New Delhi. : The Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), organized the twenty-sixth lecture of the Distinguished Lecture Series,"Coercion, Consent and Resignation: How Capitalism Survives" by Prof. Vivek Chibber,Professor of Sociology at New York University,  on Zoom. Supported by the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), Ministry of Education, Government of India, the talk was organized as part of the ongoing academic collaboration with the Department of English and American Studies, University of Würzburg, Germany, and promises to be one in a line of successively pertinent lectures.

The talk was conducted by Ms. Zahra Rizvi and Ms. Suman Bhagchandani, Ph.D. scholars, Department of English, JMI, and was enthusiastically attended by a large gathering of scholars, students, and faculty from all over the world and across various time-zones.

Prof Chibber’s lecture engaged with Marxist theorizations on exploitative class domination in capitalistic economy since the nineteenth century. Starting from the deterministic theory of classical Marxist thought which positioned consent and coercion as modes of ensuring working class participation, the lecture elaborated on the post-World War intellectual theorizations which  sought to explain the stabilization of capitalism by positing culture as the central category of analysis. Prof Chibber argued that such a cultural turn in critical thinking discounted political economy and material analyses, subsequently creating a theoretical lacuna in the New Left thinking. In conclusion, Prof Chibber proposed that working class participation may therefore be understood through lived experiences of compulsion or resignation of the working class.

In conclusion, Prof Zupančič argued that we need to move from the struggle mode of coping one day at a time to a passionate common struggle for our future lives.

This was followed by an engaging, in-depth Q/A session coordinated by Ms. Susan Aleyas, Ph.D. Scholar, Department of English, JMI. The event was brought to an end with a Vote of Thanks by Ms. Aparna Pathak.

To ensure a wide range of viewership and participation, the event was also live streamed on YouTube, and was attended by over a hundred participants.

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