Hello and welcome to Confronting Capitalism, Jacobin's newest podcast.

My name is Kail Brooks.

I'm a Jacobin contributing editor, and I'm joined as always with Catalyst Journal editor

and NYU Professor of Sociology, Vivek Chibber.

Hey, Vivek.

Kail, good to see you.

So Vivek, people might be familiar with your many interviews on Jacobin on YouTube and elsewhere.

And obviously, you are one of our foremost critics of capitalism.

That's why the show is called confronting capitalism.

But implicit of that is that we're standing for socialism.

And so maybe just to introduce everyone to you

a little bit better, how did you become a socialist? I'm not sure how exactly. It's not easy to

trace the formation of one's views because it tends to be kind of self-serving and you just

kind of put together a cobbled history, I can tell you when I started

thinking of myself as a socialist. That was when I was probably 10 or 11 years old. That's probably

because I was exposed to these ideas at a very young age. Both of my parents were socialists,

and this was in India. I grew up in India. And my parents, but also their entire social circle was on the

left and explicitly socialist left. I was exposed to those ideas that are very young age,

and I guess that's true of a lot of people. In my case, I was also, I guess, open to them and

receptive to them. And I remember I told my schoolmates when I was, I think I was 11 years old when I told them that I was a Marxist and they really didn't know what that meant.

They were left-wing parties in India, so they associated me with those, I guess.

I know that at least as far back as that, I thought of myself as being somehow on the socialist left.

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