Review: The Class Matrix by Vivek Chibber
In The Class Matrix, Chibber presents a historical materialist theory of capitalism that allows for both structural forces and the ‘conscious, directed intervention of organized political actors’ [p. 117]. This is not itself new,1 but Chibber theorises it from the ground up, adding specificity to the interrelations between class structure and agency.2 This is used to engage debates with both Classical Marxists and constructivists. For the latter, Chibber responds to the cultural turn, explaining why structural theories can be used without displacing agency, ideas or culture. Chibber’s problem with Classical Marxism is that it ‘never adequately theorised’ the ‘stability-inducing properties of the class structure’.3 Because of the precariousness of the working class, and the difficulty of collective action, capital has an in-built tendency for stability. While true, and eminently important for strategising collective action, I felt the The Class Matrix skimmed past capital's other tendencies.
Before reading The Class Matrix, I had been more or less content with a general bemusement about the culture vs. class, or ideas vs material forces debate. As it was taught to me as an undergrad, two straw men were put into a boxing ring together and, unsurprisingly, neither landed a punch. When I later discovered a strong tradition of historical materialism that drew upon both ideas and material forces, and of constructivists who saw ideas as mediating, but not displacing, material reality, I was even more confused. Why had I not at least been told about the large area of agreement? Why had I not been told that both ideas and material forces have causal significance, and historians should carefully study their interrelation? With both sides presented in a simplistic either/or opposition, I spent years ignoring, and therefore ignorant of, the importance of theory for historical research.
Chibber offers precision to my general bemusement. His discussion of the causal significance of class structure is rooted in the foundational social relation of capital, that between worker and capitalist. No matter what workers happen to believe, no matter their cultural identity, if they can’t find employment, they will starve.4 This fact about capital’s core social relation has implications for the power of workers, and the difficulty of collective action. The position of workers is far weaker than that of capitalists, who do not need to rely on collective strategies, and can focus instead on using their power to divide and crush the working class.5
This is, for Chibber, a tendency inherent to capital,6 and it remains true no matter the unique conditions of a specific time or place.7 This theoretical claim is supported by the fact that collective action by workers has been rare all over the globe. If some Marxists have previously believed that the conflictual tendencies of capital rendered collective struggle inevitable,8 Chibber shows that they mistook the unique conditions of their time for the general nature of capital as a whole [p. 104]. Crises of capital in which it is in the material interests of workers to act collectively are, Chibber argues, rare. The tendency of the capital/labour social relation is for workers to resist, instead, on an individual level.9
However sound the theoretical conclusions Chibber draws, it is important to remember that this is only one tendency. To me, the strength of The Class Matrix is in helping historians to embrace structural theories without displacing agency and contingency, concepts that Chibber serves with a breath of much needed clarity.10 So after creating a careful theoretical justification for the integration of causal structural forces with ideational ones, it’s a shame that Chibber ignores some of capital’s most significant ‘laws of motion’, or its other tendencies.
For an example of a historical materialism that seeks to account for all of capital’s tendencies, consider Ernest Mandel. Mandel also strove to balance structure and agency.11 He did this by treating causal structures in a similar way to Chibber.12 Marx’ ‘laws of motion of capital’ were treated by Mandel as tendencies, which required historical-empirical research because of the many different ways that they can manifest and interact.13 Also like Chibber, Mandel explained long periods of capitalist stability, and the reasons why workers’ collective struggle is often weak.14 However, he did not focus on a single tendency, and thus avoided giving any impression of stasis.
What about, for example, the tendency for an increased organic composition of capital, which is presently manifested in the move towards increased automation? Wouldn’t this be significant for the tendency that Chibber has explicated? When employment gets only more and more precarious, and the unemployed more and more numerous, will capital remain so innately stable? I’m not sure. Maybe it will, as Chibber implies, only increase the ‘stability’ of capitalist class structure. With more unemployment, there may be even less opportunity for collective action. But these are important questions, especially for a book that paints such a strong portrayal of capital’s stability. No doubt, this is because of the specific goals of The Class Matrix. I do not mean to suggest that any of my comments would come as news for Chibber. I am eager only to see how he might use his theoretical framework next.
Did I get this very wrong? I’m just an amateur historian eager to learn. Please let me know the error of my ways in the comments below ⬇️
Marx famously explained such a view of history, and others have pointed to similar ‘takes’ in the 18th century: Marx: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’; Robert Cox noted that this tradition was as at least as old as the Eighteenth century, locating a similar view in the work of Giambattista Vico: ‘the Vichian perspective stresses change; as Vic wrote, “… this world of nations has certainly been made by men, and its guise must therefore be found within the modifications of our own human mind.” This should not be taken as a statement of radical idealism, (i.e. that the world is a creation of mind). For Vico, ever-changing forms of mind were shaped by the complex of social relations in the genesis of which class struggled played the principal role, as it later did for Marx.’ From Social Forces, States and World Orders, Millennium, 1981; More recently, I found the relational historical materialism in
Andreas Bieler and Adam David Morton’s Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis brilliant.
‘I argue that, if properly understood, a structural class theory does not have to underplay the role of conscious choice in social reproduction; indeed, understanding the structural location of action is a crucial precondition to appreciating the content of agency.’ p. 118.
‘Early Marxists had been aware of the stability-inducing properties of the class structure but never adequately theorized it. They focused, instead, on the myriad ways class domination generated social conflict, thus reinforcing the message of The Communist Manifesto that the system tended toward its own demise.’ p. 120
Marx: ‘But the worker, whose only source of income is the sale of his labor-power, cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class, unless he gives up his own existence.’
‘At the heart of the asymmetry is the fact that workers have to organize themselves to advance their interests, while a capitalist can typically advance his interests without having to coordinate with his peers. This, of course, places all the normal burdens of collective action on workers— burdens that early Marxists never adequately theorized. And, on the other side, their class rivals are relieved of that very responsibility, since the typical capitalist is able to protect his interests in his relation with his employees without having to organize with other capitalists. But equally, since he does not have to expend his resources on forging class organizations, the capitalist has the freedom to expend them on preventing, or breaking up, the organizations built by his employees—if they manage to cobble them together at all.’ p. 107.
‘The argument I have offered in this chapter departs from the culturalist program in two ways. First, it suggests that the real source of capitalist stability is the class structure itself. From this follows the second and more portentous point—that far from careening toward imminent collapse, capitalism underwrites its own stability. This conclusion f lows naturally from the premise that capitalism distributes class capacities unequally between employers and employees. If this is so, then even while it generates antagonism and conflict between them, the conflict will tend to be resolved in favor of employers. Since the path to capitalism’s supersession runs through class formation, and since the odds are stacked against the latter, it follows that the system will tend to steer class antagonism toward a form that is manageable and keep its intensity within an acceptable range—thereby maintaining stable reproduction.’ p. 115.
‘On one side, owners are constrained to pursue a cost-minimizing, profit-maximizing growth strategy in order to survive in the market; on the other, workers are compelled to offer their labor services to these establishments and do what they can to hold on to their jobs. These compulsions hold regardless of culture and geography, as do the responses to them. Far from being limited by the local meaning universe, the class structure works by subordinating the local culture to its own demands. Two implications, in particular, are worth drawing out.’ p. 119.
‘Second, the theory suggests that the class structure itself underwrites capitalism’s stability. This is where my argument is furthest from early Marxists and the cultural turn. Early Marxists had been aware of the stability-inducing properties of the class structure but never adequately theorized it. They focused, instead, on the myriad ways class domination generated social conflict, thus reinforcing the message of The Communist Manifesto that the system tended toward its own demise. The New Left took this conclusion as the premise for its own work and turned, wrongly, to culture as the reason the demise had been forestalled. My argument suggests that the main source for capitalism’s stability is the class structure itself. Once the workforce is proletarianized, and once its members have to seek out employment in order to survive, they consent to the system, not because of the power of ideology but because of what Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations.” This compulsion not only inserts them into the employment relation but inclines them to opt for individualized bargaining strategies over collective ones. But the very act of opting for individual strategies ends up reproducing the domination of the employer since, as Adam Smith noted, in a oneon-one standoff, the employer wins. It is only when all the obstacles to collective action are overcome that workers can resist as a class—and that is the exception, not the norm. Hence, the system tends toward political stability, not revolution.’ pp. 119-121.
‘This compulsion not only inserts them into the employment relation but inclines them to opt for individualized bargaining strategies over collective ones.’ pp. 119-121.
One example: ‘There remains an abiding sense that structural theories cannot make sense of the way people actually navigate their lives because these theories reduce people to little more than the bearers of social structures. Since people go about like robots, obeying the commands of the system, social processes seem governed by ineluctable “laws,” not conscious human action. And, of course, because agency is minimized in this fashion, while the determinism of structural reproduction is amplif ied, the theory seems to have little hope of acknowledging, let alone explaining, the place of contingency in social interaction. And this, in turn, makes structural theories incapable of acknowledging the heterogeneity and richness of social life. Structural theories flatten and homogenize the social landscape, while a focus on agency enables us to comprehend its variability.’ p. 119.
Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism: ‘the rejection of a mediated unity between theory and history, or theory and empirical data, has always been connected in the history of Marxism with a revision of Marxist principles — either with a mechanical-fatalistic determinism, or a pure voluntarism. Inability to re-unite theory and history inevitably leads to inability to re-unite theory and practice.’ pp. 19-20.
‘The combination of all these uneven tendencies of development of the fundamental proportions of the capitalist mode of production — the combination of these partially independent variations of the major variables of Marx's system — will enable us to explain the history of the capitalist mode of production…’ pp. 39-42.
‘In fact, any single-factor assumption is clearly opposed to the notion of the capitalist mode of production as a dynamic totality in which the interplay of all the basic laws of development is necessary in order to produce any particular outcome. This notion means that up to a certain point all the basic variables of this mode of production can partially and periodically perform the role of autonomous variables — naturally not to the point of complete independence, but in an interplay constantly articulated through the laws of development of the whole capitalist mode of production.’ p. 39.
‘The degree of resistance of the proletariat, i.e., the unfolding of the class struggle, is not the only determinant that causes the rate of surplus-value to develop into a variable partially independent of the rate of accumulation. The original historical position of the industrial reserve army also plays a crucial role. Depending on the size of this reserve army, it is possible for a rising rate of accumulation to be accompanied by a rising, stationary or falling rate of surplus-value. When there is a massive reserve army the growing rate of accumulation has no significant influence on the relation between the demand and supply of the commodity of labour-power (except, possibly, in some highly qualified professions). This explains the rapid increase in the rate of surplus-value despite the rapid increase in the rate of accumulation in England, for example, between 1750 and 1830, or in India after the First World War. Conversely: when there is a tendency for the industrial reserve army to decrease, due — among other things — to the massive emigration of 'superfluous' labour-power abroad, a rapid increase in the rate of accumulation can perfectly well be accompanied by a plateau or a fall in the rate of surplus value. This scheme would fit Western Europe, for instance, between 1880 and 1900, or Italy at the start of the 1960’s.’ pp. 40-41.