Frith-Chibber

Another hatchet piece

Comrades the form of the new plays

Is new. But why

Fear what is new? Is it hard to do?

But why fear what is new and what is hard to do?

For the exploited, the always disappointed

Life too is always an experiment

Earning a few cents

An uncertain undertaking that no one teaches.

Why fear the new, rather than the old? And even if

Your spectators, the workers, should hesitate, then you must

Not run along behind, but go before them

Swiftly, with bold steps, unconditionally trusting in

Their ultimate vigour.

Vivek Chibber’s notion of capitalism is that it runs along a single axis. The exploiters are on one end, and they secure their wealth by extracting labour from the exploited on the other. Wage labourers exist under a form of social domination which is constitutively unjust, forcing them to subordinate their material well-being to that of a firm which, because it exists in a competitive relationship with other firms, has an objective interest in extracting from the worker more time and energy. As individual efforts to seek relief come up against the employer’s social power, leverage must be obtained in collective slowdown or stoppage actions.

Chibber’s is not a model which admits much in the way of history. Capitalism and its predicates - class, capital, working-class agency - are structures, not processes, facilitating the separation of this schema, what Chibber refers to as the economic, from what he refers to as the political. The ultimate aim of socialists, in seeking to challenge or overturn this, is to generalise a ‘decent shot at happiness’, ‘justice’, and ‘fairness’. Concretely, this means enough food, basic healthcare and housing for everyone. When Chibber published The Class Matrix, his first book on the subject of socialist strategy and its prospects, he seemed open to the idea of a ‘ruptural break with capitalism’ but positioned it as a long-term prospect on the basis that the Left had not yet figured out how to organise in a situation when large concentrated factories are no longer the norm.

Over recent years, and as his primary platform has shifted to the Confronting Capitalism podcast, transcripts from which are posted on the website of the most widely read left-wing magazine in the Anglosphere, Chibber’s position has hardened and he seems irritated at the suggestion that the economic and political are inter-related or that the necessary conditions for the transformation of economic life along socialist lines do not reduce to a strong labour movement and a political party securing increased representation in parliaments towards a Nordic-style social safety net. In what follows I hope to prove that he is resultantly led to distort the tradition he claims.

Ends and Means in History
Chibber’s primary case study in advocating for his two-fold model is the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), with its membership or broad network of affiliation extending to over two million people, seats in both the Reichstag and local government. Space is also afforded to the Bolsheviks, but when Chibber emphasises its internal culture of debate and cadre representation in the factories he clearly has their pre-October character in mind. Lenin, for his part, moved between participation or boycott to elected bodies (he was suspicious of the soviets when they first emerged) in response to the changing situation and prevailing trends within his own paxrty, versus using them as a platform for extending the reach of revolutionary propaganda beyond the limits imposed by clandestine work, an aim to which parliamentary participation in itself was subordinate. Due to its more federal character, the SPD is arguably more complicated, yet Chibber smooths the record when he argues that revolutionary and reformist wings disagreed only on the means as opposed to the goal. Rosa Luxemburg’s view that the means of achieving the goal was the goal itself led to the suppression of her writings, a personal break from the trade union bureaucrats and Reichstag deputies, who could rely on Kautsky as the ideological wing of the inter-party struggle against worker power qua power. The SPD furthermore regarded the Bolsheviks with suspicion, pressuring the party to reunite on Menshevik terms; Eduard Bernstein’s presentation of ‘evolutionary socialism’ led the Russians to consider motioning for his expulsion.

However, scant mention is made of what was most decisive about the conditions faced by the Spartacists as opposed to the Bolsheviks, that the German General Staff and middle class were sufficiently aligned to enact a revolution from above, forcing absolutism out and staving off any possibility of a German October. Any modicum of democracy, or an end to the war in Russia, was not available either from Tsarist absolutism or the timorous set of middle-class representatives who filled the post-abdication vacuum. This lack of consideration for the reasons why one party largely avoided conceding to national chauvinism and succeeded while the other did not suggests that the actuality of the high watermark for working-class power in Europe is being compressed to fit the requirements of Chibber’s worldview. Chibber prefers to present us with the voluntarist critique only, wherein all participants were traitors or insufficiently Marxist. Whatever about the merits of playing alternate history in 1918 Berlin, would we say that Ebert and his ilk, who levied the cost of an imperialist war on the class they were supposed to represent, directed machine gun fire and artillery on revolutionary workers and soldiers, collaborated with the Freikorps in winding down the councils and murdering Luxemburg and Liebknecht, were loyal to socialism?

Chibber’s apparent disinterest in moving this story beyond Europe, to consider some of the attempts to build something present in Marx or Luxemburg’s writings, is symptomatic of how analytical formalism leads to further conceptual and political problems. Chibber’s definition of internationalism is limited to the idea that people of all ethnicities are motivated by the same economic concerns: ‘it isn’t just white people…but anyone who is in the same position or class structure – white or black, brown or yellow, Hindu or Muslim, Christian or Jewish’. This is not quite right. Insofar as skin colour, racial or confessional allegiances were present within debates regarding internationalism within the Second International they were very much subordinate to the idea that some nations benefit from the exploitation of others. Chibber however, argues imperialism is distinct from capitalism. When capital from a firm based in one country mobilises the labour-power of a worker located in another, this is an economic relationship. Imperialism is the ruling class of one nation limiting or constraining the sovereignty of another. The consistent wage gap between workers in the West and the Global South has no broader significance. The line is clear: these are separate phenomena.

It is therefore of particular importance for Chibber to refute the concept of labour aristocracy, the idea that there are wage-earners in the west whose privilege relative to those in the Global South will orient them more towards reformism, or conciliation with their own ruling class, than workers from other parts of the world. Chibber makes the point that in the eighties, the domestic American working class was enduring its longest period of wage stagnation in its history, while the exploiting class was significantly increasing the scale of its investments abroad. Chibber is completely correct here and furthermore that wage growth depends significantly on the intensity of class struggle. As to whether productivity is important: it is certainly one measure one could use in measuring the gap between workers’ gains and those of the capitalist class but I would contend there is one, less straightforwardly measured but of more direct relevance — even within Chibber’s own model — and this is the rate of exploitation. Arguing that large European firms, whose value chains are international and recorded in ways which allow them to benefit from unevenly distributed regulatory requirements or tax avoidance anyway, are more productive almost provides an alibi for exploitation of cheaper, less densely unionised labour in Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan; we should not be in the business of justifying piece-work by another name. This is not just a question of capitalists bribing or handing out cash either. The high profitability of firms in imperial countries allows capital to secure social peace by facilitating domestic wage demands or funding welfare states via taxation without significantly undermining its rate of profit or, in one of the most noteworthy transformations of capitalist society over the past half-century, generate a large domestic market built on high consumption and debt. Labour aristocracy is therefore best understood as a social wage, as less vulnerability to genocide, the effects of climate change, the draining of state capacity by petty corruption indulged in by comprador regimes or military invasion. Unfortunately Chibber does not provide us with the where hows and whens of the greater degree of radicalism among better-off workers, and its necessary correlate, reformism among the immiserated, but the question is not whether workers in imperialist countries go on strikes or advocate for their interests. Obviously they do. What must be considered is their track record on international solidarity and opposition to their ruling class’ overseas ventures. In May 1974 leading trade unionists in shipyards across Ireland’s occupied six counties organised a general strike to force the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement, which would have afforded the oppressed Catholic population some representation within the herrenvolk democracy. 33 civilians were killed in bombings organised by the paramilitary proxies of the British government during this strike in Dublin in Monaghan. In 1973 the AFL-CIO backed a bill which would make undocumented migrants illegal. It was not until the year 2000 that they began to oppose the imposition of sanctions on employers, finding that these were used as a pretext to clamp down on their organising efforts. French unions have a history of refusing to admit Algerian workers, but the most grotesque example is probably the role the Histadrut played in constructing the settler state; they of course do not admit Palestinian members. The picture is clear, with honourable exceptions - Dunnes Stores workers refusing to handle goods from apartheid South Africa or Canada’s International Longshore and Warehouse Union - the most organised sections of the western working class exhibit a tendency toward pro-war, pro-empire and anti-immigrant politics. Even if this was not a phenomenon unevenly distributed across sectors, or beyond a form characterised by high union density - one thinks of Andreas Malm’s description of fossil fuel consumption, which underwrites the median lifestyle in higher emission nations as ‘projectiles fired indiscriminately into humanity, primarily the part of it living in the global South’ - I do not think Chibber would be interested in any of this. It is essential to his view not to grasp that the economic and the political are wholly intertwined than when it comes to opposition to imperialism.

Capitalism as Pristine
This preference for grappling with a mangled interpretation of his antagonist’s arguments is something of a tic in Chibber’s writing. Chibber reduces the explanation provided by Quinn Slobodian (who he does not name) as to how a political logic associated with social liberalism, shrinking the state’s disciplinary mechanisms and letting the thing loose has, in its later stages, become more visibly associated with militarisation, genocidal border regimes and a far-right syncretising scientific racism, libertarianism and even monarchism, to: the ideas of Milton Friedman, Hayek etc. were implemented because of their ‘sophistication’ and ‘validity’. Chibber also manufactures for Slobodian’s benefit a strategic upshot; if you think intellectuals and their ideas are so fundamental to capitalism’s operations, your response would be to pour your resources into opinion-editorials about social democracy and seek meetings with the president of the United States to try and win them over. Whatever our assessment of Slobodian’s what is to be done might be - contesting globalisation for the left via a consideration of the alter-globalisation movement of the early oughts - Chibber should provide an ingenuous account of it.

One problem with seeing things in such mechanical terms is that there is no role for mutually constitutive, or even second-order, causes. Slobodian’s argument that frameworks promoted by well-connected individuals within the culture industry and academia exerted an influence over particular strata in possession of social power depends on the implicit assumption that class factions are in possession of relative autonomy, which is to say that the wage relation does not allow us to lay out in advance what they will do and there was nothing fore-ordained about how they understood the causes of / solutions to stagnating rates of profit. For Chibber, since the probability of ideas causally superseding what Chibber has decided in advance is the distilled essence of capitalism – exploitation within the wage relation – is zero, Slobodian is de facto incorrect. Chibber is of course accurate in his account of the outcomes - cheap wages and flexibilisation of the workforce, the initiation of the process by which the welfare state was wound down - but if, as Chibber himself argues, there is no such thing as a free market, that flexibilisation, marketised forms of exchange or distribution and demand suppression are all forms of market engineering, that ‘the consensus’ was that corporate profits were being dragged down from excess costs arising from the welfare state, what was the conceptual apparatus which led the capitalist class to this set of conclusions? What was it that taught them the solution was to seek to pull the set of levers that they did? There is no straight line between their interests and market mechanisms because capitalism is not transparent. Chibber might respond that capitalists do not have to think very deeply or organise themselves, as they have the structural advantage. There is a lot of truth in this, but what is at issue, beyond his deliberate clouding of other writers’ work or his glibness in rejecting this as squabbles between academics, is the crucial question of how class power recognises, responds and adjusts to crises.

The Neoliberal Left
One coming to Chibber’s work with the understanding that he is the editor / editor emeritus of left-wing magazines might be surprised by how often the Left, rather than the capitalist class, is the object of his critique. Regardless of how central his position on the importance of class struggle as conveyed may be, this account is as vague, undifferentiated and hostile as that offered by the average rightist. To compile more or less verbatim the terms, both descriptive and abusive he uses, the left is figured as a shrill, moralistic, apolitical middle-class dilettantish cultural élite with no connection to the working class, installed in social science departments, magazines, television production and study groups debating body language, deconstructing Bollywood movies, romanticising violent confrontations with the state even as they denigrate the masses as racist, misogynistic, unworthy, driving them into the arms of right-wing parties.

There is a broader and more convincingly grounded set of accounts in explaining how class lost the far more visible traction it once had in contesting the existing order in western societies. Deindustrialisation, the changing nature of work, home ownership, increased domestic consumption, opportunities for self-employment or freelance contracting, increased state capacity, political stability following from the lack of any large-scale conflicts, movements for LGBTQ liberation in response to pressures felt beyond the limits of the workplace alone, the entry of immigrants into agriculture, food processing, construction and care industries, the very presence of whom is of course a consequence of the relative preponderance of western nations in the global economy. In making the case that all of these provide broader scope for the managing or displacement of class conflict, and that it is self-defeating to write this off as irrelevant due to their extension beyond the wage relation, I want to restore some perspective not least because Chibber’s Left can be a bit of a moving target.

When Chibber refers to, for example, ‘the neoliberal, identitarian, intersectional left’ I note the tension between some of these terms. While it is of course possible for someone to lament the wage gap between women and men in certain professional contexts, in a way which would most assuredly not lead them to anti-capitalist conclusions, would the extent to which neoliberalism has worked against migrants and social welfare programmes not clear them of the appellation ‘left’ and classify them more accurately as liberals? This is to say sometimes he seems to be conjuring with a caricature of a heckler at a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting or a censorious graduate student. At others, when for example referring to the ‘liberal or radical’ argument that the Iraqis were to blame for the collapse of their society in the aftermath of the US invasion, he seems to be talking about the various hacks in the upper stratum of the Democratic Party apparatus or any other Pasokified social-democratic party. If Chibber’s use of the term ‘the Left’ has a capacity to pull in both the morbid symptoms of an historical moment in which the revolutionary left is more a subculture than a social force, committed activists (because these people do exist) and some of the richest and most well-connected people on earth - who in a very real sense are up to their elbows in the blood of the oppressed - it may be time for Chibber to wise up and start making distinctions. As references to ‘certain theorists’, ‘leftists’, ‘critical theorists’, ‘left commentators’, ‘today’s leftists’, ’left journalists’, ‘many radical sophisticates’ and The Left The Left The Left The Left accumulate across Chibber’s writings I find myself desperate to respond: Who? Where? What parties? What organisations, publications and in what cities? What does Chibber think of those who, out of their revolutionary commitments, decide to sabotage ICE vehicles or protest police violence? Are these people romantic moralists? Would Chibber ever consider directing his fire on the much-vaunted left wing of the Democratic Party, the confusion and word-mincing into which it fell into on the cops, the border regime, Biden’s attempts to squeeze China or annihilate Gaza?

Materialism
Another fixture of Chibber’s writing is his critique of the failings of Marxist intellectuals such as those associated with the Frankfurt School or the New Left for not grappling sufficiently with the ‘base’, if we could be allowed deploy the abstraction which conventionally refers to social relations more purely engaged with production and the real economy. This point, previously made by Perry Anderson in Considerations of Western Marxism, has a lot of merit to it; an intellectual tradition which had more Leon Trotskys and Ernest Mandels might well have been a stronger one and every day I wish that Marxists were better represented than post-Keynesians in fora where the Volker shock, increased throughput, central banking, industrial capacity and financial instruments are discussed, though it should be said with the bulk of his own output concentrating on the cultural mores of radical social scientists this is a challenge Chibber has been himself free to take up and has not.

Chibber argues culture has taken the place of materialism among the repertoire of critical theorists. To adopt Chibber’s definitions, materialism amounts to the idea that reality exists independently of our impressions of it and in a more sociological sense, agents act in their objective material interest. In The Class Matrix Chibber writes that works of history or analysis written with a view to understanding what it is that turned the working class from revolution were valuable, but he now sees E.P. Thompson’s understanding of class as something in motion as the source of a dangerous relativism, from which it follows that i) socialists have no idea where to organise because we are forced to believe that classes exist independently of class consciousness ii) those who are not acting in their interests are mentally defective or brainwashed. Though neither of these claims follow, Chibber is right that introducing what he seeks to bracket off as mere ‘culture’ into one’s understanding of class introduces significant amounts of indeterminacy. However, if we are of the view that class does not in fact generate predictable and stable outcomes, ambiguity is unavoidable. The terrain of struggle is not always clear.

Chibber’s answer to the Gramscian problematic, the reasons why, despite the structure, workers vote for political parties with policies deleterious to their interests is that individuals pursuing their material interests are often unsuccessful in doing so due to the difference between judgements derived from direct experience versus external information. Political life is increasingly managed by thought and community leaders with interests of their own, who defend them by convincing workers to vote for someone whose policies will in fact be harmful to them. To say working-class voters are not behaving irrationally, but are rather misinformed is nothing but a more functionalist version of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony, with the more substantial difference being that it is hopelessly thin, replacing the creativity and intuition of the masses coming up against privately-owned institutions of news media or communications, the state bureaucracy or civil society with Chibber’s twin of history; an individual pursuing their rational interest and a conniving member of the intelligentsia. We might be able to redeem Chibber’s accidental insight that under capitalism, the rational can appear as irrational, even down to the level of how we obtain and interpret information. But we are left with the question of what rationality could be possible within capitalism’s terms?

Lenin once wrote that Marx’s thought brought together French utopian socialism, German idealism and English political economy, and I would add a fourth input: his experience of class formation in action. Denying there is sufficient evidence in Marx’s writings of a tendency towards determinism, or a belief that capitalism would simplify social relations by drawing everyone into one of two antagonistic camps, would require re-running a set of worn out and pedantic distinctions between the young / mature Marx or Marx / Engels. In the heat of 1848, when both men saw labourers and squeezed small manufacturers form democratic assemblies against the feudal estates and an increasingly rickety-looking absolutism they forecast the overthrow of the European ancien regime and the installation of liberal bourgeois, followed by proletarian democracy based on a structural argument, but this is one they came to revise in favour of the elucidation of the working classes’ rolling wave of self-defence. I laughed out loud when I read Chibber’s line, ‘We can point and say, “There’s the working class; there’s the bourgeoisie.” If only it was that easy.

An examination of the use of the term ‘materialism’ materialismus across the three volumes of Capital reveals that it appears only as an accomplished fact within one of Engels’ prefaces. Marx does not use it. Instead, he writes the more processual materialising, labour materialisiert sich within commodities. One will have noticed that value is absent from Chibber’s theory of wages, that his definition of exploitation is static rather than immanent. This is a significant revision of Marx’s theory of wages. If you hold with the labour theory of value you know that everything in our lived environment is a product of labour exerted across time and space communally, but privately expropriated by a class with the power to dispose of capital. If there is an idea of normative justice to be extracted from Marxism it must be these social goods, this value, returning to its commonwealth of producers. Marx’s materialism exists be in motion. It is expressed and sought in action and inquiry rather than being determinable from an outside perspective, or upholstered to fit a schema because it seeks the possibilities of moving from class-in-itself to for-itself. It is not just interests but the conditions which form, shape and facilitate their transcendence. It is a praxis-oriented philosophy. Chibber does not follow us here.

Consulting Marx’s polemics against his contemporaries in the labour movement, consistent grounds for dismissal is that their programmes were reactionary. This is not in the sense that they were right-wing or anti-socialist necessarily, but that they failed to grasp the social processes around them as being in motion. Rather, they cleaved to benefits and protections which were non-viable or expected guarantees where there were none. I do not want to overstate this point, none of us can predict the future or know what we need to do, but my prognosis runs as follows. Globalisation has put an end to the material base of the mid-twentieth century class compromise. China’s parity or lead in high-value sectors — and Western imperial aggression — is a strong headwind for those who might wish to rebuild it. The SPD proves that the supposed assets offered by the patient building of institutional power can also represent an obstacle in decisive moments. What Chibber presents as realism is nostalgia. I do not know where the universal subject is in the present, but when I try to think of leverage, of those whose emancipation would be the emancipation of us all, I think of migrant labourers, for whom the inseparability of politics and economics is manifest.

At the conclusion of The Class Matrix Chibber states that the Nordic social state may be the best we can do. Even if the plan is to get the ruling class around the table to broker another settlement, to prevent them from launching nuclear weapons perhaps, I wouldn’t begin negotiations with the compromise.