Antipode- a journal of radical geography- has a review of Chibber's new book here.
With The Class Matrix, Vivek Chibber has turned the argument for capitalism’s “stability” on its head.
Capitalism means a system where Capital is allocated by Capital Markets. It is stable if Enterprises are profitable and thus, shareowners receive a reward for their investment. Marx thought that the rate of profit would fall to zero and so shareowners would get no dividends. Thus their shares would become worthless. Capitalism would collapse.
Clearly, this was nonsense. Profit is the reward for taking on risk which itself is associated with 'Knightian Uncertainty'- i.e. the unpredictability of future states of the world. It won't go to zero unless the future becomes perfectly predictable. What about the interest rate? The answer is that it could become negative, in real terms, without Capitalism collapsing. We all have to save for our old age or for College fees or to buy property.
Suppose, over all, the economy begins to shrink. More and more enterprises go bust because they are making losses. Will Capitalism survive? Yes. Even if the economy is shrinking, entrepreneurs will be rewarded for combining the other factors of production. Of course, the enterprises which keep making losses will go bust and thus, overall, aggregate profits will keep falling. But those who don't go bust will still see positive profits. It is likely that there will be a 'flight to quality'. Successful enterprises will have high Price/Earnings ratios. The Stock jobber and the rentier won't wholly disappear.
There was some silly notion that 'culture' would keep Capitalism and Racism and Sexual Violence against Women in place. Thus everybody should study literary theory or film Semiotics to change culture. Sadly, those who did so ended up babbling nonsense. Chibber tried to point this out.
Its stability lies not in the proverbial superstructure, in culture, but in the very base that was meant to bring about capitalism’s end.
How? Marx thought some silly formula would ensure it would happen automatically. Can Chibber suggest an alternative formula?
Accordingly, not only have proponents of cultural explanations got it wrong but so too have “classical Marxists misunderstood the implications of their own theory” . It is the material constraints of capitalism’s class structure that make it so difficult to supplant, contra culturalist explanations of workers’ indoctrination.
Very true. Workers are materially constrained from flapping their arms and flying away like birds.
But Chibber does not completely throw out the cultural turn’s “very exciting … tectonic shift in social analysis” (p.4) and argues that it is only through culture that the structure’s constraints can be overcome.
Culture has magic powers. Cool.
The critical difference, however, is Chibber’s assertion of the “explanatory primacy” of the structure, not culture . In The Class Matrix, he decisively demonstrates this. Chibber’s reassertion of class, while retaining certain key insights of the cultural turn, will be welcomed by geographers, labour geographers especially, who’ve attempted to defend class—and Marxism more broadly—from the discipline’s post-structural and postMarxist critiques.
This is reasonable. A particular region can be Socialist or Traditionalist or Fascist or anything else it likes. However it may decline relative to other areas if Capital allocation is screwed up or if 'incentive incompatibility' arises. But this can also happen in Capitalist regions where peeps do stupid shite.
. The relegation of class coincided with questioning the relevance of trade unions
Trade Unions can help make 'incomplete contracts' more, not less, incentive compatible and thus enable enterprises to internalize externalities better. The same can be said of fiscal authorities. Indeed, we would expect to see a range of 'Tiebout models' with different political and enterprise cultures offering different different tax and public good combinations.
and outright rejections of Marxist “totalisations” and “metanarratives” of capitalism.
These would have to be recast in terms of Econophysics. Volatility is key here. There may be a Goldilocks conditions for Volatility as a driver for financial markets. Without this, to employ a Baldwinian term, there won't be enough 'capacitance diversity' in the system to make it 'robust'- which is all we can hope for, not stability.
Still, it must be said, particular regions may go into long run decline and 'Culture' may curate or manage that decline. But, at the margin, there will be regime replacement- at least as far as capital allocation goes.
Geographers have 1 Chibber (p.ix) distinguishes between two broad understandings of culture. Raymond Williams’ “an entire ‘way of life’—the gamut of social practices that distinguish one social formation or one epoch from another” and the narrower definition that denotes “ideology, discourse, normative codes, and so on—together comprising the interpretive dimension of social practices”. For practical purposes, he and this review only refer to the latter. 2 For Chibber, a base/superstructure model asserting that the economic base rolls over “all other social relations … subsuming them under its own logic” is “obviously unsustainable (p.129). He rather advances an updated version of G.A. Cohen’s “restricted historical materialism” whereby the base only “transforms those aspects of the surrounding institutions that interfere with it” (p.132).
The silicon chip is part of the 'base', not the superstructure. Has it transformed only engineering and management? Has culture, more broadly speaking, been affected?
The answer is that, at the margin, Culture has been fundamentally affected. But, this also means there is more 'Tiebout sorting' within Regions- indeed, the thing is 'fractal'. Mummy and Daddy belong to one type of economy while the kids upstairs inhabit Virtual Reality.
1 preferred the local and particular, over “the universalizing claims of traditional class theory” (Chibber 2017:27), and it’s not clear that the critiques of the former raised by Noel Castree (2005) have been addressed. Too often geographers deploy the concept of class as a “construction of agential identities” (Chibber 2017:28)—just one such identity among many “differences”, rather than as a materialist social relation based upon the “biggest binary of all: the division between capital and labor” (Houston and Pulido 2002:404).
The rise of the institutional investor erased that distinction. You worked for a company which was largely owned by your own Pension and Insurance and other such Funds. Trade Unions can work with Management and Local Government & Education & Skill providers- as happens in Germany- and so wages and profits can both fall during a downturn only to rise more rapidly during an upswing.
Proper theorisation and deployment of class analysis can provide a sophisticated and translatable way “for comparing apparently similar (or different) cases [of neoliberalism]” (Castree 2005:4). With the rich winning a class war, Raju Das’ (2012)
which is what happens when drunken hobos are not addressed as 'Your Majesty'
call for reinvigorated “class analysis” within geography surely needs to be taken up. That said, while: “[a] revived concern with the structure of capitalism is to be welcomed, … to return to the status quo ante—to resume a theorization of class structure as if the turn to culture had never happened—would be a mistake.
That turn to culture was shit. Grievance Studies alienates blue collar types.
We need class analysis, but it needs the update provided by The Class Matrix. In The Class Matrix Chibber is principally concerned with the debate on what “the fundamental source of stability” for capitalism is.
The fundamental source of stability for Socialism was Racial homogeneity. Immigrants may start at the bottom of the ladder but they tend to move up it whereas those currently on top move downward. 'Reversion to the mean' applies.
And the stakes are high. Karl Marx’s prediction of the expropriators being expropriated has not materialised,
There have been Revolutions and National Liberation struggles in plenty. It's just that markets allocate capital better, that's all.
and over 150 years later, capitalism, while it may be in question, has shrugged off recent challenges and crises. Contrary to the revolutionary fervour that surrounded Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg, the New Left of the 1960s saw a relatively organised labour movement seemingly consent to its exploitation or, even with militant confrontation (like the UK miners), collapse to the neoliberal turn.
The Labor share of National Income did rise till workers came into the Income Tax net and stagflation created 'fiscal drag' such that workers were paying 'Corporate Welfare'- i.e. tax on wages paid Corporations to employ workers. Add in immigration and the demand for 'solidarity wages' and proles turned to Reagan and Thatcher. The 'baby boom' played a role in this. As they aged, the 'rentier' returned because, in retirement, everybody is a rentier.
For many, the working class could no longer be counted on as revolutionary agents,
Coz they're constantly going on strike- right?
refuting classical Marxism altogether. Others, such as Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall, were unwilling to abandon the working class.
Who kept telling them to fuck off back to posh-shire.
Retaining “the basic anchor in class” they sought explanations in the “superstructure” and elevated “culture from its subordinate role to one of central importance” (p.79). But as Chibber points out, such a search for an explanation in culture retains the classical Marxist mistake of believing that the class structure “ought to incite the working class into action” .
Very true. You discover you are working and immediately go on strike coz only losers labor.
It does the reverse. In Chapter 1 Chibber demonstrates how a capitalist class structure is different from a religious one.
Women and Jews and Darkies can be Capitalists. They can't become Cardinals.
Both structures require that the various actors accept their roles.
An actor, under Capitalism, who insists on playing Ophelia when he was hired to play Hamlet, won't get paid. But then a Cardinal who keeps dancing the can can might get de-frocked.
This means that a structure will fail if an actor does not “adequately understand the details of the role” or if an actor chooses to “reject the role attached to the structure” (p.27).
Nope. The structure remains the same even if some enterprises or agents working within it fuck up because of stupidity or a bolshie attitude.
For culturalists, structures therefore require meaning formation, which in turn is vulnerable to rejection and “hence highly contingent” (p.28).
So much the worse for 'culturalists'. They would stop being any such thing if they didn't get paid or were told to go clean the toilets.
For the religious congregation, an actor might not understand the rituals, or the priest may fail in properly conveying them.
This doesn't matter provided they get paid or have private means.
So too might an actor reject certain teachings, and find comfort in a different religion. But this is not the case for actors in the class structure.
Yes it is. You don't want to be a worker- fine! Suck cock or crack skulls.
Starting with the working class, a peasant, someone who previously had access to their means of subsistence, is highly unlikely to not understand their role.
Understanding doesn't matter. What matters is doing stuff which keeps you fed.
“[E]very premodern culture with settled agriculture already has the codes needed to assimilate to” the demands of wage labour (p.31).
or those of sucking cock or cracking skulls etc.
What is more likely is that they reject their status as a labourer.
In which case, labor comes in from elsewhere- if it is profitable to do so.
But once proletarianised, to reject this status is to starve.
unless you can get by by sucking cock or cracking skulls etc.
So too the class structure “exercises its own discipline” on the capitalist (p.36).
No it doesn't. A Capitalist doesn't have to wear a top hat and a frock coat. Chibber should know this. There were plenty of Indian Capitalists who wore oriental garb.
The capitalist is also dependent on the market in having to purchase inputs and generate sufficient revenue to stave off competition.
to stave off insolvency. Nothing can stave off competition save barriers to entry.
The cost-cutting this requires inevitably leads to suppressing wages,
nope. Solvency requires your not paying mad money to your workers.
and the market “selects against … drives out … and replaces” any capitalist that does not do so (p.37).
Nope. It selects for those who internalize externalities or access 'non-convexities'. These guys are totes ignorant of economics.
This reality of the class structure accepts that it requires cultural meaning acquisition by agents,
Fuck off! Saudi sheikhs don't need to know shit about the culture of the various countries in which they own enterprises. Balance sheets and Stock Market indices provide all relevant information.
but rejects “the latter an explanatory primacy over structure” (p.38). It is the class structure “shaping the cultural codes” towards its own requirements that “radically reduces the contingency” of the structure’s activation by what cultural codes remain (p.40).
Sheer nonsense. Capitalism- which is about how investment is allocated through markets- is about stuff that happens at the margin where no fucking cultural codes have hegemony. At one time, if you wanted to work in IT, you had to dress like an IBM executive. By the Seventies, you could look like a hippie, drop acid, and still attract VC funding.
Certainly, there will be actors who reject capitalism’s oppressive norms,
it has none. If you are allocating resources more efficiently people don't care if you marry a goat. But this is also true of smart peeps wot can find cure for cancer etc.
but “the structure will simply weed them out—they will not survive” (p.40-41). Chibber’s argument is: … a less ambitious claim—for the class structure being independent of culture but not determinative of it. This does require of it the power to overturn some aspects of 3 the surrounding culture—but not all of them. It only requires that class structure transform and subordinate those components of actors’ meaning orientation that block or interfere with their ability to participate in it. (p.130)
Meaningless jibber jabber. Meaning orientation does not matter. You are upper class if you are as rich as fuck. You are working class if you are washing dishes so as to get a square meal.
Classical Marxists were correct in expounding that capitalism locks workers and capitalists into conflict.
It may lock workers and employers into conflict but employers aren't capitalists. They are managers working to a budget. A Capitalist decides what to invest in. The choice of manager might be made by somebody else hired to do so by reason of their expert knowledge or charisma or social prestige.
But in Chapter 2 Chibber shows where they were critically wrong, namely in arguing that such conflict would generate working class formation and collective organisation.
Collective organization can raise allocative and dynamic efficiency. In particular, getting rid of 'piece-work' reduces administrative costs. Indeed, because of Knightian Uncertainty, successful enterprises are likely to signal this by paying 'efficiency wages' higher than marginal product.
The class structure does the opposite. The same compulsions for the worker to accept their role as a wage labourer account for the exceptional risks of taking collective action.
Not if there is a strike fund- without which industrial action is silly.
The prospective loss of income and employment makes “[i]ndividual contestation … the norm and collective action the deviation from it” (p.48).
No. Individual contestation rises if there is a prospective gain from 'search unemployment'. Otherwise only a collective threat point obtains.
This leads Chibber back in Chapter 3 to the post-war debates of hegemony and ideology and “their anchor in the work of Antonio Gramsci” (p.82).
Who understood shit.
Gramsci’s proposition that capitalist stability required consent from the working class
was like saying saying gravitational stability requires consent from massive objects. Either there is Capitalism- in which case consent is irrelevant- or there isn't because the locals be kray kray.
fit with their participation in the post-war capitalist order, and such consent was acquired through culture.
Nope. Open a factory somewhere viable and if the locals won't work there coz of their culture of being lazy bums, immigrants will turn up- provided the wages are high enough. These immigrants may have a hundred different cultures of their own. But if they do what they get paid to do, that is irrelevant. Sometimes, an employer- like Henry Ford- might force these immigrants to adopt a particular culture, but this changed nothing.
Chibber covers the widely held culturalist reading of Gramsci which reversed the materialist understanding so that ideology constructed interests and thus “hegemony was based on consent, and consent was secured through culture” (p.85). But since such accounts accept the exploitative “elements of the employment relation”, they are suggesting that ideology “can inure workers” to such elements (p.90). This leaves culturalists: … in the embarrassing position of claiming implicitly that while they can discern the exploitative—and hence unjust—character of the employment relation, the actors who are, in fact, being exploited, who are experiencing its brute facts, are not capable of doing so. (p.91)
But Marxists are indeed in this embarrassing position more particularly if they have names like Vivek. Americans say to them, 'why not fuck off back to your own shithole country were there are no Capitalists to exploit you because Tigers have eaten them or Elephants have shat on them?'
Chibber rather focuses on the materialist accounts of ideology, using Adam Przeworski’s Capitalism and Social Democracy (1986) and Gramsci himself. These argue that while “consent was articulated through an ideology … [i]ts foundation was always and everywhere economic” (p.92).
Coz either the foundation of the ideology was economic or the economy of the foundation was ideological or some other such shite.
However, Chibber still finds fault in their accounts. Przeworski’s proposition is that “workers offer their consent when they are able to bind capitalists to using a portion of current profits to generate future gains for them” (p.93).
This is reasonable. It is the sort of thing incomplete contract theory has clarified. The techies not getting laid off at the moment are the ones who were smart enough to pick AI where, they could see, investment was increasing.
But this requires organisations such as trade unions which “leaves much of the global experience of capitalism out of its scope” (p.94).
Nope. Smart peeps can work this out on their own. Get in on the ground floor of a field which can grow exponentially.
Gramsci does not require an organised working class.
But that organization would happen by itself unless brutally suppressed.
The capitalist class acquires consent “by the prestige (and consequent confidence) … [it] enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production” (Gramsci 1971: 12).
It acquires consent by paying for it. Governments want tax revenue. Workers want wages. The Capitalist can provide both provided the enterprise is sound.
The interests of the capitalist class prevail, “but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate economic interest”, where capitalists still coordinate “with the general interests of subordinate groups” (Gramsci 1971: 182). For Chibber, “this is the most convincing account” for consent (p.99).
Everybody has an interest in getting money. Even if market transactions are illegal, there will be a black market because the police can be paid off. Look at the bootleggers during Prohibition.
But history demonstrates that economic growth can generate strike action since improvements in productivity (and wages) can be offset by the “dramatic intensification of work” this entails (p.101).
This was Marx's notion that bosses will want to raise profits by continually increasing the work load. The problem is that rival enterprises may offer superior wages and working conditions. However, Capitalists might themselves agree to put a floor under wages rather than engage in 'wasteful competition' and a race to the bottom. President Hoover was a great champion of this type of cartelization.
Further, the neoliberal era has overwhelmingly been a period characterised by “narrow corporate interests”. But Chibber’s principal critique of Gramsci’s account is that the stability of capitalism doesn’t even require consent. Consent is present and depending on the conjuncture, can play a significant role. But capitalism’s stability is rooted in the “silent compulsion of economic relations [that] sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker” (Marx 1976: 899).
The silent compulsion to get money so as to buy nice shiny things is indeed very wicked and evil.
Workers “can neither opt out of their structural location nor overthrow it as and when they desire” (p.108).
In North Korea, maybe. Otherwise, workers can emigrate.
Rather than consent, it is workers’ resignation to this reality that is the basis of capitalist stability. It is somewhat unfortunate that Chibber does not engage with geography’s debates on the cultural turn, most especially because of the rich contributions by Marxist geographers. Chibber’s argument fits with much of Don Mitchell’s in “There’s No Such Thing as Culture”, where “‘culture’ is an idea through which the various machinations of the ‘political economy’ are represented as culture” (1995: 110). A central argument of Chibber’s is that the universal tendency of capitalism to “naturalize and smooth out differences in the name of a certain social order [the market]” in a “differentiated society” (Mitchell 1995: 111).
Very true. That is why, under Manmohan Singh, Tamils started speaking Punjabi.
Harvey’s (1990) 5 The Condition of Postmodernity is entirely absent.3 But geographers must engage The Class Matrix. Chapter 4 is especially pertinent to labour geography’s agency debates. While Chibber’s is a structuralist account, he maintains “it is a fuller account of how agency unfolds in a world of constraints” (p.123). I can imagine Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2011) nodding in agreement where Chibber states: Indeed, where actors are, in fact, structurally constrained, such that they formulate their strategies in order to navigate those constraints, a structural theory does not efface agency so much as it helps us understand it. (p.125)
Only if the structures it posits actually exists. But, in that case, people could make a lot of money by investigating those structures. If nobody is making money out of some structure you think exists, chances are it doesn't exist. Take 'Neo-Liberalism'. I thought it must exist and so I made an AI generated fake video showing Neo-Liberalism taking it up the arse from Paleo-Conservatism. I then emailed Neo-Liberalism demanding a lot of money in return for deleting the video. Sadly, it turned out that Neo-Liberalism doesn't exist. Either that or it doesn't have any money or doesn't care if people think it is renting out its arse to Paleo-Conservatism.
This necessitates “closely examining the actual constraints that labor faces”
e.g. having only two arms and one head
if they are to be overcome.
Cretins can't overcome shit.
At that point, it’s back to culture, in developing “the collective identity … the cultural accompaniment to class struggle” which the class structure incessantly dispels (p.69).
The cultural accompaniment to class struggle either makes money for itself or is confined to lunatics.
On this Chibber also offers valuable insights. Reports of neoliberalism’s death are greatly exaggerated.
So are reports of its raping trillions of transgender women of colour in Nicaragua.
The Class Matrix makes it clear we cannot get beyond it without a revival of the Left.
Or Trump tanks the economy.
Its reinvigoration of class analysis, by retaining the best while rejecting the “excesses of the cultural turn”, is essential reading
For morons.
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