Why is labor represented by the value of its product and labor-time by the magnitude of that value?
Karl Marx
In the preface to his Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Vivek Chibber1 thanks Neil Brenner for the book’s name, writing that “Brenner gets the lion’s share of credit for the book’s title … the title is basically his.” Several scholars have questioned whether the book’s primary content, a sustained critique of writings by Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, is a fair proxy for the diverse efforts of people who identify themselves as studying or being a part of the “postcolonial.”2 The second part of the title, “Specter of Capital,” orients my comments on the book in this essay. It is an accurate choice of terms, because Chibber’s book does offer a significant argument about the critical study of appearances, which is a term directly related to the word “apparition” and its close cousin, “specter.”
Readers should recognize the word “specter” as a reference to the opening sentence of Karl Marx and Friederich Engel’s “Manifesto of the Communist Party” published in 1848: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.” Readers also will discern that a tradition of Marxism gets a lion’s share of credit for informing the book’s content. One of the book’s primary goals is to refute the claim, attributed by Chibber to the three authors affiliated with “Subaltern Studies,” that critical study of capitalism informed by Marxism is not applicable to the postcolonial history of India. The way that the book approaches appearances directly echoes Marx’s metaphorical use of specters and ghosts in his varied analyses of capitalist relations.3
There are two different connotations to “specter” that make their appearance in Chibber’s book. The first is the understanding that beyond or behind a surface level of particular human sentiments, practices, and habits, however dominant and durable, lies something more basic and material shared by all individuals in any context. The second perspective on appearances suggested in the book is that particular kinds of representations or mediations may actually become more material, mobile, and capable of making things happen in the world. The first modality is about appearances and something behind them. The second approach is about the agency of appearances and their capacity to hide both the conditions that give rise to them and their manner of contributing to perpetuating these same conditions. This essay focuses on these two understandings of appearances and the way that the book’s manner of minding them is integral to its critical analysis. I am less concerned with choosing a side in the academic debate to which the book substantially contributes than with using its appearance as an opportunity to push forward discussion about how better to render fully “explanatory critiques” of capitalist relations anywhere on the planet.4
INDIA AND EUROPE
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is organized as an analytical critique of the writings of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among the most prominent scholars associated with the Subaltern Studies collective. Chibber focuses on their work and identifies a constellation of arguments that stipulate several key divergences between Indian and European modernity. Chibber distills three themes, pointing out that the authors participate in an aggregate project of arguing for a radical Indian difference regarding: 1) the character of its bourgeoisie; 2) the relative role of distinctly capitalist power relations; and 3) what Chibber calls the “political psychology” of Indian subaltern actors. Chibber lays out what he understands as the necessary preconditions required for sustaining all the arguments that buttress the claim of a radical India-Europe divergence along the three thematic axes. He effectively tests to see if these conditions are, in fact, manifest in the evidence and logically plausible. Chapter by chapter, he endeavors to show how the evidentiary premises of the arguments in favor of the three distinctions cannot be sustained.
Chibber also specifies an alternative interpretation and approach meant to overcome the stark India/Europe divide, allowing for variation within what is understood as a unitary capitalism, marked by two fundamental tendencies. The first is that capitalists tend to spread and deepen their activities as a feature of their recognition of the requirements of the system in which they participate. The second is that workers, as they experience forms of exploitation through the actions of capitalists, will be inclined to resist this process, motivated by recognition of direct threats to their material or bodily well-being. Chibber calls these “Enlightenment” universal tendencies and he wishes to defend them against the claim by Subaltern Studies authors that they are not applicable to Indian history. In this defense lies the book’s first critical approach to appearances.
GHOSTBUSTER
Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital carries a definition of one domain of social life that is understood as separate and distinct from an underlying and more basic reality. In the author’s terms, all of these surface aspects or features fall under the umbrella term of “political psychology.” Chibber does not explain this expression, though it has a substantial scholarly pedigree, including its early appearance in the German ethnologist Adolph Bastian’s 1860 book, Man in History.5 Bastian’s work influenced the famous British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor and also directly shaped the scholarship of Franz Boas, known as the founder of US anthropology.6 It also is associated with the work of US political scientist Harold Lasswell during the 1930s and 1940s.7 Chibber deploys political psychology as a general hypernym for what he identifies elsewhere in the text as consciousness, culture, identity, ideology, and religion.8
Chibber invokes all five of these concepts especially in Chapters 6 through 8, making this part of the book the most concentrated critical examination of how the Subaltern Studies authors treat the content of what Chibber has called “political psychology.” He summarizes his interpretation of the Subaltern Studies position in the fourth paragraph of Chapter 7: “They deny that agents share a common set of needs or interests across cultural boundaries, arguing instead that the peasants and industrial workers in the East have a wholly different psychology from those in the West.”9 In Chapter 6, Chibber focuses on Partha Chatterjee’s work, which he summarizes as organized around the central claim that “communal norms, not individual interests, were the fount of rural politics” in India.10
Chibber’s critique rests on examining Guha’s Elementary Forms, which Chatterjee had drawn upon, as well as Chatterjee’s own research on peasants in Bengal and identifying instances where peasants seemed to act according to individual interests rather than shared cultural norms. He focuses on Chatterjee’s identification of internal differentiation between a relatively wealthy smallholding fraction, jotedars, who employed workers, obtained rents from tenant farmers, and earned income from lending operations, and the majority of peasants who were primarily subsistence farmers. Chibber argues that this apparent diversity refutes Chatterjee’s claim that a singular peasant communal ideology dominated Bengali peasant life, fully masking the relative exploitation carried out by jotedars.
In Chapter 8, Chibber continues this line of analysis, tracing the relationship between collective norms and individual interests through consideration of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. According to Chibber, Chakrabarty “purports to have discovered that subordinate groups are not motivated by a defense of their interests; instead, they are driven by their valuation of community, honor, religion, and other normative ends.” Chibber argues against Chakrabarty’s claim that jute workers “remained prisoners of a precapitalist culture”11 by pointing out that “when migrants came to the city, they constructed new communities when they became involved in trade unions or forged new social solidarities with migrants from other parts of the country. They showed themselves capable of forming a different cultural sensibility—organized around a more secular and economic axis—than the one into which they had been socialized.”12
In the second part of the chapter, Chibber defends what he calls “a stripped-down, minimal account of rationality,”13 which he defines as ultimately founded on the “the need to ward off direct bodily harm by others and the need for a livelihood.”14 These two basic needs may be translated into cultural codes in any context and in turn cognized or reflected upon, but they also remain relatively exterior to any culture as basic material prerequisites for human life. According to Chibber, both the jute mill workers and Bengali peasants “made choices, to be sure, but what all these choices had in common was that they were in defense of their physical security. The concern for basic well-being thus constituted the grounds on which the choices were made.”15 In this, Chibber asserts that “culture does not go ‘all the way down’”16 so as to conceal the real interest of human physical well-being.
For Chibber, political psychology is the particular form in which all that both threatens and contributes to bodily well-being makes its appearance. In contrast to Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, who greatly emphasize the relative sovereignty, agentive capacity, and dominance of such appearances among Indian subaltern classes, Chibber insists that this basic need to survive ultimately will, in his words, “cut through” the apparent blanket of any particular culture as if it were no more than a ghost costume. In this, Chibber decidedly is a ghostbuster.
THE APPEARANCE OF LABOR
There is a second manner of minding appearances that is implicit in Chibber’s book and it is the understanding that particular representational patterns or mediations are specific to capitalism and, rather than as the content of a finite and discrete political psychology, are quite real and capable of shaping reality “all the way down,” independent of any individual. This understanding of appearances as agentive abstractions is not directly claimed or argued by Chibber, nor is it captured by an overall term like political psychology. However, it can be gleaned from Chibber’s discussion of Marx’s concept of abstract labor and his critique of how Dipesh Chakrabarty has interpreted the concept.
Consistent with his overarching criticism of the Subaltern Studies project, Chibber focuses on how Chakrabarty’s recent work, especially Provincializing Europe, is predicated on finding radical social difference in India that defies assumptions about capitalism based on its European history. Chibber equates what he identifies as the Subaltern Studies authors’ aversion to abstract or general categories that suppress such radical difference with a particular understanding of Marx’s notion of abstract labor. Chibber is correct to criticize Lowe and Lloyd17 for their misunderstanding of the category.18 However, in Chakrabarty’s case, aversion to abstract categories in general is not the same as an aversion to the specific Marxian category of abstract labor. This can be better appreciated by considering a passage written by Chakrabarty that appeared as the second chapter in a book titled Marxism Beyond Marxism, edited by Sari Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl. Chakrabarty’s essay was titled “Marx after Marxism: History, Subalternity, and Difference.” In this essay he reflected on Rethinking Working-Class History and admitted that he had misinterpreted the distinction between “real” and “abstract” labor in Marx, assuming that real labor referred to the specific efforts of an actual person:
My larger failure lay in my inability to see that if one read the “real” as socially/culturally produced … other possibilities open up; among them the one of writing “difference” back into Marx. For the “real” then, in this reading would refer to different kinds of “social” and hence to different orders of temporality … The transition from “real” to “abstract”
is thus also a question of transition/translation from many and possibly incommensurable temporalities to the homogeneous time of abstract labor, the transition from non-history to history.19
Chakrabarty continues, explaining his recognition that “the category of ‘real’ labor, therefore, has the capacity to refer to that which cannot be enclosed by the sign.” This gesture to Saussure’s semiology and Derrida’s critique of it helps explain why Chakrabarty later used the distinction between History 1 and 2. Because he approached the capitalist commodity as a discrete Saussurian sign, a relationship between idea and utterance or structure and instantiation, Chakrabarty totally abandoned the quality of relational dynamism and interaction inherent in Marx’s analysis of capitalist value determination. Chakrabarty’s History 1 and 2 is as much about structuralism and its critique by Derrida as it is about Indian subaltern history. Remarkably, the anti-foundationalist critique of Saussure’s sign logic has helped provide a foundation for establishing Subaltern Studies as a widespread project of critiquing capitalism and its imperial effects from the solid foundation of a locus assumed to be exterior to it.
In his critique of Chakrabarty, Chibber argues that “abstract” is one quality or dimension of “concrete” labor and that this abstract quality is what matters, or comes to be dominant within capitalism, because of the market demands faced by capitalists. Concrete or “real” as in Chakrabarty’s admission above may be understood as the wholeness of labor from which the abstract dimension or quality is accentuated and made to count in capitalism. In this sense, Chibber’s critique rests on an implicit recognition that there is a dominant appearance to labor within capitalism and that this form and its maintenance is necessary for capitalism. Chibber explains that this is well understood from Marx’s inquiries and as such it provides the foundation for his critique of Chakrabarty’s distinction between History 1 and 2.
LABOR OF REPRESENTATION
Chibber’s argument is correct as far as it goes, but explaining abstract labor as a result of capitalists’ profit drive or market logic is only part of the story. It also requires all that yields the regular sale of labor power as a commodity, its use as labor and its congealing in the tools and techniques of such labor. And most crucially, it requires the establishment of money as a universal equivalent. All this is an exceedingly complex social and historical configuration that contains a manner of representation that is necessary for its continuation. These appearances are real in the sense that they cannot be reduced to individual actors or orientations.
In volume 1 of Capital, Marx poses a question about capitalism as representational proclivity by asking “why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say why labor is expressed in value, and why the measurement of labor by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of the value of the product.” The statement suggests that what is at stake in capitalism is an ensemble of representational tendencies that have become generalized, even naturalized. This is not Saussure or Derrida, but instead is the more basic recognition that capitalism entails certain systemic processes of abstraction and representation, which are continuous and unfinished processes. To grasp this means to use abstract as a verb as well as its own product, the noun form, abstraction. Determination is the aggregate social process of abstraction in that it happens independently of what any individual thinks about it. Overall, something is pulling out qualities and dimensions of something else so as to convey something else, a quality of meaning. It is the move from the possible to the actual to the general. Why does the human capacity to work upon the world take the form it does in capitalism? Why is an undefined human capacity shaped in a particular way and not others? Following this perspective, capitalism is inherently about appearances, but these do not exist in relation to their content like a dependent variable in relation to an independent one. Value as the objectification of the most abstract aspects of labor-power is the representational tendency that is specific to capitalism. Besides abstract and concrete, Marx also introduced private and social as two other qualities of labor under any historical conditions. Taken together they comprise all that could go into any product of human labor under any conditions, including labor power itself. This is the infinite whole from which, within capitalist relations, the abstract dimension is pulled out and represented or objectified in the commodity through its money price.
As I have intimated, it now is possible to see that the Subaltern Studies project reflected in part an academic debate over structuralism and post-structuralism. Marx’s approach to value determination and his understanding of representation defies both the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions. Rather than code and instantiation or infinite instantiations, it is inquiry into the historical establishment of a specific three-way representational tendency involving labor, value, and labor’s product and another three-way configuration among labor-time, value, and magnitude or measure. In inquiring into capitalism, Marx asked how and why these arrangements came into being and were sustained.
The current crossroads in the discussion sparked by Subaltern Studies and critiques like Chibber’s is that both seem to require a foundation from which to critique capitalism. It is History 2 for Chakrabarty and it is the defense of individual interests based on ensuring human bodily well-being for Chibber. The Subaltern Studies position has been attractive over the past two decades and it joins a classic tradition in anthropology of seeking cultures or cultural formations that provide fully formed alternatives to “Western” modernity.20 (Subaltern Studies scholars have explicitly remarked on the influence of British and French anthropology on their work.) An individual interest in the protection of bodily well-being may be a limit to culture or political psychology, but it also is what capitalism necessarily draws upon to “universalize.” It is the basis of most human medical research and the incredible translation of such science into widely consumed capitalist commodities. Protection of bodily well-being is as much the basis of capitalism as the grounds of its critique. In this, it doesn’t offer a limit to any representational system nor the positive content of a horizon beyond it.
The challenge is to occupy a different kind of ground for critique that does not rely on concepts like the non-West or biology. We similarly would do well to dispense with the academic categories of economics, politics, and culture—the different disciplines that substantiate their (false) separation into discrete domains, each with their own equilibrium-seeking logics of supply and demand, checks and balances, and words and ideas.
If we recall Marx’s early recognition that what people are anywhere and anywhen is greatly defined by what they produce—“making something more from nothing but”—and also how this is organized and accomplished, then the foundation of critique, including living struggles, is all that is not yet available or possible in the current form and organization of productive life on the planet. This is as much “cultural” or “psychological” as biological and material.