The fundamental aim of Vivek Chibber’s latest book, The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn, is to restore the central role that economic and structural forces play in studying the hierarchies of power and privilege in modern capitalism. This class-based understanding of social relations—one principally influenced by Marx, and which dominated leftist thought until the 1970s—gives pride of place to the material conditions that impose real constraints on people’s economic choices. Marx, Chibber explains, believed that such economic constraints would produce a working-class consciousness in which people engage in collective action centered on their economic interests, leading ultimately to revolution.
Even as Chibber—a professor of sociology at New York University—embraces much of this Marxist perspective, he believes that elements of it need to be updated. For this reason, he is sympathetic to certain aspects of the so-called “cultural turn,” which first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of the New Left. Chibber shows that the early theorists associated with the cultural turn initially sought to understand why the working class, far from being the gravediggers of capitalism, as Marx
— source thenation.com | May 23, 2022