Confonting Capitalism: Reform and Revolution
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Social-democratic politics have been part of the socialist movement for over a century. Some features, like the commitment to pursuing economic rights for the working class via the state, have remained consistent over time. But when did social-democratic ambitions to overthrow capitalism turn into efforts to reform the system?
In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber takes a broad look at the early agenda of social-democratic parties. Through an examination of their views on the state, class, and socialism, he unpacks social democracy’s relationship to the Left’s politics today.
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Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chipper, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. |
| 0:28.8 | As a reminder, if you have any questions for Vivek or suggestions for future topics on the show, you can send us an email at confronting.com at confronting.capitalism at jacobin.com. |
| 0:41.3 | V, we're coming up on our one-year anniversary of doing the podcast. |
| 0:46.3 | Yeah, it's amazing. |
| 0:47.3 | I think we've done around 24 or 25 episodes already, and that's massive. |
| 0:52.3 | Yeah, no, and we've been able to touch on such a wide |
| 0:55.6 | array of topics and we've had a lot of really great guests from Catalyst authors on. So, |
| 1:02.0 | you know, here's to another year. Yeah, it's a great time to have started the show because so much |
| 1:07.4 | is happening in New York right now. Yeah. And because it's New York, it has national and international implications. |
| 1:13.0 | So it's a very good time to have a forum and a platform to which we can analyze some of this. |
| 1:18.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:18.9 | Well, speaking of good times, today we're talking about, I would say, a good time for the left in general. |
| 1:27.3 | I'm sure there's plenty of people who |
| 1:29.1 | would want to quibble with that. But today we're talking about social democracy. Yeah, one of the |
| 1:34.1 | most important subjects for the left today, I think. And this is our initial foray into the subject. |
| 1:40.3 | And we'll be approaching it again and again and again from different angles because there's so much to be gleaned |
| 1:45.5 | and so many things to be learned from that now over a hundred year experience with it. |
| 1:49.9 | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 1:51.3 | And today, I think the goal is to just kind of set the stage, talk very broadly about social democracy |
| 1:58.5 | so that, you know, we can do future episodes that dig |
| 2:03.7 | more into specific instances of social democracy, specific parties, challenges that the |
| 2:10.3 | social democratic movement face. So we're going to be talking a lot about this topic in future |
... |
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