Over the past decade and a half, the crisis of global capitalism has led to a massive upsurge in struggle and support for socialist ideas. The capitalist triumphalism of the neoliberal era is a thing of the past. However, working-class organization hasn’t fully recovered from decades of defeats and the socialist movement is far weaker than it’s been for most of the past century. It’s with this in mind that Vivek Chibber has written Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It. 

Chibber, a professor of Sociology at New York University, is one of the main ideological figures in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). He’s the co-editor of Catalyst, the theoretical journal linked to Jacobin, two of the most prominent DSA-aligned publications. With Confronting Capitalism, Chibber’s goal is to rectify “One of the most glaring weaknesses” of the current socialist movement, “the dearth of clear and simple introductions to the basic dynamics of capitalism.” (p. 2) 

That’s a laudable goal but Chibber doesn’t deliver. While Chibber considers himself a Marxist, he champions a reformist distortion of Marxism common in the DSA. Despite the book’s title, Chibber accommodates capitalism rather than confronting it. The book came out in 2022, shortly before such reformism exposed itself when the Squad backed Biden’s crushing of the potential railway strike. Even before the book came out, Sanders’ capitulation to Biden in the 2020 election seriously challenged the viability of the reformist politics Chibber espouses.

Since the book’s publication, the struggles and consciousness of the 2010s have been thrown back. The reformist left’s inability and unwillingness to actually confront capitalism allowed the right to go on the offensive, culminating in the 2024 victory of Trump 2.0. These setbacks are a global phenomenon, with the far-right making gains internationally.

The rightward shift, however, isn’t happening without a fight. There are immigrant and trans rights struggles in the US, new left parties in Europe, and insurrectionary struggles in the neo-colonial world. The potential is there for a new upsurge in struggle that will put the 2010s to shame. But this will require a qualitative break from the failed reformism of the past. While Chibber doesn’t provide a way forward, grappling with where his ideas go wrong can provide important insights for a new generation going into struggle.

Class Struggle 101

To his credit, Chibber does provide some solid Class Struggle 101 introductions to socialism and Marxism. Without getting bogged down in jargon, he clarifies how the evils of capitalism aren’t just the personal greed of individual capitalists. They’re baked into capitalism’s drive for profits.

He explains how the very exploitation of workers for profit gives them power to challenge capitalism: “when workers do organize collectively, they have the unique ability to strike at the very foundation of capital’s power—profits.” (p. 107) The problems begin when Chibber advances to Class Struggle 102.

While Chibber defends the broad outlines of a Marxist analysis, he claims that Marx made some major oversights that he intends to correct. Marx, Chibber alleges, “underestimated, or at least failed to adequately describe, the hurdles that workers have to overcome when they set out to organize themselves.” (p. 112)

He cites three central obstacles that Marx allegedly ignored: 1. The threat that the bosses pose to an incipient organizing drive, 2. The toll that organizing takes on workers’ available time, and 3. Something that Chibber calls “free-loading” but might be more generously called “proxy consciousness,” where workers passively wait for others to do the fighting for them.

These are real obstacles. Workers going into struggle have to, and do, account for them and strive to overcome them. But they’re conjunctural obstacles that rise and fall with the strength of working-class organization. In contrast, the forces Marx described as driving the class struggle—the exploitation of the workers and their role in creating society’s wealth—are structural features of capitalism.

The workers’ movement is currently recovering from decades of neoliberal reaction. The capitalists inflicted major defeats on the labor movement leaving the unions hollowed, while past workers’ parties abandoned the class. This strengthened all the hurdles Chibber mentioned and we’re only now starting to tear them down. By elevating those hurdles to structural features of capitalism, Chibber portrays the setbacks of the workers’ movement as a fatalistic inevitability. On this basis, Chibber looks away from the class struggle, towards the state, as the means to change society.

The Role of the State

Struggles in recent years have taken a variety of forms, from the revolutionary upheavals of 2011 and 2019 to Occupy’s mass occupation of public spaces, to the spontaneous uprising of Black Lives Matter. Among these struggles, electoral politics have played an important role. We’ve seen the Sanders campaign, the growth of the DSA, and the Squad. Internationally, there was Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Syriza in Greece, and Podemos in the Spanish state. Socialist Alternative made prominent use of electoral openings through our work in the Seattle City Council via our representative Kshama Sawant.

Electoral politics is an important arena for the workers’ movement. Used properly, it’s an important tool for social change that can strengthen the broader class struggle. However, it’s an arena built in the interests of the ruling class. Left electoral forces inevitably have to confront the capitalist character of the state. Without a clear understanding of that class character, left electoral challenges have either capitulated to the capitalists or got crushed. Chibber himself lacks this understanding.

Chibber gives a token critique of the liberal notion that the state is a neutral body. But his own view isn’t that different. He sees the state as merely “biased” in favor of the capitalist class, but which could be neutral if it didn’t have the misfortune of existing in capitalism.

He explains this with a physics metaphor:

“The mechanisms we have described exert a gravitational pull on the state, making it orbit around the interests of the capitalist class. But just as with gravity, it is possible to construct mechanisms that can, within limits, loosen the grip that capital exerts on state policy. It requires the creation of countervailing forces that endow the state with a degree of independence from capital, so that it might pass policies friendlier to working people.“ (p. 77)

Through struggle, the working class can force the state to pass policies in their interest. However, that’s not because the state achieves independence from capital. It’s because the capitalists themselves are forced to make concessions to the strength of the workers’ movement. As long as they remain in power, the capitalists, and their state, will move to claw back any concessions they’re forced to make. Electoral struggles and campaigns for democratic rights within the bourgeois state are important battlefields for the class struggle. But mistaking the concessions from the capitalist state for a sign that the state is on our side is dangerous for winning the war.

Concerningly, Chibber’s illusions in the state extend to the capitalists themselves. He sees the class struggle as “bringing segments of the [capitalist] class over to the progressive coalition that become part of the movement pressing for reform.” (p. 78)

Through our Marxist approach, Socialist Alternative was able to use our electoral victories with Kshama Sawnt to win significant gains for the working class, from the $15/hour minimum wage to the Amazon tax. These victories were achieved through mobilizing the working class and exposing the liberal politicians who portrayed themselves as part of “the progressive coalition.”

In contrast, Sanders’ capitulation to Biden and the Squad’s vote to crush the rail strike show what happens when you see the capitalist state as a coalition partner. Internationally, a more extreme example was seen in July of 2015 when the left-wing Syriza government accepted the European Union’s austerity measures that had been rejected overwhelmingly in a referendum the previous month.

None of this invalidates electoral politics as a means of struggle. We’re currently seeing new electoral waves including the revival of Die Linke in Germany, the growth of the New Popular Front in France, and the possibility that Jeremy Corbyn in Britain will launch a new party. But they will run into the same walls as past electoral struggles. By obscuring what electoral struggles can and can’t accomplish, Chibber is setting up new electoral struggles for more defeats and betrayals.

Historical Models

As an introduction to socialism, Chibber’s book has to grapple with historical experiences. The only time the working class succeeded in overthrowing capitalism and holding power was the Russian Revolution of 1917. This revolution was led by the Bolsheviks, who had a clear understanding of the class role of the state. Nonetheless, the revolution degenerated under Stalin’s bureaucratic counter-revolution.

In contrast, European Social Democracy adopted an approach of winning reforms within the capitalist state. They achieved important successes after World War II but they also degenerated, embracing neoliberal reaction as the post-war boom exhausted itself. There’s no surefire way to prevent future socialist struggles from degenerating. But this doesn’t negate the importance of understanding the forces that led to the degeneration of these past movements.

Chibber is explicit in his rejection of the Bolshevik model and his support for the model of European Social Democracy. He acknowledges that the Bolsheviks were far more democratic than most bourgeois sources give them credit. But he still sees Stalin’s bureaucratic rule as stemming inevitably from Bolshevism.

Making his case, Chibber relies on a false dichotomy. Anyone who rejects his own fatalistic explanations is portrayed as a crude anti-materialist looking to blame individual baddies. He argues, “we can’t lay the blame solely on Stalin, Zinoviev, or whoever your favorite villain is.” (p. 137) By portraying Stalinism as inevitable, he’s blaming all Bolsheviks for Stalinism, including figures like Leon Trotsky who fought against Stalinism.

However, he adopts the same false dichotomy regarding the Social Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism: “it can’t have been because of individual failings and treachery.” (p. 149) This time, Chibber absolves the Social Democratic leaders of responsibility by blaming social forces beyond their control. Only petty sectarians, according to Chibber, would blame the Social Democrats for their own degeneration.

Chibber’s argument boils down to the following: The Bolsheviks’ degeneration was inevitable, so don’t emulate them. European Social Democracy’s degeneration was inevitable, so don’t criticize them. This is clearly worthless as a guide to struggle.

The failures of past attempts at socialism were the product of social forces. Stalin’s bureaucracy rested on the isolation of the Russian Revolution in a poor, semi-feudal country. The Social Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism came when the post-war boom collapsed, and there was no longer the economic basis for capitalism to make concessions to the workers.

But this doesn’t mean that either degeneration was inevitable. Stalin had to wage violent purges of the Bolsheviks. The Social Democratic leaders carried purges of their own, albeit on a less violent scale. In Britain, Neil Kinnock waged a witch-hunt against the Trotskyist Militant Tendency in the Labour Party. This involved mass expulsions and shutting down the District Labour Parties where most of the democratic party activity operated. These degenerations were facilitated by the wrong worldviews of the Stalinists (“socialism in one country”) and the Social Democrats (reformism and class collaboration).

The current crisis of capitalism provides even less room for reforms than at the end of the post-war boom. New left formations like Syriza or campaigns around individuals like Bernie Sanders have been much less stable than past Social Democracy and gone into crisis much more rapidly. The failure of these forces has recently given rise to a revival of the right in the form of figures like Trump, Javier Milei in Argentina, and  Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Chibber’s fatalistic approach blames the workers for the rise of the right and the failure of the reformists, rather than actually reckoning with the problems with reformism.

Actually Confronting Capitalism

Part of Chibber’s justification for reformism stems from his observation that the recent struggles in the US were “overwhelmingly through electoral revolts rather than organized class struggle.” (p. 1) Expecting struggle to develop linearly, he concludes: “if the progressive left achieves real electoral success in the next few years, its political agenda will broadly hew to the template laid down by social democracy.” (p. 148)

The actual trajectory of struggle hasn’t been as straightforward as Chibber presents it. The 2010s kicked off with the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring. Movements like Occupy in the US or the Indignados in Europe took inspiration from these but lacked a revolutionary strategy to take the struggle forward. The electoral struggles Chibber holds up as the sole way forward came in response to those movements exhausting themselves.

Since then, however, the electoral road also exhausted itself when Bernie Sanders capitulated to Biden in 2020. In its place the George Floyd movement saw mass protests and the burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct. When this movement exhausted itself, we arrived at the current resurgent labor movement. New struggles are now developing against Trump 2.0 that will inevitably take a variety of forms.

When workers first go into struggle, they don’t jump straight to revolutionary mass insurrection against capitalism. They take the options most available to them. This typically means fights for reforms waged through elections, protests, or strikes. Because of capitalism’s inability to grant substantial reforms, and its resistance to the reforms it does grant, these options are perpetually blocked off as the movement develops. This is the dynamic that leads to revolutionary situations.

The approach of Marxists is what Trotsky called the “transitional method.” This means supporting the struggles for reforms but providing a program and strategy that prepares the workers’ movement for the capitalists’ resistance and points the way to the objectively necessary revolutionary change.

In contrast, Chibber advocates “non-reformist reforms,” a meaningless buzzword popular in DSA circles. For Chibber, a reform is “non-reformist” if it has “the dual effect of making future organizing easier, and also constraining the power of capital to undermine them down the road.” (p. 147) That’s not a non-reformist reform, it’s just a reform.

Revolutionaries do, of course, fight for reforms. What makes such a fight reformist or non-reformist, however, isn’t the content of a specific reform, but how the fight is used to advance the class struggle. Socialist Alternative waged successful struggles for a $15/hour minimum wage and taxing Amazon as revolutionaries. This was done by mobilizing the working class into independent action and packing City Council meetings. We made a conscious effort to expose capitalists, Democratic Party politicians, and union bureaucrats who tried to water the demands down, and we were open about the insufficiency of the reforms on their own. In contrast the DSA has taken up calls for “housing is a human right” or “healthcare is a human right” but disconnected from any wider struggle to overthrow capitalism.

In practice, the DSA’s approach entailed lobbying Democratic politicians to get reforms passed through legislation. This meant the Squad holding back on struggles for Medicare for All during the “Force the Vote” campaign, instead of calling for mass rallies and ultimately breaking with the fundamentally pro-corporate Democratic Party. The issue isn’t that wage struggles, housing struggles, or healthcare struggles are either reformist or non-reformist. The reformist approach sees the fight for reforms as gradually paving the way for ending capitalism. But the capitalist class will inevitably fight back against any reforms that go too far, making revolution necessary. Regardless of his talk of “non-reformist reforms,” Chibber’s insistence on gradualism is what makes his approach reformist. 

A consequence of Chibber’s reformist approach is that he lowers his sights even from the struggle against capitalism. Instead he wants to create a better capitalism, arguing, “What is in crisis right now is the neoliberal model of capitalism, not capitalism itself.” (p. 147) His proposed improved capitalism is outlined as follows: “1. the market will be constrained so it isn’t the arbiter of people’s basic well-being, 2. economic planners will be democratically accountable, and 3. wealth inequalities will not be allowed to translate into political domination.” (p. 151)

Chibber sees this as more realistic than the Bolsheviks’ approach because it doesn’t involve directly overthrowing the capitalists. In reality, Chibber himself is being utopian to think that the capitalists will allow themselves to gradually have all their power reformed away like that.

While capitalism can’t be reformed out of existence, the working class going into struggle is still a positive development, even if it initially centers around elections and fights for reforms. U.S. politics has long been dominated by the Democrats and Republicans, two parties of big business, leaving the working class without its own political voice. A new mass workers’ party would be a major step forward, even if it had a reformist leadership. Whatever the flaws of European social democracy, or of more recent new left formations like Syriza and Podemos, they did provide a pole of attraction for radicalizing workers who could be won over to genuinely revolutionary politics over the course of struggle.

However, Chibber and the DSA don’t even go that far. Chibber puts forward a call for a Labor Party which he counters to a Leninist revolutionary party. Unfortunately, he doesn’t counter a Labor Party to the Democratic Party. In defiance with reality, he asserts that, since the 2020 elections, “the ‘Sanders wing’ of the party has gained a measure of influence over policy” (p. 89) In fact, the blocking of Sanders in the 2020 election saw the Democrats shift to the right while the “Sanders wing” was reduced to shilling for Biden. The DSA’s refusal to break from the Democratic Party and fight for independent working-class politics means, not only are they not confronting capitalism, they’re not confronting the capitalist parties.

The reformist movements of the past period have shown the unrealizability of Chibber’s approach. Not only the DSA and Sanders, but Syriza, Podemos, and Corbyn, have all buckled in various ways in the face of the capitalist resistance that Chibber downplays. These defeats have thrown movement back and led to the setbacks of the 2020s and the accompanying resurgence of the right. The rise of the right hasn’t completely crushed the movement, however. Under Trump 2.0 we’re seeing beginnings of new struggles around labor, immigrant rights, and trans rights. These, and other movements internationally have the potential to launch a new wave of struggle that will put the 2010s to shame. To do this, however, it can’t just be a continuation of the politics that Chibber advocates. It will have to be a qualitative break.