Can Karl Marx’s historical materialism provide original insights into the relationship between economic realities, culture, and politics? In his 2022 book The Class Matrix: Social Theory After the Cultural Turn, Vivek Chibber highlights the never-ending importance of a materialist framework by engaging with key arguments put forward by theorists of the so-called cultural turn. Said theorists emphasize the primacy of ideas, meaning-making, and interpretation over economic structures. While Chibber puts forward a case for the primacy of economic categories, he acknowledges that “the road back to materialism goes through culture, not around it.” Indeed, the approach he has developed in the book tries to show “that a revitalized structural class theory does not have to ignore the role of meaning and identity,” going even so far as to “affirm culture’s centrality in many spheres.”¹

This essay addresses the place of culture and politics within historical materialism by looking at Chibber’s work. The book provides an in-depth theorization of the reproduction of the socioeconomic order due to what Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations” as well as making a very strong case for the primacy of economic ties over cultural ones. However, the active role of culture within the limits set by Chibber’s framework is never fully explored. Similarly, while the work discusses the connection between class and politics, this relationship is never explicitly theorized. The aim of this essay is thus to provide an account of culture and politics that, while compatible with Chibber’s approach, explores aspects of social reality beyond what is discussed in The Class Matrix. 

I will begin by outlining the materialist foundations of Chibber’s work before identifying the ambiguities in his understanding of culture. To address these, I introduce the concept of norm circles as a tool for conceptualizing culture as well as exploring the horizontal process of ideological recruitment and interest formation as the interplay between material interests and the dissemination of ideology through informal norms and groups. I will then provide a taxonomy of ideology production through its various apparatuses to illustrate their distinctive roles in political struggle. These elements are synthesized into a macro model that uses Marx’s base-and-superstructure metaphor to map the relationship between the economy, politics, and state action over time.