Why The Work Class? Pt 3 Vivek Chibber "Why The Working Class?"

Vivek Chibber is the guest on today’s episode, discussing his essay “Why the Working Class?” which maybe not so coincidentally is the name of our series. In this episode Vivek not only answers the question he proposes to answer, but he talks some about what socialism could look like, and DSA’s role to getting there.

Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: a Journal of Theory and Strategy.

NPEC Curriculum - Vivek Chibber’s “Why the Working Class?” 

NPEC Presents: Imperialism: the US and Mexico 

The relationship between the United States and Mexico, both today and historically, constitutes a significant feature of U.S. imperialism. Speakers at this panel event will discuss concepts of imperialism; the long drive by U.S. capital and the U.S. government to dominate Mexico and seize economic benefits at the expense of Mexico and the working class of both countries; and Mexican/Chicano labor in the U.S. including the ways in which the U.S. imperialist relation to Mexico has tended to divide the working class and responses to those divisions. This unequal relationship continues today, affecting workers on both sides of the border.

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Transcript

Elton LK: 0:00

You're listening to CLASS, an official podcast to the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton L. K. this episode is part three of our series, Why the Working Class? You can find a link to the curriculum in the show notes or on our website at education.dsausa. org under resources. Today we're discussing Vivek Chibber's essay of the same name, Why The Working Class?. Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He's the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. In his essay, and in today's episode, he provides a clear argument for why socialists should put the working class at the center of our political strategy. An announcement before we begin the national political education committee, also known as NPEC presents Imperialism, The U. S., And Mexico. On Saturday, September 30th at 2 p. m. Eastern, we're conducting an event where we discuss the relationship between the United States and Mexico. Speakers at this panel event will discuss concepts of imperialism, the long drive by U. S. capital and the U. S. government to dominate Mexico and seize economic benefits at the expense of Mexico and the working class of both countries. And Mexican Chicano labor in the U.S., including the ways in which the U. S. imperialist relation. to Mexico has tended to divide the working class and responses to those divisions. This unequal relationship continues today, affecting workers on both sides of the border. We aim to develop a better understanding of the relationship between the two countries and deepen our bonds of solidarity. Okay, now let's go to Vivek why do socialists cite capitalism as the source of injustice?

Vivek Chibber: 2:03

Well, it's the source of injustice because the economic system that we call capitalism has the property of basically, assigning to people or deciding, How they're gonna earn their income, how much income they earn, and how they spend their time, which are three of the most important decisions we can make in our lives or anyone makes ever in human history. Capitalism is a system in which in order to survive, you have to produce for the market and sell something on the market. Either you sell your labor power, that is your working ability, or you sell products made by somebody else's labor power. And that's if you're an employer. And that accounts for the vast majority of the population. There are some people in the middle who we call middle class, but most of them also have to look for a job. Or if they own their own shop, or their own restaurant, they also have to sell on the market to survive. So this dependence on abstract, impersonal forces like the market. And because of the market being subject to the success and failure of making a profit or finding a job, it makes people's lives not only insecure, but for the vast majority of the working population, puts them under the authority of somebody else, which means that at 4 65, 70% of the population you spend most of your working time just trying to eke out a living. Under conditions which are not under your control, subject to the authority of somebody who doesn't have your welfare or your own wellbeing in their interest, but sees you simply as a means to an end as a tool that they're using to maximize their own profits. The result is that the basic conditions for human fulfillment are missing for most people. This is not a accidental outcome. This is not something incidental to the world in which we live. The world in which you live is built around this. So if you think that the, uh, way to a decent life is for people to have a, at least a minimum subsistence, at least to have some control over their free time, the ability to set their own agendas, the ability to have meaningful relationships in their interactions, then you have to change these rules under which people are forced to live the rules that we call capitalism. That's why capitalism is the basic obstacle to justice for most people in the world today.

Elton LK: 4:24

So describe socialism and how could socialism make society more humane and fair? Reduce insecurity and material deprivation and increase self-determination, as you say in your piece.

Vivek Chibber: 4:40

Well, socialism is an aspiration. It's not really a reality, so we can't describe it, but we can describe is the principles that will guide the building of socialism. And what sorts of institutions might, embody those principles. We have not seen a actual fully fledged socialist system yet. What we have seen is various attempts to move forward on building institutions that embody those principles, and then I can explain what, we've seen so far and how might, how we might actually deepen and improve on those. the fundamental principle of socialism is the opposite of how capitalism is run. In capitalism. Profits are put before people. The guiding, uh, principle behind social socialism is to put people before profits. That is to say instead of having people be beholden to and, slaves to the market, you make the market a servant to human needs. Now that suggests that there might be a room for markets within socialism. There's debate on this. So the question is, in order to have a meaningful life, in order to be able to have self-determination for yourself as a human being, to have minimum subsistence, to have your basic needs met, is it essential? Is it crucial to abolish the market? Well, generations of socialists thought that you would have to. Today, in today's world, socialists are a little more, reticent about this. And the reason is that the experience we have with societies that actually did away with markets altogether that tried to be have central planning was not a positive experience, both on moral grounds because they were very authoritarian societies and on practical grounds because the plannings didn't seem to have worked. So going back then to what sorts of institutions might allow us to put people before profits? What we need to do is see whether you can combine elements of a more planned system with elements of market societies. And this would do two things, having some of the functions of some of the distribution of goods and the allocation of time be determined by markets. Lowers the burden on planners. Planners now don't have to, decide on every single aspect of the distribution of goods and services, but only a subset of the total distribution of goods and services. So, practically speaking, that makes it seem a little more realizable. where have we seen that? Well, in most capitalisms in the 20th century, there was a great deal of planning within the overall structure of the market. You had large public sectors. You had the planning of medical services, public utilities, transportation systems, educational systems. We know all of this can be done. You have had some degree of success in planning in consumer goods industries as well, especially in developing countries. So we have some experience to build on. We would also have in this kind of mixed socialist economy, or what you might call a market socialist economy, a role for the state in Taxing and spending so that you have a kind of income redistribution and equality of incomes after people have earned their income from the market. We have experience with that through social democratic countries as well, was a very active use of the state to tax the rich and give income to the poor. You would of course have some degree of inequality in any, post-capitalist economy, but we think that with the appropriate use of the state, you could mitigate some of the effects of the market if you've retained a market, because markets always generate some degree of inequality. So, to my mind, what socialism would look like, Would be a far more advanced form of social democracy in which you have many of the institutions we've seen in countries like Sweden or Germany. But where what you've done away with is A, a class of profit makers, B, privately owned banks, et cetera, and C, the goal of profit maximization above all else. So you would try to use market competition and the market to try to lessen the burden on planners and at the same time, you would make sure that whatever profits are coming out of your enterprises wouldn't go to a small class of people on top of society, but would be shared or democratically allocated, both at the enterprise level and at the governmental level. So you would have markets without capitalists. I think that's probably the most viable form of socialism we can think of. Maybe we can have complete planning. I. Socialists are not religious fanatics. They should understand that this is a practical question, and if it is possible to have planning, the burden of proof is on us.

Elton LK: 9:31

We recently had a episode on Sam Ginden's piece in your journal, Catalyst. be interested maybe to have you again on the podcast to discuss that, in more detail. well, next question. So what forces in capitalist society resist change in a progressive direction?

Vivek Chibber: 9:53

Well, you can think of the answer to this question in two parts. Uh, there are personal and impersonal forces that would stand in the way of change. I. The personal forces actively resist to use your verb change. And these would of course be the people whose tremendous income, wealth, and advantages depend on a, capitalist setup. The first such people would be the capitalists themselves and the bankers and the owners of assets. And no matter how generous your socialism is, no matter how well it takes care of people's basic needs, There's no doubt that the vast majority of capitalists today would be worse off under socialism than they are under capitalism. They wouldn't be cast aside, they wouldn't be put into labor camps. They wouldn't be killed off, but they would be less, wealthy and have less influence and have absolutely less power over others than they do right now, given that we expect they would resist and they have always and everywhere resisted. So that's one. site of resistance. The second obstacle comes from impersonal forces, which is the practical constraints on building a socialist society in the 20th century. Very many attempts to build socialism. Were in the developing world, even where. Organized or violent resistance wasn't very deep to building socialism. What they came up against was the constraints imposed by economic and social conditions, which is it's very, very hard to have socialism when the level of economic development and productivity is very low. If that's where what you're confronted with, the need, the, the compulsion, the demand from the population to raise the standards of living, overtakes everything else. And socialist societies have not been good at improving the productive forces at developing the productive forces because the egalitarianism up to a point, is conducive to more rapid economic development, but is not necessarily consistent with rapid economic development. So what you had was the obsession with economic growth overtaking some of the egalitarian and moral commitments of socialists in the advanced world. We now have the luxury of having a incredibly developed economy where you could actually have people working less rather than working more and still improve their economic, their overall material welfare. I. Because after all, having more free time is a way of having a better life instead of working 60 hour weeks as most working class Americans do here. Therefore, the constraint that was confronted by developing countries wouldn't be as binding, which is the constraint of developing your economy at at whatever cost. The problem is not one of what we call dynamic efficiency, but the practical problem that if you're trying to move from a market economy to a non-market economy, The constraint of actually getting the right kinds of goods to the, the people who need them. That is the problem of allocation.

Elton LK: 12:52

So you've, you've talked about, Managers, obviously capitalists, there's professionals and, I think that's a, important. Aspect of today's, uh, economy or economic makeup of, of America. In our, last episode, we discussed Marx's wage, labor, and capital, and of course talked about the, the proletariat, the workers. So, that, can you describe who is the working class?

Vivek Chibber: 13:20

Well, the working class is what those two words suggest. It's people who have to, work for somebody else in order to make a living. So the best marker of being a worker is if you, have to acquire a wage in order to work, and secondly, if you lack authority over somebody else's labor power, you can work for a wage and still have some authority over other people, and that's what low level managers do. You can think of salaries as a kind of consolidated wage. So there's a lot of the s salary earning people who are in fact workers. They're highly skilled workers. Are all salary salaried people, workers? No, because there's some sec section of them that also command other people's labor, uh, because they're managers. Now, some managers can rightly be called non-capitalist. They'd be middle class people. but then there's a managerial class that technically earns a wage, but a job of extracting labor from other people. So just having a wage, having to work for a wage doesn't make you a worker. It's earning a wage and being under somebody else's authority. therefore being vulnerable to them and being put to the service of profit maximization that makes you a worker. So how many people is that? It's at least two thirds of the population. Probably more then the capitalist class will be some small fraction of the top 1%. The capitalist class is small. It the, the 1% is not all capitalists. Only a section of the 1% is capitalists. and then you have about 20 to 25% of the population that you would call some kind of middle class. Most of those people are going to be only hesitantly and partially supportive of a socialist agenda. more radical that agenda becomes the probably the less support you're gonna get from that section of the population. Right now, there's all this talk among the university left of Contradictory class locations and bringing the middle class over, et cetera, et cetera. That's easy to do when you're at zero. Where we are now, where nobody has any kind of social supports, no healthcare, no childcare, a big chunk of the middle class will support universal healthcare, especially the younger ones because the younger, the jobs that younger people are getting in that class are so much worse than what the older generation get in the same class. There's so few benefits in the gig economy, which is where most young people are employed. There's such little support for childcare. there's so much more insecurity for kind of a milk toast, social democratic agenda, like Bernie Sanders. They'll support it, but there's no historical evidence for the notion that as you move beyond the kind of centrist social democracy, the professors and the grad students and uh, all these, the highly skilled workers will be with you. There's absolutely no evidence for that. we come back to what's your essential support base? It's gonna be the people who, by virtue of their position in the economy, never have access to the kinds of goods and luxuries that the solaria does and the middle class does, unless they have to fight for it. That's the working class. So you identify them first, and then you say, how do we win them over? And you win them over by immersing yourself in their lives, not by lecturing at them.

Elton LK: 16:35

Yeah. And so essentially that was gonna be my next question. obviously this is a DSA podcast. How does DSA build the trust of the working class?

Vivek Chibber: 16:45

I mean, DSA is lucky here. It has 150 years of experience to look back at. And to my knowledge, and I've looked at this pretty carefully, uh, the only way socialists have ever been able to win the trust of the working class is by joining in with the working class. Getting jobs with them. Living with them be, and for, for most of the middle class, the vast, vast majority of the middle class, this is a non-starter You know, nobody wants the life of a worker. It's a really hard life. So how do you join in that universe? It's gonna be very small numbers of middle class people.'cause you're essentially asking them to be, missionaries to be saints to give up. Those goodies that workers would love to have and then join in with workers. A strategy that relies on that is a unworkable strategy. A strategy that relies on a missionary mentality on the part of middle class people will never work. you'll only get a tiny, tiny, small, eddy of people willing to do that. And that's why what socialists have said is that you don't recruit middle class people to socialism. You recruit workers to socialism. Small groups of middle class people are fine for helping trigger organizing drives, helping sustain organizing drives, doing auxiliary work around what workers are doing. But the socialists and communist organizations that had real success, they recruited workers with their imperfections, with all their flaws. And then when they're in the organization, you understand that they're gonna bring in a lot of the contradictions of civil society into your organization that you work with them. Because they have a material interest in shedding a lot of the detritus, a lot of the more backward consciousness, the forms of consciousness that they've come in with. They have a material interest in overcoming their racism, in overcoming their misogyny. Middle class people have a material interest. In keeping to their middle class hostility to working people. So if your organization overwhelmingly recruits amongst middle class people, it might have some success for a short amount of time on a limited range of issues. But if, if you're serious about being a class struggle organization, you have to recruit the people who in their daily lives, in their daily routines confront capitalist power. That's, that's workers.

Elton LK: 19:05

that's why I asked the question is that, you I think it's taken for granted that much of the growth of D S A. Over the last five years has been from the middle class, but there is definitely a major portion of D S A that is focused on it becoming a working class organization.

Vivek Chibber: 19:24

the outside. That's, uh, what I'm seeing that. there seems to be more of a commitment and more clarity. When I, I read d s a documents and when I talk to people and I see the kind of debates that are going on very, very slowly. Debates are turning to issues that matter rather than issues should be not even up for debate within a socialist organization.

Elton LK: 19:46

So, last question. How can DSA best support the labor movement?

Vivek Chibber: 19:51

I think what it's doing right now is largely very positive to support the labor movement, So there are two things that D S A does. One is electoral work, and the other is, organizing work, I should say three things. The third is just, you know, Uh, a lot what a lot of socialist organizations have had to do for the last 40, 50 years, which they, it's a talking shop, so there's a lot of study circles and talking and all that, and that's fine. That that's a, that's should be done. Uh, but if that's all you do, then you should essentially just a, a book club. You're not really a socialist organization. So the two really productive things it does is it's had a fair amount of success in its electoral work, and the electoral work is pretty solidly consistent. Around issues that are of concern to working people. And the second is the labor organizing. Now, it's understandable that the electoral work captures most of their attention, because the real boost to socialism came from the Bernie Sanders campaign, which was an electoral campaign, and that drew a lot of people in. But it's also because it's easier to do it, it's just a lot easier to do door knocking and canvassing, leafleting, et cetera, because, When the bulk of your organization is middle class people, they are what you might call political hobbyists. They come in their spare time to do what they can to help labor and socialism, but they do that in their free time because their working life is very far removed from labor and labor organizing because of their class background. Right. So they have to do it in their free time, and that means. Trade union organizing is not gonna be what you do because you can't organize at a workplace if you don't work in that workplace. So electoral becomes a lot, becomes a lot easier, and they've had a, a good measure of success in some parts of the country in this electoral work, and they've done a lot of good work with it. Problem is, if this remains your main activity as an organization, again, you have a hundred some odd years of experience to look at. it very quickly reaches a ceiling as to how much you can get done. It's easy to fool yourself that, well, we're at least we're doing something. But that's fine. If you're a philanthropic organization, that's fine if you're a charity, but if you're trying to build a political movement, something, something more than zero is not enough. You have to set much, much higher standards for yourself. Otherwise, you not only will be absorbed into the state. You'll stupidly justify it to yourself that at least I opened a soup kitchen. At least I fixed this traffic light or something like that. So that electorals has to be built on a foundation of labor organizing it. It just has to be. And D s a, I think is less conflicted about this than it was, a few years ago. You have to be brutal with yourselves about this. This is not a game. And it's fine to do this in your spare time, but at least have the right political orientation that says, I'm doing this in my spare time. What I would like to be, be, be doing is auxiliary work in an organization that is built around working class organizing and working class struggles. Now, I know that there's, caucuses inside the group that are really committed to this. They're organizing in the teamsters, they're organizing in Amazon. Wherever they can get jobs. This is the future of the organization. if this doesn't grow, the Electorals will either die or you'll become a rump Inside the Democratic party, There's no other road. You will never be a third electoral party. There is no room for a third electoral party the United States. Because of the winner take all system and the crazy rules around primaries in this country, you will either employ an inside outside strategy where you push some candidates. on a democratic ballot line and then pressure them through lead labor movement, or you will push them and then you'll, you'll become their auxiliaries and their adjuncts with no power of, of your own. If the DSA manages to traverse to vault beyond pure electoral into electoral plus, our labor organizing. it could not just have an impact on American politics, but because of the weight of American politics on the rest of the world, it'll have an impact on the global left. And what better way to spend your life than that.

Elton LK: 23:53

This is Class, an official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton LK. Thank you to Casey Stikker, who deserves a big thanks for sound engineering and theme music. Thank you to Palmer Conrad for editing. if you're inspired by anything we've been talking about, if you think the system is rigged and democracy is the solution, join DSA. Become a member. I've put a link in the show notes to DSA's website. if you're already a member of DSA, please share this podcast with your local chapter. Class is intended to be a resource for chapters and members to articulate, apply, and share socialist theory with DSA and the wider working class. Also, remember to rate and review us on iTunes or your favorite podcatcher. As you know from listening to other podcasts, this is an important way to get out the word about class.