Vivek Chibber: What is Socialism Today? | Doomscroll

ELI5/TLDR

Sociologist Vivek Chibber argues the left has been talking to the wrong people for forty years. The actual working class — multiracial, sixty-to-seventy percent of the labor force — is more open to organizing than at any point since the 1950s. The barrier isn’t “racist workers.” It’s college-educated intellectuals who need racism to be permanent because their careers depend on it. He thinks neoliberalism is in a legitimacy crisis but capitalism isn’t, that planned economies don’t work for boring incentive reasons even with supercomputers, and that any honest socialist today is a social democrat in the short term whether they admit it or not.

The Full Story

Why workers, not “the marginal”

The whole conversation starts with the gravediggers line from the 1848 Communist Manifesto — capitalism creates the people who will bury it. Chibber says yes and no. The literal version was wrong. The 50-year revolutionary opening that ran from 1848 to the 1920s closed, and the supposed gravediggers ended up lying down next to the grave instead of pushing capitalism into it.

But the underlying logic still holds. Workers are the only group with leverage against capital, because capital depends on them to make profits. Not on the unemployed, not on the disabled, not on any of the more morally urgent categories. Leverage is the whole game.

The reason is that they have a social power that nobody else does. So even while they may not be the worst off, the most vulnerable, the most marginal, they are the ones who have the most power against capital.

This is why he’s allergic to a certain style of left-wing politics that romanticizes the most marginal. Marginal people, he says, are politically ineffective by definition. The way you protect them is by hitching them to labor and passing universal measures — social insurance, healthcare, free transit. Universal programs help everyone, but they especially help the people too vulnerable to fight for themselves. Means-tested charity-mode politics turns suffering into a permanent identity instead of a problem to solve.

The “racist worker” myth

The angriest moment of the conversation is when the host asks about the standard line that trade unionism is hopeless because workers are too racist. Chibber calls it garbage and gives a clean historical comparison.

In 1955 — in the depths of Jim Crow — the white working class was full of real, hard racism. And yet 1935-65 was the great period of multiracial trade union growth in America. Black union leaders rose to the front ranks. Latinos too. Compare that to the unionization drives of the last five years: Starbucks, Amazon warehouses, the UAW. All multiracial. All run into many obstacles. White racism, he says, was not one of them.

This is an effect of the college-educated liberal left that doesn’t reflect realities about workers. It reflects their hatred of workers. It reflects their contempt of workers.

The working class moved on. Intellectuals didn’t. He blames a specific book — Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism — for re-enshrining racism as an “ontological fact” of global history rather than something historically constructed and therefore beatable. Up through the 1970s, Black left intellectuals worked to show that racism was temporal and could be fought. Then the academy decided it was permanent. The bread and butter of entire university departments now depends on this being true.

Crisis of neoliberalism, not of capitalism

Chibber is careful here. Neoliberalism is in a crisis, but a specific kind: ideological and political, not economic. For 40 years people felt this was the only game in town. Now they don’t. They’re enraged. The legitimacy is gone. Things that any advanced country should be able to take for granted — basic services, basic security — have been denied for two generations while billionaires get more obscene.

But — and this is the sober part — a system in legitimacy crisis isn’t necessarily under threat. Threat requires a replacement. Right now the political formation gaining most from the crisis is the right and far right, and none of them have a viable economic model. Trump’s tariffs were a wrinkle inside neoliberalism, mostly walked back. European far right has nothing.

The old order is dying but the new one cannot yet be born.

His worry is that politics abhors a vacuum. If the left can’t get coherent fast, the right will eventually cobble together something corporatist and state-led — not fascism, he says (he thinks the word is overused), but a meaningful step backward.

What “socialism” actually means in 2025

He lays out a clean spectrum. Worth keeping.

Centrist social democracy. What Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani actually mean when they say “democratic socialist.” Not socialism at all in the technical sense. Capitalism plus more guarantees: Medicare for All, free transit, free childcare, decommodifying the basic necessities. Right-wing parties have built versions of this. Modest.

Ambitious Nordic-style social democracy. Decommodify a bigger slice — maybe housing, maybe all of education through college, maybe utilities, maybe media. And critically: build the entire program on the back of unions. Make it easier to form them, easier to sustain them. Sweden, Norway, Denmark in their peak.

Market socialism. Now you abolish private ownership of the means of production. The means of production are publicly or community-owned, but you keep markets to handle prices and signals. Yugoslavia, Hungary, arguably the late Soviet Union were partial versions.

Planned socialism. No private property, no markets either. Planners do everything.

He puts himself between the second and third boxes and is clear that none of the first three are capitalism’s enemy in any deep sense — social democracy is “fought for within capitalist property relations,” a rocky marriage, but a sustainable one. Decades of evidence say it works.

Why nationalized healthcare is cheaper (and why America still won’t do it)

A nice clean illustration. The cliché is that government-run systems are bureaucratic. Reality: private US healthcare is bureaucratic. The fastest-growing cost in the American medical system over forty years is administrative. An army of clerks figures out what insurance you have, then another army tries to deny it. Hospitals collude with insurers to push prices up because the government isn’t there to negotiate.

In a single-payer system you walk in, show your citizenship card, you’re done. One insurer. One negotiator. Bureaucracy gets pruned, not multiplied.

So why does America not have it, given that it would even save corporations money on their own employee benefits? Because once you let the principle in — that people get certain goods as a right — capitalists lose a key piece of leverage. A worker with guaranteed healthcare, housing, transport is less terrified of getting fired. The wage negotiation changes. Employers know this and would rather pay higher costs than let that genie out.

The calculation debate (and why he thinks the Austrians won)

This is the thirty-minute weeds section worth slowing down for. The Austrian economists — Mises, then Hayek — said in the 1920s-40s that planned economies couldn’t work because planners can’t possibly gather enough information about what to make and at what relative prices. Markets do this automatically through haggling. The socialist response (Lange, Lerner) was that the planner could simulate the auctioneer that markets implicitly assume.

Chibber thinks the Austrians won that round in the 20th century. And he thinks they’re still winning, but for a non-obvious reason. Information is getting easier — supercomputers, just-in-time logistics, Walmart and Amazon predicting demand in real time. That’s the information problem and it’s increasingly tractable.

The unsolved one is the incentive problem. Imagine a plan with hundreds of thousands of moving parts. Each factory’s input is some other factory’s output. Once 10% of those links break — supply chains do this constantly — managers held accountable for outputs they can’t make start hedging. They under-report capacity. They hoard inputs in case future deliveries fail. Planners notice and start discounting reports. Now both sides systematically lie to each other, and the actual goods produced are out of step with what’s needed.

Even if you had perfect information, the uncertainty coming from the delivery of goods would create the incentive problem… Managers of establishments have an incentive to actively disobey the plan.

The Soviet Union, he says, basically learned to live with notional plans nobody followed. Punishment would have shut the economy down. So they ran the country by trying to outfox the lying. He thinks no amount of “democratic enterprise” or “real worker control” handwaving solves this — people will rationally choose deception under uncertainty.

His takeaway: planning can probably work in 40-50% of an economy where supply-demand is predictable (warehousing, basic utilities). It can’t work for the whole thing.

The Meidner Plan and the slow walk

Sweden in the mid-1970s. An economist named Rudolf Meidner proposed using union pension funds to gradually buy up stock in publicly traded companies. Maybe 1% per year, no upper limit. After enough decades, unions would own the means of production. Not by revolution, by slow accumulation.

Swedish capital recognized exactly what was happening and crushed it. Chibber’s read: the right idea, wrong delivery vehicle. American unions have hundreds of billions but it’s a trivial fraction of the US economy. The principle to keep is that you need public institutions actually creating new investment — not just nationalizing existing assets, but generating new ones — to break capital’s monopoly on where money flows.

Why “smash the state” is incoherent

Asked about anarchism. He’s respectful — the anarchist tradition lived inside the broader labor movement and produced real things like the CNT. But he points out a contradiction in the parts of the contemporary left that say both “smash the state” and “we want a planned economy.” A planned economy is a centralized authority with lawmaking and enforcement power. That’s a state. Pick one.

His diagnosis of pure-anarchist ultra-leftism is psychological as much as political. They were never in power, so they never had their priors disabused. They confuse “power corrupts” with “any compromise is corruption.” The result is a self-fulfilling marginality where unrealistic demands keep them small, and being small keeps them feeling pure.

The closer. He says there has never been a successful revolution in a democratic country (Finland 1918 is the lonely possible exception, and that was a hundred years ago). Democracy gives people enough release valves that you never get the kind of total state breakdown that makes a revolutionary opening possible.

Lenin, he says, wrote the most brilliant single sentence in social science: revolutions happen when the ruled can no longer take their conditions and the rulers can no longer rule. Both halves matter. You need a paralyzed ruling class and a defected army. You can’t manufacture that. It comes from war, fiscal collapse, fragile state formation. The 20th century revolutions all happened in agrarian post-war states on unsure moorings.

So if you can’t leap, you walk. The walk is: aggregative reforms that build a coalition over decades, nationalizations that chip away at capital’s monopoly on investment, capital controls, workplace power. Which adds up to social democracy.

If you’re not going to be able to leap into communism or socialism through a revolutionary rupture, you have to walk there.

Key Takeaways

Workers aren’t socialism’s priority because they suffer most. They’re the priority because they’re the only group with leverage against capital.
Universal programs (Medicare for All, free transit) protect the truly marginal better than means-tested charity politics ever can.
The 1955 white working class was deeply racist and still built multiracial unions. Today’s working class is far less racist. The “workers are too racist to organize” line is an intellectual class projection, not a fact about workers.
Neoliberalism is in legitimacy crisis. Capitalism isn’t. The far right is benefitting most from the vacuum despite having no economic model.
“Democratic socialism” in US discourse means social democracy. Real socialism (no private ownership of means of production) is a separate, more ambitious thing.
Single-payer healthcare is cheaper because private insurance multiplies bureaucracy; public systems prune it.
Planning’s unsolved problem is incentives, not information. Managers under uncertainty rationally lie to planners; planners then discount the lies; the whole system loses correspondence with reality. Supercomputers don’t fix this.
Planned economies might work for 40-50% of activity (predictable, basic). Not for the whole thing.
The Meidner Plan: incremental union purchase of corporate stock as a slow walk into socialism. Killed by Swedish capital, but the underlying principle — public institutions creating new investment — is worth keeping.
“Smash the state” + “planned economy” is incoherent. A planned economy is a state.
No successful revolution has ever happened in a democratic country. Strategy has to start there.
The work is decades-long: nationalizations, union-friendly law, capital controls, decommodified necessities. There’s no shortcut.

Claude’s Take

Chibber is a serious mind making a deeply unfashionable argument inside the contemporary left, which is what makes it interesting. The strongest section is the calculation debate — the incentive-problem framing is genuinely useful and travels beyond socialism (it’s why centrally-managed corporations also rot at scale). The cleanest section is the planned spectrum from centrist social democracy to full planned economy. Most people, including most self-described socialists, can’t articulate that ladder, and the conversation does it without jargon.

The weakest section is the cultural one. The “intellectuals invented worker racism to keep their jobs” line is delivered with such certainty that it overshoots. There’s a real critique buried in there — academic identity politics has detached from organizing — but the rhetorical move of saying these people hate workers reads as polemic rather than analysis. The Cedric Robinson takedown also probably deserves a longer engagement than the few sentences it gets.

The crisis-of-legitimacy framing is sharp and likely right. The honest acknowledgement that the right is winning the vacuum and the left has years to get coherent or lose the moment is the kind of sober left-wing thinking that’s rare. He doesn’t sell hope cheaply.

8/10. Loses a point for the polemical edge in the culture section and for one or two moments where the deadpan certainty outruns the evidence. But this is unusually clear thinking on a topic where most podcasts produce slogans, and the calculation-debate explanation alone is worth the run-time.