This is the text of a presentation made at the “Marxism and the Legacy of Subaltern Studies” panel at the Historical Materialism Conference at New York University on April 28, 2013. Partha Chatterjee is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective and lives in Kolkata.
From the moment of their appearance in 1982, the series called Subaltern Studies and the work of scholars associated with it have come in for criticism from many quarters. Vivek Chibber’s 2013 book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, is the latest in that line. It is a critical study devoted entirely to the early work of three Subaltern Studies historians: Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chatterjee. I examine below Chibber’s arguments against these scholars whose work he takes, rather inexactly, to be emblematic of post-colonial theory today.
DOMINANCE WITHOUT HEGEMONY
Chibber rejects Guha’s criticism of the bourgeois democracy of post-colonial India as a dominance without hegemony1 by arguing that no bourgeois revolution, not even the English Civil Wars of the 1640s or the French Revolution of 1789, was hegemonic in Guha’s sense. Chibber’s refutation of Guha is, however, based on a gross misunderstanding of Guha’s claim. It should be obvious from a reading of Guha’s longish essay that it was intended as a critique of liberal historiography and the liberal ideology it represented. It was not the historical sociology of European bourgeois revolutions that Chibber understands it to be. The short section entitled “The Universalising Tendency of Capital and Its Limitations,”2 from which Chibber quotes extensively, was meant to draw out two major claims of liberal historiography: that capital has a universalizing tendency and that the revolutions of England and France established bourgeois hegemony in the sense of being able to “speak for all of society.” Both claims, as Guha points out, are supported by Marx: the universalizing tendency appears in the Grundrisse, and the achievement of the English and French bourgeois revolutions in bringing about “the victory of a new social order” is described in the 1848 articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Taken in isolation from Marx’s critique of capital in his larger body of work, according to Guha, these statements “would make him indistinguishable from any of the myriad 19th century liberals who saw nothing but the positive side of capital in an age when it was growing from strength to strength.”3 We know, of course, that Marx also suggests that capital must come up against limits it cannot overcome. More on that later.
OF LIBERAL CLAIMS
The crucial point is that nowhere in the essay does Guha offer any propositions of his own that might be construed as a historical sociology of bourgeois revolutions in England and France. Indeed, he does not need to make any such sociological claims at all. All he needs is, first, an account of liberal claims that the new social order established by the bourgeoisie enjoyed the consent of all classes in society and was therefore hegemonic in its power. Second, he needs an account of liberal claims that British rule in India also enjoyed a similar basis of consent from Indian subjects. Third, he needs an account of claims by Indian liberals that India’s postcolonial order was similiarly hegemonic to the European bourgeoisie because the Indian liberal bourgeoisie could legitimately speak on behalf of the entire nation. Finally, Guha needs to show that these liberal claims to hegemony for the colonial as well as the postcolonial regimes are spurious. That is what the essay is designed to achieve. He needs to make no claims of his own about the real history of bourgeois revolutions in Europe.
Consequently, Chibber’s elaborate exercise of summarizing the real history of the English and French revolutions to show that the English revolution was not anti-feudal (because feudalism in England had already come to an end), or that the French bourgeois revolutionaries were not capitalists, is entirely beside the point. This demonstration does nothing to Guha’s argument. All it does is assert that Marx’s description of the historical character of those revolutions was inaccurate in light of the findings of historians writing at the turn of the twenty-first century upon whose work Chibber draws. Similarly, Chibber’s charge that Guha holds a Whig view of history is also misplaced. The Whig view belongs not to Guha but, unsurprisingly, to historians of the Whig persuasion who are, in fact, the targets of Guha’s critique.
Further, on the specific point about the French Revolution, it is clear that when Guha talks about the Indian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he does not mean capitalists in particular. In fact, he does not use the term “capitalist” to describe this group at all. What he means is the political-intellectual leadership of the liberal nationalist movement that came from the intermediate strata—the middle class—wedged between the traditional aristocracy and the lower orders of laboring people: precisely the bourgeoisie in the French sense of the word who comprised the bulk of the Third Estate. In contrast to Chibber’s conclusion, nothing that Guha says about the Indian bourgeoisie is meant to apply specifically to Indian capitalists.
But Chibber’s examination of the assumed counterfactual assumption of European bourgeois hegemony as opposed to Indian bourgeois non-hegemony sheds light on an interesting question regarding the method of historical comparison. Chibber’s exercise requires the assumption that India’s twentieth century shares the same historical time-space as England’s seventeenth and France’s eighteenth. How else could we map the constitutive elements of the French or English revolutions onto the field of victory of the Indian bourgeoisie in the mid-twentieth century and arrive at our comparative assessments? But this assumption is patently invalid, given that the justificatory claims of liberal ideology had permeated deep into the structures of rule in colonial India through the nineteenth century and were inherited by the triumphant Indian bourgeoisie in the mid-twentieth. British rule in India had to be justified before the British parliament and public as well as its potential Indian critics not by the standards of seventeenth-century ideology but by contemporary standards of nineteenth-century liberalism. If ruling India required deviating from some of those standards, the justification could not proceed by rejecting the universal validity of those liberal norms. Rather, arguments had to be constructed on why the specific situation in India warranted an exception to the universal norm. The colonial history of India is replete with such exceptions. As a consequence, when the Indian nationalist bourgeoisie rejected the allegedly exceptional status of colonial India and assumed power in the sovereign postcolonial nation-state, it too justified its rule not by the standards of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Europe but by the highest standards of twentieth-century liberalism. The best proofs of this are the Indian Constitution of 1950, designed to meet the most advanced liberal constitutional standards available anywhere in the world, and the litany of pro-imperial historians who have described Indian independence as not merely a gift but indeed a fulfillment of liberal British rule.
POSTCOLONIAL STATE
Hence the non-hegemonic character of the Indian bourgeoisie is disproved not by the English bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century or the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth, but by the bourgeoisie of the nations of Western Europe and North America after the Second World War. This is the test to which Guha subjects the postcolonial Indian state—a test that its liberal bourgeois leadership had itself welcomed, and that Guha concludes the Indian bourgeoisie has failed. Its hegemony is spurious; its rule is mere dominance in which the element of coercion far exceeds that of consent. It is also significant, though unnoticed by Chibber, that the whole essay is only a “preamble to an auto-critique.” Returning to the theme of the universalizing tendency of capital, Guha notes in his concluding section that liberal ideology fails to see the intrinsic limits to capital’s self-expansion and the points of resistance it can never overcome. Yet even anti-colonial historiography failed to perceive these aspects of capital, of which it had yet to launch a serious critique. For Guha, the fight against liberal historiography was thus only the first step in constructing an anti-colonial critique of capital.
Before leaving the theme of hegemony, one should also take note of Chibber’s understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of it. Guha argues, echoing Antonio Gramsci, that a hegemonic bourgeoisie succeeds in representing its own interests as the universal interests of society. Nowhere does Guha make the argument that Chibber attributes to him: that the bourgeoisie managed to attain hegemony because “it incorporated the real interests of subaltern social classes into its revolutionary program.”4 It would be absurd for anyone following Gramsci’s lead to say so. In fact, the hegemonic move on the part of the bourgeoisie is almost always a response to pressures from the subaltern classes—an attempt to preempt direct resistance and opposition. The hegemonic move is a feat of representation, often accomplished by a successful deployment of political rhetoric: it is constructed in and through ideology.5
ABSTRACT LABOR AND CAPITALIST PRODUCTION
Chibber roundly criticizes Chakrabarty for regarding formal equality and impersonal power relations as quintessential aspects of capitalist power. Where Chakrabarty reads the persistence, indeed the reproduction, of coercive methods within the industrial labor process and of the consciousness of religious, caste, and other cultural differences among the industrial working class as a limit that colonial capital has been unable to surpass, Chibber regards those features as entirely compatible with capitalism in general. Chakrabarty derives the essential conditions of capitalist production from a fairly conventional reading of Marx. Chibber, in rejecting this reading, offers an alternative account of capitalist production that does not have any recognizable relation to the Marxist tradition. The differences between the two approaches are striking and deserve attention.
Chakrabarty derived his understanding of the universalizing tendency of capital from Marx’s analysis of the logic of capitalist accumulation. It is the dynamic of accumulation that pushed European capital to seek overseas territories where it could find raw material and labor suitable for employment in production. But capital encountered social forms of labor there that it could not transform into homogeneous abstract labor. Industrial production under colonial conditions thus posed, says Chakrabarty, an obstacle to the universalizing tendency of capital. Chibber offers an entirely different definition of the universalizing tendency of capital. “The universalizing process is under way,” declares Chibber, “if agents’ reproductive strategies shift towards market dependence.”6 In other words, as he repeats, “what is universalized under the rule of capital … [are] the compulsions of market dependence.”7 Now, it is hard to understand how market dependence alone can be a sufficient criterion for the universalization of capital. For instance, one can imagine a system of simple commodity production by owner-producers completely dependent on the market but not employing wage labor and thus not engaging in capitalist production. Marx was emphatic that capitalist production could only take place when capital owned the means of production but sought a mass of wage laborers who had no means of production of their own. In other words, a so-called primitive or primary accumulation must bring about about the dissociation of a mass of laborers from their means of labor. Without this, there is no capitalist production.
It is only because of the emergence of free and alienable labor power that can be bought and sold like any other commodity that abstract labor can appear as the common measure of all concrete forms of labor employed in capitalist production. Abstract labor is not a meaningful category for anything but the capitalist form of production. While Marx’s definition of abstract labor is a major pillar of Chakrabarty’s argument, Chibber rejects it. Instead, he insists that abstract labor is a measure of the laborer’s productive efficiency which is brought about by the competitive conditions of the production of exchange values.8 Abstract labor, for him, measures the “socially necessary levels of efficiency” of the laborer.9 Bizarrely, he invokes Marx’s definition of socially necessary labor time as the canonical support for his argument.10
But how could the production of exchange values itself bring about an abstract measure of socially necessary levels of efficiency? Even in precapitalist modes of production where particular commodities may be produced for exchange in the market, there could exist socially recognized measures of efficiency in specific branches of the concrete labor process. Thus, in small peasant agriculture or crafts manufacture, there may well exist an accepted norm of average efficiency in, let us say, harvesting a specific crop or planing a log of wood. But how could there be a common measure of socially necessary levels of efficiency across all branches of manufacturing in an economy unless labor has been turned into labor-power—that is, a commodity that can be bought and sold in the market? How could capitalists or anyone else speak of “benchmark levels of efficiency” that apply generally to the manufacture of clothes, shoes, automobiles, missiles, and every other commodity unless there is first a common measure for labor as a commodity? That common measure, we know from Marx, is abstract labor.
Marx is so explicit and elaborate in explaining his concept of abstract labor, not only in Capital but in the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value, that there can be little confusion about its meaning. Abstract labor is that common homogeneous element that enters into the production of all commodities by virtue of the fact that they are all products of the employment of labor-power as a commodity. Even though the concrete labor processes are heterogeneous, labor-power as a commodity is the same across all branches of production. Like all commodities, labor-power too has value which, like the value of all other commodities, is given by the value of the commodities required for its production. In the case of labor-power, this amounts to the value of the commodities required to reproduce for the next period of production the labor-power expended in the previous period. In short, the value of one unit of labor-power is the value of the subsistence goods required to reproduce that unit for the next period of production. Marx says that under capitalist production, there is an average labor-time socially necessary for its reproduction: “In a given country in a given period, the average amount of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker is a known datum.”11 In branches of production that require labor of higher skill or efficiency than average, the value of labor-time is expressed as multiples, or complex combinations, of simple or average labor-power. This means that it requires greater expenditure on subsistence goods to reproduce labor of higher or more complex quality; hence those providing higher-quality labor must be paid more.
What this means is that in capitalist production, there can be no independent determination of “socially necessary levels of efficiency” of labor; these levels can only be derived from the prevailing average value of labor-power in the economy—that is, from abstract labor as the common homogeneous dimension of labor-power as a commodity. Following this definition from Marx, the problem that Chakrabarty12 poses is this: did capitalist industrial production in colonial Bengal succeed in establishing abstract labor as the common measure of labor-power? His evidence suggests, for instance, that the Brahmin worker in the jute mill claimed to need more subsistence goods than his lower-caste fellow workers because of the obligations of his caste. Others needed to keep the women of their families in the village because it was dishonorable for women to live and work in the urban slum. The role of the labor contractor or sardar in controlling, often coercively, the economic and social life of the worker, and the dependence of mill managers on these coercive controls, is a major feature of Chakrabarty’s account. Finally, Chakrabarty details the way in which Calcutta jute mill workers in the 1930s and 1940s, even as they came together under communist trade unions in struggles against their employers, frequently broke into violent religious conflict among themselves on questions of political allegiance.
Chakrabarty interprets this as evidence of the lack of freedom of the industrial worker in colonial Calcutta. In other words, the worker here is not, strictly speaking, proletarianized: he or she still retains organic links with peasant production in the rural areas, and despite working for the most part in the urban factory, his or her subsistence needs for the reproduction of labor-power (which includes the reproduction of the family) are partly met by the rural peasant economy. Chakrabarty’s point is that this situation cannot be assumed to be transitional, something that would in due time give way to the general sway of free proletarian wage labor. Rather, this structure of relations was systematically reproduced under conditions of colonial capitalism—hence Chakrabarty’s claim that the jute worker’s political culture did not split him into his “public” and “private” selves or relegate “all distinctions based on birth” to the sphere of the “private.” Thus, “the jute-mill worker had never been ‘politically’ emancipated from religion.”13
Chibber excoriates Chakrabarty for this statement, accusing him of all manner of crimes ranging from obscurity to orientalism, but does not notice that Chakrabarty is directly paraphrasing Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” in which Marx set out the conceptual conditions for the emergence of the abstract citizen-subject of the modern state under the rule of capital. By contrast, Chibber does not find in Chakrabarty’s evidence any reason to doubt the universalizing spread of capital, since, he claims, the persistence, reproduction, and manipulation of racial, ethnic, or religious divisions among laborers is fully consistent with capitalist production in general.
THE TROUBLE WITH THE PEASANTRY
The difference in perspective is brought out most sharply in Chibber’s discussion of the question of peasant consciousness as viewed by historians of Subaltern Studies. Repeatedly, Chibber refers to their alleged claims, expressed most elaborately by Chatterjee, that “peasants and industrial workers in the East have a wholly different psychology from those in the West,” and that the “political psychology” of Western workers revolved around secular conceptions of individual rights whereas those of Eastern peasants were motivated by community and religious obligations.14 The peculiar fact is that, to the best of my knowledge, of the few million words that Chatterjee has published in the last forty years, he has not used the word “psychology” a single time, let alone the phrase “political psychology.”
When historians of Subaltern Studies speak of peasant consciousness, the academic discipline they invoke most often is not psychology but anthropology. In fact, one of the achievements of their work is to bring within the field of Marxist discussion the remarkable body of scholarship produced by social anthropologists of South Asia since the 1950s. The empirical work of anthropologists has brought to light, for instance, the evolving institutions and practices of local power in the countryside from colonial times to the present, the manifestations of caste not as the doctrinal construct of religious or legal texts but as practised in actual social relations, and the changing political significance of religious practices. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from these anthropological studies is than an immense heterogeneity of practices exist, especially in rural South Asia, that defy conventional orderings imposed by Indological and colonial scholarship. This is the empirical evidence that Subaltern Studies scholars writing in the 1980s and 1990s sought to introduce into Marxist debates over the nature of the postcolonial state and the transition to capitalism.
Consequently, when Chakrabarty or Chatterjee speak about the consciousness of community among peasants or industrial workers, they take pains to situate that consciousness within specific, empirically described, historical contexts of space and time, precisely to avoid reducing the concept of community to some orientalist or romantic trope. Chibber expresses surprise that the story that Chatterjee tells of the Bengal peasantry “is a thoroughly materialist one.”15 Nonetheless, says Chibber, Chatterjee insists that “Indian peasants were motivated purely by their perceived duty to the group, with little or no consideration of their individual self-interests.”16 Chibber’s attribution is completely wrong: nowhere does Chatterjee17 say this. Had he followed more carefully what Chatterjee does claim about community consciousness, Chibber would not have been surprised by Chatterjee’s materialist account.18
No one familiar with the Bengal countryside and its agrarian history would argue that peasants have little or no consideration for their individual self-interests. The sense of individual property was well developed in agrarian Bengal even before the colonial land settlements. The latter introduced stricter and more codified definitions of the respective rights of different grades of proprietors and tenants, almost always defined as individual persons. It was sometimes remarked in the early twentieth century that the sense of mutual cooperation and common property among peasant families in Bengal in the matter of agricultural production was relatively weak in comparison with the owner-peasants of southern India, not to mention the so-called tribal communities among whom individual property in land was almost nonexistent. It would have been absurd for Chatterjee to deny that individual self-interest was indeed functional, even prominent, among Bengal peasants.
“POLITICAL STRUGGLES”
Chatterjee’s claims about the activation of community relates not to the social and economic transactions of everyday rural life, but only to what he carefully designates as “political struggles.” By this he means the antagonistic confrontations, never very frequent, between peasants and the formal structure of state power represented by government officials and big landlords. These moments of confrontation were extraordinary events. Chatterjee’s evidence suggested to him that while peasants may have pursued their individual self-interest in routine economic activities such as defending their plots, mobilizing family labor, selling or buying crops, taking or repaying loans, and buying or selling tenancy rights in land, they acted out of a sense of collective solidarity when defending their political claims against the colonial state and landlords. In eastern Bengal, where most peasants were Muslim small tenants facing big landlords and urban moneylenders, mostly Hindu, the political struggle quickly took on religious overtones. In the Southwest, where the pursuit of self-interest under favorable economic conditions had led to differentiation among the peasantry, there were conflicts between large farmers and sharecroppers, but these were suspended at moments when there emerged a political struggle between peasants and the colonial state.
The rhetoric employed in these struggles itself emphasized the distinction between the economic conflicts of self-interest and the political conflict in which community solidarity, described by real or imputed bonds of kinship, was expected to prevail. Chatterjee is indeed claiming that there was a discontinuity between the everyday and the extraordinary, the economic and the political, the domain of self-interest and that of community solidarity. The dynamics that prevailed in one did not pass smoothly into the other. Subsequent studies by Subaltern Studies scholars such as Gyan Pandey, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, and Gautam Bhadra showed in much richer detail the moments of activation of community solidarity in peasant movements from different parts of South Asia. The pursuit of individual self-interest in ordinary times did not mean that the bonds of community were erased; they could be brought into play, sometimes with remarkable suddenness, at moments of political conflict with state power.
REASONS AND INTERESTS
Chatterjee’s claim fits exactly with Chakrabarty’s that the political consciousness of peasants, and of industrial workers who had not ceased to be peasants, was different from that of the bearer of abstract rights in civil society and the abstract citizen-subject of the bourgeois state. That difference is the ground for Chakrabarty’s distinction between reasons and interests in the political sphere. Reasons are derived from beliefs, interests from needs. Chibber criticizes Chakrabarty for suggesting that reasons, not needs, are culturally constituted. Once again, Chibber ignores the solidly Marxist provenance of this distinction, derived from Hegel’s analysis in The Philosophy of Right of civil society as “the system of needs,” a domain in which the fulfilment of needs through economic self-interest creates abstract rights whose recognition within the laws of the state leads in turn to the constitution of the abstract citizen-subject. This is the understanding of civil society and the bourgeois state that Marx adopts and that both Chakrabarty and Chatterjee follow. But Chibber prefers to abandon Marx’s view altogether and instead plumps for a wholly different conception of needs.
Chibber claims that there are certain basic needs that are understood in every culture, even though they may give rise to specific, culturally framed reasons; we may therefore interpret the expression of these reasons as evidence of these needs,19 and conclude that there are “some needs or interests that are independent of culture.”20 Anthropologists may squirm at his mode of argument, but Chibber attributes the interested pursuit of basic needs to “a component of human nature.”21 Of such universal basic needs, he picks one, “the simple need for physical well-being,”22 as most relevant in the political struggles of workers and peasants, and he does not stop there. Recounting the long history of struggles by workers in Europe to defend their political rights, Chibber announces that they follow “from the defense of a single basic need: to defend one’s physical well-being.”23 This, he declares in bold capitals, is “the universal history of class struggle.”24
The philosophical sweep and arbitrariness of these statements by Chibber are staggering. At one extreme, by deriving political actions from a single universal propensity of human nature, he aligns himself with an entire tradition of early modern philosophy that leads directly to the contractarian school of liberal political thought. At the same time, he invokes in his support the contemporary economist and philosopher Amartya Sen’s concept of basic needs, completely forgetting that Chibber’s own derivation of basic needs from universal human nature would put him squarely in the camp of what Sen25 calls the transcendental approach and from which he scrupulously dissociates himself. At another extreme, the motivation to defend the universal need for physical well-being as described by Chibber is independent not only of culture but of modes of production, state formations, power structures, and all other historical configurations. Slaves, serfs, peasants, workers: everyone could be said to be defending this universal need. Indeed, if physical well-being is so universal a motivation, it is hard to see why the subaltern classes should be the only ones pursuing it; why are the non-productive classes not also engaged in defending their need for well-being? Finally, the pursuit of physical well-being emanating from human nature suggests a universal biopolitics. Or is it zoo politics, since animals are also known to pursue and defend their need for physical well-being? In short, Chibber’s universal history of class struggle is materialist universalism run amok.
UNIVERSALITY AND THE UNCERTAINTIES OF HISTORY
Chibber clearly has little patience with rhetorical techniques such as irony. That is why he reads Chatterjee’s statements on Reason as a Western imposition on non-Western nationalism as blatantly orientalist propaganda, little realizing that Reason with a capital R (which is what Chatterjee26 consistently uses) is an obvious ironical play on Hegel’s philosophy of world history in which Reason can properly belong only to the West. Chibber’s suspicion about Chatterjee’s orientalist sympathies is confirmed by the latter’s argument that non-Western nationalism began by claiming sovereignty over an inner spiritual domain. Chibber’s lazy reading leads him to overlook Chatterjee’s specification that this is an early nationalist strategy before it begins its political contest over state sovereignty. Obviously, Chibber should not have expected to find any such spiritual claims in Sukarno, Nasser, or the Ba’athist leaders, all of whom were the political leaders of nationalism in the period of decolonization. Rather, he ought to have looked at the earlier history of religious reform, the creation of modern vernacular literatures, reform of the family, and other social movements in the Arab countries and Indonesia that produced these political leaders of the mid-twentieth century.
Chibber is perplexed that Chatterjee, even after dismissing Gandhi’s anti-modern alternative as unrealizable, nevertheless criticizes Nehru for his state-led modernization plans. Surely, Chibber says, Nehru made “a rational response to real constraints.”27 Chatterjee, of course, had shown that without the anti-modern, anti-capitalist, anti-industrial maneuver by Gandhi, the peasant masses could not have been mobilized by Indian nationalism and Nehru’s leadership subsequently established over a sovereign postcolonial state. In that case, either Gandhi’s intervention was the greatest confidence trick in political history or, as Chatterjee argues, it must be justified as the mysterious workings of objective forces that bring about the universally destined result regardless of the ideological motivations of particular historical players. That is what Hegel called the Cunning of Reason and what Nehru, like all other postcolonial nationalist leaders, accepted as the real compulsion of the global system, as Chibber puts it. For Chatterjee, this is the prison house into which state nationalisms are forced, even though their political practices acknowledge every day the real presence of historical difference.
Chibber announces several times in his book that the historical differences pointed out by Subaltern Studies scholars are all perfectly compatible with the universalizing tendency of capital. Extra-economic coercion, consciousness of ethnic or religious identity among industrial workers, and cultural construction of reasons for political action can all be assimilated within the same universal history of capital common to both West and East. Hence the distinction between History 1 and History 2 is, for him, a non-problem. Indeed, he simply conjures away the problem by proposing a definition of capitalism so capacious that it would bring a blush even to the pale cheeks of Adam Smith.
We could, of course, turn Chibber’s claim around and say that capital’s journey in the East has at last revealed its true face, hitherto hidden from us by its liberal mythology. In Western capitalism we saw only a shy debutante; it is the confident maestro who now performs in the East. Were this true, it would be the sweetest consummation of the project of Subaltern Studies. Unfortunately, that happy ending is not to be.
The historical problem confronted by Subaltern Studies is not an intrinsic difference between West and East, as Chibber repeatedly insists. The geographical distinction is merely the spatial label for a historical difference. That difference is indicated—let me insist emphatically—by the disappearance of the peasantry in capitalist Europe and the continued reproduction to this day of a peasantry under the rule of capital in the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That is the crux of Chakrabarty’s distinction between History 1 and History 2,28 derived from Marx’s own separation of historical conditions “posited by capital itself” and conditions that it merely finds. The difference is not as inconsequential as Chibber maintains. As Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value, money, which long preceded capitalist production, is not a condition posited by capital. A credit system with a currency guaranteed by a central bank is.29 When this happens successfully, it means for Chakrabarty the replacement and effective erasure of History 2 by History 1. His question is: has this happened in countries like India? A great deal hangs on the answer.
That is also why, despite the apparent similarities between the disciplines, Subaltern Studies could never have been carried out in the same way as History from Below in Europe. The recounting in the latter body of work of the struggles of peasants and artisans during capitalism’s ascendancy in Europe was inevitably written as tragedy, since the ultimate dissolution of those classes was already scripted into their history. Should we assume the same trajectory for agrarian societies in other parts of the world? Does a different sequencing of capitalist modernity there not mean, as Subaltern Studies scholar Sudipta Kaviraj30 has suggested, that the historical outcomes in terms of economic formations, political institutions, and cultural practices might be quite different from those we see in the West? Do those differences not imply, in turn, that the process of primitive or primary accumulation of capital has to be carried out in many Asian, African, and Latin American countries under conditions never encountered in the history of Western capitalism, as demonstrated by Kalyan Sanyal31 writing in the trail of Subaltern Studies? That is what is at stake in Chakrabarty’s distinction between History 1 and History 2. The implication is that, contrary to the historical method Chibber prefers, getting one’s European history right is not the magic formula that will solve the problems of historical change in the non-Western world. The historical specificities of the political, economic, and cultural institutions and practices of those people, including their distinctive linguistic traditions, must be given primacy by the historian.
UNIVERSALISM
Nevertheless, Chibber’s plea for continued faith in the universal values of European Enlightenment deserves a final comment. Universalism has been defended with far more subtle and sophisticated arguments than Chibber has mobilized in his book. One can only acknowledge that the debate between universalism and its critics continues and will not be resolved in a hurry. The choice between the two sides at this time is indeed political. The greatest strength of the universalist position is the assurance it provides of predictability and control over uncertain outcomes. It is the assurance that past history is a reliable guide to the future which leads Chibber to insist that capitalism and the struggles of subaltern classes must be the same everywhere. He says this even while acknowledging that the defense of political rights by workers all over the West has led to the “perverse result” of capitalist orders dominated by democratically unaccountable financial oligarchies.32
In the rest of the world, capital is engaged in battles it has never fought before, just as peasants and workers are resisting capital in ways that have never been tried before, because the historical conditions are unprecedented. The critics of universalism argue that the outcomes are unknown, indeterminate, and hence unpredictable. They accept the challenge of risky political choices, based on provisional, contingent, and corrigible historical knowledge. Since the early work of Subaltern Studies which Chibber dissected, the discipline has gone in several new directions, especially after important interventions by Gayatri Spivak33 and Gyan Prakash.34 The historical practice of Subaltern Studies scholars does not rule out the rise of new universalist principles, but these, they insist, must be forged anew. What is certain is that the working classes of Europe and North America and their ideologues can no longer act as the designated avant-garde in the struggles of subaltern classes in other parts of the world.
Historians of Subaltern Studies have only attempted to interpret a small part of these struggles. And changing the world, needless to say, is a job that cannot be entrusted to historians.