Why There Is No Working-Class Revolution

Abstract

If all you ever heard was commentary from right-wing outlets, it would be reasonable to conclude that “cultural Marxism” was the dominant ideology among just about everyone who had ever set foot on a college campus. Of what, exactly, that ideology consists might not be very clear, but this much would probably seem beyond dispute: an out-of-touch professoriate has spent years indoctrinating students with anti-American ideas, and the wokeness they have sowed has seeped into the broader cultural sphere, poisoning the well and igniting the culture wars. What started in the ivory tower, that is, has taken over America. While this perspective is, of course, ridiculous, the reason the Tucker Carlsons of the world propagate it is because it is effective—or, at least, it works well enough. And the reason it works is because it gestures at something real, even as it grossly mischaracterizes what that thing really is. So, what exactly is “cultural Marxism”? For starters, that label—either deliberately or out of ignorance—conflates intellectual traditions that have, at best, an uneasy history. It is true that much of academic social science and humanities has, for decades, been largely focused on cultural analysis. And insofar as scholars operating under culturalist paradigms hope not just to understand the world but to change it, they do so at least in part by waging a struggle on the terrain of culture. This only makes sense if you believe that human beings construct their social reality according to norms, values, and systems of meaning they have internalized; then changing reality begins at the cultural level. They may not see it as “indoctrination” as the right does, but it is hard to escape the fact that the academic left has sought to transform society by reshaping the universe of symbols that society encounters, apprehends, internalizes, and uses as a guide to action. This is precisely what the right rails against. But the relationship between this approach and “Marxism” is far from straightforward. In fact, traditional critics claimed Marxists were insufficiently attentive to culture, relying instead on a crude structural determinism that reduced all behaviors to material interests. Modern academic cultural analysis arose historically out of a perceived failure of Marxism to explain social action, and the sources of stability and conflict within a given social order. Given the political stakes, it is necessary to clarify the relationship between Marxism and cultural analysis both for intellectual and political purposes. Stepping into this pressing need for clarification is Vivek Chibber’s newest book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn. Chibber argues that “structuralism” remains viable as a theory for explaining sources of stability and conflict in society, and a relevant model for informing political mobilization. He does not evade the culturalist critique, but acknowledges its validity in limited 1144273 NLFXXX10.1177/10957960221144273New Labor ForumBooks and the Arts book-review2022