An influential sociologist revives materialist explanations of class, while accommodating the best of rival cultural theory. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, analysis of class and other basic structures of capitalism was sidelined by theorists who argued that social and economic life is reducible to culture-that our choices reflect interpretations of the world around us rather than the limitations imposed by basic material facts. Today, capitalism is back on the agenda, as gross inequalities in wealth and power have pushed scholars to reopen materialist lines of inquiry. But it would be a mistake to pretend that the cultural turn never happened. Vivek Chibber instead engages cultural theory seriously, proposing a fusion of materialism and the most useful insights of its rival. Chibber shows that it is possible to accommodate the main arguments from the cultural turn within a robust materialist framework: one can agree that the making of meaning plays an important role in social agency, while still recognizing the fundamental power of class structure and class formation. Chibber vindicates classical materialism by demonstrating that it in fact accounts for phenomena cultural theorists thought it was powerless to explain. But he also shows that aspects of class are indeed centrally affected by cultural factors. The Class Matrix does not seek to displace culture from the analysis of modern capitalism. Rather, in prose of exemplary clarity, Chibber gives culture its due alongside what Marx called "the dull compulsion of economic relations."

Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it often difficult for working people to organize around common interests? How do we begin building a more equal and democratic society? These are the questions that are answered in Confronting Capitalism. Even though political organizing can be very hard, political education does not have to be. This will be the book that a generation of socialists turn to for strategy and understanding. Combining elements of Marxism and modern social science with clear language, Chibber is able to outline the core dynamics of our economy and politics. This book provides an indispensable map of how our world works and a proposal for how socialists might overcome the odds and build a democratic and egalitarian future.

"Vivek Chibber's "Locked in Place" is a brilliant, benchmark study of the developmental state and its dilemmas. Over the past two decades there has been a steady move away from systematic class analysis of state strategies toward state-centric approaches. Chibber decisively "brings class back in" in a nuanced and penetrating investigation of how class strategies constrain and intersect the institutional logics of developmental states."--Erik Olin Wright, University of Wisconsin, author of "Class Counts" and "Class, Crisis and the State"

"A truly outstanding book. Chibber presents a novel, powerful, and controversial central thesis that will be of great interest to scholars in the field. He beautifully elaborates the expected consequences of this thesis for comparative historical cases, and presents two critically important, contrasting cases to great effect, with lucidity and elan. The empirical matter is substantial, but is always presented economically and with modesty. The text is extremely well written. The provocative conclusions will, as they should, unquestionably stimulate a raft of further questions and new research."--Robert Brenner

"This book is an excellent piece of scholarship and an important contribution both to the ongoing comparative debate on the role of the state in development and to our understanding of India as a significant and weighty case within that debate. Marked by careful, detailed historical research and unrelenting engagement with general analytical issues, it will be an invaluable resource for future scholars trying to understand the emergence of the post-colonial state in India."--Peter Evans, author of "Embedded Autonomy: States and IndustrialTransformation"

Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital was hailed on publication as "without any doubt . a bomb," and "the most substantive effort to dismantle the field through historical reasoning published to date." It immediately unleashed one of the most important recent debates in social theory, ranging across the humanities and social sciences, on the status of postcolonial studies, modernity, and much else. This book brings together major critics of Chibber's work to assess the adequacy of his argument from differing perspectives. Also included are Chibber's own spirited responses and reformulations in light of these criticisms. With contributions by Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Ho-fung Hung, William H. Sewell, Bruce Cumings, George Steinmetz, Michael Schwartz, David Pederson, Stein Sundstol Eriksen, and Achin Vanaik.

The global economic crisis that closed the first decade of the twenty-first century has demonstrated that the contradictions of capitalism cannot be overcome. The challenge for socialist analysis is to reveal both the nature of these contradictions in the neo-liberal era of globalized finance, and their consequences in our time. Crises need to be understood as turning points that open up opportunities. How to facilitate this is the sharpest challenge posed to socialists by the most severe global economic crisis since the 1930s.

What implications does the crisis this time have in terms of capitalist economic and political restructuring? Does it portend the end of neo-liberalism? Can working classes reverse the pattern of defeat in recent decades, build new capacities, and impose their own template for types of economic and political renewal that can put back on the agenda the need to transcend capitalism itself? What additional costs will they be expected to bear as capitalists states prepare their 'exit strategies'? This edition of the "Socialist Register" addresses these questions and more with typically wide-ranging analysis from contributorsaround the globe.

Provisional Contributors: Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, Alfredo Saad Filho, Hugo Radice, Anwar Shaikh, David McNally, Doug Henwood, Johanna Brenner, Michael Moran, Julie Froud, Adriana Nilsson, Karel Williams, Riccardo Bellofiore, R. Taggart Murphy, Ho-Fung Hung, Adam Hanieh, Ben Fine, Samantha Ashman, Susan Newman, Susanne Soederberg, Larry Lohmann, Dick Bryan, Michael Rafferty, Ursula Huws, and Greg Albo.

Class explains much in the differentiation of life chances and political dynamics in South Asia; scholarship from the region contributed much to class analysis. Yet class has lost its previous centrality as a way of understanding the world and how it changes. This outcome is puzzling; new configurations of global economic forces and policy have widened gaps between classes and across sectors and regions, altered people's relations to production, and produced new state-citizen relations. Does market triumphalism or increased salience of identity politics render class irrelevant? Has rapid growth in aggregate wealth obviated long-standing questions of inequality and poverty? Explanations for what happened to class vary, from intellectual fads to global transformations of interests. The authors ask what is lost in the move away from class, and what South Asian experiences tell us about the limits of class analysis. Empirical chapters examine formal and informal-sector labor, social movements against genetic engineering, and politics of the "new middle class." A unifying analytical concern is specifying conditions under which interests of those disadvantaged by class systems are immobilized, diffused, co-opted or autonomously recognized and acted upon politically: the problematic transition of classes in themselves to classes for themselves.

In recent years, postcolonial theory has emerged as the most influential scholarly explanation for the historical trajectory and social anatomy of the Global South. Its leading proponents - many of whom have become academic superstars - not only reject Enlightenment political and economic theories, especially Marxism, but accuse them of complicity in Europe's imperial project. In this devastating critique, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber carefully examines this project's core arguments about the specificity of the Global South and the deficiencies of Western thought. He shows that their foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical errors, chief among which is a flawed understanding of capitalism's universalizing tendency. Once the real history of capital's universalization is reconstructed, aspects of modernity that appear to be unique to the South turn out to be shared with the North - - and the history of the Global South can be explained by the very theories that postcolonial theorists urge us to reject. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a turning point in contemporary social theory.