
Taking the Red Pill? William Clare Roberts vs. Vivek Chibber on the Class Matrix
Ben Burgis
3 February 2025
A couple of months ago, at the Historical Materialism conference in London, I attended a panel on the work of Erik Olin Wright. I was pleased to see how packed it was—a promising sign of enduring interest in analytical Marxism, or at least in one of the most prominent members of AM’s first generation.
One of the speakers worked in a jab against one of Wright’s students, Vivek Chibber, into his comments. The jab was about people who think that “the workplace is the only site of struggle” and issues that aren’t directly economic should be dismissed. This was followed up with, and I quote, “If you missed who that was a jab against, it was Vivek Chibber.”
I made two points in response in the Q&A. First, the socialist journal Chibber edits (Catalyst) devotes an awful lot of space to a whole range of issues like, to quote one of Chibber’s recent editorials there, Israel’s “decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.” Second, the whole thrust of Chibber’s book The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn is that interactions between capitalists and workers won’tbe automatically sufficient to generate proletarian resistance, and that what’s required is the conscious, intentional work of building up a culture of solidarity. He explicitly says this work must be done both “inside and outside” the workplace.
The speaker responded in general terms, and we had a reasonably friendly exchange in the hall after the session broke up. During that discussion, he referenced William Clare Roberts’ critical review The Red Pill: Breaking Out of the Class Matrix.
I’d read the review once before, shortly after reading The Class Matrix itself with my Marxist reading group in Los Angeles, but the conversation in London inspired me to give it another look. And that second read convinced me that it’s worth writing about, for three reasons. First and most obviously, I think that The Class Matrix is an important book and that Roberts gets it wrong in crucial ways. Second, Roberts is a very good writer with a flair for aptly summarizing complicated ideas. While I have significant disagreements with parts of Roberts’s book (Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital), for example, I found large sections of that book valuable. So, he’s an interlocutor I take seriously. Third and most importantly, the Roberts/Chibber clash raises much more basic and interesting questions about Marxist theory.
Chibber is a sociologist, and he positions The Class Matrix as a response to two critiques of classical Marxism that have been influential in academia and on academia-adjacent parts of the Left. The first is the one that inspired many of the early reflections of the Frankfurt School. At a rough gloss, these theorists asked why the proletarian revolution eagerly predicted by Marx and Engels hadn’t happened yet. Given that such a revolution would serve the material interests of the working class, the Frankfurters turned to questions of culture and ideology to explain what had gone wrong. This is part of what Chibber means by the “cultural turn.” But he also addresses the more conceptually basic challenges posed by later theorists. These thinkers questioned whether we can even analytically separate economic structures and economic interests from the contingencies of culture and ideology in the first place. Aren’t interests and structures constituted by culture and ideology?
Chibber notes the considerable irony that this deeper critique of classical Marxism became more popular among academic theorists during precisely the historical period when neoliberal globalization was proving that the same economic structures can metastasize in remarkably uniform ways across remarkably heterogenous cultural contexts. But Chibber doesn’t rest on this observation, content to simply denounce these thinkers and assert the undiluted glory of classical Marxism.
In fact, that he writes that it “would be a mistake” to “resume a theorization of class structure as if the cultural turn had never happened” and that:
There are many reasons the cultural turn took hold as fiercely as it did, but one of them surely is that its challenges to structural class theory were real…. [M]aterialists have to provide an answer to the most profound and destabilizing challenge from the cultural turn—if participation in a structure requires the construction of a specific meaning orientation, how can we attribute explanatory primacy to the structure and not to culture? How is materialism even possible if all social action is motivated by meaning and the latter is an effect of culture? To point airily in the direction of global profit shares, declining wage levels, and similar economic patterns is not enough. We need to explain how structural logics are even possible once the ubiquity of culture is admitted.
His key move, in both responding to this challenge and the older “why are we still living under capitalism?” question that motivated figures like Herbert Marcuse to turn toward an investigation of culture and ideology is to make an unaccustomed connection within the classical Marxist picture of capitalist class relations.
Let’s take a moment to review the basic outline of that picture. In modern society, the means of production are owned by a class of private capitalists. In earlier modes of production, the “immediate producers” were kept subordinate by direct force. A runaway slave or a serf who didn’t show up for his corvée duty could be met by men with swords. Under capitalism, Marx famously argued, a parallel effect was brought about impersonally, as a result of the underlying distribution of property. Proletarians showed up to the factories whose hellish conditions and petty tyrannies he spends so much of Capital documenting not because they were frog-marched there at gunpoint but because of the “mute compulsion” of economic necessity.
Chibber’s starting point is to reproduce this picture. Roberts grumbles that Chibber’s two-class model is “parsimonious” to the point of being “cartoonish” but grants that it “gets the job done, pedagogically speaking.” This misses the point. Chibber is keenly aware that any analysis of fine-grained class positions under capitalism is a lot more complicated than “some people are workers and other people are capitalists.” Indeed, in his tribute to his late academic mentor in 2019 (three years before The Class Matrix), Chibber praises Wright for his account of these very complexities.
Orthodox Marxists, he notes there, had traditionally explained away the problem of how to categorize “middle-class” layers like shopkeepers and various kinds of salaried professionals in one of two ways. They either insisted that these intermediary layers would eventually disappear as capitalism progressed and everyone either sunk into the working class or (more rarely) rose to become full capitalists, or that all of these people could already be sorted into one or the other of the main boxes with a more careful analysis.
Erik rejected both positions. First, it was clear that the middle class wasn’t a residual category, bound to disappear over time. Capitalism actively created the occupations we identify with that stratum — there would always be shopkeepers, middle-level managers, salaried professionals, etc. Second, even though it’s true that many “professionals” are just highly skilled workers, many are more than that. They have real authority over other workers, their income is only partly derived from wages, and they have genuine control over their own labor. Their power and choice sets seem qualitatively different from that of a wage laborer. So the middle class is real. The question is, how do we incorporate it into a Marxist framework?
Erik’s solution seems simple, but it was profound. He defined the middle class as those groups that had elements of both classes in them — capitalist and worker. Shopkeepers share some qualities with capitalists, in that they own the means of production, but also with workers, in that they have to be active participants in the shop’s work. Middle managers have some powers of capitalists, in that they exercise power over workers, but like workers, they have no real control over investment decisions.
Hence, Erik famously concluded that the middle class occupied contradictory positions within the class structure. What it meant politically was that this class was objectively pulled in both directions, toward labor and capital. Which way its members in fact went could not be predicted. It would depend on how politics and circumstances converged at any given time.
Of course, Wright was also very clear in his writings on all of this that he wasn’t offering this more complicated picture instead of the classical Marxist two-class map. Rather, he thought that, as with different kinds of literal maps (political maps, topographical maps, and so on), different kinds of class maps were more helpful and illuminating for different political purposes. The two-class map might be more useful for thinking about big-picture differences between modes of production and even the mechanics of how they rise and fall over the course of history, while the messy relief map of “contradictory class positions” was more useful for zooming in on the details of certain kinds of questions about socialist strategy. Presumably, Chibber mostly sticks with the two-class map in The Class Matrix because he doesn’t thinks he needs a more complicated one for what he’s doing in that book. He doesn’t think we need to look outside the basics of the Marxist picture of classes and class relations to answer the most important challenges of the cultural-turners.
While Chibber himself doesn’t quite put it this way, one way of framing the book’s core argument would be that mute compulsion can bear far more explanatory weight than was appreciated by either side of past debates between orthodox Marxists and their culturalist critics. We don’t need to, as Chibber put it when I interviewed him about this a few years ago, stipulate that the proletariat “drank the kool-aid” of capitalist ideology to explain why workers haven’t banded together to overturn the system. Instead, we just need to notice that workers being compelled by material conditions to enter the labor market, continue showing up to work every day, and so on, are, by virtue of that very same fact, disincentivized from engaging in collective struggle.
The material interests workers have by virtue of their position in the class structure are complex. They benefit, of course, from successful class struggle, but there are very real collective action problems, and they stand to lose a tremendous amount from unsuccessful struggle.
Workers don’t need to be ideologically brainwashed to think their conditions are wonderful to opt out of collective resistance. They just have to be resigned to those conditions. A little ideology often helps the medicine go down, but that’s not the main thing going on in this picture. The safer and genuinely smarter bet for most workers most of the time is not to roll the dice of collective struggle but to default to individual-level strategies for getting by and perhaps, in time, getting ahead (or, for example, helping their children go to college so they can get ahead). The thing to be explained isn’t that powerful workers’ movements that make deep inroads against capitalist property relations (never mind overthrowing those relations altogether) don’t arise more often. It’s that they arise at all. And that’s where Chibber brings culture and ideology back into the picture, precisely flipping the Frankfurt School script of economic structures being sufficient to explain working-class resistance and culture and ideology needing to be brought in to explain non-resistance.
Meanwhile, Chibber is more than willing to acknowledge that (a) the world contains enormous amounts of cultural contingency that is in no way determined by the base-level economic facts, and (b) you can’t participate in a structure of any kind if you haven’t internalized the right kind of cultural scripts.
He gives the example of a church:
The relations that bind together the priest with his parish are a kind of structure. Its relata are the priest and the members of the church. And participation in that structure situates them relative to one another in patterned behavior. That structure will remain inert unless its relata—the people it binds together—accept their roles in it. But in order for them to accept these roles, they first have to apprehend what their participation entails. If you simply herded people into a church without their having understood and accepted the norms of comportment, it would amount to nothing more than a collection of individuals occupying a small space together. Thus, the members have to understand the difference between the roles of priest and laity; the laity has to not only apprehend the significance of the rituals but also be willing to concede to the priest his authority, both over them and over the sanctity of the practices; they have to understand how they are supposed to relate to one another within the rituals and also in the quotidian dimensions of the gatherings; the priest, in turn, has to have some mastery of the symbolic universe that supervenes on the ritual gatherings…
In his review, Roberts repeatedly says that Chibber only acknowledges “one” structure. Everything else is cultural, while the matrix of class relationships alone is structural. As we’ve just seen, this isn’t so. Chibber sees a world of structures, and acknowledges that many of them are indeed highly culturally variable and contingent. Nor, even when it comes to the class structure, does Chibber ever say (as Roberts says he does) that the structure is “free” of “culturally contingent mediations.” Rather, he says that it doesn’t rely on the contingencies of those mediations to plant deep roots and perpetuate itself.
The key intervention by which Chibber carves out space for renewed materialism “once the ubiquity of culture is admitted” is once again pointing out that the necessary explanatory tool (mute compulsion) was there in Marx all along.
The reason Chibber thinks we can analyze the class structure’s basic features and its predictable effects on everything around it independently of those contingent cultural mediations is that the class structure, unlike a church structure (or, say, the wildly divergent ways that gender roles are structured in any given superstructural environment, ranging from Saudi Arabia to San Francisco) is an important sense self-activating. He acknowledges that the class structure can only be activated by means of participants internalizing the right scripts about showing up when you’re supposed to, dressing and acting in the approved manner, interacting with supervisors in ways that acknowledges their authority over you, and so on (exhibiting, in other words, “some mastery” of the relevant “symbolic universe”). But his point is that whether or not you internalize the approved cultural scripts isn’t a question that hangs on any sort of culturally contingent thread. To reverse Upton Sinclair’s classic observation, it’s extremely easy to get a man to understand something when his salary (and hence where his next meal comes from) depends on his understanding it.
Think of various kinds of structures (religious, identity-based, and so on) as board games kept on a shelf in your closet. You might decide to take one out and play it, or halfway through the game you might decide to return it to the shelf and pull out another. This doesn’t, of course, mean that all gameplay is voluntary. A parent might threaten to ground his children if any of them skip family game night. More exotically, we can imagine home invaders forcing the family to play at gunpoint. (This is, perhaps, the sort of thing that might happen in an A24 horror flick.) But in all cases some agent has to make an intentional decision to keep the game going. The class structure, to indulge in an analogy far more frivolous than anything that appears in The Class Matrix, isn’t like this. The class structure is Jumanji. You can’t just decide willy-nilly to put it back on the shelf because of your culturally contingent “meaning orientation.” It demands that everyone continue to play.
Roberts objects that “[e]conomic compulsion is not the only sort of compulsion” and “performing class roles is not the only action that economic compulsion compels.” Both are true, but it’s hard to see how either is supposed to undermine Chibber’s argument. On the second point, other kinds of structures can be and often are grafted onto economic ones, as for example in a society when so many employers are transphobic that anyone who wants to get or keep a job is powerfully incentivized to adopt a gender presentation that conforms to their sex at birth. But a quick look around the world shows that some cultures are currently playing the transphobic discrimination game and others have placed it (or are currently in the process of placing it) back on the shelf. The relationship between the enforcement of gender conformity and the mute compulsion that’s central to class relationships under capitalism is, in this case, like the relationship between the motive force of a truck and thee movement of a trailer the truck is pulling. The gas in the truck’s tank is moving the trailer if and while the trailer is hooked to the truck, but the driver can get out and unhook it at any time.
The first point is even less compelling. Neither Marx’s basic insight about mute compulsion nor Chibber’s redeployment of that point to answer the culturalist challenge requires anyone to deny the existence of noisier (and hence more culturally contingent) forms of compulsion.
“Class formation” in Marxist terminology refers to the transition of a class “in itself” (i.e. a set of individuals with the same objective location in the class structure) into a class “for itself” (i.e. a class that consciously struggles in its own collective interests). And the other half of Chibber’s point is that, tragically, class formation is not even a little bit like Jumanji.
Workers who hesitate to do everything from signing a union card to going on strike to voting for a far-left government to joining a movement for the outright overthrow of capitalism are being all too rational. They might get fired. The company might cut its losses and close down the plant where the strike happened. The employer class might cripple the economy with capital strikes the moment the socialist government starts to carry out its program. The nation might find itself economically isolated or militarily besieged by the capitalist powers around it.
The work of building up a “culture of solidarity” is extremely difficult at the best of times and more difficult given various changes in the economic structure of late-stage capitalism (e.g. smaller workplaces). Certainly, success or failure is thoroughly contingent. Even staying in the fight requires at least a hard core of organizers possessed of something like the “moral stamina” Chibber wrote about in his tribute to Wright.
Far from seeing the workplace as the “only site” at which such a culture is built up, Chibber writes in The Class Matrix about everything from “picnics” and “church events” to, yes, labor unions, but also socialist political parties, and at certain stages of the process even “cultural events like plays and concerts” as characteristic elements of the process of building up solidaristic culture. The most dedicated cadre will be primarily motivated by abstract ideological conviction, but things are more complicated the more we look out at wider circles of participants. The long slow process of spreading and deepening ideological commitment is crucial to the project’s success, but straightforward calculations of interests still have to do quite a bit of the heavy lifting. Whether we’re talking about social-democratic electoral campaigns (where voters need to be convinced not just that the reforms being advocated would be nice if they happened but that they politically can be achieved, that it’s worth the risk of losing the election to the greater evil, and so on), workplace-level organizing, or, in those times and places where change happens this way, marching on the seat of government to demand that all power be transferred to workers’ councils, any given iteration of the workers movement will expand and solidify itself or contract and become vulnerable to defeat depending in large part on whether it’s been able to put points on the board, wins in collective struggle that will change individual workers’ risk-reward calculations going forward. In the absolute best scenario, there can be virtuous circle in which solidaristic culture-building can help a movement along to a point where it can deliver material wins that change the risk-reward calculations and this helps build solidarity going forward and...
A thousand things can go wrong, though, and they usually do. Don’t pull this game off the shelf if you’re going to discouraged by long odds.
Roberts accepts Chibber’s point about the un-Jumanji-ness of the game of class formation. But he makes two fundamental objections to Chibber’s basic picture.
Chibber, Roberts says, wants to frame culture and ideology as “not the lock but the key” to workers’ chains. But is this even a meaningful distinction? After all, if the right sort of culture is necessary to break the chains, it must be the case that the wrong sort of culture is what’s keeping the chains in place. All of Roberts’s rhetorical abilities are on full display in his discussion of this alleged “glitch in The Class Matrix.” But his core inference doesn’t work. If whiskey spiked with arsenic will kill me, it doesn’t follow that drinking un-poisoned whiskey is what’s keeping me alive. If I’m standing in a locked room with a pocket full of keys that don’t open the door leading out of the room, the fact that I have all these other keys explains neither how I came to be locked in the room in the first place or why I haven’t been able to get out.
Sometimes, as Chibber himself acknowledges in a brief discussion of identity-based politics, anti-solidaristic culture can get in the way of solidaristic culture. You might think that, stretching the second analogy above, this is a bit like accidentally grabbing the wrong key. But Roberts’s attempt to use this observation to force the conclusion that anti-solidaristic culture (never mind “wrong culture” in general) is the primary cause of workers’ acceptance of capitalist class relations is far too hasty. Building solidaristic culture is difficult, and Chibber’s core point is that the primary obstacles to that task arise not from anti-solidaristic culture but from the innate features of the class structure itself.
Roberts’s second objection is more interesting. He’s skeptical that the class structure is less culturally contingent than other kinds of structures.
On this point, it’s worth quoting him at some length. He writes:
If you reject your church, your community ‘might impose sanctions’, such as ostracism or even ‘physical intimidation’. But, Chibber insists, economic compulsion is not like this: ‘no one has to monitor’ or ‘use social pressure’ on recalcitrant workers, who don’t need ‘a socially imposed punishment’ in order to be driven back to work.
This won’t work, though. First of all, unemployed proletarians are subject to all manner of coercion and social pressure to get them to return to work. If you walk off your steady job today, what are you going to do? Access to land is conditional on having the money to pay for it. You can try moving in with relatives or friends, but you might find that ostracism, the denial of certain social privileges, and other agent-imposed sanctions coming to you. If you turn to panhandling or crime, you’ll discover that this is recognised as a transgression, a breaking of convention. Monitoring and coercion imposed by other parties – even by specially uniformed and armed parties specifically employed for this purpose – will likely follow.
Yes, the mute compulsion of economic relations is a real thing, but everyone – including, presumably, Chibber – knows that the state is back there somewhere, maybe out of sight for now, but ready to step in with ‘agent-imposed sanctions’ if people get too far out of line.
Similarly, shortly afterward, he writes that:
[M]arket forces are themselves the aggregate effects of wilful buying and selling by other members of the community. The market is just people, after all.
He then folds this into an allegedly devastating problem for Chibber’s analysis. How do we differentiate an economic structure analyzable in isolation from cultural contingencies from other kinds of structures? Roberts canvasses various options, all of them allegedly problematic, including:
If what matters for sorting is whether the incentives for participation emerge from non-agential sanctions or agent-imposed ones, then markets for labour-power and other commodities – and hence capitalist labour relations – are going to be appropriate for a culturalist reading.
What should we make of all this?
It’s true enough that, if you lack money and try to get it (or get around the lack of it) by non-approved means, you’ll face various social or even legal sanctions. But the lack of money itself is the heart of the matter. An unemployed worker who spends his last dollar on a winning lottery ticket, or whose previously unknown rich uncle dies and leaves him everything just in time, faces no social sanctions to get him to come back to work. The predominant factor driving an unemployed worker back to the labor market under normal circumstances isn’t any sort of agential sanction but the lack of either productive property of his own or sufficient funds in reserve to keep consuming without generating more.
Marx’s point about this in Capital, repurposed by Chibber to address different questions in The Class Matrix, isn’t to deny that the distribution of property is backed by noisy compulsion. It’s to assert that, with the distribution in place, noisy compulsion is unnecessary to get workers to show up to work. The distribution of property does the trick. In Marx’s Inferno, Roberts saw this as an important distinction. Somehow, though, in “The Red Pill,” he seems to have decided that the noisiness of compulsion is transitive. If A is caused or backstopped by agent-imposed sanctions and A causes B, then B is agent-imposed after all.
Similarly, markets are “just people.” But if that’s true, what can we make of the crucial claim, on which the Roberts of Marx’s Inferno (like every other commentator on Capital) puts so much emphasis, that the domination of workers (and, in a different way, capitalists themselves) by market forces is an impersonal domination?
It's one thing to say that markets, distributions, and so on arise from, are backstopped by, or even are constituted by the micro-level choices of individuals. It’s quite another to claim that the powers exerted by such forces are themselves agent-imposed or that “markets are just people.” This is sloppy metaphysical reasoning, like going from the premise that William Clare Roberts is made out of molecules to the conclusion that he himself is a molecule. And it’s difficult to square his argument here with the core Marxist claims he’s (rightly) keen to defend in other contexts.
While it may be the least important of Roberts’s misrepresentations of The Class Matrix, perhaps the one I found the most baffling was his insistence that the meaning of the title is unclear. Does it refer, he asks at the outset of the review, to “deep facts” about capitalism, or to more mutable facts about how capitalism develops, or perhaps even to the two-by-two matrix on p. 109 “schematizing possible outcomes of economic growth and working class political organization”?
Or, in keeping with the red and blue cover, is it a nod to the Wachowskis’ movie and its contemporary afterlife in online political discourse? Perhaps, The Class Matrix is also meant to name the false, superficial world of academic culturalism from which Chibber offers you a ‘red pill’ exit into real class struggle?
The meaning of the title is, in fact, pretty clear in the text. Chibber is talking about the matrix of class relationships that add up to capitalism, and which (in both their fundamentals and their more historically mutable aspects) form the environment in which political organizing takes place. I’d recommend that Roberts reread the book’s penultimate paragraph, which starts out by talking about how “the class matrix today constrains and shapes the political terrain” as it did a century ago, but in different ways that pose new challenges because of structural changes to the economy. How on earth are we supposed to read that claim on the supposition that the phrase refers to “the false, superficial world of academic culturalism”?
In any case, Roberts uses this alleged unclarity about the “matrix” in Chibber’s title to explain his own title. “I will argue,” he writes, “that The Class Matrix is itself what needs to be escaped.”
In other words, his review is supposed to be a “red pill” that allows us to wake up from the false world of Chibber’s simplistic and monomaniacally class-oriented analysis. I hope I’ve shown, though, that the analytical point at the core of The Class Matrix is a good one, and that, however good a writer or otherwise interesting a critic Roberts may be, his critique doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
In other words, anyone who tries Roberts’s pill, if they follow the arguments to the end, will have the same experience people invariably have in real life when offered pills that are supposed to open the doors of perception and offer an escape into a greater reality. When the trip is over, they’re right back where they started.
Ben Burgis is a Jacobin columnist, an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University, and the host of the YouTube show and podcast Give Them An Argument. He’s the author of several books, most recently Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters.