The capitalism of 2022 hardly looks like it did in 1848, the year of The Communist Manifesto, or in 1936, the year of the autoworkers’ strike in Flint, Michigan. It’s digitized, globalized, financialized, and tightly linked with a climate crisis that Marx could only hazily foresee. Some critics use these shifts in the workings of capital to argue that Marxism, with its emphasis on the organized working class as the group best suited to radically transform society, is outdated and overly dogmatic.

Vivek Chibber, professor of sociology at New York University, has spent several decades arguing how the working class is still central to the socialist project. He is the author of The ABCs of Capitalism, a series of political education pamphlets, and several books, including The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn.

This June in Berlin, Germany, leading voices on the US and European left gathered for Socialism in Our Time, a conference put on by Jacobin and Transform! Europe. On a panel called “Contemporary Capitalism and Its Gravediggers,” Chibber laid out what the working class looks like today, and how it can build power on new terrain. Jacobin’s Ella Teevan sat down with him to discuss the task of socialists in 2022, the working-class Donald Trump voter, and the role of intellectuals in mass politics.