Let me start by saying that my biggest fear is that Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital will be taken at face value: as a systematic and thorough savaging of Subaltern Studies. Unfortunately, it does fit that description quite perfectly. But for me, it is so much more than that, and not even primarily a critique of the currently hegemonic perspective on postcolonial development. Instead, I see it as a modern analog to Engels’s Anti-Dühring, which created a kind of negative immortality for Eugen Dühring, now known only through Engels’s critique. As Engels said in the introduction to that text, he engaged in such a definitive critique because it “gave me … the opportunity to develop in a positive form my views on questions which are today of wide scientific or practical interest.”1
I view Chibber’s work as a parallel sort of enterprise. I think the “positive” analysis in postcolonial theory—that is, Chibber’s both original and synthetic portrait of the role of class dynamics and the logic of accumulation in the evolution of the postcolonial world—is so compelling that it will become foundational for a rich vein of new scholarship that supplants Subaltern Studies. And—because Chibber, like Engels, has chosen this dialectical format as the vehicle for developing and expressing his viewpoint—he may well confer upon Subaltern Studies a Dühring-like negative immortality. His critique is so devastating that long after the key texts of Subaltern Studies are out of print and out of mind, their ideas will be learned and even memorized by the legion of readers of postcolonial theory.
I want in this essay to call out some of the key components of this “positive” analysis and argue for its value, while calling for Chibber and the rest of us to utilize its strengths, correct its inadequacies, and fully develop its potential as a tool for understanding and challenging the negative dynamics of postcolonial capitalism.
Before leaving the Anti-Dühring metaphor, I want to congratulate Chibber on emulating Engels, because the brilliance of this text derives, at least to a considerable degree, from the method of exposition. Each analytic sojourn begins with perfecting the analysis contained in key texts of Subaltern Studies, then moves to a definitive criticism of the perfected argument. During this process, the criticism is leavened by a careful appreciation and absorption of the many positive contributions of postcolonial theorists, with the best elements becoming building blocks for Chibber’s (finally delivered) alternate analysis.
The method works beautifully because even brief presentations of the final positive syntheses are instantly grasped and appreciated, because we are attuned—by the detailed scrutiny of the Subalternists—to the key markers that an adequate explanation must address. But this indisputably productive approach also has its problems, because it often results in a recessive under-emphasis on the dynamic elements in Chibber’s perspective. This is particularly visible in the concluding chapter, where he devotes six long pages to reviewing the critique and only one short (though luminous) page to his positive analysis.2
Let me illustrate what I think is the problem by tracing his analysis of the origins of structural conflict within postcolonial society.3 After deconstructing the Subaltern Studies argument that such conflict resides and emanates from survivals of pre-existing formations, Chibber then accepts their claim that these non-capitalist formations play an important role in societal dynamics writ large, while showing that they have not been the locus of anti-capitalist resistance. In his crowning analysis—based on evidence drawn not only from the Subaltern theorists themselves, but also the rest of the postcolonial world, Chibber shows that the big conflicts—those that yield (and threaten to yield) major shifts in postcolonial trajectories—emanate from the contradictions within the sectors of postcolonial society that are most fully absorbed into the process of capital accumulation. In perfecting this negative argument, Chibber actually offers an integration of political economic theorizing around state development and the extensive literature on Third World revolution, while absorbing the best elements of Subaltern Studies.
I want to focus on one key moment in Chibber’s argument to point toward what I think is a major area that needs further attention. One of the most compelling passages in the book responds to Partha Chatterjee’s analysis of the dynamics of peasant mobilization. Chibber concludes:
Chatterjee maintains that the defining element of Indian peasants’ agency is their insulation from “bourgeois consciousness,” from strategies that prioritize individual interests. Their self-identities issue from their membership in the community, and their basic motivations derive from their sense of obligation to this community. If this is true, however, surely it should also mitigate the internal class differentiation of the peasantry … The emerging rich peasants acquired the land because their peers fell on hard times … The wealthier peasants had a choice: they could assist their fellow villagers out of a sense of duty, as members of the community, without seeking personal gain; or they could take advantage of their peers’ misfortune and usurp their land, their most precious resource … For the class of jotedars to have emerged it must be the case that a section of the smallholder community chose the latter course of action. They chose to pursue their individual interests. In other words, these smallholders acted on precisely the “bourgeois consciousness” that Chatterjee insists they lacked.4
This precise targeting of a key dynamic in the colonial world—the importation of capital accumulation into peasant society and the class differentiation that follows—allows Chibber to demonstrate that rural conflicts were not “conservative” efforts built on the (already fractured) communal solidarity, but rather expressions of the growing class divisions created by the capitalist invasions.
But, at the same time, Chibber rushes past a crucial point which I think emanates from this insight. As he states in other contexts, the old communalism was not obliterated—but instead transmuted—during this process. Such pre-capitalist formations do not disappear; they adapt into the capitalist structure, creating a kind of mutual evolution in which the outcome structure will be unique in each country, and quite different between and within regions.5 For many pre-capitalist formations, this adaptation has little consequence for the outcome dynamics, but surely this communalism—and the shape of its altered role in the capitalized structure—is a causal vector in the resulting class dynamics. Put simply: what becomes of the communalistic ethos that Subaltern Studies valorizes? It arrives in the new formation in a variety of forms, and Chibber (and those of us who take up his argument) must offer an understanding of the dynamics that determine the outcome formation. Even more important is to codify and understand the varying structural trajectories characterizing the various outcome formations.
I want to offer one avenue of analysis regarding the afterlife of communalism in postcolonial society. From Chibber’s argument, we see one regularity that occurs wherever rural capital accumulation is set in motion: the creation of self-aggrandizing rich peasants who have abandoned (much of) the communalistic ethos. But what of the poor (and soon becoming landless) peasants? It seems to me that there is considerable work to be done to understand the circumstances under which they abandon the communalistic ethos and organize against the rich peasants, and those circumstances when they continue to embrace communalism and ally themselves with the jotedars (despite their growing contradictions of interest). I am particularly taken by the contrast between, say, Vietnam and China, which sustained insurrections of peasants against the rural elites, and the American South, where Southern tenants most often joined movements led by the same rural elites who had taken their land and/or exploited their labor. For me, we are sorely in need of an analysis that will allow us to understand what sorts of absorption processes—and related dynamics—yield one or another of these modalities. In India, it would appear that both modalities have developed in different regions and different times, and careful scrutiny using Chibber’s analytic tools could well unravel this critical dynamic.
The various strands in Chibber’s argument are woven together, and much is lost when we disentangle them. But we need to do so anyway, because leaving them undifferentiated conceals some of the most promising yet unexplored insights. Consider, for example, Chibber’s treatment of what he calls “the real engine of democratization.”6 Here he begins with the Subaltern Studies assertion that parliamentary democracy (including its essential accoutrements, such as free speech, equal protection, and so forth) was an organic expression of the imperatives of capitalism ascending—and that the failure of democracy in the postcolonial world must derive from strong pre-capitalist (and axiomatically anti-democratic) forces. Partly, Chibber rebuts this argument through his savaging of the communalism assertions, but this is only the beginning link in what becomes his broader theory of when and where parliamentary democracy arises.
Herein lies another instance in which Chibber preserves elements of the Subaltern Studies analysis: he endorses the proposition that parliamentary democracy was (and is) a consequence of ascendant capitalism. But he stands their argument on its head. He definitively rebuts their assertion of bourgeois activism, and replaces it with subaltern activism.
To accomplish this inversion, Chibber challenges the Subalternists’ core argument that pioneering Western capitalists actively fought for parliamentary democracy and its accompanying rights, as soon as their political power allowed it. He demonstrates instead that the rising bourgeoisie and its political allies in England and France resourcefully opposed democracy, and that the arrival of universal suffrage and the other elements of what we now call democracy was a result of sustained struggle by subaltern classes. But he preserves the connection between capitalism and democratic rights, pointing out that it was only with the rise of industrial production that the working class (in alliance with the other subaltern groupings and in opposition to the capitalists) achieved the leverage it needed to demand and win universal suffrage and the other accoutrements of democracy. He completes this tightly woven argument with a gorgeous little comment: “It was only through subaltern mobilizations that capitalism was civilized.”7
But as beautiful as this argument is, I feel it is only a start. There is so much more that needs to be done here. First and foremost, Chibber (and those of us who work with his ideas) must explain why capitalism confers the needed leverage on the subaltern classes. He makes a start by invoking Marx’s founding insight that the gathering of industrial workers into close proximity, and engaged in a production process characterized by ever-increasing division of labor, was the foundation for class formation and therefore working-class agency. But this is only a beginning.
Second, and perhaps closer to the analysis that Chibber provides, is answering a host of questions around class struggle. As we look from country to country (in the capitalist core or the postcolonial periphery), we find a huge variance in the degree of “democratization.” This is especially clear if we shift our attention from contested elections as the sine qua non of “democracy” and focus instead on the full array of political, economic, and human rights that are supposed to be integral to democratic society. Once we do this, we see that there is no facile correlation between the extension of capitalist accumulation into the far corners of society and the further extension of democratic rights. Instead, there are huge and changing differences among countries with comparable levels of capitalist penetration. So we need a much more refined understanding of the dynamics of capitalist development to understand the configurations that create the capacity (and the intention) for subaltern classes to civilize capitalism. Let me point to one set of elements that must surely be a major factor in unraveling this conundrum: racism and its categorical cousins—patriarchy, religious intolerance, ethnic discrimination, and so forth. In tracking the successes and failures in civilizing capitalism, we must acknowledge that racism (or any of its cousins) has been a key factor in determining the degree of leverage either available to, or accessible by, subaltern movements. But we must press beyond this proposition to understand when, where, and how the racism process operates—since here too there is great variance in its role, depending on the national or regional setting. There has been some important work on these questions that can be integrated into the Chibberian analysis. One exemplar is Richard Williams’s argument8 that racism (or any of its cousins) is most impactful in defense of capitalist barbarism when racial categories coincide with occupational stratification, generally yielding meager citizenship rights for the racial minority and degraded rights for the “privileged” “majority.”
For me this excursion into the nuts and bolts of elaborating Chibber’s analysis leads back to the proposition that capitalism absorbs pre-capitalist formations while preserving and evolving many of the elements. Can we comprehend this absorption process well enough to understand how the distinct dynamics that emerge have an impact on the trajectory of economic development, the vulnerability of the structure to democratic reform, and the agency of subaltern masses?
Let me turn now to a third (also indelibly interconnected) element of Chibber’s analysis: the structural constraints that led Global South nationalists to pursue modernization (instead of other alternatives, including socialism). In contrasting his perspective with Partha Chatterjee’s argument that these policies were expressions of pro-Western sycophantism, he concludes: “Chatterjee’s theory of nationalism fails in large measure because it denies the reality of capitalist constraints. It treats rational decisions as having been ideologically driven and, in so doing, vastly exaggerates the role of ideas and grossly undervalues the effects of actually existing structures.”9
This is yet another of Chibber’s insights that emerge from his dialectical method. His assertion of structural constraint is fully persuasive because he has so meticulously demolished Chatterjee’s assertion that nationalist leaders could have pursued many different development strategies, and thus effectively rebutted his conclusion that modernization policy reflected ideological commitment. But this method of exposition has deprived us of a full treatment of nationalism as an ideology and its role in determining economic and political trajectories. While Chibber’s structural argument is compelling, he is inattentive to the impact of nationalism within the structural constraints he so forcefully articulates. I am thinking here that in the Indian case (and many, but not all others), nationalism was instrumental in muting the class struggle or misdirecting subaltern classes away from demands that might have brought them greater citizenship rights or a greater share of the rewards of development.
And then there is the larger question about the diversities in the types and impact of nationalism in differing postcolonial settings. Vietnamese and Indian nationalism would appear to have had very different impacts on anti-colonial struggles and postcolonial development. In explaining this difference, we may well, as Jeffrey Paige has argued,10 look to the differing paths of capitalist development as structural determinants that produce different forms of human agency—including different forms of nationalism—and ultimately have an impact on different development strategies.11
I think that Chibber points us toward a comprehensive analysis of these issues in his luminous, but all too short, recapitulation of his “positive account of how capital, power, and agency actually work.” Here he lists the first two of the four basic elements of his “alternative argument”:
The first is that the universalization of capital is real, pace the claims of the Subalternist collective. The colonies’ political dynamics did not attain a fundamentally different kind of modernity than did the Europeans’. More precisely, their modernity may have been different, but not in the ways that postcolonial theory insists. Theirs is a modernity that, over time, became no less reflective of capitalist imperatives than the French or German. The second is that the universalizing drive of capital should not be assumed to homogenize power relations or the social landscape more generally. In fact, capitalism is not only consistent with great heterogeneity and hierarchy, but systematically generates them. Capitalism is perfectly compatible with a highly diverse set of political and cultural formations.12
But this also points to what might be the least developed component in Chibber’s analysis: human agency. He is so occupied with debunking the cultural determinism of the Subaltern school that he does not pay enough attention to the first part of Marx’s famous structural axiom, that people “make history, but not as they choose.” While Chibber is right to call out the structural dynamics of capitalism that the Subalternists attempt to sweep away, we also need a comprehensive analysis of the circumstances under which people are able to collectively choose and implement progressive social change. We need to identify and comprehend the broader nexus of dynamic forces that facilitate or constrain our efforts to construct what Perry Anderson has called “a premeditated future.”13