Beyond the Wage Relation
A Marxist Response to Vivek Chibber's Materialist Socialism
February 24, 2026
Over the last year we’ve received a number of responses to Vivek Chibber’s work. Given that many of these responses raise issues of broad strategic and theoretical interest, we’ve decided to publish two of them as the beginning of a dossier. We hope these pieces will begin a developing conversation about materialist analysis and expect future contributions, both from submitting authors and members of our editorial board.
The next entry in the dossier is by Bilal Zahoor and will appear this Friday, February 27.
Since Marx’s death on March 14, 1883, there have been fiercely heated debates about the interpretation of his work. Their harshness is partly explained by the fact that the strategy of socialist parties was often derived from them. Yet with the collapse of really existing Communism, capitalism stopped being treated as a subject worthy of critical interrogation in many circles, and Marxism was increasingly dismissed as outdated. As we move into the second quarter of the twenty-first century and the failure of the capitalist system becomes increasingly evident, Marxism appears to be experiencing a tentative comeback. In this context, the issue of which Marxism will manage to become hegemonic for the left and socialist politics is once again on the table.
Amongst the various attempts to articulate what a contemporary Marxism should look like, the work of political sociologist Vivek Chibber has gained a degree of prominence in recent years. Last spring, Chibber published an article titled Materialism Is Essential for Socialist Politics (2025), in which he offers a concise and programmatic statement of his broader intellectual project—articulated in works such as The Class Matrix (2022) and in his podcast Confronting Capitalism on Jacobin Radio.1Vivek Chibber, “Materialism is Essential for Socialist Politics,” Jacobin, May 20, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/05/materialism-socialism-democracy-left-wing; Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674269835; Cale Brooks and Vivek Chibber, “A Return to Materialism,” January 15, 2025, in Confronting Capitalism, produced by Jacobin, Podcast, MP3 audio, 37:07, https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/confronting-capitalism-with-vivek-chibber/id1783361047. Specifically, he defends what he terms a “traditional” account of materialism. He argues that this understanding anchored socialism’s historical successes, but that it was gradually abandoned by critical theorists from the 1970s onward. In his view, the shift entailed the fragmentation of political struggles into those guided by competing identities, and displaced the defence of wage laborers as the universal constituency of socialism. Chibber insists that this framework should form the theoretical foundation for a renewed left-wing politics, and claims that a genuinely egalitarian and democratic project depends on this return to the traditional account.
In this article, I argue that Chibber’s nostalgic conception of materialism ultimately undermines the analytical and political capacity of the Marxist, socialist project in the name of which it speaks and ostensibly seeks to advance. Insofar as he focuses exclusively on the exploitation of wage laborers by a minority of capitalist producers, he not only limits the capacity of Marxist theory to grasp the wider ways in which capitalism structures social life beyond the wage relation; he also undermines his own attempt to articulate a unifying political language capable of bringing together all those subjected to capitalist domination within a broader anticapitalist coalition. Furthermore, Chibber presents an account of socialism that fails to see beyond, and ultimately takes for granted, what he believes to be the class structure defined in capitalist terms. He thus impedes the possibility of conceiving a different social order that does not just aspire to a more equitable redistribution of capitalist production, and ultimately weakens the long-term horizon of socialist politics. On this basis, I argue that recovering Marx’s own account of materialism—rather than Chibber’s restricted interpretation of it—is not only essential to understand capitalism, but also a necessary precondition for overcoming it politically.
1. Marx’s Critique of Political Economy and the “Fetishism” of Chibber’s Account
Chibber begins Materialism is Essential for Socialist Politics by defining what he understands as the “traditional” account of materialism. In his view, this entails the assumption that, to understand “important phenomena of the world,” one has to rely on the premise that since “agents” are “rational” beings, they will most likely pursue courses of action that further “their material well-being.”2Chibber, “Materialism Is Essential for Socialist Politics.” On this basis, Chibber derives a theory of social conflict under capitalism. The class structure that defines this system is organized so that there are a small minority of capitalist producers and a vast majority of individuals who are positioned as wage laborers. These two structural positions, he argues, compel the “rational” members of each class to follow distinct courses of action: capitalist producers will attempt to reduce costs, thereby undermining the material well-being of wage laborers; and wage laborers will resist in order to defend their “material well-being.” According to Chibber, socialist movements relied on this framework to fuel the antagonism between these two structural positions. This, he claims, underpinned their political success for much of the twentieth century.
Chibber is right to insist that any Marxist position should unreservedly support wage laborers in this regard. Yet a materialist perspective grounded in Marx’s critique of political economy cannot be reduced to the defense of wage laborers alone. If Chibber’s account of materialism does so, it is only because it rests on a caricatured conception of Marx’s work—one that limits both its analytical scope and its political potential…Marx’s own conceptualization points toward a more expansive and demanding materialist framework.
Chibber then moves on to suggest that, as successful as this framework may have been, it was largely abandoned after the “cultural turn” of the 1970s. Instead of focusing on the structural conflict between capitalists and wage laborers, critical theorists began to privilege categories such as “ideology, discourse, social interpretation, and the like” —phenomena that, as he puts it, can be said to “fall under the umbrella of culture.” In this new framework, “class” no longer operated as a stable source of political interest, and the notion of a class strategy based on common “material interests” was consequently dismissed. In Chibber’s view, this intellectual shift had disastrous political consequences, as it led to the fragmentation of political struggles, and obscured what he takes to be the common denominator that unites those in a dominated position within the capitalist social structure. It is precisely this universality, he insists, that should serve as the foundation of a renewed class-based politics. A revision of social theory that returns to this traditional account of materialism, he thus concludes, is a necessary step towards what he calls “the road back to sanity.”
Chibber’s call to defend wage laborers more openly and vigorously than has been done recently is both relevant and appealing today. In a context where the Democratic Party in the United States and most socialist parties throughout the world have embraced the interests of the market at the expense of increasingly pauperized sectors of society, his insistence on underscoring the importance of “bread-and-butter” issues is indeed pertinent.3This comparison is not meant to imply that the Democratic Party in the United States shares the same political tradition or working-class roots as most socialist parties outside the United States. Rather, it serves to underline a partially shared process of political accommodation to market interests over time. The New Deal under Franklin D. Roosevelt represents the Democratic Party’s most notable, albeit short-lived, departure from this trajectory. However, it still provides a minimal but analytically relevant point of comparison. The main issue with Chibber’s account, however, is not merely that he calls for renewed support for wage laborers. Rather, it lies in his attempt to advance a broader philosophical and political project: a defence of a particular account of materialism from which he derives a socialist political programme fundamentally centered on mobilizing wage laborers against capitalists’ structural tendency to depress wages and deteriorate working conditions. Indeed, Chibber is right to insist that any Marxist position should unreservedly support wage laborers in this regard. Yet a materialist perspective grounded in Marx’s critique of political economy cannot be reduced to the defense of wage laborers alone. If Chibber’s account of materialism does so, it is only because it rests on a caricatured conception of Marx’s work—one that limits both its analytical scope and its political potential. A materialism that is reduced to wages and working conditions will have wages and working conditions as the only possible basis for political struggle; however, as I will show, Marx’s own conceptualization points toward a more expansive and demanding materialist framework.
What is ultimately at stake here is a disagreement over political priorities that reflects a fundamentally different understanding of what materialism itself entails. The core problem is that Chibber’s materialism ultimately operates as a behavioral theory of “rational agents” acting within a social world structured around wage laborers and capitalists, in which “material interests” are collapsed into wages and working conditions for workers, and into revenues for capitalists.4Following a common misconception in certain strands of contemporary Marxism, Chibber refers to “material” interests as “economic” interests, and effectively treats both as synonymous with “objective” interests. Although a full engagement with this issue lies beyond the scope of this essay, it is important to note that this identification—together with the implicit equation of the subjective with the merely “psychological”—is philosophically problematic from a Marxist perspective. Treating “economic” interests as objective in this way risks assuming that they are simply given, rather than historically constituted through determinate social relations. It thereby obscures a key premise of Marxist materialism: that any account of the economy—and thus of anything that can be understood as an “economic interest”—is always and already constituted through historically mediated processes that necessarily include practical activity and socially mediated forms of consciousness and subjectivity. Drawing on Hegel’s account of objectivity as internally mediated rather than given in itself—most systematically elaborated in Science of Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit—Marx carries this insight forward throughout his work. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx explicitly criticizes Feuerbach for advancing a materialism that, in his view, remains too abstract—and even idealist. Feuerbach, Marx writes, “does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity,” but reduces it to mere “contemplation.” Chibber’s understanding of “material” and “economic” interests as objective thus treats what he believes to be the historically specific form of capitalist social relations as self-evident. As will become clearer in the discussion of fetishism below, this type of move reproduces the very theoretical error that any Marxist materialist critique of capitalism should aim to critique. For a more in-depth engagement with these ideas, see: György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971); G. W. F. H. Hegel, Science of Logic (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969); Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1975); G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Crucially, for Marx, materialism cannot be reduced to a theory of interests or motivations under capitalism, but must be understood as an ontological and methodological approach to understanding the emergence and development of social forms in general. Its starting point is the recognition that human beings, as biological entities, depend on the satisfaction of needs through some form of economic organization. On this basis, Marx claims that any such organization necessarily entails determinate relations of access, dependence, and control over the means of subsistence—relations that, in turn, shape a society’s structure. Importantly, this premise does not imply that the economy occupies the same place, or assumes the same form, in every society; it simply highlights that human needs are mediated by a variety of social relations across and within societies. From Marx’s materialist standpoint, then, social analysis should aim to scrutinize these relations to determine the historically specific forms of power, conflict, and varying degrees of freedom to satisfy needs that they generate.
While Chibber’s framework seems to perform precisely this task when he focuses on the struggle between wage laborers and capitalists, it is in fact unable to do so because it mistakes the point of production and the relations that emerge around it for the totality of the capitalist social structure. From a Marxist perspective, however, a key point of any materialist critique of capitalism is to move beyond precisely this kind of misunderstanding.
Drawing on Hegelian insights into the distinction between appearance and essence, Marx develops this critical orientation most systematically in his critique of classical political economy. While he accepts that capitalism may appear as a self-contained sphere of commodity production and exchange, he insists that it cannot be understood on these terms alone. For Marx, this appearance is not the result of a mere analytical mistake, but of what he famously describes as the “fetish” character of commodities. Under conditions of capitalist exchange, he claims, social relations between people necessarily take the form of relations between things. This process thus generates the illusion that categories such as prices, wages, and revenues exhaust the underlying structure of social life. Unable to see beyond this fetish character, classical political economists such as Smith and Ricardo treated these categories as analytically self-sufficient, and presented capitalist production and exchange—and the existence of capitalist producers and wage laborers they presuppose—as the direct expression of inherent human dispositions. Marx’s materialist project, by contrast, subjects these appearances to critique, to underscore that there are broader social relations through which they are historically produced and sustained.
…these relations illustrate a common logic, whereby capitalism’s reproduction relies on processes of accumulation that systematically weaken access to the means of subsistence through multiple and overlapping forms of deprivation. Once fetishized appearances are set aside, class division can no longer be defined, as Chibber proposes, by one’s immediate position in production alone.
Despite presenting his argument as grounded in Marx, Chibber largely ignores this critical move. By treating the point of production as the sole locus of capitalist social reproduction, he reproduces the very fetishism that Marx’s critique of political economy sought to overcome. Marx’s materialist critique demands moving beyond this fetishized appearance to analyze the broader relations through which capitalist reproduction is secured, as well as the forms of power and domination they may generate beyond the wage relation. It is precisely this task that the next section undertakes.
2. Towards a Nonfetishized Account of Capitalism
The nonfetishistic understanding of materialism developed above requires scrutinizing the broader social relations on which capitalist reproduction relies. Pursuing this task brings into view a plurality of social positions both implicated in and harmed by capitalist reproduction. This plurality exceeds those that are visible when the point of production is one’s exclusive framework for social analysis. This broader vantage point shapes our understanding of the social positions implicated in capitalist reproduction and the relations through which access to the means of subsistence is structured. Taking Marx’s critique of fetishism seriously thus allows for a reconstruction of a set of paradigmatic relations that remain obscured within the limited account of capitalism that Chibber’s materialism can offer.5While Nancy Fraser does not frame her argument in terms of fetishism, she nonetheless undertakes a comparable methodological gesture in Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do about It (London: Verso, 2022). Following Marx’s turn from the sphere of exchange to the “hidden abode” of production, she proposes to push this move one step further, to uncover what she calls the “background conditions of possibility” of capitalist production.
Among these relations, Marx himself theorized the existence of a “relative surplus population”—a term he used to refer to the unemployed population willing to work. The structural role of the surplus population, he argued, is to discipline workers through the constant threat of unemployment, keep wages low by sustaining labor oversupply, and serve as a flexible reserve for capital to mobilize or discard in response to market fluctuations. Marx’s point is that the incapacity of a certain number of people to rely on their wage for subsistence must be seen not as a deviation from capitalism, but as one of its constitutive features. Capitalism, he showed, requires the continual production of a surplus population to secure accumulation, and thus simultaneously denies certain individuals stable access to the means of subsistence on which their lives depend.
While there are disagreements over the extent to which Marx himself fully theorized other forms of domination, his materialist critique nevertheless opened the analytical space that later Marxist traditions would develop to identify further foundations of capitalist reproduction. Once capitalist reproduction is analyzed beyond the relations established at the point of production, at least three such relations clearly emerge. First, as the tradition of thought known as Black Marxism has argued since at least the 1930s—and most forcefully throughout the late twentieth century—capitalist accumulation has historically depended on imperial expansion, colonial plunder, slavery, and the ongoing dispossession of racialized populations. Thinkers such as C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Barbara Fields, and Cornel West have shown that these processes are not peripheral episodes, but constitutive conditions of capitalism’s ongoing reproduction.6For foundational works in Black Marxism, see: C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938); W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1940); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1948); Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980); Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001 [1961]); Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990): https://doi.org/10.64590/cfe; Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999).
Second, as Marxist feminists have shown since the 1970s, unpaid reproductive labor—historically carried out predominantly by women and encompassing childcare, household maintenance, and the daily reproduction of life—is indispensable to the reproduction of wage labor itself. Thinkers such as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Eli Zaretsky, Angela Davis, Lise Vogel, and later Silvia Federici, Nancy Fraser, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Susan Ferguson have challenged wage-centered accounts of class by demonstrating how capitalism structurally relies on forms of labor that remain external to the sphere of production while being essential to its functioning.7 For major interventions in Marxist feminism, see: Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Nancy Fraser, “Contradictions of Capital and Care,” New Left Review, no. 100 (July–August 2016): https://doi.org/10.64590/nt2; Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1vz494j; Susan Ferguson, Women and Work: Feminism, Labour, and Social Reproduction (London: Pluto Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvs09qm0.
Third, as Marxist ecosocialists have emphasized since at least the 1990s, capitalist accumulation necessarily depends on nonhuman nature, both as a source of indispensable inputs—raw materials, energy, fertile soils, clean water—and as a sink for waste, including carbon emissions, industrial pollutants, and toxic byproducts. Through the work of figures such as Ariel Salleh, Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster, Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, Kohei Saito, and Alyssa Battistoni, Marxist ecological thought has shown that capitalist reproduction is inseparable from ecological degradation—and that in this process ecological degradation undermines the material conditions of social reproduction itself, particularly for those populations whose lives are already shaped by other forms of capitalist exploitation and dispossession.8For major contributions to Marxist ecological critique, see: Ariel Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern (London: Zed Books, 1997); Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299651; John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (London: Verso, 2015); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016); Kohei Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1gk099m; Alyssa Battistoni, Free Gifts: Capitalism and the Politics of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691263489. Any broad analysis of materialism and ecology should also consider Joan Martínez-Alier’s contribution to ecological economics. While not strictly Marxist, his work has been deeply informed by Marxian political economy, and represents a paradigmatic effort to theorize ecological conflict within a broader critique of capitalist development. See: Joan Martínez-Alier, The Ecological Economics of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002), https://doi.org/10.4337/9781840649093.00014.
Taken together, these relations illustrate a common logic, whereby capitalism’s reproduction relies on processes of accumulation that systematically weaken access to the means of subsistence through multiple and overlapping forms of deprivation. Once fetishized appearances are set aside, class division can no longer be defined, as Chibber proposes, by one’s immediate position in production alone. Instead, it must be understood in relation to the broader conditions of social reproduction on which material subsistence depends. Accordingly, class struggle cannot be confined to the defense of wages and working conditions, but must be grasped in relation to the wider processes through which social life is subordinated to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation. The implications of this expanded, nonfetishized account of capitalist reproduction are therefore not merely analytical; they bear directly on how socialist political strategy must be rethought.
3. Revisiting the “Cultural Turn” from a Materialist Perspective
The work of Marx and Marxist authors shows that capitalist reproduction relies on a plurality of social relations through which access to the means of subsistence is structured and systematically undermined. Once fetishized appearances are set aside, exploitation at the point of production appears as only one moment within a broader configuration of domination that encompasses (at least) surplus populations, racialized dispossession, unpaid reproductive labor, and ecological degradation. As the various strands of the Marxist tradition that Chibber disregards have sought to show, these relations are not peripheral to capitalism, but constitutive of its reproduction. This raises a decisive question for socialist politics: if egalitarian and democratic emancipation is said to depend on materialist theory, as Chibber explicitly claims, can such a project be grounded on a conception of capitalism grasped only through the wage relation? Or, put differently, can a socialist political programme that restricts class struggle to wages and working conditions plausibly be considered genuinely egalitarian and democratic? It is from this perspective that Chibber’s critique of what he terms the “cultural turn” can now be reconsidered.
Far from displacing class, [Marxist feminist, antiracist, and ecological traditions] have sought to expand its analytical scope by scrutinizing the wider, no less material social relations through which class domination is produced and reproduced.
Chibber argues that the turn towards culture, discourse, and identity displaced class as the primary axis of political conflict and, in doing so, fragmented socialist politics by undermining its material foundations. He therefore insists on centering the wage laborer as a way of countering what he regards as the fragmentation produced by the cultural turn, with the aim of forging broad coalitions capable of contesting capitalism. Yet by reducing the scope of class to wage laborers alone, his strategy ends up reproducing the very fragmentation it seeks to overcome. From a nonfetishistic understanding of class, this diagnosis therefore proves insufficient. The problem is not that struggles articulated around race, gender, ecology fall outside the terrain of materialism, but that they have often not been organized and addressed from a Marxist, materialist perspective.
Chibber is right to observe that, in recent decades, significant strands of feminism, antiracism, and environmentalism have been articulated in ways that leave capitalist relations intact. In many cases, these traditions have been absorbed into liberal frameworks that recast injustice as nothing more than a problem of representation or inclusion, while displacing questions of exploitation, dispossession, and accumulation. Capitalist elites have also instrumentalized these causes by selectively adopting their language—a strategy that has made capitalism appear more lenient, while indeed often contributing to the fragmentation of broader socialist coalitions.9For a more detailed account of the ways in which liberal frameworks have coopted and reshaped emancipatory struggles, see: Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity (London: Verso, 2018); Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). Yet it does not follow that these traditions are themselves reducible to such appropriations. Alongside these implicit or explicit procapitalist variants, Marxist feminist, antiracist, and ecological traditions have, as I have shown, explicitly drawn on Marx’s critique of political economy to analyze capitalism as a historically specific system of social reproduction grounded in multiple, intersecting relations of domination. Far from displacing class, these approaches have sought to expand its analytical scope by scrutinizing the wider, no less material social relations through which class domination is produced and reproduced.
Since Chibber’s account prioritizes struggles carried out by wage laborers, and overlooks these other forms of domination, it misses the analytical and political capacity of Marxist materialism to underscore the links between struggles that may initially appear disconnected. The struggles of warehouse workers subjected to union busting practices, of Indigenous communities resisting dispossession by extractive projects and large-scale imperial violence, or of migrant care workers in Europe whose paid reproductive labor undermines their own capacity for social reproduction may differ in form and immediate context.10In light of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, as well as the regime-change politics directed by the United States administration against Venezuela and the tightening of sanctions against Cuba, it is striking that Chibber proposes a form of socialism predominantly focused on wages and working conditions. From the perspective developed by the Black Marxist thinkers mentioned above, such events cannot be understood as external to capitalist reproduction but rather as expressions of its racialized and imperial dimensions. It is difficult to see how genocide and the political destabilization of another country could be understood as unrelated to people’s “material well-being.” Yet they are unified by a common material logic: in each case, the capitalist drive for accumulation systematically deprives these groups of secure access to the means of need satisfaction and social reproduction. On this basis, Chibber’s reductionism not only weakens the capacity of socialist analysis to grasp the full range of capitalist domination, it also impedes the construction of a political rhetoric capable of unifying these struggles into broad, anticapitalist coalitions. While this was precisely the purpose for which Chibber invoked materialism, it is one his fetishized economistic framework cannot deliver.
Once the connections that unite these struggles are recognized, a final implication for socialist politics comes into view. Reducing socialism to a conflict between wage laborers and capitalists entails taking a central social relation of capitalist society as given, rather than subjecting it to critique. A socialist project that focuses exclusively on this relation risks yielding a vision of emancipation confined to securing a larger share of the product of labor, or marginal improvements in working conditions. In this way, Chibber’s narrow account of materialism risks aspiring to little more than a selectively “fairer” version of capitalism, rather than confronting the multiple ways in which capitalist domination produces deprivation by restricting access to the means of subsistence—including, of course, via a wage. Perhaps ironically, the limitations of Chibber’s supposedly Marxist defence of materialism closely echo Marx’s warning in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he cautions against reducing socialism to a problem of distribution while leaving intact the social relations that generate deprivation in the first place.11Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in The First International and After: Political Writings, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Verso, 2010), 339–59. Such a framework could, in principle, even accommodate a world in which wage laborers were paid more, yet continued to live in—and die as a result of—polluted environments and degraded food systems, remain unable to meet care obligations, or face systematically higher risks of dispossession along racialized lines. The problem, then, is not that these forms of deprivation fall outside material well-being as such, but that a fetishized conception of capitalism prevents Chibber from recognizing them as material relations. By contrast, the materialist conception of class struggle developed here not only possesses greater strategic capacity to forge broad coalitions; it also points towards a more ambitious political horizon—one that seeks to dismantle the broader subordination of social life to the various forms of domination on which capitalist accumulation rests.
4. Marxist Materialism and Emancipatory Politics: A Concluding Defence
As the broad Marxist understanding of materialism discussed above makes clear, confining socialist analysis to the point of production alone imposes clear analytical and political limits on the project itself. Despite agreeing with Chibber’s insistence on the need to defend wage laborers more forcefully than has been done in recent decades, I have argued that his conception of materialism reproduces a fetishized and economistic understanding of capitalist society akin to that of classical political economy. In his attempt to vindicate materialism, Chibber thus reproduces precisely the kind of error Marx had already identified as central to his critique. Stated more directly, the limitation of Chibber’s position is not that it demands too much from materialism, but that it demands too little: by taking the wage relation as the principal horizon of socialist politics, his account forecloses the critique of the broader social relations through which material deprivation is produced and sustained. In doing so, it treats these forms of deprivation as analytically secondary and politically external to class struggle. Beyond impeding the formation of broad anticapitalist coalitions, this account restricts socialist emancipation to a problem of redistribution within capitalism, rather than confronting the conditions under which capitalist domination is reproduced in the first place. Recovering a nonfetishistic conception of materialism—one that extends the analysis of domination beyond the wage relation—is therefore not a mere theoretical refinement within purely abstract debates on materialism; it is a necessary condition for any socialist politics that aspires to be both politically plausible and genuinely emancipatory.