Does class matter?

Is class still a useful category for understanding capitalism and oppression? We discuss with Vivek Chibber on our podcast. Listen.

Soweto, South Africa (Image by Marc St on Unsplash).

On this week’s AIAC Podcast, we chat with Professor Vivek Chibber about his latest book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn. Why, despite the powerful antagonism capitalism generates between bosses and workers, is it so resilient? Why did class disappear as an analytical category for the international left? Can the left rebuild class consciousness through organizing, or are the multiple crises the world faces too insurmountable and the obstacles to organizing too great?

Vivek Chibber is a Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. He is a contributor to the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review, the New Left Review and Jacobin. He is also the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

Listen to the show below, and subscribe via your favorite platform.

Further Reading

The culture wars are a distraction

When our political parties only have recourse to the realm of identity and culture, it is a smokescreen for their lack of political legitimacy and programmatic content. It is cynically unpolitical, and it’s all bullshit.