Tag: class conflict

Real Freedom in America Can Only Be Won Through Class Struggle / by Nick French

1883 cartoon depicting income inequality and class oppression in the United States by Bernhard Gillam. (Library of Congress vis Wikimedia Commons)

Reposted from Jacobin

Review of The Ends of Freedom: Recovering America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights by Mark Paul (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

A long tradition in US thought has emphasized the importance of economic security for ensuring individual liberty. But to truly realize equal freedom for all, we need a socialist politics fighting for democratic control over the economy.

There’s no doubt that individual freedom is fundamental to the American self-conception — as our national anthem has it, the United States is “the land of the free.” Yet despite its obsession with liberty, the United States is in many ways one of the least free countries in the developed world, with highly undemocratic political institutions, a vast carceral state, and a remarkably anti-worker legal regime.

Those facts are in large part the legacy of our “Founding Fathers,” who sought to limit popular rule to protect elite property rights. The free market ideas espoused by the likes of Milton Friedman and other neoliberal ideologues that provided justification for the dismantling of the New Deal order in many ways had their origin in those of America’s founders. Hollowing out the welfare state, weakening trade unions, and defending unrestrained free trade was justified by a vision of individual freedom restricted to a robust defense of the property rights of the wealthy.

On this view, freedom is a matter of people being protected against intrusions on their persons and property by the government, and assuring that people have equal legal rights to participate in the political process. These are by and large the sorts of protections enumerated in the US Bill of Rights, of course, and the later amendments to the Constitution.

But from the time of the United States’ founding, some thinkers, politicians, and civil rights leaders have advocated a broader view of liberty. This is the point of departure of economist Mark Paul’s new book, The Ends of Freedom: Recovering America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights. In it, he attempts to excavate this alternative, more radical conception of freedom.

This subterranean tradition, he writes, has argued that the US government should recognize certain basic economic rights, which are necessary to truly guarantee everyone’s freedom and enable all to meaningfully pursue happiness. Paul urges us to recover this tradition, and to that end outlines an ambitious proposal for a twenty-first-century “economic bill of rights,” encompassing the right to a job, housing, health care, a basic income, and a healthy environment, and an array of other worthy reforms. The Ends of Freedom offers a series of policy ideas for realizing these rights, as well as proposals for how the government might finance such an ambitious program.

Paul’s book is a welcome contribution to thinking about policies that might help build a more just, freer society. It is, however, hampered by two shortcomings. On the one hand, it does not push its philosophical argument against a narrow “political” conception of freedom and rights far enough; on the other, it does not grapple seriously with the resistance that capitalist interests pose to establishing and sustaining a robust set of economic rights.

An Alternative Tradition

The Ends of Freedom has three parts: the first an intellectual history of different strands of American thinking about freedom, the second an enumeration of Paul’s proposed economic rights and their component policies (the book’s longest and meatiest section), and a short coda in which the author explains how his proposed policies can be funded.

In the first part, Paul claims the alternative tradition of thinking about rights that he champions stretches back to American revolutionary Thomas Paine, who argued that political freedom and equality required economic security. On those grounds, Paine argued for redistributive taxation and a basic income. Paul tracks related ideas about the government’s responsibility to ensure its citizens’ economic security through Alexander Hamilton and the Radical Republicans to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who explicitly proposed an economic bill of rights. Martin Luther King Jr later revived a similar idea in the form of his Freedom Budget, which he saw as necessary to fully realize the promise of equal civil and political rights.

According to Paul, this tradition has been largely lost to us thanks to the defeat of redistributive liberalism in the 1970s, and the resulting rise of the ideology of neoliberalism: the view that heavy-handed government interventions for the sake of greater equality or other social goals are usually harmful, and that governments should be content with protecting and facilitating the free choices of market actors.

But we know the fruits of this doctrine: gaping inequality, stagnant wages for workers, the persistence of extreme poverty, and a climate crisis driven by the very market forces we were told to trust. Paul therefore argues that we need to reassert the importance of economic rights, retrieving a radical tradition suppressed by decades of conservative hegemony.

The book’s second section lays out in detail the economic rights to which Paul thinks we are all entitled, along with his favored policies for fulfilling them. They comprise:

  • The right to work: through economic policy promoting full employment and a federal jobs guarantee;
  • The right to housing: through rent control and an ambitious public housing program;
  • The right to an education: through free public education for all from pre-K through college;
  • The right to health care: through a single-payer Medicare for All system;
  • The right to a basic income and banking: through an unconditional basic income and a public banking system;
  • And the right to a healthy environment: through a Green New Deal including public investment, regulation, and carbon pricing.

Paul concludes the book by answering the question “How will we pay for it?” guided by John Maynard Keynes’s quip that “anything we can actually do, we can afford.” More precisely, Paul’s answer is twofold. He argues, first, that the United States does not need to fear expansive deficit spending to finance economic rights, since such spending can be undertaken while growing the national debt sustainably, and in fact should be undertaken if it helps the economy grow.

But Paul acknowledges that the ambitious program of public investment and redistribution he’s recommending does have to deal with real resource constraints, in terms of labor, land, and raw materials. He proposes to address supply constraints through public investment in various areas, price controls to deal with short-term bottlenecks (e.g., rent control), and reallocations within the federal budget.

The Question of Property

There’s a lot to like in Paul’s policy proposals — which resemble, in many ways, the platform on which Bernie Sanders ran in 2020. Yet his historical-philosophical argument for the importance of economic rights, and his justification of its feasibility, seem incomplete.

Adopting the framework of political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Paul says that economic rights are necessary to ensure positive liberty or freedom — the “freedom to” do certain things or be a certain kind of person — in addition to negative liberty — the “freedom from” interference or constraints imposed by others. Negative freedom corresponds to the civil and political rights protecting freedom of speech, due process, and the like; positive freedom corresponds to economic rights like the right to housing or the right to a quality education.

But this distinction, which Berlin — a White emigree from the Soviet Union — formed under the polarizing climate of anti-communism created by the Cold War, ought to be interrogated. When the constraints imposed by a capitalist market economy are taken into view, the problems with this framework become obvious. For instance, if I lack the resources that are supposed to be guaranteed by economic rights, this may deprive me of negative freedom, not just positive freedom.

This was the objection raised by the analytic Marxist philosopher G. A. Cohen in his engagements with Berlin. Property rights, construed by Berlin as negative, also grant their possessor the power to intervene with the actions of others. When English capitalists set up enclosures in the countryside in the eighteenth century, they were not simply asserting their negative rights to property but restricting the right of free movement of the rural peasantry.

Money also confers rights on its possessor in ways ignored by Berlin’s dichotomy. If, for example, I try to occupy an apartment without paying rent, the landlord has a right to evict me; if I try to take bread from a grocery store without paying, the manager has a right to call the cops on me for shoplifting. Money allows us to pay landlords, business owners, and others to get them not to so interfere. So, I don’t merely lack freedom to do certain things if I lack money; I lack freedom from interference in my choices by others.

Maybe the economic bill of rights Paul champions, then, should be thought of as necessary for ensuring everyone equal maximum levels of negative freedom, in addition to securing positive freedoms. This is not just a semantic point. It shows that advocates of neoliberalism, contrary to their claims, are not defending one form of freedom while neglecting (or opposing) another. They are in fact failing to consistently defend the conception of freedom that they themselves espouse. (Paul makes a version of this point too, following the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson in arguing that neoliberalism has led to the creation of tyrannical “private governments” in the workplace. But the right to a democratic workplace is not included in his proposed economic bill of rights.)

Once we accept that even negative freedom is heavily constrained by the distribution of property rights and money, then we should recognize that how we distribute property and money is no less important to securing equal freedom for all than what civil or political rights we recognize. But acknowledging that should lead us to ask why, in the first place, we accept a system in which a few individuals own the means of production, which allow them to command the labor of others who are forced to survive by the sweat of their brow.

Paul of course accepts that lack of economic security translates to reduced freedom, and his proposed economic rights are meant to address this. His proposals do seek to impinge on capitalists’ power, by, for instance, giving workers increased bargaining power and weakening “labor discipline” through a policy of full employment, a federal job guarantee, a basic income, and giving the state authority to rein in destructive enterprises (like big polluters) through strong regulation.

Paul’s solutions also attempt to correct gross income and wealth inequalities with extensive redistribution. But he stops short of arguing that there is a fundamental injustice in giving capitalists control over society’s productive assets — or that adequate respect for individual freedom requires us to reevaluate that control.

Force Decides

Part of the cause for these blind spots in Paul’s approach is related to the inadequacy with which he addresses issues around political strategy. Despite recognizing that corporations and the rich are likely to fiercely resist most of these policies, Paul says very little about how such a program might be enacted over that resistance, or how it might be defended and sustained once in place.

The American tradition from which Paul draws inspiration, after all, is over two hundred years old. We should ask: If ideas about the need for economic rights have been floating around for so long, why — with partial exceptions, like the New Deal and Great Society programs — have they not been realized? And why have even partial achievements been rolled back or undermined since the 1970s?

The phenomenon of retrenchment is not unique to the United States. In the countries that have done most to realize elements of Paul’s vision, the neoliberal era has seen a retreat from bold social democratic policies. Capitalists used the political and economic crises of the ’70s as an opportunity to launch a counterattack on trade unions, left parties, and the welfare state, successfully imposing a more business-friendly, anti-worker regime throughout the developed world.

Business’s neoliberal assault was enabled by capitalists’ immense financial and structural power, and they have used that power to successfully resist efforts at a revival of social democracy. Social democracy was won by strong left parties with a mass base in organized labor movements that were able to use their collective might to overcome capitalists’ immense power; when the power of labor and the Left waned, business was able to reassert itself. Neoliberalism is, as the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr has succinctly put it, simply capitalism without a working-class opposition.

To his credit, Paul recognizes that “much like the victories won during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, economic rights will require mass movements and mass struggle.” Strangely, however, he has little to say about the dynamics of class struggle that have allowed capitalists to undermine the social democratic project globally — or why a United States that recognized his economic bill of rights wouldn’t fall prey to the same fate.

This reflects a broader tendency on Paul’s part to focus on the power of ideas rather than classes organized around material interests. The main villains of his story are intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, who marshaled arguments against the New Deal and similar redistributive projects. But business didn’t need Hayek or Friedman to tell it that a successful political mobilization and assault on trade unions was a good idea. Capitalists’ interest in restoring profitability was the motivating force.

Simply put, capitalists have a strong interest in undermining attempts at redistributing wealth and improving the situation of the vast majority — and leaving the lion’s share of decision-making power over investment and production in their hands provides them the leverage to do so. This gives us a reason to excavate another forgotten tradition of American thinking about freedom, one that Paul largely sidelines. This tradition, represented by Eugene V. Debs and labor radicals from the Knights of Labor through the International Workers of the World to twentieth-century socialists and communists, championed not just economic rights but full-blooded “industrial democracy.”

They fought, in other words, for socialism: democratic, collective control over society’s productive resources. Socialists like Debs thought that this industrial democracy was necessary for actually realizing the ideals of freedom that the Founding Fathers spoke about.

Maybe this is where Paul’s sympathies ultimately lie, too. Discussing Bernie Sanders’s definition of democratic socialism as “[recognizing] that economic rights are human rights,” Paul says:

Is Sanders’s version of democratic socialism indeed socialism? No. Socialism entails democratic ownership of the means of production. But in establishing and mainstreaming a social democratic vision for economic rights, one rooted in American history, Sanders has forged a public path to thinking in such terms.

I would agree that a struggle for the kind of bold social democratic program that Sanders advanced in his presidential campaign is a promising path for advancing a socialist project. By raising ordinary people’s expectations and mobilizing them around the idea of taking on billionaires and corporations, Sanders’s campaigns represented the possibility of building a mass political movement to challenge ruling-class power in a more thoroughgoing way. The greatest contribution of The Ends of Freedom is in rigorously working out the sorts of freedom-expanding policy demands that democratic socialists and their allies might champion in their efforts to build this sort of working-class political movement.

Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin.

The Housing Crisis Is Class War / Sahar Raza

Tenants of a low-rent apartment building in Toronto, Canada, protesting evictions, July 16, 2022. (Steve Russell / Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Republished from The Monitor / Posted in Jacobin on June 18, 2023

Review of the The Tenant Class by Ricardo Tranjan (Between the Lines, 2023).

A new book on the housing crisis in Canada poses the idea that the housing crisis is simply a result of the housing market working in exactly the way it was designed. To break this paradigm, the tenant class must organize and build political power.

What if there is no housing crisis, but a housing market working exactly as designed?

Ricardo Tranjan’s The Tenant Class rests on this premise, effortlessly dismantling apolitical narratives of Canada’s housing system to reveal an intentionally obscured class struggle between exploited tenants and extractive landlords — most of whom wouldn’t have it any other way.

In this timely and refreshing manifesto, Tranjan takes aim at Canada’s structurally inequitable and increasingly deregulated rental market, which prevents, rather than promotes, housing security, affordability, and adequacy among tenants.

He draws parallels between exploitative labor relations and the exploitative rental market to describe how property-owning landlords amass wealth on the backs of tenants — all thanks to government complicity dating back to the dispossession of indigenous lands and creation of property rights.

He then uses historical and contemporary tenant organizing stories — alongside his own professional and lived experiences as a political economist, policy researcher, and child of turbulent 1980s Brazil — to argue that the only solution is a struggle: the tenant class must organize to build political power and demand a more equitable, regulated, and largely nonmarket housing system.

Which Side Are You On?

To create the conditions for social change, Tranjan also calls on progressive researchers and allies to practically feed and support on-the-ground movements. After all, “it takes political power to go up against the landlord class and force governments to rein in markets,” and part of building that power involves addressing the cultural marginalization of the tenant class.

But more than that, it requires that the rest of society sees and names the class struggle within Canada’s housing system for what it is. To this end, Tranjan advances a simple and unsettling provocation in the last chapter, reminding readers of their own agency: “now the question is . . . where you stand.”

The message is clear: it’s time to pick a side in this class struggle. There is no neutrality in the face of injustice, disinformation, and exploitation.

The Tenant Class practices what it preaches, systematically busting harmful myths about tenants and “struggling landlords” while offering compelling and research-backed arguments, stories, and quips, which can be mobilized by organizers and advocates to push for housing justice. And though it may not be politically palatable to the roughly two-thirds of the population who benefit from the status quo (namely, property owners), Tranjan’s clear and incisive class-based analysis extricates itself from the endless housing “policy merry-go-round” in important and radical ways.

The Housing Crisis Is Not Apolitical

For one, Tranjan decisively names the power-holders that feed, constitute, and enable the elite landlord class in its mission to extract more and more income from tenants. From homeowners to industry players, landlords, real estate investment firms, pension funds, developers, banks, and other mortgage providers, he makes apparent that a huge segment of the population benefits from a housing market in which rents rise faster and faster, untethered from income, inflation rates, and vacancy rates (not to mention human rights standards).

This doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however — government laws and policies (or lack thereof), institutions like landlord and tenant boards, and mainstream moral standards permit and legitimize this wealth accumulation. Meanwhile, disproportionately racialized, low-income, and already marginalized peoples in, or in need of, rental housing face deepening intergenerational poverty at the hands of the property-owning elite — a fact that is conveniently obscured in our mainstream news media and consciousness.

Tranjan thus argues that mainstream narratives that frame the “housing crisis” as an apolitical, complex, or new issue that requires technical or win-win solutions only serve the interests of the elite. In fact, these elites pour money and resources into making these narratives appear to be common sense or the way of the world, particularly through their influence over news media and government. They even co-opt progressive language (like the language of human rights, equity, and “affordable housing”) or use disinformation to undermine criticism, disguise their exploitative policies and practices, and maintain the status quo.

“Supply-side” arguments constitute one such narrative, suggesting that we simply need to build more housing faster to make housing affordable — a solution that conveniently involves sweetening the deal for developers and landlords through financial incentives. And, as Tranjan notes, our governments reproduce, pander to, and invest in these narratives.

Take Canada’s National Housing Strategy, for example. Steeped in supply-side logic, the strategy funnels billions of dollars to for-profit developers who produce housing that, more often than not, ends up contributing to, rather than addressing, the root causes of unaffordability, homelessness, and housing inequity. Yet, insidiously, the strategy uses the language of human rights and affordability to disguise these extractive practices.

In the context of my own work to implement the human right to adequate housing via federal policy, I see these dynamics firsthand. Well-intentioned and progressive housing policy professionals too often become trapped in cycles of consultation, make-work, and self-censorship with governments, only to have their research and solutions shelved time and time again.

Government and sector leaders engage in the endless “merry-go-round” of debating policy tweaks or Band-Aid solutions to homelessness and inadequate housing rather than meaningful, structural, and human rights–based change. And all the while, our political and policy leaders (many of whom are part of the elite class) manage to evade naming and regulating the profiteers and beneficiaries of housing injustice.

Fighting Back

This reality is what makes The Tenant Class so powerful, timely, and necessary. It resists the cyclical dynamics of the housing discourse and reminds readers of what tenant movements have known for decades: the problem is political, not technical. And importantly, profit doesn’t have to be part of the housing equation.

Drawing from inspirational stories of defiant tenant movements, resistance, and power, Tranjan places our contemporary “housing crisis” within a century-long history of class-based struggles — struggles that are ongoing.

The book reminds tenants of their agency and allies of the need to center and support those tenants, all while recognizing that “the challenge for the tenant class is not to find solutions for the so-called housing crisis, but to enact the solutions we know work”: namely, moving as much housing as possible outside of the private market (i.e., to increase nonmarket housing); tightly regulating private market housing (i.e., via tenant protections, rent and vacancy controls, etc.); and keeping tenants organized to ensure ongoing political pressure and access to adequate, affordable, and secure housing.

In this way, The Tenant Class stands apart from the mainstream housing paradigm and gets to the heart of Canada’s so-called housing crisis with precision and conviction. Weaving together history, data, and stories with thoughtful ease that makes the complex feel accessible, it serves as fuel for social change and vividly demonstrates the power of collective action. It paints a vision of a housing system that decenters profit in favor of justice, democracy, and human rights — one in which everyone has access to safe, affordable, and dignified housing.

And, most importantly, it makes social change feel possible so long as readers confront the reality of our class-based housing system head on.

This book is, therefore, a must-read for tenants, housing advocates, policy professionals, or “anyone else interested in rental housing.”

To tenants, it says: join or start a tenant union — you have the power to fight back.

To housing advocates and policy wonks, it says: now is the time to organize, build political pressure, and link arms with tenant movements who have been doing this work all along.

And to everyone else, it says: pick a side. Do you stand in solidarity with the rising tenant class, or will you uphold the exploitative status quo?

Tranjan doesn’t let anyone off the hook in this compelling piece, asserting that it is up to all of us to take up the mantle of tenant organizing, to support those on the front lines of the struggle, and to demand a world in which adequate housing is truly for everyone.

Sahar Raza is director of policy and communications at the National Right to Housing Network and a member of Oxfam Canada’s board of directors.

Why and How Class Still Matters / by Nick French

A custodian working on a stairway at the Zakrzewska Building in Boston, Massachusetts, October 5, 2022. (David L. Ryan / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

Originally published in Jacobin on January 21, 2023

Review of The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn by Vivek Chibber (Harvard University Press, 2022)

It’s fashionable to declare that Marxism doesn’t have much to say about complex, modern societies. But class and the material interests it generates are still the central features of capitalism.

Though Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, and other developments have brought the themes of class and economic inequality back into public consciousness in recent years, this resurgence has been accompanied by denunciations of Marxism as an outdated framework for social and political analysis. Pundits and politicians warn us of the dangers of focusing too much on class or treating it as in any way “more important” than other social identities or forms of hierarchy.

These popular refrains echo claims that have become dominant in academic social theory for decades. Where Karl Marx and his followers saw economic forces as central to understanding social stability and conflict, proponents of “the cultural turn” in social theory give pride of place to noneconomic factors. If class is a matter of a person’s location in an economic structure — whether, say, they own means of production or must sell their labor for a living — then class has little predictive power in explaining why people do what they do, culturalists argue. We should look instead to contingent cultural factors: social norms, values, and religious practices.

It’s easy to see the attraction of these arguments. Despite renewed concern with economic inequality represented by Sanders and related phenomena elsewhere (Corbynism in Britain, Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise), class-based critiques have failed to capture the support of the working classes on a large scale. The old parties of the Left are in decline, with ever more workers gravitating to the Right. Global politics continues to undergo class dealignment: compared to the early and mid-twentieth century, class is becoming a less and less salient category of political identity and conflict. Partisan divisions are hardening, but no side credibly claims to represent the interests — or can win the loyalty — of workers.

If class is so important, why do so few people think so? Why, as the chasm of economic inequality widens, aren’t workers rallying around the red flag and trying to overthrow the system?

In his recent book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn, sociologist Vivek Chibber argues that dismissing the importance of class analysis is a grave error. A proper Marxist understanding of class, he argues, can rise to the challenge of culturalist arguments in social theory. But more than that, Marxism can give us a framework to understand why workers under capitalism will be more likely to acquiesce to the capitalist system than to revolt against it — and can shed light on how to make revolutionary change a reality.

Economic Structure and Culture

At the core of Chibber’s argument is an elegant explanation of the relation between the class structure of capitalism and culture. Culturalists argue that all intentional human behavior is mediated by the “interpretive work of human actors,” as social theorist William Sewell puts it. For a social structure — like, say, the capital–wage labor relation — to become effective in motivating behavior, the agents participating in that structure must learn and internalize the appropriate cultural scripts.

This argument, Chibber writes, suggests that “the very existence of the structure seems to depend on the vagaries of cultural mediation.” If I am a worker, I must learn and internalize the fact that I have to find and keep a job in order to sustain myself, and I must learn and internalize the norms and habits required to do so (norms of speech and dress, certain skills, a “work ethic,” and so on). If I’m a capitalist, I need to learn and internalize the fact that success means maximizing profits, and I must learn and internalize the norms and habits that allow me to do that (a single-minded focus on expanding market share and cutting costs, for instance, which requires a ruthlessness in dealing with my employees.)

So, it may seem that human motivation is explained by culture “all the way down.” But this isn’t so. Though culturalists are right that people must adapt to certain cultural scripts to participate in social structures, Chibber admits, it doesn’t follow that these cultural scripts have causal primacy in explaining the structure. Instead, the economic structure itself explains why people need to learn and internalize the relevant scripts in the first place.

Consider what happens if a worker fails to internalize the cultural script appropriate to their role. That means they will fail to secure a job; or, if they do manage that, they won’t be able to keep it for very long. The outcome will be destitution, hunger, and worse. Likewise, a capitalist who fails to internalize the script relevant to their role will soon find their firms going under — and if they don’t get their act together, they’ll eventually find themselves in the desperate situation of a propertyless proletarian.

For capitalists and workers alike, the economic structure generates powerful material interests that compel them to internalize the cultural scripts corresponding to their class positions. The fundamentals of their individual well-being are on the line if they fail to do so.

None of this is to deny the importance of culture. But it is to say that, if we want to understand why people in capitalist societies act as they do, economic structure must be given a primary explanatory role. This claim is borne out, Chibber argues, by the global spread of capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Far from particular cultural understandings being either prerequisites or insurmountable obstacles to the development of capitalist class structures, the imposition of capitalism has transformed cultures around the world — including those once thought to be inimical to capitalist relations — to suit its purposes.

The False Explanation of False Consciousness

Marxists argue that capitalism essentially involves the exploitation and domination of the working class by the capitalist class. Because they don’t have access to “means of production,” workers must sell their labor power to those who do: the capitalists. Once a worker secures a job, they are subject to the tyranny of the boss, who will attempt to get as much work out of them for as little pay as possible. Though workers are the ones who produce the goods and services that the capitalist sells, the capitalist gets to keep the lion’s share of the social surplus produced by their employees in the form of profits, while workers receive a pittance in the form of wages.

This antagonism of interests involved in the capitalist–wage labor relationship, and the harms it imposes on workers, leads to conflict. Marx, observing the nascent labor organizations and political movements of his day, thought that this conflict would take on an increasingly collective and revolutionary form: workers would band together to resist their exploitation and eventually “expropriate the expropriators,” abolishing private property and doing away with capitalism entirely.

This didn’t happen. There were, of course, socialist revolutions in countries where capitalism was just starting to develop, beginning with Russia in 1917, but these societies soon degenerated into authoritarian regimes and by the end of the century were evolving in a capitalist direction. In the West, socialist parties gradually accommodated themselves to the capitalist system and eventually moved away from even promoting significant reforms to the system and representing their traditional working-class bases. Even labor unions have now been on the decline globally for decades.

Why didn’t Marxism’s revolutionary prophecies come true? According to thinkers of the New Left, the answer lies in culture. Workers do have an interest in organizing collectively to defend their well-being and, ultimately, in overthrowing the capitalist system. But they have been thoroughly indoctrinated by bourgeois ideology to accept the system as morally legitimate, and anesthetized by the shallow consolations of “the culture industry,” the promise of consumer goodies, and the like. If only workers could pierce the veil of illusion and recognize their true interests, the thought goes, they would revolt.

Chibber deploys his materialist understanding of class to dismantle this argument. The problem with this explanation is that, as a result of their class position, workers daily experience pervasive harms and loss of autonomy at work, anxiety over finding or keeping a job, and the struggle to maintain a comfortable standard of living. To say that the working class in general has fallen prey to ideological indoctrination is to say that ideology has overwhelmed these prominent features of workers’ lived experience — that the influence of “bourgeois culture” is so strong as to induce systematic “cognitive breakdown” — in other words, false consciousness. Worse still, this explanation bizarrely positions the theorist as having more insight into the workers’ experience than the workers themselves.

And, in fact, workers do often resist their exploitation. They shirk when they’re on the job; they call in sick when they’re not; they occasionally engage in acts of petty theft and sabotage against their employer. These widespread forms of individualized resistance show that working people aren’t simply dupes of pro-capitalist myths.

Why Workers (Only Sometimes) Revolt

So, why don’t workers revolt? The answer lies in the costs and risks associated with collective action. Workers depend on their jobs to sustain themselves and their families. It is not the case that workers “have nothing to lose but their chains”: in organizing or taking action with their coworkers, they could very well lose their livelihood. “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all,” the economist Joan Robinson quipped.

Besides the vulnerability to unemployment, there are plenty of other obstacles to a strategy of collective resistance. Workers have diverse interests that sometimes push against collective action. For instance, while the vast majority of workers would benefit from building powerful labor unions and political organizations in the long run, in the short term, lucky or very skilled workers may be able to secure a better deal for themselves through individual bargaining with employers.

Then, there is the problem of free riding: while everyone benefits from the fruit of collective effort, no individual worker will be worse off if they don’t contribute. That creates a strong incentive for workers to shirk their responsibilities to collective organizing efforts — but, if enough individuals shirk, the efforts will of course fail.

Chibber’s conclusion is that Marx was wrong to think that capitalism would naturally produce its own “gravediggers.” Instead, the material interests generated by the class structure usually militate against collective action and instead push workers to advance their interests by working hard and “keeping their heads down,” while engaging in occasional acts of individualized resistance. New Left theorists who say workers don’t revolt because they’re under the sway of bourgeois ideology make the same mistaken assumption as Marx — they think the reasons for workers’ acquiescence must come from outside the economic structure. In fact, in most times and places, the class structure provides strong-enough reasons of its own to eschew collective resistance, let alone revolutionary activity.

But workers can and do sometimes organize together to fight their exploiters. Under what conditions does collective action become feasible? A crucial ingredient, Chibber argues, is the creation of a culture of solidarity:

[Workers] have to make their valuation of possible outcomes at least partly on how it will affect their peers; this stems from a sense of obligation and what they owe to the collective good. . . . In directing every worker to see the welfare of her peers as of direct concern to herself, a solidaristic ethos counteracts the individuating effects normally generated by capitalism. In so doing, it enables the creation of the collective identity that, in turn, is the cultural accompaniment to class struggle.

When workers come to see their own well-being as bound up with that of others, the normal obstacles to collective action become smaller. They become more willing to take individual risks, and they become averse to free riding on the efforts of their comrades.

Again, culture is constrained by material interests here. A solidaristic ethos is not the same as an altruistic ethos, in the sense of a selfless concern for the welfare of others. Solidarity is rather about forming a sense of reciprocal obligation around shared interests. Knowing that, in the long term, they all stand to benefit from strong workers’ organizations, workers internalize norms that change how they weigh the costs and risks associated with collective action. My sense of obligation to my coworkers may allow me to overcome my fear of the boss’s retaliation; it may encourage me to see an individual wage increase here and now as less important than the security offered by a union contract; it will make me see free riding as a shameful betrayal of my comrades.

Where workers build cultures of solidarity, they are more likely to pursue, and succeed in, strategies of collective resistance. But we should emphasize that class-based organization is not the only way that workers under capitalism might pursue their interests collectively. They also of course belong to formal and informal organizations based on race, ethnicity, religion, kinship, and other social identities. Workers may use such networks to navigate the vicissitudes of labor market competition by hoarding resources and job opportunities; the usefulness of these strategies gives rise to justifying ideologies of racism, ethnocentrism, and the like.

Such collective identities, then — like class — have a basis in the economic structure of capitalism. Yet over time, workers’ prioritizing their identification with (say) members of their race or coreligionists makes it less likely they will forge large, durable coalitions to advance their interests and makes it easier for capitalists to pit workers against each other. (If a union refuses to admit nonwhite workers, for instance, it will sooner or later find the bosses employing those excluded workers as scabs.)

So, the reason to treat cultures of class solidarity as particularly central is not because we chauvinistically regard class oppression as more morally significant than other social hierarchies, as some ill-tempered critics charge. It’s because organizing along class lines is the only feasible long-term strategy for resisting and eventually overcoming capitalist domination and thereby undermining the material basis of racial and other forms of oppression.

Class, Politics, and Class Politics in the Twenty-First Century

It follows that class formation — the transformation of workers from a “class in itself” to a conscious, organized “class for itself,” in Marx’s terms — is an extremely fraught proposition. The material incentives generated by capitalism’s economic structure discourage collective class organization and instead push workers to seek individualized means of pursuing their interests or otherwise to fall back on networks of kinship, race, and so on that pit them against their potential comrades in arms.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of ideologically committed left-wing organizers to build cultures of solidarity, the workers’ movement was born and grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These organizers were aided by propitious circumstances. Rapid industrialization brought ever-greater numbers of workers into large factories and dense urban centers and decreased workers’ fear of long-term unemployment. In most of the capitalist world, workers were politically disenfranchised, strengthening their sense that they were unjustly treated and making clear the need to organize along class lines to demand political well as economic rights. Workers lived close to each other in city slums, segregated from other elements of society, facilitating an awareness of their shared interests and the forging of a collective identity.

These structural and institutional facts were fertile ground for the growth of powerful labor movements and socialist parties. Those organizations fought for a partial “humanization” of capitalism, redistributing wealth and income toward the poor and working classes. For a while, especially in the postwar era, rapid economic growth meant that employers could (reluctantly) absorb unions’ and left parties’ redistributive demands. Yet a decline in profit rates starting in the 1960s forced employers to be less tolerant, and capitalists began to fight back, successfully crushing unions and rolling back the welfare state across much of the developed world.

This story brings us to the neoliberal period, which workers haven’t yet been able to fight their way out of. For decades, they have suffered from stagnant wages and the erosion of public goods. At first, Chibber notes, workers responded by retreating from political activity and civic life. But recent years have seen active expressions of discontent, in the form of an uptick in strike action (though still at historically low levels) as well as explosions of anger at the ballot box in the form of support for populist, antiestablishment parties and candidates of both the Left and Right.

This pattern of working-class disaffection and anger is understandable in materialist terms — as are the obstacles to a renewal of the organized labor movement and mass working-class political parties. The structural and institutional factors underlying the birth and expansion of the Old Left are no longer in place. Globally, capitalist economies are now deindustrializing, which has meant slower employment growth; the dispersion of workers into smaller firms; and less job security. Workers in most capitalist democracies now have full political rights, and they are no longer geographically isolated in their own densely populated communities but spread out in the suburbs among other classes.

These facts mean the project of organizing workers has a totally different character than it did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Workers’ electoral status and social conditions once worked in tandem with the class structure to push workers toward a common identity,” Chibber writes, “but this is no longer the case.” Their electoral status and social conditions today pull workers apart, exacerbating the tendency to adopt individualized or parochial modes of resistance.

Back to Class

The Class Matrix is not without its flaws. Nowhere does Chibber explicitly offer or defend a definition of material interests, a notion fundamental to his account of human motivation under capitalism and to his distinction between materialist and culturalist explanations of social structure. Nor does he discuss the connections between interests, preferences, and motivations — a topic that has long bedeviled philosophers as well as social scientists, and one on which Chibber makes some controversial assumptions that he does not entirely bring to the surface. (Very briefly: he seems to be working with a definition of material interests as universal components of well-being, rooted in human biological needs and capacities, that systematically regulate people’s preferences and motivations across cultural contexts. That is certainly a plausible and defensible conception of interests, but not, I think, a self-evident one.)

Finally, many of the book’s formulations suggest a dichotomy between individualistic forms of resistance to domination and class-based collective action. But as discussed above, and as Chibber himself acknowledges at points, collective strategies of interest advancement can also take the form of reliance on racial, ethnic, and other nonclass collectivities. There is, of course, an important similarity between individualistic forms of resistance and reliance on parochial networks to hoard advantage: they mean failing to unite workers to challenge capitalism at the root and are, for that reason, ultimately self-defeating.

However, these are complaints about presentation rather than substance. Overall, The Class Matrix is a clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we’re to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms.

Socialists today face the difficult task of building cultures of solidarity on different, and less favorable, terrain than our predecessors. Whether and how exactly we can do so are questions Chibber leaves to his readers. But his contribution to understanding what class is, and why it matters, will likely be indispensable to finding the answers.

Nick French is an assistant editor at Jacobin.

While Elites Fret About Inflation and Worker Wages, CEOs Are Robbing Us Blind / by Branko Marcetic

The already massive CEO-worker pay chasm only widened over the course of 2021. (Alexander Mils / Unsplash)

The Fed has embarked on an anti-inflation policy designed to destroy jobs and keep wages low. But a new report shows just how exorbitantly CEOs are profiting from the price hikes.

As an impending war on workers’ wages gathers steam, there’s comparatively little talk about the gargantuan pay packets of corporate executives. That’s too bad, because a new report suggests those pay packets have ballooned to new, ever-higher levels even as worker pay has stagnated.

The report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is the latest of the organization’s annual series of Executive Excess reports, this time examining CEO pay at three hundred publicly held US corporations that recorded the lowest median wages in 2020. What the IPS found is as depressing as it is unsurprising: the already massive CEO-worker pay chasm only widened over the course of 2021, and worker pay at many of the companies has fallen behind inflation, even as corporate profits have been turned into millions of dollars more for individual executives.

According to the report, CEO pay at these low-paying firms rose by 31 percent to an average of $10.6 million, pushing the average ratio of CEO-to-median-worker salary to 670-to-1, up markedly from 2020’s gap of 604-to-1. Forty-nine of the firms even recorded pay gaps of an astounding 1,000-to-1.

Few reading this will be surprised to hear who the worst offender was: Amazon, whose CEO-to-worker pay gap grew an unfathomable 11,062 percent over 2020. CEO Andy Jassy, who took over from Jeff Bezos in 2021, at least nominally — Bezos and Amazon have made clear he’s staying involved in the company and was mostly handing over day-to-day responsibilities — ended up making $212.7 million last year, or 6,474 times the average Amazon worker pay of $32,855. Besides union-busting efforts directed by the exorbitantly compensated Jassy, Amazon workers have to contend with intense workplace surveillance, discrimination and harassment,  and notoriously hectic working conditions that force them to pee in bottles or skip bathroom breaks.

Other top offenders include Abercrombie & Fitch, whose CEO takes home a salary 3,282 times the size of that of his median employee, toy maker Mattel (2,705), tobacco supplier Universal Corporation (2,683), the Gap (2,485), footwear brand Skechers (2,265), and McDonald’s (2,251).

Some firms in particular saw their CEO-to-worker pay gaps widen astronomically over the course of 2020, like digital payment services company FleetCor Technologies (a 3,595 percent rise in the CEO-to-worker pay gap), clothing retailer Urban Outfitters (3,400 percent), casino and racetrack operator Penn National Gaming (1,145 percent), electronics multinational Methode (1,096 percent), and hair salon operator Regis Corporation (969 percent). Jay Snowden, the CEO of Penn National Gaming, which is planning to take full ownership of Barstool Sports next year, took home the third-largest payday of all the CEOs covered in the report, with $65.9 million.

At the same time they were doling out massive paydays to their CEOs, 106 (35 percent) of these 300 hundred low-paying firms paid their workers a median wage that fell behind the 4.7 percent average US inflation rate over 2021, states the report. In fact, sixty-nine of these firms saw their worker pay fall.

It’s not that these firms didn’t have the money to pay their workers better while inflation soared. As the report points out, of those 106 firms where median worker pay didn’t keep up with inflation, sixty-seven spent a collective $43.7 billion on stock buybacks to pump up their CEOs’ stock-based paychecks. According to the report, Lowe’s, Target, and Best Buy, for instance, could’ve given all of their employees a raise of $40,000, $16,000, and $32,270 each respectively, if they had spent the billions they blew on stock buybacks on their workforce instead.

The report’s findings come amid a national debate over inflation that has consistently stressed the impact of higher worker wages and government policies that put money into average people’s pockets. Meanwhile, the idea that corporate price gouging has played some role has been cast by some as a “conspiracy theory.”

Of course, the biggest risk of further inflation comes from the supply shocks caused first by the pandemic and now Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and the Western sanctions that came in response. But the impetus has also come from opportunistic price hikes by profit-hungry companies taking advantage of the widespread public awareness of inflation to sneak through added price hikes. A recent Guardian investigation based on Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and investor calls for a hundred US corporations found executives disclosing they were raking in massive windfalls as profits far outpaced inflation, with executives openly admitting their price increases outstripped inflationary costs.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is embarking on a series of interest rate hikes that will at minimum cause job losses and at worst stagflation and a recession. The main target of these rate hikes is what Fed chair Jerome Powell called “an extraordinarily strong labor market,” which has given workers the leverage to get the higher pay Powell believes is now driving runaway price increases.

Powell has said his strategy for tackling inflation will involve “some pain” and declared in a May press conference that outlined his belief in the need to stifle wage growth that “we can’t allow a wage-price spiral to happen.” An imbalance in supply and demand for the job market means “wages are running at the highest level in many decades,” he explained, and the Fed’s policies would enable “further healing in the labor market” to bring them “back into balance.”  The “healing” Powell is euphemistically referring to in reality means the erasure of job opportunities, which will erode workers’ bargaining power and make them more willing to take on jobs with substandard working conditions, including low pay.

While all of this is taking place, the IPS report reminds us, the price gouging and extravagant salaries of corporate executives go conveniently ignored in the debate over inflation and the government’s seemingly willful failure to tackle them. The report notes that the Joe Biden administration has dragged its feet on using the federal government’s contracting power to tackle the widening CEO-to-worker pay gaps, which it could easily do: 119 (40 percent) of the 300 companies examined got federal contracts between October 2019 and May 2022, to the tune of $37.2 billion, a massive sum that could be leveraged to force the firms elbowing for a place at the trough to put in place fairer pay practices.

We seem to be on an irreversible course to repeat the disastrous economic shocks of the 1970s and early 1980s, all in the quest of suppressing whatever meager advances low-wage workers have seen in their paychecks these past couple of years. And meanwhile, the corporate profiteers robbing us blind laugh all the way to the bank.

Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.vely little talk about the

Jacobin, June 10, 2022, https://jacobin.com/

The already massive CEO-worker pay chasm only widened over the course of 2021.