Since its release in March, the response to Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital has, in many ways, been as I expected. From the followers and practitioners of postcolonial theory itself, there has been the predicted hysteria and vitriol. But what has been gratifying, what I did not expect at all, is the steady stream of positive responses, even from within cultural studies and even from some quarters of postcolonial theory. Bruce Robbins’s review falls somewhere in between. His tone for most of it is respectful, sometimes positive. He quite ably sets the context for the book’s arguments and tries to lay out what is at stake. In this, he rises above the mudslinging that has been the resort of some of his colleagues. But once he sets out his own criticisms, the essay degenerates into a series of distortions and misconceptions. What makes them interesting, and worth responding to, is that they converge with misgivings that even sympathetic readers have expressed. Hence, although Robbins presents them in a very telescoped form, with the predictable helping of snides and cheap shots, they are worth responding to, mainly because of their resonance with other criticisms. I can only give a flavor of the arguments I need to make, since this is a short essay. A longer response will have to wait for another occasion.
The crux of Robbins’s criticism comes at the end of his review, and it comes down to three issues: whether my views of the English Revolution of 1640 and/or 1688 are defensible; whether my framework can apprehend the difference between East and West; and whether my materialism is really a restatement of rational choice theory. Robbins quite summarily dismisses my arguments on all three counts. I wish to show here that all of his criticisms are mistaken.
Let us start with the English Revolution. In PTSC I examined whether Ranajit Guha’s view about the events of 1640 were correct. Guha, in essence, understands 1640 to be an instance of a “bourgeoisdemocratic revolution,” in which the emergent capitalist class undertakes and accomplishes two goals—the eradication of feudal landed relations, and the establishment of a liberal, consensual political order. I showed that this view is irredeemably flawed, and that it sets up an illusory contrast between the history of the bourgeoisie in the East as against the West. First, the English Revolution was not a war between a rising bourgeoisie and the ancien régime, for the economy was already largely capitalist. Second, and most importantly, the victorious post-revolutionary regime had no interest in, and did not establish, the liberal, encompassing, consensual order that Guha attributes to it. In fact it strove mightily to squelch what democratic rights there were. What the revolution bequeathed was a narrow bourgeois oligarchy.
Robbins dismisses this argument out of hand as being wrong. He seems to think that an economic transformation of this magnitude had to have occurred through something like a political revolution. How, he asks, could feudalism have disappeared without anyone noticing, without a “political commotion”? I seem to make politics recede into irrelevance. Two points are worth mentioning here. First, I do not say that feudalism was replaced without any political commotion, or transformation of polical relations more generally. In fact, as I argue in some detail in the book, there was a very important political transformation that accompanied the change in agrarian relations in the Tudor era—the landed classes acquired greater and greater political power for themselves throughout the country by capturing local juridical institutions and in parliament by controlling regional elections. Over the course of a century, they bent the structure of the state toward their own interests, thereby constraining the monarchy in its unilateral power. This was a transformation of epochal significance, in that they slowly turned the state into an organ of their own power—albeit with a monarchical form. The strife in 1640 was the final act in a decades-long effort by Charles to wrest control away from the landed classes, centralizing it again in the person of the monarch. The revolution itself was a war over what kind of state an already bourgeois England would have. My argument doesn’t consign politics to irrelevance—it simply corrects an erroneous story about what the battle was fought over.
But even more importantly, Robbins fails to understand the real issue. Even if the traditional story about the revolution were true—that it was a political revolution led by the bourgeoisie against a feudal state—it wouldn’t be enough to save the Subalternists’ case. For them the central issue isn’t whether or not England was already capitalist by 1640. It is, rather, whether or not the capitalists who came to power were committed to a liberal, consensual, inclusive political order—their commitment to “speak for all the nation.” This is where they set themselves apart from the postcolonial and colonial capitalists. And on this score, there is simply no debate among historians. What the English bourgeoisie wanted, and what it erected after 1688, was a narrow bourgeois oligarchy, geared centrally toward the exclusion of popular classes from the political arena. The heroic bourgeoisie against which Guha compares that of the East is a historic myth.
I point out the centrality of this issue at some length in Chapter Four, but Robbins seems not to have noticed. Indeed, his entire line of criticism is not based on any empirical grounds at all. He rejects my argument, not because he has any facts to marshal against it, or any historical literature he can cite, but from first principle. He announces from on high what events must look like in the advent of capitalism. If a particular narrative fails to conform to his model, well then, so much the worse for the narrative. This is certainly an interesting approach to historical inquiry, but one more properly belonging in a church or synagogue.
Turning now to the second issue, the chasm putatively separating East from West, Robbins fares no better. Now, I have to tread lightly here, since his argument gets very murky. But he seems to think that a focus on the universal properties of capitalism, which he takes me to be recommending, can only end up papering over the real differences between regions. So even though it might be that capitalism has swept the globe, surely we want to explain the difference between “capitalism in the style of IKEA and capitalism in the style of Rana Plaza.” Apparently I am not interested in such mundane matters, being slavishly bound to capitalism as a Grand Narrative. As proof, Robbins adduces numbers—it is not till page 290 that I even broach how Eastern capitalism actually diverges from its Western counterpart.
Robbins has to know that he is being disingenuous. My entire book is wedded to showing that taking cognizance of certain universal forces is no impediment to also explaining diversity. The issue of social and historical difference is at the very heart of my argument. The clearest discussion of this is in Chapter 9, on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s confused and rather tortured analysis of abstraction. I explain there that the very universalizing forces of capitalism also generate very diverse forms of capitalism, because even though the pressure to accumulate is common across economies, local response to it can be quite varied. This is in part due to the unevenness of the accumulation process itself, but also because of the contingencies of class conflict and local institutional influences. Capitalism thus universalizes its dynamics, but exists in variable forms. Just so readers know how bizarre Robbins’s accusation is, my discussion of this issue is in a section labeled “Capitalism and Diversity Revisited” (Chapter 9, Section 6), in which I summarize the argument in its subsection titled “Three Sources of Diversity in Capitalism” (pp. 244–6). So I literally spell out what I am arguing—and Robbins still manages to miss it.
It is true that I do not produce an actual theory, a historical account, of why this or that country—say, a Sweden—turned out differently in its capitalism than another one—perhaps an Argentina. But that is because I have to set the argument at the same level of generality as the theories that I criticize, those of the Subalternists. The argument coming from their camp is not that some particular theory is falling short; it is that any theory built on certain premises is incapable of ever recognizing difference. I try to show that the kinds of theories they impugn are in fact quite capable of appreciating historical diversity, and I show what it is about their logic that enables them to explain both universal processes and divergent social formations. I then point, on page 290, to the veritable mountain of literature that does just that—explain how Sweden and Argentina are both capitalist but still very diverse. I do not offer such an explanation myself because I do not have to, since it has been at the core of several theories’ research programs for more than one hundred years, which postcolonial theorists either pretend doesn’t exist, or are ignorant of.
Finally, the question of rationality. Robbins seems of two minds here. He accuses me of offering a model of action derived from rational choice theory, on top of which he heaps further opprobrium—not the least of which is the dreaded verdict of being “pre-dialectical.” But he also quickly draws back and admits that he might be exaggerating (even my being weak on the dialectic?). Since it isn’t clear which of his accusations he actually believes, let me address the question squarely. Do I rely on a rational choice model of action? I have to admit being puzzled by this question, since I go to some lengths in the book—not just in a footnote, as Robbins wrongly asserts—to show how and why my argument is not a version of rational choice theory. Robbins is again a little dishonest here. He uses a quotation from me about the “asocial individual, hovering above his culture, ranking his preferences,” and so on, implying that that is the view that I wish to endorse—when he notes perfectly well that, in that passage, I am lampooning that view as one that I reject.
So what is the view that I endorse? Do I reduce agents to asocial automatons? What I actually say in the book—and it is hard to see how Robbins could miss this—is three things. First, that people are largely shaped by their cultures, but culture is not constitutive of human psychology. There are some needs that exist and endure independently of culture, and chief among these is the need to attend to one’s physical well-being. Second, that people are typically cognizant of this need and it therefore generates interests that influence political and social interaction. And third, that it is the universality of this need that explains the universality of resistance to exploitation—since the latter typically undermines the former. Note that I don’t simply assert this argument—I show that the actual historiography of the Subalterns themselves validates this proposition, even though they deny it (with the exception of Guha, who never denies it).
None of this entails a commitment to rational choice theory. All I am offering is one route to what was once called materialism, and those are two very different animals. I do not imply, indeed I explicitly deny, that people are welfare-maximizers. Nor do I suggest that people are selfish or competitive individualists—the two implications most commonly associated with rational choice, and rightly rejected. What I do say is that people have a healthy appreciation for situations in which they are being oppressed or exploited, that this appreciation holds steady across cultures, and that it generates reasons for action. This is why what we typically see is what James Scott called “everyday forms of resistance.” If anyone has an alternative foundation for non-reductionist materialism, I’d be happy to entertain it. I don’t know of any.
Furthermore, my argument does not in any way imply that a concern for one’s well-being is all there is to human nature. In the book, I offer that people are probably also hardwired for a desire for autonomy or self-determination. But I also say, and I will repeat, that human nature is in fact much richer than either of these—there is the innate creativity, the desire for love, for social ties, for meaning, and so forth. All those needs and capacities that Marx describes in the 1844 Manuscripts are ones that I accept. The reason I focused on one particular property is that this is the one that is at the core of Subalternist arguments, and it is the aspect of human nature they deny, especially to people with darker skin—and I have to go where my quarry goes. It is worth repeating that Marx, the Enlightenment thinker with the richest conception of human nature, never doubted the existence of basic human needs, nor the importance of material interests as the fount of politics and political struggles. What made capitalism unjust was that it turned—and in so many parts of the world, continues to turn—workers’ lives into a struggle around their bare material well-being, suppressing the development of their other manifold capacities. We should of course object to any theory that reduces peoples’ motivations to those focused on this one goal—but we should be equally suspicious of a theory that denies or impugns its salience outright. The most deplorable consequence of the “cultural turn” is that it does just this, and Robbins’s response is just another example of it.
The sad fact is that every accusation Robbins throws at me was anticipated in PTSC and addressed to a greater or lesser extent. Now he is of course free to disagree with the defenses I offer in the book. But in pretending that I don’t address the issues he raises, and in simply ignoring what I explain quite clearly and at great length, Robbins only confirms what I predicted at the end of PTSC—that the most likely response from the defenders of postcolonial theory would be to dismiss and calumniate outside criticism, rather than addressing it squarely. As I said at the outset of my response, he is not as hysterical or shrill as some others. But he also doesn’t manage to rise above the dismal level of debate that the field has established.