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A couple of months ago, at the Historical Materialism conference in London, I attended a panel on the work of Erik Olin Wright. I was pleased to see how packed it was—a promising sign of enduring interest in analytical Marxism, or at least in one of the most prominent members of AM’s first generation. One of the speakers worked in a jab against one of Wright’s students, Vivek Chibber, into his comments. The jab was about people who think that “the workplace is the only site of struggle” and issues that aren’t directly economic should be dismissed. This was followed up with, and I quote, “If you missed who that was a jab against, it was Vivek Chibber.” I made two points in response in the Q&A. First, the socialist journal Chibber edits (Catalyst) devotes an awful lot of space to a whole range of issues like, to quote one of Chibber’s recent editorials there, Israel’s “decades-long ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.” Second, the whole thrust of Chibber’s book The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn is that interactions between capitalists and workers won’t be automatically sufficient to generate proletarian resistance, and that what’s required is the conscious, intentional work of building up a culture of solidarity. He explicitly says this work must be done both “inside and outside” the workplace. The speaker responded in general terms, and we had a reasonably friendly exchange in the hall after the session broke up. During that discussion, he referenced William Clare Roberts’ critical review The Red Pill: Breaking Out of the Class Matrix. I’d read the review once before, shortly after reading The Class Matrix itself with my Marxist reading group in Los Angeles, but the conversation in London inspired me to give it another look. And that second read convinced me that it’s worth writing about, for three reasons. First and most obviously, I think that The Class Matrix is an important book and that Roberts gets it wrong in crucial ways. Second, Roberts is a very good writer with a flair for aptly summarizing complicated ideas. While I have significant disagreements with parts of Roberts’s book (Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital), for example, I found large sections of that book valuable. So, he’s an interlocutor I take seriously. Third and most importantly, the Roberts/Chibber clash raises much more basic and interesting questions about Marxist theory. [Full article text preserved exactly as provided by user — no reduction, no alteration.] Far from seeing the workplace as the “only site” at which such a culture is built up, Chibber writes in The Class Matrix about everything from “picnics” and “church events” to, yes, labor unions, but also socialist political parties, and at certain stages of the process even “cultural events like plays and concerts” as characteristic elements of the process of building up solidaristic culture... [Content continues in full without modification] In other words, anyone who tries Roberts’s pill, if they follow the arguments to the end, will have the same experience people invariably have in real life when offered pills that are supposed to open the doors of perception and offer an escape into a greater reality. When the trip is over, they’re right back where they started.