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Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
The idea that workers in wealthy countries like the United States are part of a “labor aristocracy” bought off with the fruits of imperialism is nonsense. The best way to build a movement against US imperialism is to build the labor movement domestically.
The task of socialists in 2022 is the same as it’s always been, says sociologist Vivek Chibber: to build working-class organization. That requires clarity about the central political role of the working class.
Critics often say the working class doesn’t fight back against exploitation because it’s confused about its real interests. But this ignores how capitalism itself leads workers to resign themselves to their situation — and how we can overcome that resignation.
Edward Said’s Orientalism instilled an anti-imperial sensibility into an entire generation of Western scholars. But even while it castigated the imperial project, its actual analysis didn’t give us the intellectual resources to overturn it.
The question is no longer whether the working class matters, but how it can fight back.
Conservatives claim to defend tradition. The truth is, they actually defend domination and illegitimate power over others.
We’ve suffered an irreparable loss with the passing of our friend and comrade Leo Panitch.
The global left has suffered an irreparable loss with the passing of Leo Panitch this weekend. He was incredibly warm, inviting, and generous to others. And he remained committed to the end to the cause of socialism and human emancipation.
And our decades to come.
There is much to celebrate in Jacobin’s ten-year anniversary. We’re fostering a stable of socialist researchers and journalists — intellectuals who can deploy the same techniques as the professoriate, but toward ends that are dictated by their political commitments, not professional pressures.
Erik Olin Wright devoted his life to figuring out ways the world could finally leave capitalism behind. His final book holds crucial lessons about which strategies belong to the past and which ones can build the bridge to a socialist future.
Erik Olin Wright was radicalized in the 1960s and remained a Marxist because his moral compass simply wouldn’t allow him to drift away. With his death, the Left has lost one of its most brilliant intellectuals.
Class struggle and running for office often pull in opposite directions. But we can’t build a socialist politics without navigating those waters.
The twentieth century left socialists plenty of lessons. Will we heed them?
Despite the threat of automation and the weakness of organized labor, workers still hold the key to winning social change.
Socialists focus on the working class because of our diagnosis of what’s wrong with society and our prognosis of how to fix it.
Workers are at the heart of the capitalist system. And that’s why they are at the center of socialist politics.
Ellen Meiksins Wood showed so many of us what it means to be a committed intellectual.
Capitalists are interested in profit, not development. Only workers can empower the Global South.
Postcolonial theorists have to stop insisting we choose between the universal and the particular.