that could possibly happen to them is for somebody to block their upward mobility because they’re a woman, because they’re black or what have you. So what they question is not the fact of exploitation. What they question is the lack of upward mobility bourgeois ideology promises. And that comes out of their active acceptance of capitalism and their anger at chances not being distributed properly. Workers on the other hand for the most part don’t believe in these promises, what they hate is that they don’t have any other options.
But is that not what Slavoj Žižek would precisely describe as ideology - the cynical reason of „they know very well, yet they’re still doing it“?
Chibber: I had a conversation with Zizek just the other day when he brought this up, and I think he’s exactly right. Cynicism is the most common ideological form of how the working class views their situation: they feel that the system can not be changed, the game is rigged, everyone’s corrupt. Now remember what I said about the proper place of ideology: it is a rationalization of the situation the workers find themselves and, that helps to make sense of it and sometimes justifies it. Cynicism is the ideological response to having no power. It isn’t a false consciousness – it accurately perceives a state of affairs, and makes it easier to live with it, because when you have no power, you rationally choose to opt out.
What is the connection between resignation in your analytical sense - workers seeing their situation clearly but having no other option but individualized resistance - and resignation in the narrower, psychological sense, given the ever growing number of people with mental health problems?
Chibber: Well you might be aware that there is a opioid crisis in the US. Part of the reason I wrote the book was to challenge the elitism of the left who will look at these “deaths of despair“ and think “if only these people could understand their situation better“, and thus assigning the blame to them, instead of seeing that they’re doing the best they can. The distinction between resignation and consent I make in my book is meant to appreciate the agency of working people. I wrote this book because I was appalled by the elitism of the left.
What connects The Class Matrix with your earlier work on postcolonial theory?
Chibber: The Class Matrix provides the underlying theory that was only partially expressed in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. I argued for two universalisms: the universalism of capital and the universal tendency to resist, regardless of culture. The question then becomes, what is the source of these two universalizing drives in contemporary society? The Class Matrix tries to explain that it is the class structure of capitalism that generates them both. And this class structure operates by motivating people on the most basic, the most common instincts they have – the need to preserve their economic viability. The book is, in many ways, the theoretical foundation on which the Postcolonial Theory was built, even though it comes after I wrote the latter.
The Class Matrix. Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, Harvard University Press: 2022.