Book Review: Sight Readings Photographers and American Jazz, 1900–1960

Abstract

to it in the absence of viable alternatives. Chibber’s theory does not dismiss the importance of ideology and culture in capitalism, but redefines it: rather than its essential endurance mechanism, ideology is the self-reinforcing consequence of the system’s stabilisation, allowing workers (and capitalists) to rationalise their place in it (p. 112). Neither does this framework entail, as Chibber successfully argues in Chapter IV, ‘Agency, Contingency and All That’, embracing a sort of functionalist structuralism turning culture into a complete determination or expression of political economy. So, how does capitalism manage to endure in spite of its antagonistic nature? Chapter V sums up Chibber’s answer: capitalism endures not on account of the cultural or ideological indoctrination of the subordinated groups at the expense of which the dominant class advances its own interests, but on account of the differentiated allocation of power, pressures, risks and costs imposed upon each social class: ‘The system locks the classes into an antagonistic relationship, but the unequal distribution of capacities ensures that the conflict, where it occurs, tends to be resolved in the employers’ favor’ (p. 160). In other words, capitalism manages to endure above all due to the working class’s precarity and limited political power, which in turn are a direct consequence of the class structure itself. In the latter, therefore, lies both the cause of the system’s conflictive nature and its self-stabilising mechanism. Chibber’s book provides consequential insights into political agency and class structure under capitalism. Its jargon-minimum style, together with its admirable argumentative clarity, makes it quite accessible for non-specialists and young students of culture and society – and for activists and organisers as well. While Chibber’s theory will probably be dismissed by many as ‘economicist’ or ‘class reductive’, it successfully evinces that ascribing explicative priority to class in order to understand capitalism’s endurance is not only justified, but that cultural theory can hugely benefit from a revival of materialism, provided, of course, it does not gloss over the theoretical headways of culturalism in the recent past.