Abstract
1. Introduction
Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (2022) is an important book. Its central purpose is to develop a theory that distinguishes between class structure, which is the actual material interests of a class and has concrete economic underpinnings, and class formation, which is how classes perceive these interests and how they organize collectively to realize those interests. The goal of this distinction is to show the pre-eminence of the material interests to “find a way back from the excesses of the cultural turn” (178). For Chibber, the cultural turn started out with the laudable goal of explaining why the working class failed to act on its concrete material interests through class formation. However, the cultural explanation took a turn for the worse, according to Chibber, when it argued that the economic structure could only be understood as a product of culture. With this causation, the construction of identities according to local cultural practices submarined the notion of a grand, universal theory since structure could only be specific to its interpretation in a specific time or place. Chibber uses the structure-formation distinction to argue that culture is not responsible for the lack of mobilization of the working class. Instead, it is the structure of capitalism that establishes stability (defined here as the perpetuation of the economic system as opposed to the absence of recessions or depressions).
2. Chibber and Structural Power
For Chibber, the structural power of capital is anchored by the material obligations that capitalism places on firms (36). Capitalists everywhere quickly learn that they must conform to the rules of competition. Real competition means cost-cutting, choosing investment over consumption, finding workers to exploit, materials to use, and making sales to remain in business. Refusal to dump toxic sludge or use more expensive inputs shows up as rising unit costs, noncompetitive prices, and the road to ruin.
These structural imperatives have bent cultural traditions around the world to its demands. Hindu, Muslim, Confucian, and Protestant cultures have been molded to the structural requirements of the system. Firms in these very different cultures must obey the rules of real competition to survive. There are variations of capitalism, and they have their important differences, but they remain capitalist. You would be hard pressed to find empirical support for Chibber’s culturalist opponents in the debate over whether capitalism’s gravitational pull dominates the world. Even “revolutionary” cultures, including China, have been drawn into its orbit (Li and Kotz 2021).
Chibber argues that, although capitalists “do benefit from creating class organizations” (157), their structural power means that they can realize their interests “without having to coordinate with (their) peers” (107). Employers have less need to generate their own class organizations because their interests are preserved simply by the reproduction of the employment relations. Since the class structure places every employer in a position of dominance over the dependent employee, the employer’s power is guaranteed. Collective action is both not particularly necessary and very easy for capital.
Workers’ lack of structural power means they have a stonier organizational ground, which explains their failure, confusing to many on the left, to coalesce collectively to dig capitalism’s grave. Workers, deprived of every other source of income, must seek employment. Having found employment, they now need to provide the services their employer demands. They cannot afford to misunderstand or not obey. The precariousness of the market means loss of autonomy and inevitable subordination to their employer’s profit motive imperative.
Collective action by workers is not inevitable or natural; rather, it must be hard won and attempts to organize will be hampered by countermeasures from antagonistic employers, heterogenous interests among different kinds of workers, and the nasty free riding issue present in any collective endeavor (64–66). As a result, workers’ interests often steer them toward the already established (and free from business opposition) informal networks of caste, ethnicity, and race. This creates a divisive competition of “desperate ferocity” against the “other” over the distributions of labor’s rewards (64).
When economic growth is strong and workers have managed to overcome the difficulties of collective organization, Chibber argues that this creates consent by labor in which strong collective worker organizations, like unions and pro-labor political parties, manage to successfully channel a reasonable share of society’s income toward the working class. This is how he would describe the post–World War II economies in Europe and North America, where labor sacrificed its more radical goals in exchange for union recognition and a degree of employer acceptance.
However, these twin requirements for consent are exceptions rather than the capitalist rule. When growth is slow and worker organizations weak (this second criterion is especially likely to be absent given the difficulties of organizing workers), the more common, and materially rational, worker response is resignation. This is when workers follow the “dull compulsion of economic relations” (110) by taking individual actions, like working hard and doing what the boss wants, that will create as much personal benefit as possible. This is the “neoliberal” period.
Economic coercion results in systemic stability instead of one pregnant with the possibility of resistance, let alone revolution. Because workers are persuaded to accept the system as legitimate not by dint of ideology but because of how it aligns with their material well-being, this fundamentally contributes to the system’s stability. They know they are being exploited, but the alternatives are too daunting.
There is much to admire in Chibber’s 195 pages. His distinction between the objective material interests of the class structure and the extent to which workers will perceive and act on those interests in class formation—along with the structures that stand in the way of collective organization—is particularly useful.
3. Class Formation and the Rise of Neoliberalism in the United States
Chibber is attempting to outline general rules rather than drill down to the detail of specific times and places. However, his descriptions of class formation in both the capitalist and worker case sit uncomfortably beside the facts outlined by other writers, at least as they apply to the United States.
Chibber argues that the structural power of the capitalist class creates power without it needing to lift an organizational finger. Other authors have provided some fairly persuasive evidence that firms in the United States took a very active role to create a political fist with which to smash working-class power, which suggests that capital needs more than its structural power and that, even in the United States, the working class has organized in sufficiently radical ways to threaten capital.
There is a deep literature documenting a very active political role for the capitalist class. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson agree power is concentrated at the top, but not without a lot of effort by businesses: In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, 2,445 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1200 by the middle of 1980. . .. The Chamber of Commerce. . . doubled in membership between 1974 and 1980. Its budget tripled. The National Federation of Independent Business doubled its membership between 1970 and 1979. The Business Roundtable, designed to mobilize high-level CEOs for the advancement of shared interests, formed in 1972. (Hacker and Pierson 2010: 176)
Corporate money poured into both direct lobbying on specific, narrow issues, and into the foundations, think-tanks, policy formation groups, media outlets, and university institutes that promoted a broader neoliberal agenda. This required enormous organizational resources, the foremost of which is money to pay lobbyists, lawyers, and experts to engage in keeping abreast of policy formation, identifying relevant areas, and intervening with elected politicians and staff (Kotz 2015).
In Affluence & Influence (2012) Martin Gilens found that, in the decades prior to 2010, economic elites and organized groups representing business interests had substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens had little or none when their interests diverged from those of business. According to Gilens, middle-income Americans were more likely to support raising the minimum wage or indexing it to inflation, increasing income taxes on high earners or corporations, and cutting payroll taxes on lower-income Americans. They were more likely to oppose tax cuts for upper-income individuals, spending cuts in Medicare, and rollbacks of federal retirement programs. Yet these policy preferences were ignored because Americans in the 90th income percentile donated much more money to political campaigns than middle-income Americans, and the citizens that made the most substantial contributions were far more affluent still. Donations from this elite economic stratum tended to tilt strongly Republican in an era in which its policies could be reliably associated with those favored by business (Gilens 2012). For Gilens, the capacity to determine policy outcomes in favor of business stems from their willingness to spend significant income to sway political outcomes rather than the structural power emphasized by Chibber (for a similar argument focusing on the top 1 percent of US wealth holders, see Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013).
In the 1970s the business class very deliberately set out to have neoliberal policies enacted at the state and federal level to restore the rate of profit and change the balance of power in the United States. The rise of rightwing think-tanks, massive campaign contributions at the national and state levels, and the exponential growth of lobbying represented a clear class formation to change the country in their interest.
Chibber appears to underestimate capital’s own belief that it needed class formation. Chibber argues that the structural power of business makes class formation both easy and unnecessary, but the massive class efforts undertaken by business after 1980 create something of a problem for his analysis. Why would these companies, so cost conscious in their market competition, spend wildly on unnecessary political efforts?
Chibber’s characterization of working-class organization is “consent” prior to the 1980s. While his definition of consent revolves around acquiescing to the economic system, as opposed to the distribution of gains from the economic system, it seems a stretching of the term to only apply it to outright system change. Again, we can look at the turn to neoliberalism in the United States to illustrate the point.
During the “Golden Age” period, from the late 1940s to the 1970s, profits, wages, and productivity were growing and employment was high. So, too, was working-class organization, at least as measured by union membership and strike activity. Between 1947 and 1981 the number of strikes per year involving more than 1,000 workers ranged from 145 to 470.
There were 470 strikes in 1952, 412 in 1969, and 424 in 1974 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2022). The compression of wealth and incomes during the Golden Age period can be associated with the degree of labor militancy. Chibber’s notion of consent requires strong working-class organizations to allocate economic gains to workers. Assumedly, for Chibber, consent includes going on strike, but over limited bread and butter goals. His notion of consent, in this sense, corresponds with Kotz’s (2015) explanation of the boom period of regulated capitalism. Kotz (2015) argued that the Cold War served to limit labor militancy, while the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 greatly constrained the scope of working-class actions by outlawing general and wildcat strikes.
However, it is probably more than mere semantics to say that “consent” may not match the events of the time. Many of the strikes were wildcat strikes in which workers chafed against what they perceived to be their overly conservative leadership. Further, according to Kotz, the reason that business abandoned regulated capitalism was that it lost control. The Business Roundtable identified rising wages as a source of declining profits in the early 1970s. American citizens were also voting for changes that would constrain profits: the social welfare state expanded, government-provided medical insurance spread to the elderly, social security payments grew, and protective regulation for the environment and worker safety was introduced. Historian Benjamin C. Waterhouse’s (2013) Lobbying America claims that business was in a “full-blown panic” as it saw the ship of state sailing away from the capitalist class. The Business Roundtable, facing a higher tax and regulatory “rights conscious revolution” from below around the environment, gender, and ethnicity, along with the demand for rising wages, certainly felt that the activities of the US population were probably stretching the definition of “consent” (Kotz 2015).
4. Conclusion
Chibber’s insistence on the pre-eminence of class structure over culture and the influence of culture in class formation is articulated very effectively. In broad brush strokes, that structure makes life very easy for capital while labor must collectively sweat and strain even to achieve the half-win of consent. However, his development of class formation is understated for both capital and labor—a claim that can be illustrated by looking at the transformation to neoliberalism in the United States. If Chibber’s arguments about the inherent logic of capitalist competition are accurate, and we would argue they are, it is unlikely that so much would be spent on solidification if structural power alone were sufficient to carry the day. Although it is true that workers consented to capitalism as an economic system, framing anything but system transformation as “consent” stretches the definition of the word when workers were organizing in support of public health, care for the elderly, environmental and safety regulations, and a dramatic expansion of the welfare state.
