The class structure of contemporary capitalism cannot be reduced to or explained by cultural, interpersonal, or discursive practices. This is the thesis of Vivek Chibber’s recent book, The Class Matrix. Chibber’s attempt to elucidate this thesis by identifying the specificity of the economic structure — and of the power dynamics that are proper to it — is not, I think, successful. But his failure to pin down what is distinctive about the forces confronting the modern class of wage workers is arguably less important than his realization that there is something there that needs to be pinned down. Even if Chibber does not solve the puzzle, he identifies, at least, the right puzzle.

Søren Mau’s approach in Mute Compulsion: A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital is quite different from Chibber’s. Where Chibber is combative and programmatic, Mau is collaborative and exploratory. While Chibber tries to resuscitate analytical Marxism, with its orientation toward mainstream social theory, Mau’s most important conversation partners are on the far left, with Endnotes, Andreas Malm, and Michael Heinrich supplying some of the most important theoretical materials.

That said, Mau and Chibber are dealing with a similar question: How can we make sense of the economic power that circulates and accumulates in — and animates — capitalism? Near the end of Capital, Marx claims that, “in the ordinary run of things,” capitalist societies reserve “extra-economic, immediate violence” for exceptional circumstances, relying instead on “the mute compulsion of economic relations” to enforce “the domination of the capitalist over the worker” (translation modified). Mau takes his title and his object of study from this passage. What, exactly, is the mute compulsion of economic relations? How does it enforce capitalist rule?