Workers Hold the Keys
Despite the threat of automation and the weakness of organized labor, workers still hold the key to winning social change.
To coincide with the second printing of our primer on the history and practice of socialist ideas, The ABCs of Socialism, Jacobin and Verso Books are hosting a series of talks with ABCs contributors. Our first was a conversation with Jacobin’s Jason Farbman and Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at New York University and author of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, about why socialists talk about the “working class” so much.
You can read the first part of that conversation here. In this edited transcript of the second half of their conversation, Chibber and Farbman discuss precarity and the changing composition of the working class, how socialists should think about unions, how the Left can get off the college campuses and into the workplaces and streets, and more.
You can listen to a podcast of the discussion (and subscribe to Jacobin Radio) here. You can also buy a copy of The ABCs of Socialism for a special sale price of $5 here.
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