Confronting Capitalism: Why Class Matters
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 27 August 2025
⏱️ 49 minutes
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Summary
Utilizing class analysis is the bread and butter of socialist politics. But understanding how classes are shaped and reproduced has changed over time.
On this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber breaks down how the Marxist tradition has theorized class, the difference between a class in itself and a class for itself, and how class analysis is used within political organizing.
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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 Vecipper, |
| 0:22.4 | a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalysts, a journal of theory and strategy. |
| 0:28.2 | Are you ready for this one today, V? |
| 0:30.0 | I've got my theory cap on, yes. |
| 0:32.5 | Yeah, today we're doing a pretty theoretical episode. |
| 0:36.3 | We're talking about Marxist class analysis, which is probably my personal favorite aspect of Marxist theory. |
| 0:43.8 | This is what really hooked me into being a Marxist and convinced me that Marxism offers a uniquely insightful and systematic way of understanding capitalism, politics, and the global |
| 0:59.4 | economy. It's also pretty much how we met. Yeah, you sat in on a class of mine, what, |
| 1:05.0 | seven, eight years ago? Oh my gosh. I didn't realize. I knew it was 2017, but when you sit down and think about it. |
| 1:13.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:13.7 | Wait till you hit my age. |
| 1:15.1 | Then you regret these years even more. |
| 1:17.1 | No, I'm going to be 30 forever. |
| 1:18.9 | It's going to be fine. |
| 1:20.4 | I think we should kind of give the listeners a little trigger warning or something |
| 1:25.3 | that this is pretty much the matrix code. |
| 1:29.1 | Like, once you see it, you can't unsee it. |
| 1:32.1 | And for better and for worse, I would say. |
| 1:34.8 | Was it blue-pilled or red-pilled? |
| 1:36.5 | I know. |
| 1:36.7 | I'm so pissed that the rights stole that. |
| 1:39.1 | Because they don't have any systematic understanding, like, what we can offer. |
... |
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