Confronting Capitalism: A Return to Materialism
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Foregrounding workers’ material interests used to be commonplace among socialists. But as the Left faced decades of defeat, a materialist approach to politics fell out of favor. In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, Vivek Chibber defends materialism from its critics and discusses how a materialist perspective understands rationality, the challenges around collective organizing, and cultural differences.
Read the article mentioned in this episode: https://catalyst-journal.com/2024/12/the-flight-from-materialism
Confronting Capitalism with Vivek Chibber is produced by Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, and published by Jacobin. Music by Zonkey.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to another episode of Confronting Capitalism. |
| 0:19.6 | I'm Jacobin contributing editor, |
| 0:21.0 | Kale Brooks, and I'm here, as always, with Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst. |
| 0:26.9 | How are you, Vivek? I'm doing fine, Kail. Thank you. |
| 0:30.0 | So in our previous episodes, we've already talked quite a bit about what hope there is for a continued revival of the left and what kinds of issues leftists should |
| 0:38.1 | take up. And so I was thinking for this week, we could go deeper into how socialists think about |
| 0:43.3 | doing politics and bringing people together around common demands. Yep, that sounds good. |
| 0:48.5 | So you actually wrote a piece for Catalyst recently titled The Flight from Materialism, |
| 0:53.2 | where you answer that question of how |
| 0:55.6 | socialists should think about doing politics by saying they should return to materialism. |
| 1:00.5 | And not only that socialists can be materialist, but that they must be, can you start by |
| 1:06.0 | spelling out what materialism means? |
| 1:08.5 | Well, materialism has a kind of a baseline component to it and a narrower one, |
| 1:13.0 | and socialists accept both. The baseline idea is that ideas, attitudes, cultural mores, norms, |
| 1:21.9 | they don't come out of nowhere. They aren't hardwired into people's brains. They all have |
| 1:26.0 | social foundations. So if you want to know why American culture has particular aspect and why it's different from, say, African, South African culture or from Chinese culture, you look at these social institutions. You look at their social conditions, the economic conditions, instead of thinking that people are just born thinking differently. Now that basically everyone |
| 1:45.0 | accepts. On top of that is a narrower view, which is not just that ideas or institutions |
| 1:51.3 | shape people's attitudes, but that people, when they go about their lives, when they go about |
| 1:58.6 | trying to make a living or have their social relationships, |
| 2:02.6 | they're motivated in some powerful way by their what's called material interests. And that's why we call it |
| 2:09.6 | materialism. People are motivated by their material interests. And what we mean by that is that they try to |
| 2:16.3 | advance their well-being, their physical, |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in -71 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jacobin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Jacobin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.