Class Readings

From The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber (2022)

I have been reading American Idyll, Catherine Liu’s sprawling survey of anti-Elitist strains in American politics, education and culture of late, a conclusion of which might be summarized (with embellishments, extrapolations, unforgivable interpretive shortcuts and misrepresentations courtesy of yours truly of course) in the following way: the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) which should have solidarity with the working class by virtue of their mutual vulnerability to being jerked around by the owner class, have instead been successfully both propped up and tarred by the owners as “the Elite” so successfully that the owners have been able to lure the working class into an alliance with themselves, their own interests be damned, against “The Elite”;  and, being basically unconscious and actually eager to embody the characteristics of an Elite that the masses have come to despise, the PMC are ineffectual and defenseless to do anything about it.  Moreover, Liu seems to indicate that while there is value in expertise,  it is squandered by the current class of experts (i.e., the mainstream left-ish PMC).  

As I was nearing the finish line on this book, I saw a “debate” hosted by Jacobin Magazine between Vivek Chibber and Slavoj Žižek on the usefulness of ideology.  It was more like a discussion as there was little expressed disagreement.  Actually, Chibber did most of the talking and Žižek did most of the agreeing.  I was so interested in what Chibber had to say that I bought his new book The Class Matrix, which occasioned the meeting, and am reading it now.  What he had to say was actually a great deal in keeping with Catherine Liu, albeit a bit more focused on working class priorities and a bit less sympathetic to expertise.  Chibber leaves the PMC out of it,  but I project that there would be agreement on this: the professional, verbal, academic left needs to shut up, stop lecturing the working class and start organizing, which means listening,  for much the same reasons that Catherine Liu discussed; to wit, that the working class is long past openness to the expertise of a class that they feel with good justification has fucked them over with its neoliberal bullshit.  I would say both Liu and Chibber believe the "professional left" such as it is needs to learn how to beat the owners to the punch with workers with true solidarity.  They need to figure out how to channel the energy of the working class’s done-ness with the power structure – the goal needs to be not ideological but numeric – i.e., overcoming the default solitary nature of how individual workers face their lot in this rotten system to build solidarity and mass momentum for change. 

Re the chart, that’s the Class Matrix.  Chibber's thesis is that what sustains the participation of the working class in the capitalist system in spite of a low growth economy and its documented heightened misery (and in contrast to classical Marxist materialist predictions) is low social working class organization due to high individual resignation.  I.e., because there is less and dwindling cohesion of the working class, individuals do not have a vision for a replacement system for capitalism, so they resign themselves to the misery of exploitation because at least it comes with more certainty of survival into tomorrow than the uncertainty of what working class cohesion could mean.  By tomorrow, we are speaking of course not about The Future, but about Tuesday, say, because on Monday, Tuesday is the only future the working class have some control over.  Chibber wants to highlight this resignation—a very logical stance on the part of individuals under this system since alternatives to capitalism are not forthcoming—as the obstacle to overcome in embarking on a socialist future.  There is no escaping exploitation in order to survive, people think, and they think this wherever capitalism has a hold (which is nearly everywhere now) regardless of the local culture.  To Chibber, cohesion of the working class is the essential missing ingredient but it’s not anyone’s fault (other than those who by virtue of monopolizing reproduction deprive us of hope for alternative co-survival systems).  In other words, it does no good to shame or blame the working class for not seeing what Marx saw in terms of the inevitability of class consciousness leading to revolution.  Because Marx didn’t foresee neoliberal post-abundance capitalism at all, let alone for the isolating trap it is for everyone (including the theorists if they would but admit it to themselves) who does not own a piece of it.  Hello! It’s all so clear now!  

The rest of the matrix charts other possibilities/contingencies/actualities.  You’ll note that low growth with high working class cohesion leads to social change through systemic challenge—the goal!  But how to get there in the desert of our current milieu?  (I’m only 60% done with the book so maybe he’ll get to that.)  Gramscian consent is what the much discussed Italian theorist Gramsci* saw as the obstacle to what the classical model predicted.  It’s similarly the idea that when working class cohesion is low but growth (and presumably wages/benefits) are high, individuals consent to their exploitation because capitalists are more inclined to meet them halfway in order to keep the growth going.  Chibber thinks this may have been somewhat true in the middle of the last century at the peak of abundance, but something was not quite right with that model because as soon as capitalists rescinded, workers gave up their gains, including the mediating institutions that were unions, in an effort (in hopes) of minimizing their own individual losses.  It’s really individual resignation to the system that’s the key, Chibber believes.  I’m inclined to concede to his point.

Why do they, the working class. resign themselves to capitalism?  I firmly believe they is us.  It’s to survive.  Chibber talks about a theoretical  Cultural Turn (The Cultural Turn, he calls it) discussed by cultural theorists, which suggests that the problem needs to be attacked via culture/ideology, e.g., through indoctrination, propaganda, proselytization, scolding, admonishing, criticizing, twitter. Chibber rejects this approach on the basis that the problem is not cultural or ideological but economic.  I am not a scholar of any of this but an amateur, a dabbler, a dilettante, but The Cultural Turn, I gather from repeated mentions of it in the book, is the theorized turn that the working class took from the supposedly inevitable path to communism predicted in classical Marxism-- a supposed "observed event" that needs an explanation.  The cultural theorists suggested that something about the culture changed or eluded the model—i.e., that American culture for instance accounts for why the American working class failed to embody the prediction and discarded it at the mere whiff of countercultural conflict.  Chibber I think sees this as a bit of blaming the victim.  Workers understand that they are exploited regardless of the culture they are in. I mean of course you notice them screwing with you—underpaying you; making you come into the office in the middle of a pandemic and forcing you to sit where they put you and not where you want to sit and to do shit they want you to do which is far, far from work that you want to be doing  (oh far far far from it!)  But if they, meaning we, don’t believe in an alternative it isn’t happening.  The Culture is practiced in mocking the very notion that there could be an alternative to what is; but indoctrination aside, with all the striving and surviving going on, who has time to believe?

One more thing because I haven’t talked about #1 in the chart.  Consent through political exchange is exemplified by the strength of unions at the peak of abundance and of working class cohesion.  We as a class consent to be exploited under conditions that we demand (namely, some of the abundant pie)  In spite of this the shortcomings in this model of understanding were exposed in 1968, at perhaps the peak of the peak of union strength when general strikes and unrest broke out throughout the capitalist world, mystifying theorists.  But it was because while capitalists were publicly and in ink conceding to union demands, privately, they were exploiting the shit out of workers.  

One interesting thing Chibber points out is that whereas the working class needs solidarity to make headway, capitalists do not.  They can exploit to their heart’s content individually without the benefit or need of class solidarity.  Low class organization doesn’t seem to impair them. This highlights the tremendous imbalance between the classes.  What I always find fascinating though is why this class which consists of incredibly selfish assholes, who don’t need each other to get by just fine, did coordinate and cooperate and collaborate on the insanely intense oppression we have been undergoing for decades.  Was it just to be sociable?  Why do they never cooperate on behalf of or to the benefit of those they exploit?  Class ties?  Evil strategery?  Why do they succeed even more when they cooperate?   They have leechy personalities and you can never have enough of a good thing like people who require your consent to survive.

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* Who I come across in my dabbly scholarly excursions but whom I have not read.  He's on my list.