On Chibber, Existential Insecurity, and Trump's firings.

I recently read Vivek Chibber’s (2022) Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change it (Verso). I am not the implied audience for it. The book intends to “contribute to the development of the incipient Left.” (p. 2) It understands itself as advancing a “project of renewal” for the “Socialist Left.” (p.4) It does so by using fairly simple language, by being admirably free from jargon, and by keeping scholarly trappings to the bare minimum. There are airport bestsellers aiming to improve leadership that have more endnotes. Chibber is a professor of sociology at NYU, but I bet that the vocabulary of Confronting Capitalism is pitched at high school level. (I mean that as a compliment.)

The core point of Chibber’s analysis of capitalism is its harmful effect on workers. And its leads him to an extraordinary universal claim: “a baseline level of insecurity is forced onto workers by capitalism, all the time, everywhere, regardless of country or region.” (p. 38) This universal insecurity is not due to the bad ethics of capitalists, but the systemic effect of relentless competition (pp. 23-25), the compulsion to minimize cost (pp. 25-29), the growth of productivity which generates a structural vulnerability in the labor market (pp. 29-31) and which prevents workers from reaping the economic gains from productivity (as income).*

This structural insecurity is one of the main harms of capitalism according to Chibber (p. 39). (The other harms are material inequality and a kind of colonization of a worker’s time.) Sometimes Chibber treats these harms also as kinds of injustice or sources of injustice (p. 45). And Chibber is explicit that this structural insecurity (of “the vast majority”) is a central source of the injustice of capitalism. (p. 45) Because there is no legitimate accountability in the authority that constrains the freedom and choice to which the vast majority have to submit in a capitalist system (p. 45). With its emphasis on majority Chibber invites the reader to assume that a more democratic system of economic organization might become more legitimate. (And indeed (e.g., p. 82) Chibber discusses the possibility of “real democracy.”)

Later in the book, Chibber implicitly defines membership of the working class in terms of this structural insecurity: “to be in the working class means that you lack access to the means of production” (p. 99; I think he means control over rather than access, but let’s leave that aside.) And from this follows a kind of existential, structural vulnerability: “the only way to secure a livelihood is by finding a job working for somebody else.” (p. 99) Securing and keeping a job is at least partially outside the control of the worker. The dependence involved is a species of vulnerability because the interests of employers and employees are not shared, and often opposed. And this generates the “economic and psychological” insecurity that is pervasive in capitalism (p. 100). (In context, Chibber has shifted his treatment to “Global South today,” but the underlying logic is universal.)

As regular readers know, I am not especially interested in regurgitating the usual polemics between liberals and socialists. So, before you suspect I will engage in these, let’s stipulate that the structural insecurity that Chibber diagnoses is a feature of capitalism.

Now, a rather central argument developed in the second chapter of Chibber’s book — that is also important to non-Marxist/socialist theory — is that in a capitalist system the state is not neutral between workers and capitalists. And, crucially, this would be so even if the people who run the state were not captured economically and ideologically by capitalists, and the state itself could be miraculously secured from rent-seeking behavior of well-organized interests. For, the state has an underlying interest in promoting economic growth and this means it will be “strongly biased toward the holders of wealth and capital.” (p. 89)

So, on Chibber’s view the liberal sense of state neutrality with rule of law and property rights has a class bias built into it. “The state in capitalism is not and cannot be politically neutral.” (p. 89; emphasis in original.) The state is, in fact, structurally dependent on capital. (p. 76) And so its baseline tendency is to protect the wealthy’s privileges. (p. 76; emphasis in original)

Before I get to the real point of today’s digression, two important but internally connected asides. First, Chibber himself lands on a market socialist position. (p. 154) In fact, in a rare return to jargon, he explicitly rejects the “legacy” of the “Second International” and its identification of “socialism with planning.” (p. 152) But I don’t see how on Chibber’s analysis this structural bias of the state can itself be avoided in market socialism. Who will benefit of it may be different than under pure capitalism, but the odds are is that it will be those (say the managerial class either inside or outside the party) who control the levers of employment.

Second, and related, in Confronting Capitalism the environment is almost wholly absent in Chibber’s analysis. And this matters because the same structural bias in the state’s functioning that generates the heavy environmental externalities under really existing capitalism would also operate under really existing market socialism. This strikes me as a rather surprising omission by Chibber.

In Chibber’s account, only an organized working class with trade unions is able to transform class warfare into political clout. This requires a labor party of some kind. (pp. 76-81) And this has been the means to mitigate the structural insecurity diagnosed above. Interestingly enough, on Chibber’s historical reconstruction America never had such a labor party (see especially pp. 86-7). For Chibber this absence explains why under similar conditions, “Western Europe was able to build welfare states that were deeper, more generous, and more enduring than the American one.” (p. 87).

So much for set up.

I was reading Chibber’s booklet just when the second Trump administration got away with the sudden and unilateral termination of employment and contracts of hundreds of thousands of federal employes. (Over 10% of federal employees has been affected.) In addition, there are mass layoffs in academic labs among non-tenured personnel as an effect of the abrupt cancelation and adjustment in the terms of federal research grants (see here for an unfolding list). While the Trump administration suffers an occasional set-back in the courts while this is unfolding, on the whole one cannot help but think that both as an employer and in its respect for existing contracts the American federal government is fundamentally unreliable. In fact, because policy toward its own federal employees seems to reflect without much time-lag the impulses of the president and his team, these working conditions can be described fairly as ‘arbitrary’ and, presumably, a source of pervasive insecurity.

From the perspective of a European (and I assume a Canadian) the events of the previous paragraph are truly shocking. In many European states the powerful role of and protections associated with civil service status often preceded the rise of labor unions and democratic politics! (See here this Wikipedia page on the German Beamte, which also accurately describes the Austrian, Belgian, Dutch, and French situations.) In fact, this is one reason why the kinds of arguments that Chibber makes about the insecurity of capitalist employment would have felt so compelling once; the alternative to the pervasive insecurity in the capitalist marketplace would have been a civil service status—which often also involves an absence of a right to strike. (In my own native Holland, academics have lost this status and when I returned to employment there from Belgium a decade ago, I immediately joined a labor union.)

The Apprentice and its key phrase "You're fired!" were instrumental in the rise of now President Trump’s fame and popularity. This identification with and glorification of the arbitrary power wielded by American employers — in the private and public sector — is one of the most instructive characteristics of our era. It’s not unique to our era because, if Adam Smith is right, its deeply rooted in our moral and political psychology: "This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." What is implied by Smith (in broader context) is that this disposition also facilitates the disruption of disordered societies, where existential anxiety is pervasive.

Let me wrap up.

The kind of structural and existential insecurity that Chibber has diagnosed is a genuine harm of un-bridled capitalism characterized by at-will-employment and the ability to change terms of contract unilaterally. It also has other effects (on health and spontaneity) that Chibber does not mention that are rather important too. I don’t think the harm is absent in many other ways of organizing social and political life not the least (as Chibber acknowledges) in Soviet era Marxist states. This existential insecurity was often named ‘fortune’ in other eras and is coextensive with political disorder. How to combat it, is no easy matter when strategic agents among the rich and powerful promote it for their own gain.

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*I added ‘as income’ because Chibber has a tendency to ignore workers’ status as consumers.