Vivek Chibber is a professor of sociology at New York University. He is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.
Capitalism’s recurring crises have long fueled predictions of its inevitable demise. Vivek Chibber explains why breakdown isn’t guaranteed — and why political agency, not historical laws, will determine whether we get socialism or barbarism.
Central planners had a rational vision: replace the anarchy of the market with conscious coordination. Vivek Chibber explains why calculation and incentive problems undermined that vision, but a different sort of socialism can still flourish.
A socialism with a role for markets but not capitalists can deliver human flourishing without the pitfalls of fully planned economies.
Krystal Ball, Vivek Chibber, and Matt Karp discuss how class politics stalled after the Bernie Sanders campaigns — and why a new political opening is finally emerging.
With its vast logistics empire deploying robotics, surveillance, and AI to block worker power at every turn, Amazon now sits atop the throne of American capitalism. Organizing it will define the future of the labor movement.
Both the White House and Israel wanted swift regime change in Iran. Instead they’ve triggered a spiraling conflict with no plausible endgame.
Under capitalism, technological “progress” like AI systematically deskills workers, deepens managerial control, and turns the labor process into a site of conflict rather than liberation. This is by design.
Artificial intelligence is unlikely to produce permanent mass unemployment, Vivek Chibber argues. But without class struggle from below and state action, automation will deepen inequality and leave workers to bear its costs.
Iranians have been trying to complete their democratic revolution for over a century. Every time the US gets involved, it sets that project back by decades.
In Europe, labor unions and socialist parties marched together and won massive reforms. In the United States, they were divided. Vivek Chibber explains how that split still shapes US politics today.
For 40 years, social democratic parties radically improved life for workers. The labor movement and worker militancy made it possible.
Today liberals lead the call for abundance. But if they really want to deliver plenty for all, they’ll need to confront the entrenched power of the capitalist class.
Why was the revolutionary road out of capitalism abandoned for an evolutionary one? Vivek Chibber explores how socialist parties moved from revolution to reform, but why real progress will always mean a conflict with capital.
Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power. Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.
Despite what you may have heard, colonial plunder didn’t give rise to capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber discusses why the “colonialism-created-capitalism” argument fails, and why Marxism provides a better account of its emergence.
Vivek Chibber describes how four decades of neoliberalism have distorted the radical left, but also how the Left is finally starting to rebuild a truly socialist politics — and what it will take to advance further.
We live in an age of populism, on the Right and on the Left. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber explains both populism’s potential and limitations for putting class and economics back into politics.
Some argue that the continued existence of the middle class refutes Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber explains why this is wrong.
Vivek Chibber on how we should understand capitalism's middle strata — and why so many professionals are moving toward anti-capitalist politics.
The Trump administration's recent bombing of Iran suggests that elites have failed to learn the lessons of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.