A confused professor
Vivek Chibber is a well-known figure on the American left. A professor of sociology at New York University, he regards himself as a Marxist and is seen by some as an important social theorist. The April 2023 edition of the Socialist Standard carried a review of a book he had recently published with the ambitious title Confronting Capitalism. How the World Works and How to Change It. The review recognised the author’s clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works. In particular it endorsed the book’s explanation of capitalism’s relationship with the state and the struggle it inevitably generates between the two classes in society – capitalists and workers – and how it dictates that governments, no matter what their stated ideology, cannot have a mediating role between workers and capitalists but have no choice but to govern on behalf of the capitalist class and in their collective profit-making interest. In the same way, the review approved the book’s further observation that individual capitalists, regardless of their personal character or values, are compelled by the nature of the system they operate in to minimise costs and seek profit, wherever possible and whatever the consequences, the result being that a tiny minority of the population are able to live in luxury while billions struggle to keep their heads above water and experience life as a daily grind.
Chasing reforms
So far, so good, and, as explanations of capitalism go, pretty lucid. But, as the review then went on to point out, Chibber’s prescription for remedying the situation he correctly analyses was not to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a different one but rather to chase reforms of various kinds to try and make that system more palatable. And this, puzzingly, after having told us that the imperatives of capitalism make that impossible. Arguably even more puzzling then was his final call to ‘start down the road of social democracy and market socialism’, even though, by any standards, ‘market socialism’ is a contradiction in terms.
Since all book reviews that appear in the Socialist Standard are sent to the book’s author, Chibber should at least be aware of the Socialist Party’s view and criticisms of his ideas. So when an extended interview with him appeared recently in the Jacobin magazine on aspects of his Confronting Capitalism book, it could only be of interest to see whether he seemed to have taken on board any of the points raised in our criticism of his ideas.
Though it’s clear from the start of that conversation both interviewer and interviewee see themselves as Marxists and socialists, there is virtually no reference made to what socialism might mean and nothing at all is said about the kind of socialist society that Marx advocated – one based not on the market and buying and selling but on the abolition of the money and wages system and free access to all goods and services. There is, however, an approving reference to two major 20th century practitioners of authoritarian state capitalism, Lenin and Mao, which seems to echo the line taken in Confronting Capitalism about a Leninist party model with a centralised leadership. So no change here then. But what about his book’s advocacy of reforms of various kinds within capitalism – ‘non-reformist reforms’, as he calls them? Well nothing seems different here either. He refers to struggles for ‘workplace rights, a universal basic income grant, or pensions’ echoing the need expressed in his book for ‘a combination of electoral and mobilizational politics’ and ‘a gradualist approach’.
How many classes?
To be fair, however, the main focus of the Jacobin interview is not how capitalism could be improved or what comes after it but rather its class structure. And here, initially at least, Chibber seems to be living up to the Marxist analysis of class explained in Confronting Capitalism, ie, the existence of two classes in society – capitalists (a tiny minority) and workers (the overwhelming majority) – with irreconcilable interests, and the state being not some kind of mediating body but rather an instrument of support for the capitalist class. But then, in the second part of the interview, what can be described as a variation on this perspective emerges. Here he moves from seeing capitalism as a two-class structure to stating the existence of a third class, a ‘middle class’. This of course is a term commonly used by social analysts seeking to categorise workers in terms of such things as their backgrounds, outlooks, living styles or levels of pay. But should such a ‘third’ category have a place in any claimed Marxist analysis of class? Well, it didn’t in Confronting Capitalism, but now, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it does here. To be precise, Chibber has this to say: ‘So the two “fundamental” classes, workers and capitalists, account probably for around 75 percent of the labor force. What’s the other remaining 25 percent? That’s what we call the middle class.’ But who are this ‘middle class’? According to him, they fall into two groups – the self-employed (‘owner operators, the traditional petty bourgeoisie’, he calls them) and ‘the salariat’.
What to respond to this? Well, we can accept – because it corresponds to observable reality – that in capitalism there has always been a small minority of individuals, who wish ‘to be their own boss’ and to set up their own small businesses of one kind or another. A small proportion of these turn out to be lucrative and may result in their creator becoming rich to the point of not having to work, But the vast majority of them are not particularly successful. Sometimes they procure a precarious living for those who run them, but more often they fail and plunge their owners into the world of seeking to sell their energies to another employer for a wage or salary. Of course, such people, at least for as long as they are in business, can be categorised as wannabe-capitalists, but the vast majority of them (those, for example, that Chibber calls ‘owner-operator shopkeepers’) still have to carry out labour on a daily basis themselves in order to survive and to support their families. So it can’t be meaningfully maintained that the existence of small ‘entrepreneurs’ somehow means that there are three classes in society rather than two.
Still less can it be said that there is, in Chibber’s words, ‘a second group’ helping to make up that ‘middle class’, consisting of those he calls ‘the professional classes and the managerial classes’. An example he gives of this is ‘a mid-level manager’ to whom certain duties are ‘outsourced’. ‘What do they do?’, he goes on. ‘They’re keeping the books, they’re designing the labor process, but they’re also managing and supervising labor. Managers are workers but who carry out the functions of capital and whose own well-being depends on the successful exploitation of labor. So they are caught between the two worlds. That’s why they’re middle class.’ He goes even further, including in this middle class ‘sections of the professoriate and the professional strata’, those with ‘a lot of autonomy’, or ‘salaried people in the professions’, though ‘some are shading into the working class: same occupation, different classes’ (eg, teachers or ‘a professor working at a community college’). To this we would have to respond that all those in Chibber’s ‘second group’, though they may have more autonomy and more pay than other workers, are no less members of the working class for their position of subordination to a system that makes them dependent on the wage or salary they receive. In addition, despite the greater security their role may appear to give them, they can never be sure that the stresses and strains of the capitalist system will not make them just as expendable in the future as workers in other occupations, ie that capitalism’s constant need for cheapness and reorganisation will not make them just as insecure in their jobs or just as surplus to requirements as any other workers.
In short the ‘Marxist’ theorist and professor not only seems not to have taken on board any of the points made in this journal’s review of his book about what replacing capitalism means and about the futility of reformist activity, but to have now rendered his previously ‘clear and accessible explanation of how capitalism works’ distinctly less clear and less accessible.
HKM