Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is a critique not of postcolonial theory in general, but specifically of the Subaltern Studies school, as represented by Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. The Subalternists, of course, have focused specifically on Indian history, a subject with which I have only a passing acquaintance. This means that my comments should surely be taken with a healthy grain of salt.
I suppose I must have been asked to contribute to this symposium to say something about the famous entity called “Europe” that Dipesh Chakrabarty1 and other postcolonial theorists have striven to deprovincialize. After all, Europe is the unavoidable “other” against which the Subalternists have evaluated Indian history—unavoidable because India was conquered and ruled by Britain for nearly two centuries and because Europe, and more recently an expanded “West” that notably includes the United States, have dominated the world militarily, economically, culturally, and intellectually for the past 300 years. Chibber, it should be said, doesn’t dispute the necessity of thinking about the history of India in comparison with the West; what he disputes is the way the Subalternists think about it and the conclusions they draw.
Chibber is not a sympathetic critic: indeed, he’s basically hostile to culturalist theories, to postmodern literary and philosophical tropes, and to the murky Hegelian and Heideggerian language that appears in the later work of Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chibber attempts to puncture what he regards as the vague and exaggerated claims of postcolonial theorists and to defend a Marxist version of universal Enlightenment values against what he calls the Subalternists’ “orientalism.” But Chibber doesn’t waste time declaiming against the Subalternists. Rather, he seriously and painstakingly subjects their arguments to a dissection that is unforgivingly rationalist. In the end, Chibber convinces me that the Subalternists’ major claims are pretty shaky.
The Subalternists’ arguments of course evolved over time. Thus Ranajit Guha’s Dominance without Hegemony,2 a collection of essays composed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was written from within a basically Marxist framework, whereas Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe insists on Marxism’s essential Eurocentrism and its consequent inability to grasp Indian historical developments. But it is remarkable that from beginning to end the “Europe” that the Subalternists grapple with is represented above all by Marxism and by particular Marxist imaginings of European history. This suggests that Subaltern Studies must be understood in part as an ambivalent emanation of a disappointed Marxism, an aftermath, one supposes, of the failed Naxalite movement of the 1970s.
Chibber thinks this disappointment is misplaced, that Marxist analysis retains its utility for understanding economic, social, and political developments both in the “West” and in the developing world. The Subalternists’ discontents, he argues, arise from both empirical and theoretical errors.
Ranajit Guha, in Dominance without Hegemony, argued that much of India’s postcolonial misfortune can be traced to the weakness of the Indian bourgeoisie. In Guha’s telling, the Indian bourgeoisie failed to live up to the heroic legacy of their European counterparts, who, in two great revolutions—in England in the 1640s and in France in 1789—overthrew feudalism and established liberal bourgeois states that fulfilled the universalizing drive of capitalism, both by securing the political dominance of the capitalist class and by fashioning hegemonic political orders that extended political rights to subordinate classes. By contrast, the Indian bourgeoisie, in its would-be revolutionary moment of decolonization, gained political dominance but failed to overthrow feudal relations in the countryside or to establish anything like the genuinely hegemonic political order characteristic of Europe.
I need hardly point out that this portrayal of the English and French revolutions is standard-issue orthodox Marxism—and is by now well past its “sell-by” date. The problem, as Chibber argues, is that this old orthodox Marxist account seriously misunderstands European history. Now, I have to say that Chibber’s own grasp of French and English history seems to me a bit shaky. For example, he discusses the English Civil War of the 1640s at some length but doesn’t even mention the English Revolution of 1688, which most European historians now alive would regard as having a much better claim to being something like a bourgeois revolution. And he concludes, remarkably, that the contribution of the European revolutions to “the birth of modern liberalism” was “weak”—completely ignoring, for example, such founding liberal moments as the separation of powers instituted in England in 1688 or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Nevertheless, Chibber’s most important conclusions about the European experience seem to me quite correct: that the regimes put in place in the wake of the so-called bourgeois revolutions actually placed stringent limits on the political participation of popular classes and that democratization in Europe owed far more to struggles from below than to the generosity of the bourgeoisie. This, in turn, implies that the Indian bourgeoisie’s failure to embrace an egalitarian order, far from constituting a deviation from the politics of the European bourgeoisie or a failure of capitalism’s universalizing dynamic, was instead exactly what the European experience of capitalism and revolution should have led us to expect.
Chibber also strives to refute the essentially parallel argument of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Rethinking Working-Class History.3 Chakrabarty asserts in this book that the nature of relations between jute mill workers and capitalists in Calcutta—which were based more on personal authority, caste, and religious identities than on the anonymous labor market and class identities—demonstrates that European capitalism’s universalizing mission had stalled on Eastern shores. Chibber replies by showing that European and American capitalists have repeatedly relied on personal authority and particularist identities whenever these could produce a tractable labor force. Again, there was nothing “Eastern” about labor relations that took this form nor did they represent any failure of capitalism to universalize itself.
Chibber’s arguments in these two cases have perfectly good Marxist credentials. What he shows here and elsewhere in his book is that Marxist empirical and conceptual work on the history of capitalism is perfectly capable of making sense of Indian developments—that there is no fundamental conceptual divide between the history of “Europe” and the history of “the East.”
This, of course, puts Chibber strongly at odds with Chakrabarty’s arguments in Provincializing Europe, probably the most celebrated (and certainly the most difficult) work of the Subaltern school. Chibber remarks that Chakrabarty, near the beginning of this book, claims that the “Europe” used as a point of comparison for Indian history is a “hyperreal” entity—in Chakrabarty’s terms a “metanarrative figure of the imagination” that is “constructed by the tales that both imperialism and nationalism have told the colonized.”4 Chibber dismisses this claim as a dodge, asserting, quite correctly, that Chakrabarty in fact constantly makes claims about divergences between the real histories of Europe and India.
However, I think that Chakrabarty’s “Europe” actually is hyperreal in a somewhat different sense. It seems to me that Chakrabarty constructs a “Marxism” fused with a hyperreal “Europe” that is very much a “narrative figure of the imagination”—and then proceeds to criticize this construct. (Note that “Europe” for Chakrabarty never connotes such eminently European features as Christian fervor, or royal absolutism, or romanticism, or militarism, or Fascism—only the Enlightenment, democracy, liberalism, rationality, capitalism, and imperialism. Such a one-sided Europe is quite unrecognizable to a Europeanist.) In Provincializing Europe Chakrabarty, on the basis of a rather daunting reading of Marx, claims to find, but I would say constructs, a highly idealized, unified, teleological and (it must be said) un-dialectical history of capitalism that he labels “History 1,” a capitalist history to which “the Enlightenment universals” adhere or that includes within itself “the categories of Enlightenment thought.”5 Next to this he constructs another history, what he calls “History 2,” that contains diverse logics of action and belonging and that is “charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrusts of History 1.”6 It is this History 2 that especially comes into prominence in the East, where capitalism has been more recently introduced. Chakrabarty claims that historians, both Eastern and Western, have been too mesmerized by the perfect unity and self-identity of History 1 and have underplayed the disruptions and incompleteness that History 2 introduces into the history of capitalist societies.
Chibber agrees that one can reasonably distinguish a History 1 that refers to the specific and necessary dynamics of capitalist accumulation from a History 2 that is not fully interior to capital’s life process. But Chibber’s version of History 1 is rather stripped down: it’s not identified with Europe or freighted with necessity or equated with the Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is decidedly dialectical—the capitalist core is full of contradictions that constantly threaten to disrupt any orderly process of accumulation. That is to say, it actually resembles the capitalism that we all know and love. Chibber’s History 2, like Chakrabarty’s, is defined as those historical forces not constituted by the core of capitalism. But Chibber insists that History 2 normally poses no particular threat to History 1. It’s either perfectly compatible with capitalism, as when capitalists take advantage of differences of religion, caste, or race to divide or discipline their workforces. Or it’s basically indifferent to capitalism, as when cultural practices of one sort or another go on with no noticeable influence one way or the other on capital accumulation. Aspects of History 2 can, of course, on occasion disrupt History 1, but disruptions from within the logic of History 1 are far more common and far more consequential. For Chibber, there is no reason either to shun History 1 or to exalt History 2. As you may have guessed, I prefer Chibber’s version of the two histories to Chakrabarty’s.
To sum up: Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital provides a careful, sustained, intelligent, and salutary critique of Subaltern Studies. Its genius is critique, however, rather than reconstruction. Chibber’s rationalism, which sometimes gets very close to rational choice, is basically a solvent or a deflator. Chibber has cleared the ground and has usefully indicated the value of Marxist analytical tools. But in my opinion it will take a Marxism more infused with cultural sensitivities to reconstruct a superior history of the postcolonial world.
Let me close with a few final thoughts on the provincialization of Europe. If postcolonial historians really are serious about provincializing Europe, perhaps they should begin by recognizing that Europe is actually divided into many provinces—usually known as nation-states—that have surprisingly diverse histories. The histories of politics or thought or industrialization of England, Spain, France, Hungary, Germany, Norway, and Greece are by no means the same. Differences between the histories of Portugal and England may be as great as those between the histories of China and France. And the histories of none of these countries are identical to the history of capitalism, or the Enlightenment, or democracy. Perhaps we should try banishing the over-inflated collective noun “Europe” from our vocabularies for a few years and treat that broad peninsula at the western end of Eurasia as what it is: a collection of highly diverse provinces, not some unified totality. Chibber’s deflation of postcolonial theory should help to point us in this direction.