Social theorists have been telling us the same story

For fifty years

For fifty years, social theorists have been telling us the same story about why capitalism survives.

The story goes like this: workers don’t challenge the system because they’ve been brainwashed. Schools, media, and cultural institutions have convinced them that capitalism is natural, inevitable, even desirable. They’ve internalized the ideology of their rulers. The system persists through consent.

It’s a comforting explanation if you’re on the Left. It means that once you wake people up—once you pierce through the ideological fog—the revolution can begin. The only thing standing between workers and liberation is false consciousness.

There’s just one problem. The theory doesn’t work.

Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix offers a devastating alternative explanation. And if he’s right, it changes everything we thought we knew about why the working class hasn’t overthrown capitalism—and what it would actually take to change things.

The cultural turn in social theory began with a reasonable observation. Classical Marxism seemed to predict that capitalism would generate its own gravediggers—that the conflict between workers and employers would escalate until the system collapsed. But by the 1950s and 60s, this clearly wasn’t happening. Workers in the West were buying cars, moving to suburbs, voting for conservatives. The revolution had been indefinitely postponed.

Theorists like Stuart Hall, the Frankfurt School, and the Gramscians concluded that Marx’s framework was missing something crucial. As Hall recalled, the New Left believed that “the major transformations were not so much political and economic as cultural and social.” The problem, they decided, was that classical Marxism had neglected the superstructure—the realm of ideas, values, and meaning. To explain capitalism’s durability, you had to look at how dominant classes secured their hegemony through ideology.

This became the conventional wisdom. As Martin Carnoy summarized the view, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony meant that “neither force nor the logic of capitalist production could explain the consent that production enjoyed among the subordinate classes.” Rather, “the explanation for this consent lay in the power of consciousness and ideology.” Dominant classes maintained their rule by establishing “their view of the world as all-inclusive and universal.”

Chibber thinks this entire framework rests on a fundamental error.

Start with the claim that workers consent to capitalism because ideology tells them to. This argument requires that workers be unable to perceive the harms that their class position inflicts on them. The theorists of the cultural turn certainly recognize these harms—the exploitation, the insecurity, the loss of autonomy. But somehow, the workers who actually experience these conditions are supposed to be incapable of seeing what the theorists see.

As Chibber puts it, culturalists are “in the embarrassing position of claiming implicitly that while they can discern the exploitative—and hence unjust—character of the employment relation, the actors who are, in fact, being exploited, who are experiencing its brute facts, are not capable of doing so.”

This doesn’t hold up. Workers know perfectly well that their jobs are precarious, that their bosses have arbitrary power over them, that they work harder while their wages stagnate. They don’t need to be woken up. They’re already awake.

So if workers aren’t fooled by ideology, why don’t they organize to change things?

Here’s where Chibber’s argument takes an unexpected turn. The classical Marxist prediction that workers would inevitably organize against capitalism wasn’t wrong because it overestimated the conflict between workers and employers. It was wrong because it underestimated the obstacles to collective action.

Workers face what Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal called a fundamental asymmetry. Capitalists can pursue their interests individually—each firm competes in the market without needing to coordinate with other firms. But workers can only effectively challenge their employers through collective action. And collective action is hard.

First, there’s vulnerability. Workers depend on their jobs to survive. They know that any attempt to organize can get them fired. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, in any dispute between employer and employee, “it is not difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage.” Employers can hold out much longer. “Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment.”

Second, there’s the problem of interest aggregation. Workers don’t share identical interests. Some have scarce skills that let them negotiate individually for better terms. Some prioritize wages, others prioritize job security or working conditions. Building a coalition requires hammering out agreements among people with partially divergent goals.

Third, there’s free riding. Even workers who want change have an incentive to let others bear the costs and risks of organizing. Why stick your neck out when you’ll benefit from your colleagues’ success regardless?

These obstacles don’t prevent collective action entirely. Labor movements have emerged throughout capitalism’s history. But they make individual strategies far more attractive than collective ones for most workers most of the time. As Chibber argues, “the class structure locks its incumbents into conflict, and it does so in a way that limits the latter’s explosiveness.”

This leads to the book’s most counterintuitive claim. The baseline condition in capitalism isn’t consent or coercion. It’s resignation.

Workers accept capitalism not because they think it’s legitimate or just, but because they see no realistic alternative. They’re not dupes—they’re rational actors responding to genuine constraints. They understand that challenging the system requires successful collective action. They also understand that collective action is incredibly difficult and usually fails. So they make peace with reality as best they can.

This doesn’t mean workers like their situation. Chibber expects their ideological reaction to be “cynicism about the system—its being corrupt and so on—and a general tendency to be very pessimistic about social change.” Sound familiar?

The implications are significant.

First, the argument from resignation explains something that the argument from consent cannot: why capitalism remains stable even when living standards stagnate. According to the consent theory, stability depends on the dominant class’s ability to deliver material improvements. When growth slows and wages stagnate, consent should erode, and the system should become unstable.

But look at the neoliberal era. In the United States, real wages have been essentially flat for two generations. In Germany and Britain, stagnation has persisted for decades. Yet there’s been barely a ripple in the political waters. Working-class resistance has grown weaker, not stronger, even as conditions have worsened. Strike activity collapsed almost in tandem with stagnating wages.

The consent theory predicts instability in these conditions. The resignation theory predicts exactly what we observe: quiescence born of perceived powerlessness.

Second, the argument reframes what it would actually take to transform society. Cultural theorists thought the key was breaking through ideological mystification—consciousness-raising, counter-hegemonic discourse, exposing the contradictions of capitalism. But if workers already know their situation is unjust, the problem isn’t their ideas. The problem is the material obstacles to collective action.

This is why labor organizing is so arduous—”precisely because employees are not blindly following the rules.” They have perfectly good reasons to be cautious. Overcoming their rational hesitation requires actually changing the risk-reward matrix they face: building organizations that reduce the individual costs of participation, demonstrating that collective action can succeed, creating the trust and solidarity that make people willing to sacrifice for each other.

In other words, the road to change runs through painstaking, institutional work—not ideological revelation.

Third, Chibber rescues structural class theory from what he sees as a misunderstanding by both its critics and its defenders. The cultural turn accused structural Marxism of ignoring agency and reducing workers to automatons. But Chibber argues this gets things backwards.

For a structure to reproduce itself, the actors within it must have reasons to play by its rules. The capitalist class structure generates those reasons by placing workers in a situation where individual compliance is more attractive than collective resistance. Workers participate knowingly, not as robots executing a program. Their agency is the mechanism through which the structure reproduces itself.

This means a deterministic process—the steady reproduction of class relations—is actually produced by conscious human choice. As Chibber puts it, “a process that is quite deterministic... is the product of fully activated social agency.” Seeking out a job, holding onto it, competing in the labor market—these require “enormous drive, creativity, imagination, and resolve.”

The structural argument doesn’t deny agency. It explains how agency unfolds in a world of constraints.

There are questions the book leaves open. If resignation is the baseline, under what conditions does it break down? What turns the exceptional moments of successful collective action into something more durable? How do we understand the periods when working-class movements did reshape capitalism—the rise of social democracy, the welfare state, the union density of the mid-twentieth century?

Chibber’s framework suggests these achievements required overcoming the structural obstacles to collective action through sustained, organized effort. And it implies they remain vulnerable whenever that organized power weakens—which is precisely what’s happened over the past fifty years.

The Class Matrix is ultimately a book about taking workers seriously. Not as dupes to be enlightened or automatons executing a historical script, but as rational actors navigating real constraints. The question isn’t why they don’t see the truth. The question is why the truth isn’t enough.

Understanding this matters because it changes what we should focus on. Not better arguments or more compelling narratives. Not piercing through ideological mystification. But the long, difficult work of building organizations capable of shifting the material balance between workers and employers.

The revolution, if it comes, won’t arrive because workers finally wake up. It will arrive because someone figured out how to change the odds.

——

Sources:

Chibber, Vivek. The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn. Harvard University Press, 2022.

Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776.

Offe, Claus, and Helmut Wiesenthal. “Two Logics of Collective Action.” Political Power and Social Theory 1 (1980).

Hall, Stuart. Lectures at the University of Illinois, 1983.

Carnoy, Martin. The State and Political Theory. Princeton University Press, 1984.

Przeworski, Adam. Capitalism and Social Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.