Class Matrix

Regular price €25.99
A01=Vivek Chibber
Adam Przeworski
Age Group_Uncategorized
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Antonio Gramsci
Author_Vivek Chibber
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autonomy
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HPS
Category=JBSA
Category=JFSC
Category=JHBA
Category=JPQB
Category=KCS
Category=QDTS
class conflict
coercion
collective action
consciousness
consent
contingency
COP=United States
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eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erik Olin Wright
hegemony
Language_English
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
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resignation
softlaunch
stability
Stuart Hall
varieties of capitalism
wage labor
work conditions

Product details

  • ISBN 9780674297296
  • Weight: 229g
  • Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
  • Publication Date: 06 Aug 2024
  • Publisher: Harvard University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
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“A quite thorough and impressive work, not only a compelling defense of materialism but also a fair-minded if highly critical engagement with cultural theory. It isn’t clear how culturalists—especially the anti-Marxist ones—can effectively respond to this broadside, tightly and cogently argued as it is.”—Chris Wright, CounterPunch

“Chibber…has developed a sophisticated, elegant, and readable defense of the sociological significance of class structure in understanding and addressing the key problems inherent in capitalism.”—Choice

“[A] clear, compelling, and systematic statement of the view that class is an objective reality that predictably and rationally shapes human thought and action, one we need to grapple with seriously if we’re to comprehend contemporary society and its morbid symptoms.”—Jacobin

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, theorists argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture—that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival.

Chibber accommodates the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework, showing how one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. He vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain, while also showing that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors.

The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called “the dull compulsion of economic relations.”

Vivek Chibber is Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. He is a contributor to the Socialist Register, American Journal of Sociology, Boston Review, and New Left Review.