I
Since its launch in 1983, the book series Subaltern Studies has had a profound influence on academic debate in and about India. The series was published by a group of historians and social scientists based in Calcutta, led by Ranajit Guha. From the 1990s, the group and the book series were to become familiar far beyond India, no doubt helped by the publication in 1988 of a selection of articles from the series in the US, with a foreword by Edward Said and an introduction by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The group’s influence has perhaps been strongest in the humanities and in the field of postcolonial studies, with which it came to be associated.
The first volume of the series came out in 1982. In the preface to the first volume, Ranajit Guha proclaimed that the aim of the series was to write a “history from below,” and to rectify what he described as the “elitist bias” of existing research. In line with this programmatic aim, in subsequent volumes, studies were published about peasants, workers, and other marginalized groups (lower castes, tribals) in colonial and postcolonial India. Taking their inspiration from Western theorists such as Antonio Gramsci (from whom the term “subaltern” was borrowed) and E. P. Thompson, the series had its origin squarely within the Marxist tradition.
The context of the establishment of the series was the situation in India in the 1970s, when the development model chosen by the Nehruled government after independence appeared to unravel. A number of national strikes broke out, and a violent Maoist rebellion emerged in the late 1960s in a village called Naxalbari in West Bengal. And in 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (daughter of Nehru, the first prime minister) declared a state of emergency. When the emergency was lifted two years later, the Congress party was badly beaten in elections. However, two years later, Indira Gandhi returned to power in new elections.
For the founders of Subaltern Studies, these developments showed that Indian modernity was of a fundamentally different nature than Western modernity, and that Western theories of development and modernization could not explain developments in India. Specifically, the Indian bourgeoisie did not have the kind of hegemony enjoyed by the Western bourgeoisie. Hence, in the Gramscian terms employed by the Subalternists, it had to rule by force rather than by consent. The situation was therefore best described as a form of rule with domination without hegemony.
However, over time, the theoretical orientation of the group shifted away from Marxism, and by the mid-1990s, its leading representatives such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty had abandoned Marxism and adopted a postmodern or post-structuralist position, taking their inspiration more from Foucault than from Marx and Gramsci.
II
The theoretical shift from Marxism to post-structuralism in Subaltern Studies has been strongly criticized. Perhaps most significantly, one of the group’s own leading members, Sumit Sarkar, publicly left the group for precisely this reason, arguing that the group had abandoned the project of writing history from below, and that “the subaltern” had disappeared from Subaltern Studies.
However, Vivek Chibber’s new book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is the most sustained critique yet of the school. Perhaps surprisingly, Chibber does not mainly focus on the Subalternists’ shift from a Marxist toward a postmodernist perspective. Instead, he seeks to show that the foundations of the project were fundamentally flawed from the outset, and that its basic assumptions have been the same throughout the school’s evolution.
Chibber summarizes the core arguments of the Subalternists in six theses:
1.The colonial bourgeoisie, unlike that of the West, was never able to establish itself as hegemonic. Crucially, instead of challenging the power of the feudal elite, it incorporated them into the new political order. As a consequence, it was unable to align itself with subordinate classes and create a political alliance which incorporated workers and peasants.
2.By refusing to dismantle feudal power, the bourgeoisie abandoned its “universalizing mission.” This has two aspects. First, it meant that the bourgeoisie was not able to successfully claim that its own interests coincided with those of peasants and workers or claim to represent the nation as a whole. Second, it meant that economic hegemony was not accompanied by real democracy and political liberalism. The failure of universalization implies that the evolution of capitalism in the Global South is fundamentally different than in the West, and that theories constructed on the basis of the Western experience cannot be appropriate for understanding the nature and evolution of capitalism elsewhere.
3.As a result of 1) and 2) a different kind of modernity has emerged, in which capitalist/bourgeois power relations coexist with forms of domination associated with pre-capitalist social relations. Hence, there is a disjunction between capital and power, which means that capitalism has not become universalized.
4.Because of the failure of capital’s universalizing mission, the bourgeoisie did not integrate subaltern culture into its own modernizing discourse. There is therefore a subaltern domain of politics, related to, but distinct from, that of the ruling classes. This domain is characterized by form of politics associated with pre-modern societies, a form of politics which cannot be grasped through the conceptual categories of Western theory that presuppose the universal applicability of theories based on rationality and bourgeois individualism. These categories only apply to the elite domain, where Western individualism and capitalist forms of thought have been influential. Hence, the bourgeois language of politics cannot explain the nature of politics in the subaltern domain.
5.Because the bourgeoisie failed to integrate the elite and subaltern domains, the bourgeois leadership of the nationalist movement failed to “speak for the nation.” The reason for this failure was that while the bourgeoisie had internalized the Western narrative of modernization and progress and the ideology of individualism, these were foreign to the subalterns. Nationalist ideology therefore represented a false universalism, in the sense that it claimed to speak for a nation that in fact did not exist.
6.The theoretical implication of the differences between Western and non-Western capitalism is that the conceptual categories derived from the Western experience cannot be appropriate for analyzing non-Western societies.
According to Chibber, all six theses are wrong. The first thesis, first formulated by Ranajit Guha, is wrong because it is based on a false understanding of the role of the bourgeoisie in the West. It was not the case, Chibber argues, that the bourgeoisie achieved hegemony in Europe. Rather than incorporating subalterns in an anti-feudal coalition, the bourgeoisie in Europe, like in India, made compromises with feudal powers and supressed political pressures from below. The Subalternists therefore rely on a false historical sociology of European capitalism to justify their rejection of Western theories. As a basis for this conclusion, Chibber draws on (mainly Marxist) analyses of European history, such as those of Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens.
Thesis 2 is wrong mainly for conceptual reasons. The assertion of capital’s failed universalization rests on a definition of capitalism in which liberal democracy is seen as a constituent element. This conflation of capitalism and liberal democracy is the basis for Guha’s claim that capitalism abandoned its universalizing mission in India. According to Chibber, however, capitalism and liberal democracy should be conceptually separated. The universalization of capitalism should instead be understood as the universalization of market dependence and the compulsion of capital accumulation. While this compulsion may take a variety of forms, there is still an underlying common economic logic. This common logic does not depend on liberal democracy, and the universalization of capitalism is therefore, according to Chibber, fully compatible with the persistence of coercive political and interpersonal relations. Capitalism can therefore be universalized even without bourgeois hegemony and social homogenization, and is entirely compatible with the persistence of precapitalist forms of domination. The fact of cultural difference is therefore not proof of capital’s limited universalization.
It follows from this that the third thesis is also wrong. According to Chibber, “capital does not have to obliterate social difference in order to universalize itself.”1 And if the universalization of capitalism is compatible with the persistence of cultural difference and with the preservation of pre-capitalist forms of coercion and interpersonal domination, the basis for the claim that Western theories are unable to account for the specificity of colonial and postcolonial capitalism disappears.
Chibber’s critique of the fourth thesis focuses on the claim that subaltern politics is based on forms of consciousness where notions of rationality and interests are irrelevant. Instead, such politics are based on notions of community and traditional social ties such as caste, ethnicity, and family. Peasant consciousness is inherently traditional and distinct from the rational individualism characteristic of bourgeois consciousness. This “culturalist” view, according to Chibber, amounts to orientalism, because the Orient is seen as inherently irrational and its inhabitants as incapable of mobilization based on the rational pursuit of interests.
The problem with the fifth thesis is not so much its main empirical claim—that nationalist ideology failed to “speak for the nation”—but the basis for making this claim. Subalternists argue that the reason for this failure was the fact that the nationalist elite adopted the aims and ideology of modernization, which were alien to the subalterns. Nationalist ideology therefore appeared irrelevant to subaltern concerns, and “the nation” was nothing but an imposition. According to Chibber, however, this amounts to an extreme form of idealism, in which the policy of modernization appears simply as an ideological choice. In fact, he argues, this choice was a rational response to real capitalist constraints. The analysis of the Subalternists (mainly Chatterjee in this case) therefore “vastly exaggerates the role of ideas and grossly undervalues the effects of actually existing structures.”2
Finally, at a theoretical level, the claim that Western theories are necessarily Eurocentric and therefore incapable of explaining developments outside the West is wrong because it wrongly assumes that Indians and other non-Western peoples (or at least those that do not belong to the elite groups whose thinking has been influenced by the West) think and act in ways fundamentally different from those in Western societies. This, according to Chibber, amounts to “resurrect[ing] the worst instances of Orientalist mythology … by assigning science, rationality, objectivity, and similar attributes to the West, thereby justifying an exoticization of the East.”3
III
It is clear that Chibber has written an extremely ambitious book. On the face of it, it is simply a thorough critique of postcolonial theory in general and of three members of the school of Subaltern Studies in particular. However, it is far more than this, and raises a number of fundamental issues, including the meaning of universalism, the understanding of capitalism, the relevance of Marxist theory, and the role of ideology in social scientific explanations. Hence, it raises issues of importance for social theory in general, and not just for studies of former colonies.
I cannot discuss all these issues here, and instead will focus on a few of them. First, however, a note on the accuracy of Chibber’s textual interpretations. In a response to Chibber’s book, Partha Chatterjee has claimed that he (Chibber) completely misunderstands Ranajit Guha’s argument. Rather than comparing the evolution of capitalism in the East and the West, Guha’s point is to compare Western liberal ideology with Eastern realities. Hence, he does not make any claims about what actually happened in Europe when capitalism emerged, but simply criticizes what liberals assumed would happen in India with the introduction of capitalism.
However, this defense is hardly convincing. First, reading Dominance without Hegemony, there can be no doubt that Guha makes a series of empirical claims about European history. One example will suffice here:
the bourgeoisie … in Western Europe … had led the struggle against feudalism and established its hegemony over the peasantry, whereas in India the influence it gained over the rural population in the 1920s and 1930s did not develop into a full-fledged hegemony because of its reluctance to break with landlordism.4
Second, if it had been the case that Guha only compares liberal ideology with Indian realities, the basis for rejecting the relevance of Western theories for understanding developments in India would disappear, according to Chibber. After all, Guha asserts that the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to establish hegemony is what explains the specificity of Indian capitalism. This argument presupposes that the bourgeoisie succeeded in Europe, since if the bourgeoisie failed in establishing hegemony in Europe as well as in India, how can its failure in India explain the difference between Western and Indian capitalism? Chatterjee’s defense of Guha is therefore misplaced.
What about the other arguments made by Chibber? One of his key aims is to defend social scientific universalism. As we have seen, Guha argues that capital in India “abandoned its universalizing mission.” This “mission,” according to Guha, has two components. First, it refers to capital’s economic logic and its tendency toward self-expansion: driven by the imperatives of economic competition, capitalists are compelled to accumulate ever more capital. The second is that as it expands, capital must also transform traditional societies’ cultural and political forms.
In India, Guha argues, capital failed on the latter dimension, as it did not transform traditional societies’ cultural and political forms and “replace them with laws, institutions, values and other elements of culture appropriate to bourgeois rule.”5 The combination of its alignment with feudal landlords and its adoption of a policy of modernization meant that the Indian bourgeoisie failed to acquire hegemony through consent over subaltern groups.
Chibber argues that this represents a false understanding of what the universalization of capital implies. Contra Guha, Chibber argues that the universalization of capital does not require a transformation of laws and institutional forms at all. Capital is compatible with a variety of institutional forms, including non-liberal or “traditional” ones. Consequently, it can also be universalized without bourgeois hegemony and a liberal political order. To be universalized, capitalism only needs to transform the institutions required for its reproduction. As long as accumulation of capital is possible, elements of traditional culture can very well coexist with it, and cultural pluralism and difference is not incompatible with its universalization.
According to Chibber, the same misunderstanding underlies Dipesh Chakrabarty’s distinction between what he calls History 1 and History 2.6 History 1 refers to the processes, institutions, and structures that constitute the conditions for capitalism’s reproduction. They represent, he says, the “life process” of capitalism. History 2, by contrast, refers to the institutions and social relations that do not contribute to the self-reproduction of capital.7 They may be absorbed into capitalism, but their reproduction is not subordinated to the logic of capitalism. The existence of History 2, according to Chakrabarty, shows that capital’s universalization is incomplete. Moreover, it shows the limits of Marxist theory, since this theory can only account for History 1, and not for the processes, structures, and institutions that fall under History 2. But according to Chibber, if capitalism is compatible with the persistence of traditional culture and existing institutions, the existence of History 2 is no indication of capital’s failed universalization. In addition, the argument that the existence of History 2 constitutes a reason for rejecting Marxism is based on the most reductionist interpretation of Marxism. Hence, Chibber concludes, Guha’s and Chakrabarty’s argument is doubly invalid.
So far, so good. Chibber convincingly shows that Guha’s and Chakrabarty’s understanding of capital’s universalization is invalid, and that the conclusions they draw on the basis of that understanding must be rejected. However, from this, Chibber draws the conclusion that capitalism has in fact been universalized. He comes to this conclusion based on an alternative understanding of universalism, composed of two elements.
The first component is that mentioned by Guha (but quickly discarded), namely the compulsion to accumulate, which is the result of producers becoming market-dependent. Chibber, following Robert Brenner, sees market dependence as the defining feature of capitalism, and argues that if producers are market dependent, capitalism has been universalized.
But showing that capitalism can be universalized without abolishing cultural pluralism is one thing. To be fully convincing on this point, Chibber’s argument must specify conceptually what the universalization of capital would require. Chibber does not present any clear criteria for establishing what its universalization entails. While he does not make any claims about the actual universalization of capitalism in India, arguing that this is an empirical question,8 he argues that capitalism, wherever it exists, universalizes the compulsion to accumulate. This follows from his definition of capitalism, focusing on market dependence and the compulsion to compete. However, this definition is quite vague. Within the Marxist tradition, capitalism is usually conceived as having a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Horizontally, the key feature is competition between actors (firms and individuals). In a capitalist economy, all actors are compelled to compete for market-shares. Vertically, capitalism is characterized by specific class relations, in which the producers are separated from the means of production, and can only reproduce themselves by selling their labor power. The combination of these two features—generalized market dependence and commodification of labor—is what constitutes a fully developed capitalist system. On the basis of this definition, it seems quite clear that capitalism has not, in fact, been universalized in India. In particular, labor has not been fully commodified, as the majority of the population have not become wage earners.
But does a universalization of capitalism require the commodification of land and labor? Based on Chibber’s definition, generalized commodification of labor is not a necessary requirement for capitalism to be universalized. This may or may not be a valid view, but it is certainly not uncontroversial. However, since Chibber does not elaborate on the definition of capitalism, it is not entirely clear what its universalization would imply. While this lack of specification does not in any way invalidate Chibber’s critique of Guha and Chakrabarty, it leaves his own understanding of capitalism’s universalization unclear.
The second component of Chibber’s understanding of universalism is “social agents’ universal interest in their well-being.”9 Here, Chibber criticizes Chatterjee’s (1982) and Chaktrabarty’s (1989) analyses of the nature of peasants’ and workers’ agency, or what he calls their “political psychology.” Chatterjee and Chakrabarty, Chibber argues, reject the assumption drawn from Western theory that Indian subalterns act “rationally,” on the basis of interests. Rather than acting on the basis of a utilitarian calculus characteristic of bourgeois consciousness, peasants’ and workers’ actions, according to the Subalternists, are based on community, religion, and honor. Understanding them therefore requires new, indigenous categories, which do not project Western, bourgeois forms of rationality and action onto Indian peasants and workers.
Against this, Chibber defends the notion of universal interests and argues that Chatterjee and Chakrabarty overstate cultural difference. He then goes on to defend the universality and indispensability of the notions of rationality and interests, and attempts to show their incompatibility with the “culturalism” underlying Chatterjee’s and Chakrabarty’s theoretical claims. Here, he defends a soft version of rational choice theory, where the existence of non-economic preferences and moral motives are acknowledged, and actors are seen as “satisficers” rather than “maximizers.”
It can be debated whether Chibber misinterprets Chatterjee and Chakrabarty on this point. In his response to Chibber, Chatterjee10 says that he never denied that considerations of interest existed among Bengali peasants. Likewise, Chakrabarty, in Rethinking Working-Class History (1989), makes a number of references to needs and interests. This is acknowledged by Chibber as well, but he claims that Chatterjee and Chakrabarty draw theoretical conclusions that contradict their own empirical evidence. Thus, he uses Chatterjee’s and Chakrabarty’s own empirical material to demonstrate that their theoretical conclusions are invalid.
This is convincing enough. Chatterjee and Chakrabarty make a number of claims about the primacy of “community” and the irrelevance of interests, which are at odds with their own empirical evidence. Whether Chibber’s interpretation is accepted or not, we can, at the very least, conclude that Chatterjee and Chakrabarty are elusive on this point, with different statements pointing in different directions.
However, at this point, Chibber takes the argument one step further than he needs to in order to refute their arguments. While it is important to insist on the universal relevance of interests, the appeal to rational choice theory is not necessary to substantiate this. Moreover, the soft version of rational choice theory that Chibber endorses can easily slide into tautology. If any action and any end pursued by an actor can be described as “rational,” it is not clear what we gain by insisting on the actors’ rationality.
But it is quite possible to accept the universality of interests without endorsing rational choice theory. Thus, an actor’s interests can be seen as constituted by his or her position in a social structure, while at the same time, it may be seen as an empirical question whether the actor a) is aware of his or her interests and b) acts on the basis of an intention to maximize/satisfice them. In other words, interests exist, but whether actors are aware of them or their actions motivated by them is an empirical question. This is the case both in the East and in the West. Chibber’s appeal to the “political psychology” of (soft) rational choice theory is therefore unnecessary. And in light of the fundamental objections that have been raised against this theory, it only weakens an argument that is more than strong enough without it.
IV
All in all, Chibber’s book is an impressive achievement. He convincingly shows that Guha, Chakrabarty, and Chatterjee base their analyses on a false understanding of Western modernization and misleading theoretical assumptions regarding the nature of capitalism, the relationship between capitalism and democracy, the role of culture, and the nature of difference between the West and the East. Through his critique, he also demonstrates the continued relevance of Marxist theory.
However, postcolonialism is diverse, and not all varieties are based on these theoretical assumptions. Chibber’s critique does not therefore invalidate all forms of postcolonial theorizing, some of which is quite compatible with Marxism. His book is therefore best seen as a critique of Subaltern Studies, rather than of postcolonialism in general.
Also, while the critique is by and large convincing, his alternative account of the same issues is partly unspecified and partly unconvincing. The lack of specification especially applies to his concept of capitalism. Even if one accepts the emphasis on market dependence as a defining feature of capitalism, there is a need for further elaboration of what this entails. The least convincing part of his argument is the defense of rational choice theory. Fortunately, the core of his critique does not depend on this defense.