Chapo Trap House - Bonus: Amber Interviews Vivek Chibber on "The ABC's of Capitalism"

Episode Date: April 29, 2019

Amber talks to writer and professor of sociology Vivek Chibber about "The ABC's of Capitalism," his new series of pamphlets for Jacobin. Vivek Chibber is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, which is published by Jacobin, along with The ABCs of Capitalism. You can pick up a copy of the ABC's of Capitalism here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/store/product/56 Tickets still available for our upcoming shows in Berlin, Glasgow, Manchester and Dublin at: http://chapotraphouse.com/tour

Hey, folks, it's Amber here. We got another Vegetables episode for you. I am joined by Vivek Chibber, Professor of Sociology at NYU and Editor-in-Chief of Catalyst. And he has just put out a pamphlet series with Jacobin Magazine called The ABCs of Capitalism. Welcome, Vivek. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Amber. Good to be here. Okay. Let's start out talking a little bit about the project. So there's a book from Jacobin called The ABCs of Socialism, which is a short little series of essays. And now you have this pamphlet series that's The ABCs of Capitalism. What's the difference and why

did you go with the pamphlet structure? Well, they share the title, but they're quite their distinct projects. And the difference between them is the ABCs of Socialism was really kind of a very, very short introduction to a whole series of topics that the left needs to know about when they are introduced to socialist politics, about how capitalism works, about what socialism will be like, about why you should be a socialist. And they're extremely short essays of like 500 words each. And that has its place. These pamphlets came about actually independently of that, which is I was involved and I have been involved in a number of educational efforts, special

schools for trade unionists and for militants. Actually, most of it was being done in India. And I realized that when we have these schools, we don't really have any literature to give to people introducing them to how capitalism works, how the state works, about what the history of the left has been, things like that. And in my head, I'd had a project for a long time, which is that ever since the 1930s and 40s, there hasn't been a lot of really popular writing on the basics of what socialist politics is. The 30s was a time when the Communist Party was trying to really create a mass base for itself and popularize socialist politics and Marxism. With the decline of the left, all these projects kind of fell by the

wayside. Now with the wave around Bernie Sanders and the rise of left-wing politics, again, there's a whole generation of people coming to left politics, but they don't really have a lot of educational material. So I thought we needed something like this. These pamphlets are the first installment of what I hope will be a large series dealing with individual issues in the history of Marxism and in the history of socialism. And each one, unlike the ABCs of socialism book, which was just a collection of very short essays of a few hundred words each, these pamphlets, each one is the size of a substantial article. So it's long enough to go into a lot of detail and depth about the issue, but short enough

that it won't intimidate people, hopefully, and they feel they can just sit down and go through each one. So that's really what was behind it. Right. And they're very readable. They're very digestible. I had a friend who once asked me, what should I read if I'm stupid but want to be a socialist? So I think this would be a great place to start. Yeah. I think these pamphlets, they're intended to make you less stupid. Right. And I think they do that well, even for me. And I've been reading about this stuff for a while. So I think we should just start with the first pamphlet on understanding capitalism.

Well, it's three pamphlets. The first one, and they're intended to kind of form a coherent whole. Right. So the first one is basically called understanding capitalism, and that's exactly what it's about. What are the basic structural features of the system? How does it work? And why does it produce so much misery on one side and so much wealth and so much comfort on the other? What is it that makes it function this way? How is it that individuals get trapped in it and can't make their way out of their poverty or their situation in the class structure?

And then what can be done to change it? That's the first pamphlet. And the second pamphlet is on the state, and it tries to explain why governments cannot be expected to pass laws or intervene on behalf of the poor, that there's overwhelming pressure on them to always take the side of the rich. And so you can't rely on government to help you out. That's the basic idea. You're going to have to fight for whatever creature comforts you need, whatever social supports you need. You're going to have to fight for them. The third pamphlet is called the class struggle, and that's about how to fight. How is it that poor people fight? When do they win? What can be done to enable them to win? So these

three things, the pamphlets go together. Right. Okay. So we start out in understanding capitalism by giving us a little bit of the lay of the land. So inequality is skyrocketing, and you have what we used to call the end of history where we thought, oh, capitalism's won. This is it. It's now definitely in question and not just for academics and professional Marxists, for workers all over the world. However, the economy, as we're often told, is still growing. It's very healthy. So how does the economy grow, and yet workers are still suffering?

Yeah, exactly. That is the secret to capitalism, which is the economy can be doing fine while the masses of the people are doing really badly. And that's essentially the essence of capitalism. How does this happen? Well, when we say the economy is growing, what we're essentially saying is people who control investment, people who have all the money are using it to start up new operations, new factories, new restaurants, new hotels, things like that. And as they start up new operations, it also expands jobs, employment. Now, that sounds like a great deal. That sounds like everybody's benefiting. Economy is growing, investment is growing,

jobs are growing, everybody wins. The thing about it is, it doesn't tell you the terms on which people are getting their jobs. Are they getting decent wages? Are there working hours, are humane working hours? Are there working conditions in any way safe for them? Are they working in situations where they're going to get injured because their pace of work is too fast, because the demands on them are too high? What's happened over the past 15, 18 years or so is that rich people have decided that it makes a lot of sense for them to invest because there's a lot of investable opportunities out there, a lot of money to be made. But unlike, say, the 50s and 60s, what's happening

is the money that is being made from these investments is all going into the pockets of the people who own the stuff, people who own the establishments that own the factories at the expense of the workers. So the economy, yeah, it's growing, jobs are increasing, but wages are stagnant, and working conditions are really shitty. And the sense of insecurity that people have as to how long they'll be able to keep their job, whether they'll get the hours that they want, that's completely now out of their control. I contrasted it to the 50s and 60s because that was a time when jobs were growing, when the economy was growing. Institutions existed that made sure that some of these income gains came back

to the workers and that they had some say in their working conditions. Well, what were these institutions? Primarily, it was unions. It was unions that defended them. That's what's missing now. So there's no one to fight for the worker, and the individual worker is left at the mercy of his boss. And the bosses say, we own everything, we get to keep everything. That's what's going on now. Right. So this is the basis of capitalism. That, however, is like a little bit of a difficult concept. We can usually say something about the capitalist zone, the means of productions, but you identify five different features of how capitalism functions that I think are

actually a better explanation than just prattling off that one sentence. Can you go over those really quick? Well, you can say that they're five, but you could narrow them down to two or three if you wanted to, or even fewer. But basically, what we say is, fundamentally, what you have to understand about capitalism is that it's not just individuals going to the marketplace and doing the best they can. I mean, it is, of course, that individuals go to the marketplace and do the best they can. They try to get the best job they can. They try to run their shops the best they can. But these people aren't randomly distributed. They fall into

very clearly identifiable groups, and we call these groups classes. And the class that you belong to very seriously constrains and determines the chances you're going to have in your life. So when a working class person goes to the market and tries to find a job, the income that they're going to get is going to be very different from when a capitalist is participating in the market and tries to do the best they can. So people's where you're born and how you live has a huge bearing on how well you're going to do before you undertake any actions at all, before you even try to get a job. So the first point is, people are distributed into classes, and the two main classes are capitalists and workers. Now, capitalists

are people who own shit. By shit, I mean they own productive establishments, not shoes and shirts. They own the things that make the shoes and shirts. And then the working class is obviously people who work for the capitalists. These are the two main classes. That's the second point that identifies who the classes are. Thirdly, capitalists have no choice but to be in a perpetual state of war with their own employees. That's the third point in capitalism. And the reason they have to do that isn't because they're greedy, isn't because they're evil, but in order to preserve the bottom line, in order to make their profits, they've got to cut costs as much as they can. And the wages of

their workers are a cost to them. Every capitalist therefore knows when he starts a business, if I want to make the most money that I can, I've got to hold a line on all my costs, including wages. The reason they do that isn't because they're greedy. It's because that's what it takes to win in the market against their competitors. Competition forces capitalists to look at workers as nothing other than a means. It's something that they use to get this stuff for themselves, but which they have to get as cheaply as possible. Because of this, every employer tries to hold a line on the income that his workers are getting individually. And that means if you expand that to the system as a whole, the class of

capitalists, because it makes sense for them to win out in the competitive battle, tries to hold a line on the income of the class of workers. And that's what creates enormous wealth on one side, which is they're taking all the money for themselves, and inequality and poverty on the other side, which is what their workers are getting. And finally, because of this, the only way out of it for the poor is to try to fight for their rights and fight for their interests and act collectively, which is what they've done in the past, rather than relying on their individual capabilities or on who they know or on what they can get away with. So those are the five things.

So you clarified that capitalism doesn't just rely on wage labor, it's market dependence. Can you explain a little bit about market dependence? Well, there are two ways of really saying the same thing. Market dependence is something that comes about when you have a society of wage labor. And you can say conversely that when everybody's dependent on the market, it's going to necessarily bring about wage labor. You cannot have a society in which most people work for a wage in which you don't have market dependence. The two things go together. So they're not separate things. It's just another way of talking about the same thing.

But there was wage labor in pre-capitalist societies. What's the marker? The marker is that wage labor before the rise of capitalism, and we're talking about now 12th, 13th, 14th century, 16th century even. There were wage laborers in village societies and towns, but they were very small in number. The vast majority of people were peasants, what we would call now farmers of some kind. And they grew their own food. They relied on their own labor. They worked for themselves, in other words. They didn't work for somebody else. There were wage laborers, but they were on the periphery of the economy. What changes is that at a certain point around the 16th, 17th century, wage labor became the main

form of work in the economy. And that was because all those people who used to work on their own land as farmers had the land taken away from them. Since they don't have any way of acquiring food now on their own, since they don't have any land of their own, the only way they can get food is by getting money to buy it. The only way they can get that money is by going to work for somebody. That gives you wage labor. Right. So you mentioned that under advanced capitalism, managers are often used to direct workers. So we talked about workers. We talked about capitalists. What are managers and what do they have to do with late capitalism, whatever that is?

Managers are the people who's essentially whose job it is to spy on the workers, to monitor them, to make sure they're doing the job they're supposed to do, and to squeeze the most labor out of them that they can. Managers are essentially an offshoot of ownership. The reason you have them is that if somebody owns a factory or if somebody owns, say, a hotel or a restaurant or something, they've got, say, 30 or 300 or 3,000 people working for them. They can't be everywhere all at once, watching all their workers, making sure that they're working as hard as they can, giving whatever labor they'd agreed to give. So essentially, owners have to hire a bunch of people whose job it is to make

sure that the boss is getting the owners getting as much bank for his buck. If he's paying these people, they got to be working as hard as they can for them. That's what managers do. They are not the same thing as owners, but while they work for the owners, they're not in the working class. They carry out the functions of management. Typically, what they end up being is people in the middle class or upper middle class or even quite wealthy people. But while they work for the owner, they shouldn't be confused with workers. So here's a big one. I'm one of those millennial-type people. And basically, since I graduated college, almost everyone I know my age either works 15 hours a week or 60 hours a week.

Why does that happen? Well, they're both phenomena that both things come out of the same motive, which is when an owner or capitalist hires somebody, his basic philosophy is to get the biggest bank for his buck. If I'm giving you whatever wage I'm giving you, what I want to make sure is that I'm getting as much work out of you as possible for that. And any amount of time that I'm paying you but you're not working actively for me is for me, I'm just burning money. In fact, what owners like to say is, you're robbing me. If when I give you money, you're not working for it all the time. Well, one way in which I can maximize the amount

of work I get for the money I'm giving you is to just make you work your ass off. You show up at whatever place I've hired you at and you just work, work, work, work. Or I let you go home, but now thanks to cell phones and social media and stuff, you're at my back and call all the time, even when you're at home and you're racking up hours even at home. So here what I'm doing is I'm making sure you work for me all the time, every minute of the day, that's the 60 hour side. Okay, well, what about the 15 hour side? Well, there's some industries in which it's hard to have a person productively working all the time. And a great example of this is retail. So if you go to walk into an H&M or if you walk

into a Banana Republic or something, okay, when there's a rush of people coming in, the owner wants all his employees there working hard. But in businesses like this, unlike an auto, where in an auto factory, ownership decides how much throughput there's going to be, how many cars they're going to make, how many seats are going to put in the cars on any given day, and that tells them how much labor they need because they control how fast and how much is being made. In retail, say in restaurants or in shops like clothing shops, you can't control how many customers are coming in. That's up to the customers. So there's parts of the day and even parts of the week that they call dead time, there's

nobody walking in. And you've got all these workers standing around doing nothing. From the ownership standpoint, those workers are essentially now getting money for free. And that's a loss to the owner. His ideal situation is I want my workers at my shop only in those hours and those minutes when I need them. And so on those parts of the day, when the business is light, I want to be able to send them home. This is called flex time. Same principle. I want to get the most work for every dollar that I'm spending on you. Well, if I've spent a dollar on you and there's no work to be done, I want that money back. So I send you home and I tell you, I'll call you if I need you. So in places like in things like nursing,

things like retail, in a restaurant business, a lot of workers are under the guise of flex time. They're told, well, you may not get a full 40 hours this week. You might just get 10 hours or 12 or 15. It depends on how business is doing. And we don't know how business is going to do. So week to week, the employee doesn't know how much they're going to be working. And this is what then creates this weird situation where while some people are overworked, other people are underworked. Same principle in both cases, which is you want to try to get the most. You want to try to make sure that every dollar you spend on a wage on a worker is a dollar that's giving you active labor back in return.

Right. So workers have all of these problems. They're most of the people. Allegedly, we live in a democracy. It's difficult to see why we're in this situation. So I think it makes a little sense here to talk about the second pamphlet, capitalism in the state. So if we live in a democracy, there's one person, one vote, why do capitalists have more power than workers? It's because when the basic idea is politicians they win office by competing for votes. And whoever wins the most votes gets to be your president or gets to be your congressman. And that's true technically. But in a system like ours, there's actually two competitions that go on. The competition for votes is the

second one, and that's the one everyone sees. Before that, there's what you might say is a more important competition that all the politicians have to enter into, and that's the competition for dollars. The reason they have to do that is that electoral campaigns in the United States are privately funded. There's no public money if you want to run for office. I mean, there is, but it's trivially small. So you've got to raise your own funds. And that means that given that the funds that it takes to win are so large that very few people are independently wealthy enough to raise it themselves, they've got to go hand in hand to the rich and say, well, you please give me some money so I can run for office.

Whoever wins that competition is the person you see then running for office. Well, who's going to win that competition? It's the person who the rich think is the friendliest to them and what they want to see. So by the time the election is fought, it's fought between people who've already made all the promises that really matter in the system, which is promises to the wealthy. The stuff they say to the poor to get the votes is stuff they forget about as soon as they get into office. So one reason why people's votes end up not mattering is that the votes only come into the game at the very end when most of the outcomes already been decided. And the second reason is that once they're in office, well,

now they're looking for advice on how to make laws. I mean, who the hell knows how to make a telecommunication law? Who the hell knows all the intricacies of climate change? None of these people do. So they have to rely on experts, expert advice. Well, the overwhelming majority of the experts who are available in Washington to give you advice are professional lobbyists and the overwhelming majority of professional lobbyists work for corporations. So they're over there essentially in the ear of these politicians telling them what to do. And since they work for corporations, the corporations also kind of butter it all up by reminding the politicians, hey, if you not only should you listen to us, but if you

want to get reelected and get our money again, you'd better listen to us. And of course, the third reason, the one that is the most subtle, is that every politician, every major, the politicians who are the apex of the system know that at the end of the day, if the economy isn't doing well, they're the ones who are going to lose because the voters take it out on them. And the only way to keep the economy going well is to keep investors happy. So policies that investors don't like that are going to make them unhappy or policies that they tend to avoid. What are those policies? It's well, it's the ones that benefit the poor is the ones that investors don't want to see happening. So politicians tend to

stay away, even on their own, even without all the pressure, even without all the lobbying and all that, they will favor the investor class because they're the ones who control the economy. And unless the economy is doing well, politicians don't get reelected. Right. Okay. So the state facilitates capitalism. So why aren't you an anarchist? You got to ask that one. People always ask. Yeah. You know, anarchism as a political doctrine has undergone a lot of changes. One reason I'm not an anarchist right now is that contemporary anarchism has very little to do with the philosophy and the political doctrine historically. Anarchism historically was a wing of the labor movement,

of the working class movement. And it was an expression of how to organize against capitalism, but also a vision of what a post-capitalist society ought to be. These days, over the past, say, I'd say 50 years, anarchism has really become kind of a lifestyle politics of the middle class and the upper middle class. It's college kids, college students. And it really has no connection to the labor movement anymore, even ideologically. It basically says, I'm going to do whatever the hell I want. It's not anarchism. That's just narcissism. So that is not an attractive philosophy. But if you go back to its original, the original doctrine, I think there's some shortcomings there, too, which is anarchism prides itself

on saying that we see the post-capitalist society as one in which we either abolish the state or dramatically reduce the size of the state, where it really doesn't occupy much of a force in people's lives anymore. I don't think that's possible. I don't think it's really possible to have a post-capitalist society without a pretty strong and important role for the state for one really important reason, which is you've got to have some kind of economic planning. If you don't have economic planning, so let's say we go the anarchist way and say we want workers' control over everything. Well, workers' control leads to factory-level decision-making. If you have workers' control without a planned economy,

what that gives you is individually, democratically controlled companies fighting against each other in the marketplace. There's no other solution. The only way, and that is going to end up giving you some kind of market society all over again in which workers collectively decide to exploit themselves. The only way out of some kind of anarchy of the market, no pun intended, is to have some degree of planning. You can't do that without a state. So in my view, there's no way around the necessity of a state. Now, the anarchist impulse is a positive one, which is to say, yeah, the coercive powers of the state have to be reduced to the absolute minimum that's necessary. I completely agree with that. I think that's

something that any socialist can agree with. The sticking point comes to whether or not how much coercion you think is necessary. I'll just say this. Planning requires some degree of coercion. Coercion in the sense that you can't do whatever the hell you want. A workers' control factory cannot do anything at once if it's part of a planned economy because it's got to go by what's been democratically decided to put into the plan. So there's a limit to how much autonomy and freedom you're going to have even in a socialist economy. People don't like to hear that, but that's what social cooperation is. People voluntarily agreeing to submit to a certain kind of discipline and a coordinated set of

actions. No way around that. No way to do that by a state. So you instead point to mass parties and organized labor as democratizing forces within the state. So how do those institutions work for workers, so to speak? Well, there's two ways they work. What I've said in these pamphlets is once we understand that capitalism works to the detriment of most people, that it's a system in which if you leave it to its own devices, the rich will get richer and the poor basically get to share the crumbs. How do you get out of that? Well, you get out of that by people working people coming together and organizing themselves and fighting for their freedoms and fighting

for their rights, ideally also through a political party of some kind. So that's the context in which I said that. How do they work to the favor of workers? Well, in two ways. First of all, within the workplace, they give workers some kind of strength, some kind of leverage against their boss, because the only way in capitalism to have some say in the conditions of your work is if you do it collectively. Individually, if a worker goes and tries to negotiate with a capitalist, typically, except in very rare cases, typically, the capitalist has all the power. So the only way you're able to amass any power for yourself and leverage is collectively. One worker is easy to replace. A hundred workers are a lot harder to replace.

So that's point number one. The second way in which they help the mass of the people is once you've aggregated those numbers, you bring people together, they can fight for systemic changes with things like not just better healthcare at the workplace through employment, but better healthcare nationally for all people, universal childcare, pensions, social security, things like that. All of that stuff historically has only come about through two kinds of things, mobilized working people, acting together, and a political party that fights for them within the state. But we don't have that. What is unique about the United States? You always hear, well, America's different. And it's true in some

ways America never really got to the kind of level of social democracy that you saw in comparably wealthy European countries. Why is that? That's a tough question, actually. I don't think we have a really satisfactory knockdown response to why the US is different. Let's just lay it out for a second. Fundamentally, you hit the nail on the head. What makes the US different is, well, at least one of the things that makes it different is that it's the only rich country that doesn't have a mass labor party or a mass socialist party or rather never had one. Nowadays, really no countries have any of those now. They have parties that call themselves socialist, but

they're not socialist. The US is different in that it never had any sizable socialist or communist party. Why is that? I mean, there's, I think there's several reasons. One big one is that it has a working class that was ethnically and racially one of the most divided and diverse that we've seen in the world. And a lot of the arguments stop there. But in my opinion, that was a factor, but it wasn't the only factor. It might not even be the most important factor. Another really important factor was that American corporations were the biggest, baddest, meanest, most resourceful and richest capitalists in the world that had the most resources at their disposal. And it had the most means at their

disposal to fight off a labor movement, unlike the European countries in which the labor movement grew in tandem with their industrial structure. The United States, you got this gigantic wave of corporate mergers and the labor movement comes much later. And by that time, the state is basically taken over by corporations. The corporations themselves are have decades of experience in fighting off labor and they have the resources to, in fact, either buy off a lot of the unions or to simply squelch them. After that, you combine it with the fact that at the moment when the labor movement was at its strongest, which is let's say from 48 to the early 50s, the United States unleashes a wave of anti-communism,

which sections of the labor movement also buy into, which unlike Europe ends up decimating the most radical and militant members of the labor movement. They got kicked out of all the people who led the strikes and the mobilizations of the 30s and 40s when the labor movement grew. Most of them got kicked out of the labor movement in the 1950s under McCarthyism. So by the time you come out of it in the 60s, which is when there was a huge wave of welfare state expansion in Europe, in the United States, the labor movement is actually starting, is on its heels in getting weaker and weaker. So you get this exceptional situation where you have a weak labor movement, no political party that's going to fight for them, you

have a very divided working class going up against the baddest, biggest corporations in the world. That's a lot to try to overcome. However, we talk about how we didn't get to European-style social democracy. You still hear people now talk about, I think in some ways fairly, in some ways unfairly, the decline of social democracy in Europe and the limits of social democracy. And you have people saying it was never sustainable, that sort of thing. So what would you say to someone who is skeptical, let's say, of either America's potential for social democracy or the sustainability of social democracy as a concept?

Well, I think those are real concerns. Social democracy in Europe is under attack. It has been rolled back considerably over the past, let's say, 20 years or so. And in the long run, maybe it's not sustainable. We don't know. And socialists shouldn't pretend they have all the answers to this. And in the era of retreat, when we have had no power, no ability to get things done, we fall into this habit of saying, ah, but we know everything. And the truth is we don't know everything. So first of all, we should admit that some of the grounds for suspicion and skepticism about social democracy are true. On the other hand, let's say that social democracy, as I've described it, all these things are happening

to it. The question is, what's the alternative? From the left, the answer comes, well, revolution. Okay. When was the last time you saw a revolution in the advanced capitalist world? There hasn't been one since the 1940s. And in a democratic capitalist country, there's never been one. So there's this, there seems to be the sense amongst a lot of the people who engage in these discussions that, well, we can just flip a switch. And it's like a menu. I'll have the cheesecake or I'll have the strawberry shortcake. Well, I like strawberry shortcake, which is revolution. I'm going to go there. Unless you have some way of making a good case that revolution is even possible, this is idle speculation. This kind of stuff, it's

good to know what the shortcomings of social democracy are. So you can then try to figure out how to avoid them. But at the point of the discussion is to say, well, screw it. Social democracy is for pussies. And I'm going to, I'm a real revolutionary. That's just cafe parlor chat. I mean, chatting and prattle. Unless you have some strategy for bringing about revolution, I don't even know where this conversation is supposed to go. Well, not only that, whether it's possible or not, is it desirable is also a pretty good question. You'll find most people who have lived through sort of war torn countries don't find the prospect very appealing. Stability is really under underestimated as an appeal.

No doubt about that. Revolution's sound great. And they have brought about a lot of progress. I don't want to sound as if I'm against the idea, but the stakes are very high. Yeah. And you'd better be sure that you know what you're doing because and that you have a lot of people on your side. Yeah, because there's nothing worse than a failed revolution. If you doubt that, go to Chile in 1973. These are very high state games. And unfortunately, because of the isolation of the left, it's really become more of a scoring style points kind of stuff where people go on about this. I think we should separate two issues. One is recognizing the real limits to social democracy, recognizing real strategic errors and weaknesses

that the model of social democracy that we've seen in Europe had, and distinguishing that from saying, well, therefore we're not going to do it. We're just going to have a revolution. Revolution is not on the agenda. It's great to talk about, to try to impress people, but it's not on the agenda. Even if it is someday on the agenda, let's say down the line someday it will be. The road is going to be through social democracy, not around it. So I think the reason to worry about the shortcomings of it is to have a better social democracy, not to have some magical path around it because that's not in the offing. So revolution, not that appealing right now. Class struggle, very appealing right now.

The way forward, you would argue. Yeah. And this is where I think we're in a new era, which is that historically most of the people who said what the kind of politics we need is class struggle politics were the ones who were advocating for revolution. That was an era when revolution seemed to be on the agenda. And we're talking now from, say, 1910 to 1930s. Since the 1930s, a lot of left-wing politics was taken over by social democrats who had a much more technocratic view of how to do social reform, how to make things better. What's new about this era, I think, is that for the first time in a long time, we're seeing people advocating for class struggle, but

we're also saying that maybe revolution isn't the end point of this class struggle, at least in the near run, in the near future. What we need is class struggle even to get the reforms that might be on the agenda right now. So what we mean by class struggle is simply this, working people, organizing themselves, fighting for their rights, and not taking the dictates, the demands, or even the limits of their employers as the limits of what they're going to do. Being motivated by a certain vision of what a basic minimum set of guarantees is for a decent life, and saying these are the guarantees that every workplace is going to have to give. And if the workplaces are

not able to deliver these, they have no right to exist. That's the class struggle politics that we're advocating for. And I think that in this political era, more and more people are realizing that even if revolution might not be possible, class struggle is a necessity. Right. Okay. But we look at the big sort of invigoration of class politics in America, which you can largely attribute to Bernie Sanders, which is a campaign that doesn't have anything to do with a mass party, and it doesn't have anything to do... Well, I'm not going to say it doesn't have anything to do with trade unions because trade unions like Bernie, but it's not a mass party and it's not a labor movement, but it does seem

like that's the way forward. And I didn't see it coming, but I believe that's the way forward. So how did that come out of nowhere? And should people put a lot of energy behind Bernie? Well, how did it come about? It caught most everybody by surprise. And I think the reason it did was that when you see for 40 years nothing but defeat for labor, nothing but retreats on every front. And the right and the center right take over politics. And they define all the debates and all the discourse and all the talk about what's good and bad and possible or impossible. It kind of drowns out all the suffering and crying and dejection

that the masses of people are feeling. And a lot of us started to think that maybe nobody is noticing how bad things have gotten because you don't hear any other voices. Well, we didn't realize was that the unhappiness and the fury and rage at how lopsided the system has become was very much there. It was just that people thought that there's no way out. And what Sanders did was it was the first time a major political force came around and said it doesn't have to be this way. Now mind you, he came in a context where there had already been a kind of a reawakening of movements against the new gilded age, as it were, right? There had already been Occupy Wall Street. There had already been this anti-globalization movement.

The Black Lives Matter movement for the time that it was based among poor working class blacks had already made an inroad. So he was tapping into something that we were already seeing the first signs of. But no doubt about it, it was his putting these issues on in the mainstream that had the effect that people who for years had thought, I'm the only one this angry, I'm the only one who's this enraged at what's going on suddenly said, I'm not the only one. And that's literally like flipping a switch is people said that we can actually now maybe think about making a difference. Now, the weaknesses of Sanders are that he's stuck with a party that is unrelentingly hostile to working class interests. That's a democratic

party. And to him. And to him, of course, exactly. And he does not have a mass organization of his own. Again, these are grounds for skepticism. And the people who say that you need to be careful with Bernie are right to say that if this is all there's going to be, then we're not going to get a lot out of it because a democratic party is going to kill any democratic initiatives. But I think there's reason, good reason to throw ourselves into the Sanders campaign. And here's two important ones. One is for the first time in 100 years, it's possible in American political culture to advocate for socialism. Now, of course, he doesn't mean the same thing by socialism that a lot of people on the left mean. He really means

by it, social democracy. Sure. But the Cold War is over. Exactly. And it's okay that he means something different. Because when you're talking to people, we're talking to people, we can use the word to mean by it something that we intend for it to mean. And people are open to it. They're willing to listen to it. He's given the left for the first time in 60 years, an entree into everyday working people's lives, not these cloistered little sectarian little groups stuck in campuses or in little halls somewhere or the other. So first of all, it gives you an opening to actually do organizing, real organizing. Secondly, he might win. And Sanders is not like the traditional social Democrat. When someone

like Obama wins, not that he was a social Democrat, Obama was a neoliberal to the core, but he did embody and share one element with postwar social Democrats, which is when he gets into office, he says to the people who voted, your work is done, go home, leave it up to me, which is kind of a technocratic social democratic message. Sanders is saying, if you get me into office, our work is just starting because the only way I'm going to get anything done is if there is a mass movement behind me. Sanders is the first president in American history, even more than FDR, who was saying, I need to be part of and elevated by a movement of working people. And he uses that term. So Sanders is now using the bully

pulpit to try to reinvigorate a labor movement that's been dormant for more than five decades. So while we continue to say, and I say that you can't get very far without a big labor movement behind you, Sanders seems to be the best chance we've had in a very long time to get that labor movement going again. And I think it'd be a huge mistake to stay out of that, to not take part simply because it's not the familiar scenario that we've all read about in textbooks. Okay. Well, Bernie talks about the workers. And when you hear him speak, he says working people, he says the working class, which is something you haven't heard politicians say

for an extremely long time. You hear middle class families, maybe, if you're lucky. But it, and I think you've spoken to this before in multiple situations, always worth restating. Why the working class? Why not, you know, the women's march or Black Lives Matter or the student movement? What is it about the working class? Okay. All of these movements are important. All of them. It's only a good thing to have an energized, mobilized citizenry, whether it's in the form of women's marches, whether it's in the form of student groups, whether it's in the form of Black Lives Matter, all that. But there is something special about the labor movement. And let me say one thing.

One of the achievements, one of the great, I'm using this term ironically, achievements of these radical academics and all that, is that they've managed to convince many parts of the left that the labor movement means old white guys. The labor movement is predominantly women and increasingly people of color. It's just that we're talking about those women who work for a living and those people of color who also are wage workers or work for a living. So the working class is not meant to mean people who are not women or not dark skin. It means those people who work for a wage, whether or not they happen to be women or of darker hue or of whatever sexuality it is. Now that said, there is something special

about those women and those people of color who are in the working class, which is they are in the part of the system that everything else depends upon, which is they do the work on which profits are made. I had said earlier that politicians realize that the whole system runs on the profits that capitalists make, and this is what makes politicians so craven to what capitalists want. Yeah, but those profits come from the work that laboring people are doing. And the one social agent that can bring down capitalists is the people who work for them. Anybody else, anybody else can basically be safely ignored. They might make a lot of noise. They might have a lot of protests. They might even break things, but eventually

they're going to go home. Workers, when they stop working, bring the entire system down to a crashing halt. This is why nobody has the power to do, and this is why the word marginal to describe a worker is the height of political illiteracy. A worker is important because he or she is not marginal, because they're central to the system. And Sanders realizes this. The left always realized that. It's just the contemporary left, which has been so cut off from any kind of real organizing for 50 years that all this jibber jabber about marginality and all this has taken over. Okay, but for better or for worse, workers don't look the way we remember them. We don't have those factory floors. You hear a lot about

the precariat as if that's something new. Are we in a new stage of capitalism, or do these categories still apply? Are we dealing with something different? It is different, and we've got to realize that. And that's one reason why I think labor movement hasn't been able to revitalize itself for so long. The proportion of the labor force that is in the manufacturing sector now is about half of what it was in the 1940s and 50s. Much of it now works in services, in much smaller venues, smaller shops. Much of it works from home because they've been recategorized so that they don't have to get benefits and things like that. And yeah, that makes it a lot harder to organize them. That's just

a fact. And one of the challenges for us now is this. Even though the working conditions are very different than they were, say, in the 1940s, capital still depends on labor and the work that labor does to make its profits. That fact hasn't changed. However, the way in which the work is done, where it's done, the numbers in which it's carried out is very different. In the 30s and 40s, the left was successful because it figured out how to organize in these gigantic venues. What's the case now is that it hasn't figured out how to organize in the new context. And everything depends now on our figuring that out. Bernie's success, if he gets elected, will depend on an energized citizenry, not just in the streets,

but also in the workplaces. And somebody's going to have to eventually come up with an organizing model that gets us to that. Right. It does seem like we're trying a lot of new things right now. We're seeing a little bit of a boom in union activity in America. I remember Wisconsin and things like that. So I know that these things don't necessarily play out to our favor. And a lot of times, you'll see a lot of early success and it won't add up. What are your thoughts? Do you think we're building something new? Possibly. I mean, I hate to sound like the person who always hems and haws, but possibly.

The reason, so first of all, I think in a time like ours, when we've taken five decades of nothing but defeats, any sign of energy anywhere is to be welcomed. Right now, it's in public sector unions and in particular in the teachers' unions. That's great. But it's also the case that in order to be, we're going to be successful, these strikes are going to have to spread to the private sector because teachers' unions ultimately get their funds from a social surplus and profits and revenues that come out of the manufacturing or the private, the held economy, not the public sector economy. So it's going to have to spread to these other venues. Now, a big reason why in these other venues there hasn't

been any organizing for so long is that there's a deep demoralization and a sense of defeat and a sense of isolation on the part of workers in the private sector. And the wins that we've seen the teachers' unions acquire can maybe energize people in the private sector too. And there's some glimmerings of that right now. So in my opinion, nothing bad can come out of what's going on in the teachers' unions. It's a great thing, but it has to be the first step in a much wider mobilization. And in particular, I think it's going to have to spread to the private sector if it's really going to do the damage that it needs to do. So what are you knowing that we're at this specific kind of new moment where actually

new things are happening for the first time too? What do you hope to accomplish with these pamphlets? Why should people read them? Well, I think any move to revitalize the labor movement also has to have an educational element to it. I think that some of the basics, the fundamentals of capitalism haven't changed. But as we pointed out in this discussion, a lot of facts about it are kind of new around the edges and around the way it's organized. And education is going to be an essential part of the agenda. The show you guys do, Chapeau Trap House, has its role to play. It's taken a lot of the mystique out of the left. It's bringing it down to how people

talk every day amongst themselves. Oh, we have no mystique. Okay. So the demystified left, we're going to call it. What do you guys call yourself? The dirtbag left. So that has its role. What things like these pamphlets or catalysts do is that they try to also bring a analytical and educational element into it so that when people see the need to organize, they have some material ready for them, which kind of shows them how it's been done in the past and what's at stake and how the system works as a whole.

The left has always taken the intellectual side of its task seriously. There's a kind of anti-intellectualism that's seeped in over the past few decades or so, but that's a sign of defeat. And what you're going to see is as things get moving again, I think you'll see a lot of people starting to try to write and analyze and move forward. And hopefully, they won't all be in universities because the main function of university academics has been trying to demoralize people. Well, I think they're great. I think they're especially good for anyone wanting to have conversations with people who aren't socialists about socialism, which we need to do over

and over again. We aren't actually that big. I know it feels like we're kind of big. We're not even a little bit big. That's right. We're nowhere near where we need to be. So if you want to be a good socialist, learn how to talk about socialism. Vivek Chibber, thank you for joining us. Hope to have you on again. Thanks for having me, Amber. Thank you.