Vivek Chibber: How the Left Got Lost | Doomscroll

ELI5/TLDR

A Marxist sociologist at NYU argues the American left is dead — captured by university professors and NGO staff who’ve redirected the language of radicalism away from class and capitalism toward fights about discrimination among the top 2% of professionals. He says the worst thing that’s happened isn’t Trump or Rufo; it’s that the people who call themselves the left now blame workers for losing rather than themselves, write in deliberately incomprehensible prose, and treat losing as proof of their own virtue. To rebuild, the left has to publicly disown “wokery,” reclaim the Enlightenment, and go back to unions and electoral politics through the Democratic Party — not because the Democrats are friends, but because everywhere else has been bulldozed by neoliberalism.

The Full Story

The basic charge

Chibber’s claim is that what calls itself “the left” in America is structurally a creature of two institutions — the university and the NGO — and that its political content has been bent to serve the interests of those institutions’ inhabitants. The people in those spaces are professionals or aspiring professionals. Their grievance, when they have one, is that they aren’t getting what the white men at the top of their profession are getting. So radicalism, in their hands, gets reshaped from “fight capitalism” into “fight the barriers to my upward mobility.”

“Radicalism becomes mainstream. Because these are the people who control the syllabi in Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia.”

The trick — and it’s a good one if you’re a university administrator — is that this kind of radicalism is permanent. Disparities inside the professional class will never fully close. Even under socialism, he says, you’ll have some bias. So you can run this scholarship forever, get promoted forever, and never have to actually take on capital.

How the cultural turn happened

The “cultural turn” is academic shorthand for the shift away from political economy — from studying the structure of the economy and class — toward studying culture, identity, language, and consciousness. Chibber splits it in two.

Phase one (roughly 1965-1990) was actually good. People like E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, the Frankfurt School. Their argument was modest and correct: people live in material conditions, but they perceive those conditions through cultural lenses, so we should understand the lenses too. This produced a generation of serious radical scholarship. A non-Marxist sociologist tells Chibber that in 1970s England, “whenever a Marxist came to give a talk everyone would go, because whatever else, you knew they were very serious.”

Phase two (1980s onward) flipped the modesty into something else: culture doesn’t just shape how you see the world, culture makes the world. Class, profit, exploitation — these are now just stories people tell themselves. Change the stories, change the world. Which is convenient if you happen to be paid to tell stories for a living.

“How’s that working out? Well, it’s given you the world we have.”

He’s careful, though: the cultural turn didn’t kill the left. The left was already losing — the unions were collapsing, the New Deal coalition was breaking up — and the cultural turn was the symptom of intellectuals being pulled into universities and told to theorize without consequences for their careers.

Why losing feels good

The most cutting passage in the conversation is about a contrast between two communist responses to losing. Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party, fled Mussolini in the 1930s and went to Moscow. He gave lectures asking: what did we do wrong? Why did Italian workers go to Mussolini instead of to us?

The contemporary American left, Chibber says, did the opposite after Trump won. Their response was: I told you so. The workers are racist. They brought this on themselves.

“That left took the rise of fascism as a failure on its part. This left takes the rise of Trump as a failure on the workers’ part.”

Once you’ve decided losing is the workers’ fault, losing actually starts to feel like vindication. You were ahead of them all along. You don’t have to ask hard questions about your own program. And — this is the key — you can keep going to meetings without ever having to do the brutal work of actually winning anyone over.

The professional misfits problem

Chibber spent fifteen-plus years in organized US left politics, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s. His description of who actually showed up is worth quoting at length: middle-class people, mostly social misfits, “unhappy in their social lives or in their intellectual life,” who used the meetings as group therapy and accusation sessions. “You’re a misogynist, you’re a so-and-so” — what activist Twitter would later call call-out culture, born in person decades before social media.

He has a structural diagnosis for this. People in the DSA, NGOs, and most leftist orgs are doing what he calls “political tourism.” They have day jobs. Their livelihood doesn’t depend on the organization succeeding. If they blow it up, they go home and they’re fine. So there’s no internal discipline against destructive behavior. Compare that to a union member whose wages depend on the union not collapsing — they police themselves because they have skin in the game.

The funniest, saddest example: union staffers now unionize against the unions they work for. NGO staffers want overtime, paid vacations, weekends off. While fighting capital. Chibber doesn’t mock people for wanting those things — he wants those things — but he points out that you cannot build a movement that takes on the most powerful forces in human history if you’re punching out at 5 PM.

The Foucault problem

A lot of this gets dressed up in Foucault. The slogan, paraphrased: power isn’t centralized, it’s diffuse — it’s in the “interstices,” the folds and wrinkles of every relationship. So you fight everywhere. The faculty lounge is a battleground. The cappuccino line is a battleground. The salary differential between you and your colleague is a battleground.

There’s a real insight buried in this, Chibber concedes. If unions are dead and you can’t fight at the workplace, fine, take the fight elsewhere. But the move from “we’ll fight wherever we can right now” to “all sites are equally important” is a huge philosophical concession that conveniently lets professionals never have to leave their professional bubble. Most workplaces, neighborhoods, and street-level fights are messy and uncomfortable. The faculty lounge is air-conditioned.

“The places you inhabit may not be at all important in the reproduction of the key forms of domination in society. But it’s a great way for faculty and NGOs to say we’re never going to actually try to organize working people.”

The Enlightenment, defended

A predictable feature of phase-two cultural-turn scholarship is anti-Enlightenment talk — the Enlightenment “caused” slavery, racism, colonialism, the Holocaust. Chibber thinks this argument is so weak it “doesn’t rise to the level of stupidity.”

Slavery is older than recorded history. Genocide is older than recorded history. You don’t need Voltaire to enslave people. What you do need the Enlightenment for is the vocabulary of liberation — the sovereign individual, autonomy as a right against the community, science as a method, the idea that exploitation and domination can be theorized rather than just instinctively resented. Marxism is downstream of Rousseau, Kant, and parts of Locke. There is no socialism without the Enlightenment.

The fact that today’s “left” academics throw the Enlightenment overboard is, in Chibber’s view, the deepest sign that they’re not really the left at all. They’re a particular professional class faction that has captured left language for itself.

What he actually proposes

Three things, roughly:

Unions and the Democratic Party are the only two real avenues left. Not because the Democrats are good — they aren’t — but because everything else (community institutions, neighborhood organizations, even churches as organizing sites) has been hollowed out. Stay close to the mainstream. Use elections as propaganda windows. Sanders did more in one campaign than the entire post-1970s New Left did in fifty years.
Stop folding into the Democratic Party. Build an independent socialist organization that orients to the Democrats but isn’t absorbed by them. This is the Sanders/Jacobin/DSA project at its most charitable.
Publicly criticize the woke left. Not quietly, not in private. Out loud. Otherwise the right wins both the substance (because they’re the only ones criticizing identity politics in public) and the brand (because socialism gets painted as critical race theory). If you value free speech and the only people defending it are conservatives, you’ve created a pipeline that delivers every newly-politicized young person to the right.

The personal arc

He grew up in mid-1970s India, in a family and social circle of socialists. His memory of them is the opposite of the American picture: warm, vibrant, mainstream people, fully alive in their culture, not maladjusted refugees from it. He came to the US, called himself a Maoist out of inheritance, then locked himself in a library for three years reading every issue of Monthly Review, New Left Review, Science & Society, and Socialist Register cover-to-cover. He read every argument and every counter-argument. “Every time I read something, it made perfect sense. Then I read the criticism, and that made perfect sense. It was very, very torturous.” That’s how he got out of Maoism — by reading the people who disagreed with him, which he thinks is the one habit most missing from his peers.

Key Takeaways

Tourism vs. skin in the game. An organization where members can walk away unharmed will be destroyed by its members. Material stakes are what discipline behavior, not ideology. Applies to unions, parties, even — interestingly — companies.
Losing is a signal, not a verdict. A serious movement asks why it lost. An unserious movement uses losing as proof that everyone else is too stupid to deserve it. The second posture is psychologically comfortable and politically terminal.
The professional class invents its own radicalism. When the actually-radical impulse moves into a careerist environment, the language survives but the content gets bent toward whatever’s compatible with promotion. This isn’t conspiracy, it’s gravity.
You can’t win on language someone else owns. If conservatives are the only ones speaking against censorship, identity politics, or institutional overreach, every newly politicized person who’s bothered by those things — which is most of them — defaults to the right.
Clarity is a discipline, not a style. Writing simply forces you to know whether you actually understand the thing. Writing obscurely is often a tell that you don’t.

Claude’s Take

This is a smart, bracing 70 minutes from someone who has spent his life inside the thing he’s criticizing, which gives him both credibility and a slightly unhinged edge — there’s clearly accumulated personal frustration here. The diagnosis is sharper than the prescription. “Stay close to the Democratic Party but don’t fold into it” is correct in the abstract and unanswerable in the concrete; nobody has cracked that puzzle yet. The DSA tried, with mixed results.

The strongest part of the conversation is structural rather than ideological: his point that organizations without material stakes get hijacked by people with psychological stakes is genuinely good political sociology. It explains a lot of why online leftism feels the way it does — not because the people are bad, but because the incentive structure selects for performative behavior over effective behavior. It also explains why unions, for all their problems, remain a more serious political vehicle than any subreddit or podcast network.

Where I’d push back: he’s a little too dismissive of the cultural turn’s first phase, given that he admits it was actually good. And his take on degrowth is a strawman of the better versions of that argument, which do explicitly center distribution rather than universal austerity. The slogan critique is fair; the underlying critique less so.

But the core argument — that the contemporary left is the organic ideology of one slice of the professional class, mistaking itself for a mass movement — is hard to argue with. You don’t have to be a Marxist to notice that the people most loudly speaking on behalf of the working class haven’t met one in a while. Score: 8/10. Loses a point because he repeats himself and his solutions are thinner than his diagnosis. Gains everything back because he’s one of the very few people on the actual left willing to say any of this out loud.