Confronting Capitalism: Why We Don’t Revolt
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 June 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
The Left often invokes the media’s power of persuasion to explain why people accept their situation within capitalism. But what if instead the system remains stable by “the dull compulsions” of economic life?
In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber discusses the difference between consent and coercion, the real role of the media, and the conditions for organized resistance.
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 Jacobin contributing editor Kale Brooks, and I'm here as always |
| 0:22.8 | with Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU, and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy. |
| 0:29.3 | How are you doing, Vivek? Doing very well, Kail. Thank you. So today, I wanted to go back to something |
| 0:34.2 | you had said in a previous episode when we were discussing neoliberalism, |
| 0:38.5 | you had said that neoliberalism never had people's consent, and that instead, at best, |
| 0:44.2 | there was a grudging acceptance, and that grudging acceptance has now, in the last 15 years, |
| 0:49.2 | turned into outrage. Why do you think people on the left got this so wrong? |
| 0:53.9 | Well, Kail, a couple of things. One is that |
| 0:56.2 | I think that it's easy to make the mistake that when you don't see a lot of resistance, |
| 1:00.6 | don't see a lot of people fighting against something, it must be because they like it. That's just a |
| 1:04.2 | kind of common-sensical mistake you can make. And if that were all there was to the world, |
| 1:08.3 | you wouldn't need social analysis. You could just infer, well, we don't see a lot of resistance going on, so people must be okay with it. And you did |
| 1:14.7 | see intellectual saying this, exactly that, that what's the proof that people like neoliberalism? |
| 1:21.8 | Well, they're not doing anything about it. Okay, that's just a kind of a common-sensical mistake. |
| 1:26.4 | But added to that on the left was a sort of trajectory of thought about society and social |
| 1:34.4 | stability and conflict that came out of the 60s and 70s. |
| 1:38.8 | This body of thought addressed the issue that capitalism is such an explosive, exploitative, unfair system, then if it is such a system, |
| 1:47.3 | why doesn't it implode? Why doesn't it explode? Why don't people resist it? And the answer that |
| 1:52.4 | had been given in the 60s and 70s by people on the left was it's because of something called |
| 1:57.8 | ideological hegemony. It's a very fashionable concept in the 60s and 70s, this |
| 2:02.5 | notion that capitalists don't rule through brute force, through coercion, through jails alone, |
| 2:09.6 | although of course they have all those things and they use them, but no society can run on |
... |
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