Confronting Capitalism: Populism’s Promises and Pitfalls
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
Populism is in the air, providing unique opportunities and challenges to the Left. On this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber discusses how populist sentiment — popular anger at elites and a demand for economic redress — helped socialists reinsert economics back into politics.
Recent electoral victories, such as Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City Democratic primary, have shown the success of centering material demands with widespread appeal. While not populist in the classic sense, campaigns like Mamdani’s have been able to harness this broader mood of popular discontent. The strategy is not without its limitations, but it holds important lessons for how the Left can reshape a political environment that has been hostile to workers for decades.
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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. |
| 0:18.8 | I'm Melissa Nashik, and I'm here, as always, with Vecbber, |
| 0:22.9 | a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, or Journal of Theory and Strategy. |
| 0:28.9 | Before we start the show today, I wanted to let the listeners know that the podcast now has an email |
| 0:33.7 | address. So if you have any questions for V or if you just want to yell at him, |
| 0:39.6 | you can send an email to confronting.capitalism at jacobin.com. Are you excited to hear from |
| 0:46.6 | our listeners? Actually, you know, it's funny. I have been receiving a steady stream of emails |
| 0:51.8 | over the past weeks and months. So what it means is people are |
| 0:57.1 | interested in responding to what we're saying. So the positive here is that we're making it formal |
| 1:02.5 | and I'll have fewer emails in my inbox. I can defer some of it to you guys. |
| 1:21.0 | Well, it'll also give us a chance to hear more from the listeners about, you know, what they like about the show, what they want to see more of, you know, topics that we haven't explored that are of interest. And I should say we very much intend to, as best we can, respond to these questions and even requests for topics that people think |
| 1:29.5 | are important and deserve analysis from a left perspective today. Yeah. Please force |
| 1:35.0 | Vivek to talk about state theory for 10 episodes. I thought you were going to say movies or something |
| 1:41.1 | like that. Oh, well, we will be talking about movies. Don't you want. |
| 1:47.2 | But today we're not talking about movies. |
| 1:49.6 | Today we're going to talk about populism and electoralism. |
| 1:53.9 | The 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign really, I think, put the left down a certain strategic |
| 1:59.2 | path that has proved remarkably |
| 2:03.0 | durable even though he's no longer a viable presidential candidate. |
| 2:08.1 | So, you know, his formula was kind of Mary appeals to the 99% with attempts to get more |
| 2:13.2 | social democratic politicians elected to state office. Now we're about a decade out from the start of |
| 2:21.3 | this. So I think it's a good time to take stock of what's been successful about this strategy and what |
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