Just when it appeared that the debate between postcolonialists and Marxists had ended in something of a stalemate, Vivek Chibber’s new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, was published in 2013, in which Chibber attempts to rethink the significance of postcolonialism and Marxism. The book continues some earlier arguments made by Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik, but Chibber takes the debate to a new level with more detailed analysis and criticisms of the postcolonial and Subaltern Studies theorists’ arguments.2 His book reveals that the conflict between postcolonialists and Marxists is not merely about identity or the problem of Western hegemony but involves fundamental questions about how to understand global capitalism and resistance. Given the larger issues on which the book touches, it is not surprising that scholars have responded to the book from various directions. Exemplifying one prevalent form of critique, Chris Taylor contends that Chibber is unaware of or covers up the similarities between postcolonialism and Marxism and ends up producing “enlightenment jibber-jabber.”3 Despite the polemical nature of his comments, Taylor highlights two points that are at stake in the Chibber–postcolonialism debate, namely, the relationship between postcolonialism and Marxism and the role of Enlightenment universality in contemporary political practice. Behind all of these questions lies a perennial issue for Marxism, namely, how to conceive of the relationship between capitalism, thought, and culture in various regions of the world, especially those countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system.
In the beginning of his book, Chibber tells readers that his central “concern in the book is to examine the framework that postcolonial studies has generated for historical analysis and, in particular, the analysis of what once was called the Third World.”4 Chibber analyzes postcolonial theory not merely as a theoretical exercise, but rather because the object of postcolonial theory overlaps with his own area of research, namely, how to think about capitalist development and politics in a postcolonial world. He is inspired by anti-colonial Marxists and activists, including Mao Zedong, Amílcar Cabral, and Kwame Nkrumah. At stake in this debate is precisely the legacy of anti-colonialist Marxism and Third World movements. How should we understand these forms of resistance in light of their potential to create a postcapitalist future?
The debate between postcolonialists and Marxists is about both the nature of global capitalist modernity and consequently the forms that resistance against global capitalism and imperialism could or should take. The postcolonial theorists claim that Marxist categories and many anti-colonialist concepts are inadequate for understanding colonial difference. They fault anti-colonial movements for framing independence struggles in terms of the Enlightenment, which takes European society as a model. The postcolonialists claim that as capitalism moves from the metropoles to the colonies, it changes in form. Therefore, the categories of Marxism, liberalism, and the Enlightenment, which emerged out of a European context, are inadequate to make sense of the reality of capitalism on the peripheries of the world system. Moreover, postcolonialist theorists assert that because both Marxists and anti-colonialist thinkers have emphasized Western values and the nation-state, they merely replaced foreign colonization with self-colonization. The suppressed premise in post-colonial discourse is that the movement of capitalism from Europe to the peripheries implies not only a change but also possibilities for a different future. Consequently, self-colonization leads to blocking such possibilities and remaining locked in a vicious circle of imitation and inadequacy. Chibber argues that the postcolonialists find a change in capitalism because they have an inflated conception of capitalism and therefore do not know where to look for it or to find resistance to it. In this sense, his argument is primarily theoretical in that he suggests that if postcolonialists worked with a different understanding of capitalism, they would have come to different conclusions.
These debates often overlook that different understandings of capitalist modernity often entail diverse ways of coming to terms with the ghost of Hegel. Initially, postcolonialists discussed the discrepancy between the European and Indian bourgeoisie and often appear to be no friends of Hegel. Indeed, like post-structuralists, Hegelian totality is one of their main objects of attack. On the one hand, they argue against the totality of capitalism by claiming that capitalism changes fundamentally when it travels to the peripheries. On the other hand, however, when postcolonials criticize anti-colonialist and Marxist intellectuals and activists for reproducing Eurocentric discourse, they presuppose something like a totality at the level of discourse. Postcolonials contend that a Eurocentric ideological structure, represented by the Enlightenment and an idealist representation of capitalism, does not map onto a disjunctive reality. This ideological structure is the Hegelian totality that postcolonials love to hate.
Initially, postcolonial theorists placed the blame for the construction of this Eurocentric discursive totality on the influence of imperialism, local elites, and anti-colonial and Marxist thinkers in colonized regions. However, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work goes a step further and tries to ground Eurocentric discourse and the impulse to repeat this discourse in various parts of the world in capital itself. It is in this context that we must understand Chakrabarty’s theory of History 1 and History 2. History 1 represents the abstractions associated with capital, including the ideals of the Enlightenment, while History 2 represents remnants from the past and the affective immediacy of phenomenological life, which can never be completely subsumed by History 1. As Chakrabarty connects these two histories to the logic of capital, he draws on a number of Hegelian Marxists, including Moishe Postone. For all their differences, Chakrabarty and Postone articulate positions that appear to overlap, especially when compared with Chibber. In particular, Postone would suggest that one totalize capital further and that both History 1 and 2 are two sides of capital, which in many ways completes Chakrabarty’s attempt to ground Eurocentric ideology in capital, while at the same time seriously circumscribing Chakrabarty’s phenomenological alternative.
From this perspective, the debate between postcolonial theorists and Chibber hinges on two extremely significant questions: (1) How should we think about difference in a global capitalist world, especially with respect to the problem of the universality of the human condition? (2) Can one use the concept of capital to ground both the Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment discourse? These questions are of course huge and crucial to most endeavors in the social sciences and the humanities, not to mention to those who are interested in a theory that aims to transform the global capitalist world. The questions ask whether, how, and to what extent Enlightenment ideals, local traditions, rational interests, the nation-state, or the working class can play a role in resisting capitalism.
Chibber and postcolonials, especially Chakrabarty, differ on how to answer the above questions; however, they both launch their position through immanent critiques. Recently, Neil Larsen defined immanent critique as implying that theory “is not just applied but is immanent to” their objects.5 Postcolonials see themselves as Marxists and consequently construct their positions from what one could call an immanent critique of Marxism. Chakrabarty derives his categories through reading Marx’s Capital and also finding what he sees as potential within capitalist society. Chibber’s mode of critique attempts to show where the postcolonials’ texts themselves point in a different direction. For example, he will argue that Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee both actually provide evidence that workers and peasants are motivated by interest rather than communal feeling or religion. Chibber also contends that the postcolonials misrecognize their objects of critique, namely, the Enlightenment and capitalism.
In what follows, I will continue the above trend by attempting an immanent critique of both Chakrabarty and Chibber, showing that both only partially grasp their object of critique, namely, capitalism. However, I would also like to stress another issue with which neither Chibber nor Chakrabarty seriously engages—the immanent critique of capital. In Moishe Postone’s words, such an immanent critique must be able to locate the “‘ought’ as a dimension of its own context, a possibility immanent to the existent society.”6 Assuming that we are discussing capitalist society, this will mean expounding a theory of capitalism that shows how a postcapitalist society is both normative and possible.
I will begin with a general discussion of Chibber’s problematic and his own immanent critique of Chatterjee through reading Ranajit Guha, before moving to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s engagement with Subaltern Studies and Marx, focusing on his distinction between History 1 and History 2. In this way, I will bring out the immanent Hegelian possibilities in Chakrabarty’s text. Then I will briefly treat Chibber’s critique of postcolonialism’s totalizing readings of capital and touch on his own alternative, which draws on Marxist attempts to save the Enlightenment from capitalism. Finally, drawing on a number of Marxist theorists, I continue the effort to ground History 1 and 2 in a theory of capital that accounts for unevenness and show how capital could point beyond itself, thus suggesting how ought is immanent and possible in capitalist society. In this context, I explore the potential for a politics of History 2 that is oriented not toward the past but toward the future, in particular, a future beyond capitalism.
I. CHIBBER: CULTURE, INTEREST, AND RANAJIT GUHA
Before Chibber devoted a book to the critique of postcolonial theory, he had been interested in the various responses that countries on the periphery had to the global capitalist world. However, he was already somewhat suspicious of the cultural turn, and this informs much of his critique of postcolonialism as well. In her comments on Chibber’s first book, Elizabeth Clemens remarks that “in Chibber’s universe of comparative politics, it is as if everything happened except the cultural turn.”7 Chibber agrees with Clemens’s remarks, adding that his book emerges from an “alternative universe” not only because he does not take the cultural turn, but because of his focus on class analysis.8 In light of these remarks, we could consider Chibber’s work as subtitled, “How Not to Take the Cultural Turn.” In other words, the cultural turn becomes problematic when it obscures the dynamics of class and capital. In these cases, the cultural turn and its close cousin, the linguistic turn, can end up becoming ideologies often connected to false dichotomies such as those between East and West. Indeed, the concluding chapter of Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory is called “Subaltern Studies as Ideology,” and he makes the dual claim that postcolonial theory obscures the dynamic of capital and produces “profoundly Orientalist constructions of Eastern cultures.”9
This does not mean that Chibber is insensitive to regional differences. His problem concerns more the way in which postcolonialists explain difference. For example, in the early chapters of Postcolonial Theory, he takes issue with the way Guha and those who follow him contend that the failure of modernization in India is due to the lack of hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Against this, he contends that even in Europe, the ideals of modernity and the Enlightenment were not promoted by capitalists but by labor movements. Indeed, in his first book, he argues that it is precisely the success of the Indian capitalist class that partially explains why, after the 1970s, the Korean developmental state succeeded while the Indian developmental state failed. In a response to a symposium on his first book in Comparative and Historical Sociology, he gives readers the following summary of his work: “Korea exemplifies a case where domestic capital supported state-building, hence allowing for its success; India, in contrast, experienced a massive campaign against such a state by its business class, hence forcing state managers to retreat on their agenda, leaving the state with a relatively feeble planning apparatus.”10
Chibber’s concerns overlap with those of the Subaltern Studies group and the postcolonialists in that they were all interested in understanding the uneven development of the global capitalist world. Moreover, like the postcolonials, he underscores the autonomy of politics from capital. However, Chibber does not think of the autonomy of politics as cultural, but in terms of what we could call the relative autonomy of the managerial class from the capitalist class.11 In short, Chibber and postcolonial theorists differ with respect to how to interpret the cultural turn, and this different analytical framework leads to different interpretations of Indian history.
In particular, by downplaying the importance of culture to explain historical difference, Chibber focuses on human agents following interests, which he believes informs actions in all societies, including peasant communities. Put simply, Chibber contends that culture does not imply radical incommensurability and that there are some universal traits of human experience that we can use to understand the peasants in India. Partha Chatterjee, on the other hand, contends that peasants’ actions, especially when engaged in rebellious action, stem from fundamentally communal motives. Chatterjee writes:
What the principle of community does as the characteristic unifying feature of peasant consciousness is directly place it at the opposite pole of a bourgeois consciousness. The latter operates from the premise of the individual and a notion of his interests (or, in more fashionable vocabulary, his preferences). Solidarities in bourgeois politics are built up through an aggregative process by which individuals came together into alliances on the basis of common interests (or shared preferences). The process is quite opposite in the consciousness of a rebellious peasantry. Their solidarities do not grow because individuals feel they can come together with others on the basis of their common individual interests: on the contrary, individuals are enjoined to act within a collectivity because, it is believed, bonds of solidarity that tie them together already exist. Collective action does not flow from a contact among individuals; rather, individual identities themselves are derived from membership in a community.12
Chatterjee posits an antinomy between bourgeois and peasant consciousness, especially Indian peasant societies, where the former is completely individualistic and the latter is communal. Therefore, in the case of bourgeois societies, solidarity can only emerge a posteriori, while in Indian peasant societies there are a priori bonds, which form the condition for action. By opposing individual and community, Chatterjee participates in a larger discourse beyond geographical distinctions such as East and West. Communitarian philosophers, such as Michael Sandel, invoke a similar argument at a more general level when they criticize liberals for focusing on the disembedded individual and hark back to a time when American values were not so tarnished by industrialization.13
More problematically, the Japanese conservative thinker Watsuji Tetsurō made a similar statement in the 1930s, in order to criticize the rapid urbanization and commodification that was taking place at the time in Japan.14 If we turn to China, in the 1930s and 1940s, Mao Zedong and the more conservative Liang Shuming argued precisely about the universality and particularity of the Chinese peasant. Although Mao inspired scholars associated with Subaltern Studies, Mao’s own words seem to support Chibber. Mao wrote: “Chinese society has its own particularities, its own cultural tradition, and its own ethics, which is not wrong for you to emphasize. Chinese society also has qualities in common with Western societies, which include class opposition, contradiction and struggle. These are its most fundamental attributes, which determine social progress. You overemphasize its special nature and neglect its universal nature.”15 Although Mao does not stress individual interests in this observation, he clearly sees the rifts in society as crucial to peasant life. His use of Marxist theory and class analysis in China was premised on the universality of such conflicts. Interestingly, both the Indian postcolonialists and some members associated with the Chinese “New Left,” such as Wen Tiejun, expound a position similar to Liang Shuming and stress the particularity not only of peasant life but also of Chinese and Indian peasants.16 Chatterjee sees himself as elaborating a position that Ranajit Guha made in Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, which he claims provides evidence for this view of the Indian peasantry.
However, through rereading Guha, Chibber contends that Elementary Aspects actually supports his own and, we could add, Mao’s position. This should not be surprising because the book was first published in 1983, when many of the Subalterns were closer to Maoism than they are today. Chibber points out that because Guha describes meetings and deliberation among peasantry, this presupposes that peasants needed convincing that rebelling was in their interests. Moreover, Guha underscores that denial to cooperate would result in denial of cooperation with fellow villagers, which would affect the potential participant both economically and socially.17
Chibber provides sufficient evidence for us to conclude that Guha probably takes individual interests more seriously than does Chatterjee, but there are other more pressing issues related to the debate between postcolonials and Marxists that emerge from Guha’s texts. Specifically, Guha’s text is largely about the problem of politics, temporality, and action in peasant rebellions, rather than about theorizing the problem of peasant interest. These issues require us to move from our brief description of the Chibber–Chatterjee encounter to a confrontation between Chakrabarty and Chibber’s respective work.
II. CHIBBER, CHAKRABARTY, AND THE PROBLEM OF MODERN POLITICS
A. Interests, peasant rebellions, and modernity
Chibber finds in Guha support for his claim that peasants are not naturally united with their communities and that they are capable of thinking about their interests. However, Chibber explains that Guha’s main claim was to underscore, against Eric Hobsbawm and others, that peasant rebellions were not prepolitical but drew on informal sources to formulate their own inchoate politics.18 Here we glimpse the complexity of Guha’s argument, namely that on the one hand, peasant rebellions involve deliberation while, on the other, there is something collective and spontaneous about them, which nonetheless deserves to be taken seriously as politics. As Guha writes: “For it is the subjection of the rural masses to a common source of exploitation and oppression that makes them rebel even before they learn how to combine in peasant associations.”19 This citation again implies that peasants are aware of interests at some level, but also that Guha emphasizes spontaneity, contingency, and the transience of group activity, which he does not want to relegate to the prepolitical. Indeed, much of Guha’s analysis in Elementary Aspects touches on how rituals, religion, and other activities charged with affective intensity helped to catalyze rebellious action.
Chakrabarty’s reading of Guha begins by bringing together the unorthodox, spontaneous, collective political action of peasants in colonial India and modernity. Chakrabarty contends that Guha saw that the political consciousness of peasants was part of modern capitalism and colonialism; it did not represent something incomplete. In Chakrabarty’s words, Guha “insisted that instead of being an anachronism in a modernizing colonial world, the peasant was a real contemporary of colonialism, a fundamental part of the modernity that colonial rule brought to India. Theirs was not a ‘backward’ consciousness—a mentality left over from the past, a consciousness baffled by modern political and economic institutions and yet resistant to them.”20
Neither Chakrabarty nor Guha would completely deny the importance of interest in analyzing peasant rebellions; however, they would underscore that there are other, more affective and experiential aspects of these rebellions that cannot be reduced to interest. Indeed, the meaning of interests is conditioned by the various semiotic systems in which they are embedded. Guha goes to great lengths to show how the conflict between traditional semiotic systems in North India and the new set of colonial sign systems also provided the conditions for rebellion. In short, when the colonial regime invented new semiotic apparatuses while making use of existing ones, peasant insurgency by the subaltern classes emerged as a negative consciousness against the colonial and local elites and their semiotic systems.21
Chakrabarty wants to understand this ensemble of colonial elites, local elites, and subaltern resistance as modern and not outside the world of global capitalism. He contends that this has significance beyond analyzing peasant rebellions, since even today, in the popular media, India is described in terms of people living in different times. As a foil, he cites a Wall Street Journal article that claims that “Indians are capable of living many centuries at once.”22 The above statement implies that remnants of the past remain in India, which is not the case in European modernity. In Chakrabarty’s view, the author did not understand that such apparent remnants are actually reconstituted by capitalist modernity.
This is a Hegelian move on Chakrabarty’s part, because rather than seeing a conflict between the premodern remnant and the modern capitalism, he moves to a more totalizing concept of capitalist modernity in India that has four aspects: the legal institutions associated with the Enlightenment that emerge with colonialism, direct domination, religious practices, and finally various modes of peasant consciousness and uprisings. From this perspective, one would not merely chastise Enlightenment-oriented intellectuals for seeing the Indian peasants as backward or even explain this position based on their class location. Rather, this is the dominant discourse in a world of global capitalist imperialism, and that which falls out of this discourse, such as the experience of the subalterns, tends to be invisible. In short, the developmental narrative, which is taken up by many Marxists, actually supports capitalism by adopting the standpoint of capital and failing to see the hidden possibilities of rebellions operating on a different logic. Here we glimpse how Chakrabarty wants the subaltern peasants to be both inside and outside capitalist modernity; they are not an anachronism and so inside, and yet they are outside to the extent that their logic escapes capital. This outside-inside will be crucial to Chakrabarty’s theory of history and his critique of progress.
In the context of a critique of progressive history, Chakrabarty sets E. P. Thompson up as a type of Marxist variation of the Wall Street Journal reporter who claimed that Indians live in many times. Thompson puts this vision into motion by theorizing how peripheral nations could overcome their nonsynchronicity. Chakrabarty cites Thompson, claiming that “without time-discipline we could not have the insistent energies of the industrial man; and whether this discipline comes from Methodism, or of Stalinism, or of nationalism, it will come to the developing world.”23 In Chakrabarty’s view this is an excellent example of a historicist narrative that stresses linear historical progress without considering multiple temporalities or possibilities. He further contends that various concepts such as the passage from formal to real subsumption and uneven development are all different versions of the above thesis by Thompson in that they relegate India and other countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system to a type of waiting room of history. They must move from formal to real subsumption or wait until uneven development can become even. At a basic level, Chakrabarty does not deny a basic insight entailed by the above statements: the logic of capitalism is such that it needs to expand beyond its borders, and consequently time management and real subsumption will pervade the world. Anyone who looks at India and China today would not be able to deny this. However, his point concerns the heterogeneity implied in this process. Real subsumption and the spread of time management does not imply a homogeneity of life forms and experiences or the eradication of residues from the past. This is precisely where History 2 begins.
B. Modernity, Abstraction, and Residues: History 1 and History 2
In the previous section, we saw Chakrabarty criticize a position similar to one that Chibber ascribes to Guha and other Subalterns, namely, that India was caught in two times, one premodern and one modern—living many times at once. Against this, Chakrabarty attempts to ground his argument about different histories in capitalism and the outsides it produces. On the one hand, we have capital or History 1, “global in its historical aspiration and universal in its constitution,” whose “categorial structure” “is predicated on the Enlightenment ideas of juridical equality and the abstract political rights of citizenship.”24 On the other, Chakrabarty hoped to show that in the translation of capital into that which was outside, something emerged that was beyond both capital and the Enlightenment. This is History 2.
Chakrabarty now has a huge task ahead of him: he must connect both the Enlightenment and that which escapes it in capital. This is what we might call Chakrabarty’s immanent critique of capital because History 2, which resists capital, only exists in capitalist society. We can understand Chakrabarty’s attempt to link the Enlightenment and capital with reference to what the Marxist scholar Jacques Bidet has more recently referred to as the “meta-structure of capital.”25 From the beginning of Marx’s Capital, when Marx speaks of commodity exchange, he presupposes a certain legal structure, the equality of human beings, who are free to sell their labor power on the market. This abstract structure is then available to challenge the inequalities that capitalism inevitably reproduces and consequently could produce the desire to realize a world beyond capitalism. By invoking something akin to this metastructure, Chakrabarty connects the logic of capital to certain fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment.26
Chakrabarty grounds the Enlightenment in the abstract side of capitalism and the commodity, and this leads to a discussion of abstract labor in which he draws on I. Rubin and Moishe Postone. He notes that although abstract labor has in some sense existed in all societies, it becomes universal in capitalist society and this makes possible the existence of abstract labor as an analytical category: “In a capitalist society … the particular work of abstracting would itself become an element of most or all other kinds of concrete labor, and would be thus more visible to an observer.”27 From this perspective, we can understand how abstracting labor could be connected to other abstractions associated with the Enlightenment. Abstract labor, in Chakrabarty’s interpretation of Marx, is the “hermeneutical grid through which capital requires us to read the world.”28 This hermeneutical grid has a social basis in the regulation and intensification of labor for the sake of increasing productivity. We will see that this abstraction encounters various forms of resistance.
1. Concrete Life as Resistance to Capitalism
If he stopped here, it would be as if capital does not allow for difference and life. But Chakrabarty attempts to show that within Marx there are various ways of identifying difference and contradiction in capitalism, and he draws on the distinction between abstract and concrete labor to discuss the way in which Marx posits life as constantly resisting capital. Life refers to “the abstract living labor—a sum of muscles, nerves, and consciousness/will—which according to Marx, capital posits as its contradictory starting point.”29 This starting point is contradictory because living labor embodies the possibility of resistance to capital. Chakrabarty cites Marx and then makes the following explanation: “And labor power as ‘commodity exists in his [the laborer’s] vitality … In order to maintain this from one day to the next … he has to consume a certain quantity of food, to replace his used-up blood etc … Capital has paid him the amount of objectified labour contained in his vital forces.’ These vital forces are the ground of constant resistance to capital.”30
Living labor and life in general, on Chakrabarty’s reading of Marx, is that which capital constantly needs to create value but, at the same time, can never domesticate.31 In other words, despite all the disciplinary mechanisms under capital’s control, there is always an excess of life that is necessary for capitalism but cannot be completely consumed by capital.
At this point, Chakrabarty compares Hegel and Marx on the problem of life in the following manner: “Life, to use Hegel’s expression, ‘is a standing fight’ against the problem of dismembering with which death threatens the unity of the living body. Life, in Marx’s analysis of capital, is similarly a ‘standing fight’ against the process of abstraction that is constitutive of the category of ‘labor.’”32 Capital both posits and threatens life and living labor in the process of its reproduction. Chakrabarty understands labor as two-sided, both abstract and concrete, and consequently he understands Marx’s project as one of protecting life from the process of abstraction.
2. Beyond Concrete Life: Life as Belonging
It would appear that Chakrabarty has already grounded the abstract and concrete sides of life in the dynamic of capitalism, and thus he would have accounted for particularity and universality, or difference and homogeneity. However, Chakrabarty believes that the above opposition between abstract labor and life does not completely account for the diverse modes of being in modern capitalism. It is as if every time a Hegelian maneuver is made to bring two opposites together there remains another insurmountable outside. This outside-inside emerges in the relationship between History as capital, that is, as the abstract logic of capital, and the pasts that preceded it.
It is at this point that he introduces two different pasts in Marx’s texts, which we have mentioned above: History 1 and History 2. History 1 is a “past posited by capital itself as its precondition,” and it describes aspects that “contribute to the self-reproduction of capital.”33 From the perspective of History 1, time and history itself are produced by capital, which fundamentally mediates the way we see the world. Chakrabarty cites a passage from the Grundrisse to explain his point: “These ‘conditions and presuppositions of the becoming and the arising of capital,’ writes Marx, ‘presuppose precisely that it is not yet in being but merely in becoming; they therefore disappear as real capital arises, capital which itself, on the basis of its own reality, posits the condition for its realization.’”34
The past ceases to be what it used to be once capitalism comes into being because of a new idea of temporality and history that develops with this new mode of production. Until this point in his chapter, Chakrabarty has been following a Hegelian model in thinking about two sides of an antinomy, but History 2 is not the dialectical Other of History 1 or histories posited by the logic of capital.
History 2 is a past that is “antecedent” to capital but cannot be completely reduced to the logic of capital. To use a Derridean metaphor, History 2 is something that the capitalist system cannot digest without remainder and consequently must eject.35 In this sense it is life, but not life thought of in mere opposition to abstract labor. The textual basis for Chakrabarty’s interpretation is somewhat confusing, since he relies on the following passage from the Theories of Surplus Value, where Marx writes: “In the course of its evolution, industrial capital must therefore subjugate these forms and transform them into derived or special functions of itself. It encounters these older forms in the epoch of its formation and development. It encounters them as antecedents, but not as antecedents established by itself, not as forms of its own life-process. In the same way as it originally finds the commodity already in existence, but not as its own product, and likewise finds money circulation, but not as an element in its own reproduction.”36 In this passage, Marx discusses how various practices such as commodity production and the use of money predated capitalism. In short, he suggests that industrial capitalism brings these existing practices into its own system, and we would usually think of such elements as being fairly well integrated into capitalism. Chakrabarty here performs something like an immanent critique of Marx. He contends that the above passage implies two histories: capital’s own life process and the antecedent histories that precede it. Moreover, he concludes that capitalism will have to repeat this process completely. The subsumption of these remnants into capital can never be complete. By focusing on antecedents, Chakrabarty is highlighting a rupture in the temporality of capital. The remnants are in capital but of an earlier time. Unlike the opposition between use value and exchange value, there is a strange type of nonsynchronous synchronicity between History 1 and History 2.37
Although in the above passage Marx speaks of remnants such as commodities and money, which become central concepts of capital, Chakrabarty creatively reads the above passage to include feelings and modes of life, such as those of Guha’s peasants, which become remnants that could potentially resist capital. Chakrabarty continues this reading by citing the following passage of the Grundrisse: “Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories that express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc.”38 Chakrabarty focuses on the idea of remnants and emphasizes that these are only partly conquered. Most readings of the above passage would conclude that Marx is discussing the early period of capitalism, when there are unconquered remnants and these will eventually be transformed. Indeed, the original text reads, “Noch unübergewundene Reste,” which could also be rendered “not yet conquered remnants” and suggests a trajectory toward further incorporation but leaves open the possibility that full incorporation without remainder is impossible. Chakrabarty asks whether this incompleteness is a mere transitional moment or a more fundamental structural feature of capitalism. In the former case, the “not yet” would just be another version of the “waiting room” theory in which countries outside the history of capital must only wait until they are fully integrated into the logic of capital. Instead, he argues for the latter and calls these elements not reducible to capital’s logic “History 2”; such elements can disrupt capital. In his words, “History 2s are thus not pasts separate from capital; they inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic.”39
Chakrabarty leaps from elements that would become essential parts of capital, such as money and the commodity, to premodern remnants and various forms of life. History 2 represents the sides of the various feelings, attitudes, and comportments that people embody during their everyday lives but which cannot be directly connected to the reproduction of capital. Chakrabarty explains the relation between these two histories in this way: “One consists of analytical histories that, through the abstracting categories of capital, eventually tend to make all places exchangeable with another. History 1 is just that, analytical history. But the idea of History 2 beckons us to more affective narratives of human belonging where life-forms, although porous to one another, do not seem exchangeable through a third term of equivalence such as abstract labor.”40
Chakrabarty moves away from the political-economic narrative of Marx, who focused on commodities and money, to phenomenological forms, such as those of belonging and identity. He explains how workers in the factory embody both of these types of history. A worker is of course producing surplus value for the capitalist, but on the other hand has a number of other histories, namely, History 2. These histories or narratives have an irreducible singularity and cannot be exchanged with one another like commodities on the market. Because of this singularity, they become potential sites of resistance against capital.
3. Phenomenology beyond Labor
However, such resistance is not based on brute life or labor. History 2 seems to be precisely not-labor. Indeed, Chakrabarty points out that as long as workers affirm their identity as workers or bearers of labor power, they are part of History 1, even or especially when they unionize to fight capital. “To the extent that both the distant and immediate pasts of the worker—including the work of unionization and citizenship—prepare him to be the figure posited by capital as its own condition and contradiction, those pasts do indeed constitute History 1.”41 This echoes Moishe Postone’s argument that by affirming themselves as laborers, workers are deepening the logic of capitalism.42
Chakrabarty shows how capital constantly wants to turn the worker into sheer labor and make the worker part of its totality. The worker plays into this logic when she or he takes up the identity and practices of a worker. But this totalization can never be complete because there is always an excess, that which cannot be abstracted, a phenomenological remainder that cannot be reduced to labor. For this reason, Chakrabarty underscores that History 2 concerns the claim that “even in the very abstract and abstracting space of the factory that capital creates, ways of being human will be acted out in manners that do not lend themselves to the reproduction of the logic of capital.”43 This opens the space to rethink various forms of oppositional politics in relation to forms of identity other than the working class.
Chakrabarty’s argument overlaps with a number of recent Marxist attempts to theorize labor. For example, Bruno Gullì recently contends that Marx has a third category of labor, called “neither-productive-nor-unproductive labor.” He writes that this neutral labor is “able (that is, [has] the power of Potenza) to be what it is and what it wants to be, rather than being posited by capital as capital’s disguised necessity.”44 Similar to Chakrabarty, Gullì separates that which is posited by capital and that which partially escapes its logic. He follows more orthodox Marxists in claiming that neutral creative labor is “always present within production, regardless of the mode of production.”45
If Chakrabarty followed Gullì he would perhaps fall into what Postone objects to as criticizing capitalism from the standpoint of the transhistorical concept of labor.46 Chakrabarty wants to avoid such recourse to labor; he would like to keep History 2 as something that interrupts capital, rather than something that produces history in general.
He rather connects the disruption of History 2 to phenomenology and global unevenness and writes:
These pasts, grouped together in my analysis as History 2, may be under the institutional dominion of the logic of capital and exist in proximate relation to it, but they also do not belong to the “life process” of capital. They enable the human bearer of labor power to enact other ways of being in the world—other than, that is, being the bearer of labor power. We cannot ever hope to write a complete or full account of these pasts. They are partly embodied in the person’s bodily habits, in unselfconscious collective practices, in his or her reflexes about what it means to relate to objects in the world as a human being and together with other human beings in his given environment.47
Chakrabarty makes two related points here. The first concerns the irreducibility of the human being in the world to the bearer of labor power or worker, which could have a number of implications.48 However, second, by stressing the body and prereflective habits, Chakrabarty connects his narrative to phenomenology. The problem here is that there are two partially overlapping narratives of History 2, one stemming from Guha’s analysis of peasant societies and the other stemming from phenomenologists, such as Martin Heidegger. The former narrative is one of remnants from previous modes of production of various practices, including modes of production and religious practices. The second narrative is phenomenological and more elusive, but also potentially universal. If it refers to a past, it is something like Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “past that was never present,” an experience that has not been present in ordinary time but nonetheless fundamentally pierces one’s subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty writes: “Hence reflection does not grasp itself in its full sense, unless it refers to its unreflective ground that it presupposes, from which it profits, and which constitutes for it an original past [un passé originel], a past that was never present [un passé qui n’a jamais été present]”49
This original past, like History 2, could refer to the bodily habits that are prereflective and done before one is conscious of a present or time. Obviously, this phenomenology will be informed by the various remnants that emerge, but History 2 then is not structurally dependent on remnants of precapitalist modes of production. A worker’s bodily habits might be inherited from his family members, whom one could perhaps eventually trace back to precapitalist times, but we would find no necessary hostility to capitalism in these forms of comportment. This would be different from the peasant, who feels his livelihood being threatened by various forms of indigenous and colonial domination and then revolts.
The key issue in both the phenomenological perspective and the discourse of unevenness concerns the incompleteness of capital’s totalization. Because totalization cannot completely subsume human experience and values, Chakrabarty distinguishes between globalization and universalization in the final lines of the chapter, which again brings us back to the issue of unevenness: “But globalization of capital is not the same as capital’s universalization. Globalization does not mean that History 1, the universal and necessary logic of capital so essential to Marx’s critique has been realized. What interrupts and defers capital’s self-realization are the various History 2s that always modify History 1 and thus act as our grounds for claiming historical difference.”50
Here we return to a paradigm close to Guha’s Domination without Hegemony, which Chakrabarty at times invokes. In another text, glossing Guha, Chakrabarty claims that capital and power should be considered as separate variables and therefore even though India has been incorporated into global capital, there remains a space for different types of politics, as is evidenced by the insurgent peasants. In short, the “global history of capital need not reproduce everywhere the same history of power.”51 At the same time, in Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty articulates more universal theory that tries to grasp the structure of this difference. After all, History 1 and History 2 now work as universals connected to capital and are not merely limited to the Indian case.
Keeping this universality in mind, in the above passage, we might say that globalization works something like the formal subsumption under capital, where the original mode of production is not altered even when it is now used to make profit for capital. The universalization of capital could be tantamount to real subsumption, where the structure of labor changes and technological innovation and time discipline become essential components of capitalist production. This is a possible interpretation of Chakrabarty. History 2 at times appears to imply forms of life that are formally subsumed, as in Guha’s peasants. Indeed this is perhaps a way of thinking about domination by capital and hegemony in a manner that does not rely on the bourgeoisie. The problem with this interpretation is that it would entail that if there is real subsumption, then History 2s would be gone.52 However, we saw that there are History 2s going on even in the factory, which would appear to be an area of real subsumption.
Consequently, difference and transcendence or History 2’s relation to capital is ambivalent. It is a remnant or a phenomenological experience of the everyday in an uneven capitalist and colonial system, but how these remnants or experiences will destabilize capitalism is unclear. In Chakrabarty’s words, “Difference, in this account, is not something external to capital. Nor is it something subsumed into capital. It lives in intimate and plural relationships to capital, ranging from opposition to neutrality.”53
Given the wide range of possible relations between History 2 and capitalism, we could say that we might need a new term to describe distinctions within History 2. Chibber suggests that there are two History 2s: History 2(1)s, which are indifferent to capitalism, and History 2(2)s, which pose a threat to capitalism.54 We might want to add History 2(3), remnants that actually help to reproduce capital.55 I am going to be more concerned with History 2(2) in what remains, but we should note that it bears some interesting structural differences from the other two in that, rather than being past or present oriented, it is future oriented. History 2 could be redescribed as religious and aesthetic visions that could be mobilized against capitalism to help envision new forms of community and being in the world.
One of the best examples of such History 2s is perhaps found in Michel Löwy’s book Redemption and Utopia, which examines the work of a number of Jewish thinkers in central Europe during the Weimar period, including Franz Rosenzweig, Gustav Landauer, and Walter Benjamin. Following Löwy’s analysis, we could argue that it was precisely a common Jewish History 2 that enabled a romantic resistance to capitalism. These History 2s may have included unconscious collective practices and shared ideas about dealing with humans and things. We could describe the process of Judaism becoming a modern religion as one in which History 1 attempts to incorporate a history that preexists capitalism, and such incorporation conflicted with some existing practices. The history of Judaism becomes incorporated within capitalism, but not without a remnant. Within capitalism, this remainder might offer possibilities of resistance. For example, Löwy claims that many Jewish intellectuals from central Europe mobilized Hebraic ideas such as “Tikkun” or the “restoration of the original harmony” to create romantic anti-capitalist visions.56 Of course, here we are dealing with highly reflective appropriations of History 2s, and it is at least as much the moment of reflection as the inherited body of practices that help to constitute this particular form of romantic anti-capitalism. This reflection takes something that on face value appears to be a “restoration” and propels it not to a completely open future, but to a future beyond capitalism. We should note that reflection here is crucial because the type of reflection could change the nature of the movement. For example, we could argue that around the same time as the above messianic thinkers, Watsjuji Tetsurō was elaborating his own conservative romantic anti-capitalism, drawing on various Asian traditions, including Buddhism and Bushidō (the way of the warrior). However, like many Japanese critics of modernity during this time, he ended up supporting Japanese imperialism and fascism.
In short, given that reflection is crucial to turning History 2s into a politics, by itself, even the History 2s that are potentially anti-capitalist risk being indeterminate. Indeed, this might be the revenge of Hegel since his critique of Schelling, namely, that he describes a night in which all cows are black seems to apply to History 2 as well. Moreover, given the history of various romantic anti-capitalisms, especially those like Heidegger’s that were also antagonistic to the Enlightenment, we can immediately perceive the dangers. Therefore, it is not surprising that toward the end of his book, Chakrabarty returns to the necessary mediation by History 1 and the Enlightenment as a way to orient politics.
In this history [History 1] inhere the Enlightenment universals. As moderns desirous of social justice and its attendant institutions, we, whether decisionist or historicist, cannot but have a shared commitment to it … It is through this commitment that is already built into our lives that our jousting with European thought begins. The project of provincializing Europe arises from this commitment. But this beginning does not define the project. The project has to be defined with reference to other pasts, that is to say, with reference to History 2s—pasts “encountered by capital as antecedents but not as belonging to its own life-process.”57
Chakrabarty ends by claiming that he is finding within European thought and the Enlightenment impetus to provincialize and take our being in the world seriously. Indeed, Chakrabarty’s History 2 commitment to autonomy from History 1 already implies some commitment to the Enlightenment.58 So we must think of History 2 as part of a larger project to creatively rethink the ideals of the Enlightenment. However, to begin such a project, it becomes important to show how and what type of resistance History 2 entails or could entail. Chakrabarty himself notes that History 2’s relation to capital could range from opposition to neutrality, but because History 2 remains indeterminate with respect to both the Enlightenment and with respect to capital, we have not been given a clear criterion as to how and when History 2 could count as resistance or what kinds of futures it could gesture toward. Chibber believes that there is a problem with the whole paradigm that Chakrabarty and other postcolonials use and therefore begins by interrogating the relationship between capitalism and the Enlightenment. Through this critical gesture, we will come back to History 2 and its relation to capital in the final sections of this essay.
III. CHIBBER’S CRITIQUE OF CHAKRABARTY’S POSTCOLONIALISM
Chibber’s criticism of postcolonialism is multidimensional; however, for the purposes of this essay, I will focus on two interrelated points: his defense of the Enlightenment and his emphasis on class, based on a restricted definition of capital. After dealing with these, I will further examine the significance of Chibber’s discussion with respect to how to conceive of global capitalism. To some extent the restricted definition of capital allows him to affirm Chakrabarty’s History 1 and History 2 without any problem. He does not believe that the existence of relatively autonomous cultural and phenomenological experiences is sufficient reason to give up Enlightenment values and indeed claims that the critique of capital requires the universal goals of the Enlightenment, including autonomy and equality.
Chibber’s reading of the French and English experiences emerges as a response to Guha’s reading of the Enlightenment and plays an important role in his critique of Chakrabarty’s two histories. Because defending the Enlightenment from critics is part of Chibber’s larger goal, his discussion of France is important for his general argument. Despite the difference between Guha and Chakrabarty, they are united in questioning the totality and universalization of capital and see the problem as the incompleteness of the Enlightenment project. As we shall see, Chibber will defuse their argument by deflating what he takes as their bloated conception of capitalism and their misunderstanding of French and English history.
Chibber distinguishes between the Enlightenment and capitalism by separating the French and English Revolutions and then showing that those who promoted the English revolution, especially the bourgeoisie supporters, were not interested in promoting universal rights and other Enlightenment principles. Consequently, he suggests that we need to rethink the historical significance of these revolutions. The following citation succinctly grasps Chibber’s point: “The English Revolution could not be anti-feudal because it occurred after the transition to capitalism had already been completed. In France, capitalism had barely begun to sprout by 1789. Hence, there was every possibility for the revolution to be anti-feudal, and in fact, this was one of its defining characteristics. The problem is that it was not led by actors who in any sense could be identified as capitalists.”59
One could say that before getting to the idea of History 2, he wants to show that History 1 has an internal rupture. In other words, capitalism and the Enlightenment, which are both supposed to be part of History 1, are now seen as separate and in tension with each other. At this point, Chibber draws on the work of Robert Brenner and Ellen Wood to show that the bourgeoisie is different in England and in France.60
Chibber’s gesture here is interesting since it parallels Chakrabarty in creating a type of outside perspective to criticize capitalism. Indeed, even more than Chakrabarty’s History 2, which is both inside and outside, Chibber’s Enlightenment seems truly outside capital because it preceded capitalism. Drawing on William H. Sewell, Jr., and T. C. W. Blanning, Chibber explains that the term “bourgeoisie” in prerevolutionary France was vague and encompassed much more than just capitalists: “It is well understood in the historiography of the ancien régime that the term ‘bourgeois’ was a nebulous term, referring not to capitalists per se, but to a cluster of occupations that had in common only what they were not: neither peasant nor laborer, these persons belonged to moneyed strata outside the nobility. They could be industrialists, merchants, shopkeepers, urban professionals. In fact, the typical bourgeois in eighteenth-century France belong to the last category, simply because of its growing importance in the political economy.”61
In this way, Chibber follows Wood in proposing a Marxist response to a huge range of historiography of the French Revolution, which attempted to understand the French Revolution as a bourgeoiscapitalist revolution.62 The separation between bourgeois and capitalist allows one to distinguish the historical trajectories of France and England, which in turn has implications for their respective intellectual histories. In Wood’s view, the Enlightenment ideas of thinkers such as Rousseau and Condorcet both follow from these urban professionals and also bureaucrats, who are separate from the nobility but are not capitalists. One can hence begin to conceive an Enlightenment against capitalism. The logic of the Enlightenment involves a universalizing connected to the bureaucracy, which should be seen as separate from that of capitalism and its own ideologies. In particular, Wood argues that the Enlightenment ideals of equality predated capitalism and provide a contrast to the capitalist framework where everything is subordinated to productivity and profit. George Comninel applies the above differences to Marx and goes so far as to say that Marx was able to develop his critique of capitalism because he spent time in France, which provided him a standpoint related to the Enlightenment and outside of capitalist England.63
From this perspective, we could say that the Enlightenment should be added to the commodity and money as part of History 2.64 Chakrabarty writes, “Marx recognizes the possibility that money and commodity, as relations, could have existed in history without necessarily giving rise to capital, they make up the kind of past that I have called History 2.”65 Bringing Wood and Chakrabarty together, one could argue that the Enlightenment is a History 2, which is even more antagonistic to capital than are either the commodity or money.
Note that with Chibber/Brenner/Wood capitalism has shrunk both conceptually and spatially. Capitalism is no longer what Chakrabarty claims is seen in terms of “the Hegelian idea of a totalizing unity.”66 Rather, Chibber explains his own more modest conception of capitalism in the following manner: “Subalternist theorists work with an unduly expansive notion of what capitalism is supposed to universalize. We saw that the most defensible case is for a narrower conception, in which capitalist globalization amounts to the universalization of practices related to economic production.”67
Capitalism has now become merely an economic form that does not entail any necessary relationship to Enlightenment values or other cultural practices; rather, it is about producing surplus value and eventually relative surplus value. Chibber describes this process in the following manner:
What capitalism universalizes then, is a particular strategy of economic reproduction. It compels economic units to focus single-mindedly on accumulating ever more capital. Economic managers internalize it as their goal because it is built into the structural location of being a capitalist; it is not something capitalists have to be convinced to do. Wherever capitalism goes, so too does this imperative … Based on the new definition I have offered, we can accept that capital has universalized even if its political mission is not devoted to winning the consent of the laboring classes. By our criteria, the universalizing process is under way if agents’ reproductive strategies shift toward market dependence.68
Chibber notes that the main point about capitalism concerns producing only for exchange and profit, namely, the accumulation of capital and not merely for use. It is this logic that is universalized rather than any political structure. This is why when India becomes a capitalist society, it does not have to become a replica of England in terms of culture or politics. But Chibber continues to argue that because of market dependence and market competition, there are changes in intensity that primarily concern time, and this eventually leads to class struggle.
In short, as Chibber explains, the capitalist “has to induce his employees to produce more goods in the same amount of time, which translates into insisting that his employees work at the highest level of intensity that they can sustain.”69 As capitalists shift to producing relative surplus value and resort to technological mediation, laborers will resist increases in productivity because it will “increase the likelihood of job loss, because as each worker is able to produce more goods in less time, the employer can afford to shed some of his labor force.”70 At the same time, even when their job is not in jeopardy, workers find that “the increasing intensity of labor comes at the cost of their well-being.”71 This discussion of course captures the famous dialogue between the worker and capitalist in Marx’s chapter on the working day, but the concept of well-being is not an easily quantifiable concept and would be concerned with use values as opposed to exchange values. At the same time, Chibber would argue that the ideals of the Enlightenment, albeit abstract, could be mobilized by mass movements in order to secure greater well-being.
Chibber makes an important contribution by underscoring class and interest, especially movements involving the lower classes. Against Guha, Chibber argues that it is not the bourgeoisie who should be given credit for the spread of Enlightenment values in Europe, but the laboring classes and their movements that forced the upper classes to yield. This leaves open the question of whether, following Chakrabarty’s logic, the workers were spreading the logic of capitalism as they caused the upper classes to yield. Here we may see the limitations of focusing on interests as a given, without a theory of how interests could be reconstituted toward a different future. It appears that all that is required for resistance to capitalism is a combination of interest and Enlightenment ideals.
Given Chibber’s defense of the Enlightenment and of workers’ resistance to capitalism, it is not surprising that he finds little use for Chakrabarty’s abstract reading of capital or his reading of History 2, which he sees as irrelevant at best and possibly dangerous. Chibber rather says that the threat to capitalism comes from History 1. This “disruption” in capital comes from “the universal interest that working people have to protect their well-being from capitalist authority and abuse.”72 Here the idea of well-being is crucial to Chibber’s argument and is another concept that plays a role something like Chakrabarty’s History 2, since it is outside capital: “The interest in well-being is a fundamental source of instability to capital, simply because of its ubiquity—it is built into the psychology of social agents, regardless of culture or location. The very fact that cultures exist at all presupposes that social agents have a drive to protect their basic needs. But precisely because this interest is a component of human nature, it necessarily brings workers into conflict with the logic of accumulation, wherever and whenever it unfolds.”73
Chibber’s point about the drive echoes Spinoza’s definition of the conatus. Ethics, Book III, Proposition 6 states: “Each thing as far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its being.”74 In Chibber’s view, culture emerges out of this struggle for existence. While Chibber invokes human nature, he does not need this for his argument. His argument only requires a historically specific claim that workers and capitalists have mutually antagonistic conati at some level. Thus he could easily follow Marxists who contend that the idea of people following their individual interests emerges with capitalism, along with the idea that individuals are free and equal bearers of labor power, which they sell on the market.75 But Chibber’s contribution here is to bring class struggle into the abstract dichotomy between History 1 and History 2, which might offer a path to a more active History 2. Indeed, if one examines Chakrabarty’s discourse, one finds no attempt to show how History 2s are mediated by class, such that capitalists’ History 2s have a radically different texture than that of workers and so on. Perhaps the price that Chakrabarty had to pay when he generalized Guha’s discourse of the Subalterns to the ontology of capital was that he had to be silent about class conflict. Capitalists might also be concerned for their well-being, but their role as capitalist involves the struggle to increase surplus value rather than merely to procure use values to promote one’s personal well-being.76
Without getting into the issue of whether interests are in some sense universal, we need to take seriously the point that workers concerned for their well-being can cause a significant threat to capital and modify it. Although the specific struggles that Marx describes often occurred in Victorian England, “they have been played out all over the globe, whereever capital has established its rule. They are, to use Chakrabarty’s language, a part of the universal and necessary history of capital, and hence of History 1.”77 However, by saying that the class struggle is part of the history of capital, he seems to be following Chakrabarty in subsuming class struggle into capitalism. In other words, class struggle would not point beyond capitalism but merely be incorporated into it.
As a partial answer to this problem, Chibber redefines what it means to “modify” the logic of capital and explains how and why struggles by the proletariat could modify the logic of capital. He argues that workers’ struggle to shorten the working day could count as a modification of the logic of capitalism to the extent that it forces capitalists to move from absolute to relative surplus value, that is, to switch from merely exploiting labor power to focusing more on technological mediation.78 Such a movement would of course not amount to overcoming the conditions of capitalism and hence is not yet a threat, but it does count as a modification of capitalism, and clearly a capitalism that is primarily based on relative surplus value is quite different from a capitalism based on absolute surplus value. In this way, we have seen how, using a new conception of the Enlightenment, Chibber has posed an alternative vision of the social universal to that of Chakrabarty.
However, in the end, neither Chibber nor Chakrabarty have been able to think of a vision beyond capitalism. While it might be the case that workers struggling for their interests helped to modify capitalism, such a logic seems fully compatible with the politics of capitalist social democracy. Chakrabarty at first seems to go further because he is attempting to find spaces beyond capitalism, but because he cannot show how such spaces would cause a threat to capitalism or be mobilized in such struggles, he retreats from the project of going beyond capitalism and appears to ask us to take solace in History 2s within capitalism.
IV. RETHINKING CHIBBER AND CHAKRABARTY IN LIGHT OF GLOBAL CAPITALISM
Having seen in some detail Chakrabarty’s attempt to launch an immanent critique of Marx and Chibber’s immanent critique of postcolonial discourse, in the next two sections I am going to begin an immanent critique of Chakrabarty and Chibber to shed light on the possibilities of a postcapitalist future. I separate this part of the essay into three sections because there are three aspects to my immanent critique: (A) determining the conditions of the possibility of the object of critique, namely, Chibber and Chakrabarty’s respective discourses, in capital, which leads to (B) theorizing the relationship between capital and the nation-state. Finally, (C) I make some remarks about how the logic of capital, which is also the object of Chibber and Chakrabarty’s respective critiques, could point toward a different future. None of these are simple tasks, and therefore, the next sections can only consist of preliminary sketches.
A. Bringing History 1 and 2 together: Rethinking the logic of capital
When discussing History 1 and 2, Chibber makes a provocative statement about Chakrabarty’s conception of capital, which points toward an immanent critique of his own work and Chakrabarty’s: “Chakrabarty’s argument amounts to the rather absurd view that universalization requires the subordination of all practices to the dictates of capitalism, to the ‘logic of capital.’ Yet I am unaware of any theorist outside of the domain of postcolonial studies who would defend this view, nor do I see any justification for it.”79 Interestingly, this conception of capital as a totalizing dynamic that encompasses all modes of life is not only close to Chakrabarty’s position but perhaps, more accurately, describes the position of Moishe Postone. Postone’s reinterpretation of Marxism is relevant here not only because it represents a conception of capital that Chibber finds in Chakrabarty, and has been recently mobilized against Chakrabarty,80 but because it will pave the way to ground History 1 and 2 as part of capital. Although Postone’s Marxist project has little to do with provincializing Europe, in this section we will see how, far from leading to Eurocentrism, Marxism allows us to provincialize Europe in a more fundamental sense—that is, by showing how the logic of capital itself creates differences between Europe and Asia. Moreover, capital’s relation to regions and nations can change over time, as is evidenced in the transformations of China and Brazil since the 1970s.
The first conceptual move is to separate capital from Europe. The former is an abstract dynamic that is logically prior to regions such as Europe and Asia. In other words, as Chakrabarty suggests, Europe invades Asia because of the logic of capital and the uneven world that it creates. In this context, Postone’s framework appears to allow one to criticize Chakrabarty not for being too Hegelian but for not being Hegelian enough. Instead of arguing that History 2 is outside of capital, from this reading of Marx, one could suggest that History 1 as Enlightenment and History 2 as phenomenological feeling and concrete modes of belonging are both products of the commodity form and logic of capital. Such a reading would complement Chakrabarty’s view of the Enlightenment, explaining how it is connected to capital and also offering some suggestions concerning how to deal with History 2. On this reading of Marx, the key to grounding History 1 and 2 lies in locating these forms in the logic of the commodity.
In the first chapter of volume 1 of Capital, Marx explains that the commodity has two sides: exchange value, which reduces the various commodities in the world to a common measure, and use value, which represents the particular way in which one can use a commodity. From the latter perspective, a commodity is a particular thing that can be used. The use of a computer is different from that of a table and so on. However, from the standpoint of exchange value, the various commodities lose their particular concrete existence and come to represent a number, which is generally construed as the socially necessary labor time required to produce a given commodity and is eventually represented as the commodity’s price. Although the two sides of the commodity appear in the same object, once exchange value appears as money, people experience the two sides of the commodity form, the abstract and the concrete, as separate. Because the value of a commodity is eventually embodied in an external object as money, people in capitalist society immediately experience exchange value and use value separately. This separation allows for various forms of consciousness. Now let us examine the extent to which we can ground History 1 and History 2 in capital, using the above framework.
Turning to History 1 and the Enlightenment, we might ground these concepts in the commodity. One might immediately accept the homology between the abstraction of the commodity form and Enlightenment abstractions, such as the idea of equality. However, we would need to do more work before we could conclude that abstractions such as equality are grounded in the exchange value side of the commodity form. This is especially the case if we follow Chibber in concluding that France was not capitalist during the French Revolution. Recall that Wood attempted to connect the ideals of the likes of Condorcet not to capital, but to the state.
William Sewell has recently made a strong argument for the applicability of the categories of the first chapter of volume 1 of Capital to eighteenth-century France. Sewell suggests that the ideas of “civil equality” during the French Revolution could have emerged through market exchange. He contends that “eighteenth-century French commercial capitalist development fostered a vigorous growth of abstract forms of social relations and that the growing experience of such abstraction in daily life helped make the notion of civic equality both conceivable and attractive by the 1780s.”81 He does not place the emphasis on class but focuses on Chapter 1 of Marx’s Capital, which is about production for the market and exchange. Sewell’s point allows one to ground the Enlightenment in the commodity and market exchange and dovetails with Jacques Bidet’s comments about how market exchange presupposes concepts of equality and freedom.
Bidet claims that the concept of capital does not really emerge until the fourth chapter of volume 1 of Capital, which, as the title suggests, deals with the transformation of money into capital.82 Before this point, the concept of wage labor has not actually been introduced and interestingly this point might be relevant to France in the eighteenth century. As Sewell explains, “although the textile producers were generally quite poor and were exploited very effectively by the merchants who supplied them with raw materials and marketed the products, they were not actually wage-workers.”83 So although we do not have capitalism in its developed form, we do have the relations outlined in the first three chapters of Capital, which presupposes the ideas of equality and freedom, and through participation in the market, these elements become part of the structures of feeling of commoners. The key issue here is that the so-called economic practices that Chibber highlights entail cultural and intellectual dimensions, including ideas of equality and freedom.
Bringing Postone, Sewell, and Bidet together, we can also more fully ground Ellen Wood’s insight, which connected the idea of equality to the state and bureaucracy. The meta-structure of the market, namely, the ideas of free and equal individuals exchanging commodities, must be backed by some type of legal structure, which implies the state. Following Sewell, one could conclude that the state during eighteenth-century France embodies this contradiction of on the one hand supporting market equality, at least in some places, and on the other reproducing an extremely hierarchical system. Although it might be the lower classes and state functionaries who would draw on the above ideals more than the aristocracy, there is no logical connection between such ideals and any particular class—they are not merely products of a capitalist class. In some sense, this discussion has grounded Chibber’s understanding of Enlightenment and Chakrabarty’s History 1 in a theory of the commodity and market exchange. The above analysis shows that Marx’s example of capital finding money and commodities preexisting it, far from being History 2, actually tends to produce History 1. Now we can return to grounding History 2 in capitalism, which is a more difficult task.
Chakrabarty’s History 2 is clearly polysemic. In the above discussion we have seen that it could mean phenomenological experience, concrete religious feelings of belonging related to unevenness, especially between places in the center and the periphery, but also more generally experiences that could potentially resist or provide temporary transcendent vantage points on capitalist society. In addition to all of this, there is a temporal dimension to History 2 both because it is a “history” and because it emerges in capitalism as something that has always already been. So although one can assert that History 2 is concrete, one still needs to think about how to deal with the temporality and spatiality of History 2 in relation to capitalism and dominant forms of political belonging.
In the context of dealing with forms of belonging, we need to inquire into how History 2 could be understood in the interface between the nation-state and capital. In a footnote to his discussion of capitalism and the nation-state, Chibber invokes Manu Goswami’s emphasis on the “material basis of national consciousness” in colonial India, which suggests some ways to deal with History 2 as unevenness.84 In particular, Goswami contends that History 1 and History 2 are both produced by the dynamic of capital. She writes:
A conception of global space-time as hierarchical and differentiated rather than unified and homogenous foregrounds the ongoing creation of unevenness (economic and cultural, spatial and temporal) as the internal supplement of the universalizing orientation of capital. It suggests that the universalizing dynamic of capital develops unevenly across space and time and that it actively generates new forms of sociospatial and sociocultural unevenness. From this perspective, History 2 represents an internal dimension of History 1, not an absolute outside that episodically interrupts the supposedly homogenous, linear progression of an abstract logic of capital as such.”85
In such a framework, we can understand History 1 and 2 in a world in which the dynamic of capital along with the logic of territorialization continually reproduces the ideal of equality and real inequality, unevenness, and domination. Goswami explains how the “interpenetration of socioeconomic processes, during this period, was part and parcel of the consolidation of Britain’s global hegemony as defined by its welding together, as Giovanni Arrighi argues, of ‘territorialist and capitalist logics of power’ on a historically novel world-wide scale.”86
Although they are “welded together,” Arrighi analytically separates territorial and capitalist logics, and, as we have seen, Chibber makes a similar distinction in his discussion of India and Korea. The basic insight here is that the organizational, social, and political infrastructures that help to reproduce capital are by no means expressions of the capitalist social relations.87 To the extent that History 2 involves narrative and feelings of belonging, we could connect them to the logic of territoriality. At this point we come to the problem of nationalism to which I alluded earlier. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, Neil Brenner succinctly summarizes the issue of nationalism and the state in the following manner:
Lefebvre argues, the relation of national states to multinational capital is never predetermined but is the object and expression of nearly continual sociopolitical contestation, conflict and struggle. If the risk persists that the state might be subordinated to the demands of global corporations, so too, according to Lefebvre, does the possibility of a state controlled by an anti-imperialist, popular democratic coalition oriented toward radically anti-productivist goals. Although Chibber does not cite Lefebvre, his book is fundamentally concerned with the extent to which people could mobilize the nation-state against capital, especially in the initial stages of the struggle for socialism.88
B. Nationalism against capitalism?
Chapter 10 of Chibber’s book is called “The Nation Unmoored” and explicitly argues for the idea of a Third World nationalism as potentially destabilizing capitalism. The major aim of this chapter is to criticize Chatterjee’s conception of nationalism in a number of his writings. However, Chibber’s major aim is to potentially separate nationalism from capitalism, which is part of his project to separate the Enlightenment/modernity from capitalism. We can now deal further with this major rift between the postcolonials and Chibber as we move toward rethinking capital and the possibilities of its determinate negation in relation to nationalism.
Chibber promotes a modernizing anti-colonial nationalism against Chatterjee’s more spiritual version. While Chatterjee does not use the term “History 2,” we can see similar themes in the following citation:
By my reading, anti-colonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it ever begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the work of social institutions and practices into two domains—the material and the spiritual. The material is the domain of the “outside,” of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology, a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had succumbed … The spiritual, on the other hand, is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity … This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anti-colonial nationalism.89
In this passage, many of the things associated with History 1, such as the Enlightenment and capital, are not part of anti-colonial nationalism. We could read Chatterjee as outlining one possible political use of History 2.90 The problem with the above description is that anti-colonialist nationalism ends up being like Hegel’s “beautiful soul,” which is beautiful only as long as it does not enter reality.91 Unfortunately, in a global capitalist world of nation-states, anti-colonial nationalists eventually have to enter this reality and end up mixing Chatterjee’s categories of outer and inner. Hence, they can be criticized for eventually becoming modernizers. Chatterjee’s critique of the nationalism of Gandhi and others involves this maneuver.
Chibber, on the other hand, sees a hope in this anti-colonial nationalism and claims that not only did they not follow the above model, they should not have. He mentions Mao Zedong, Amical Cabral, and Ho Chi Minh as some of the nationalists who openly embraced the modernizing model and were critical of their own traditions.92 The question is, What role could such a nationalism play in creating a future beyond capitalism? If one separates the logic of territoriality from the logic of accumulation à la Arrighi or market from organization à la Bidet, it would be logically possible to think of a type of nationalism that was not capitalist. This is a controversial interpretation of capital and the state but followed by a number of Marxists on whom Chibber draws, so let us assume that we can make this analytical separation. In this case, we would need to specify further how such a noncapitalist nation-state could play a role in promoting a wider movement not just against capitalism, but toward socialism. After all, even Althusser-influenced Marxists such as Jacques Bidet and Gerard Duménil argue that actually existing socialist regimes used organization to overcome the market mechanisms of capitalism, but ended up reproducing many of the same phenomena, including domination and alienation.93
Marx hinted at the potentialities of unevenness in his letter to Vera Zasulich. Zasulich asked whether Russia had to go through the same stage of capitalism as Western Europe and dissolve its earlier communal forms of life. Marx suggests that there may be areas where earlier forms of communal life continue by being articulated into a capitalist world. The question concerns to what extent these forms of life could be drawn on to imagine and even realize a future beyond capitalism. Marx wrote many drafts of his response, but the basic idea is grasped in the following remarks: “My answer is that, thanks to the unique combination of circumstances in Russia, the rural commune, which is still established on a national scale, may gradually shake off its primitive characteristics and directly develop an element of collective production on a national scale. Precisely because it is contemporaneous with capitalist production, the rural commune may appropriate all its positive achievements without undergoing its [terrible] frightful vicissitudes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world, and nor has it fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power.”94
For our purposes, one of the key issues here is the “contemporaneity” of Russia with the world of capitalist production, which makes notions such as backward and forward irrelevant when discussing the development of nation-states. The discussion also intimates History 2, because the communes are contemporary with global capitalism, but still different. Harry Harootunian has recently connected the above case to the issue of formal subsumption. In his view, Marx’s point is that countries on the periphery of the global capitalist system could “utilize residues of prior modes of production to create either a new register of formal subsumption or bypass capitalism altogether.”95 This is an extremely tempting position that combines anti-imperialist nationalism on the periphery of global capitalism and the hope for socialism. However, unless it can eventually move beyond nationalism, one may find oneself reproducing the problem of the beautiful soul that has to keep from being contaminated by a capitalist reality. This will only aggravate the organizational controls that attempt to purge such contamination from the nation.96
C. Contradictions of capitalism: Deriving “ought” from “is”
Although they are both in some sense supporting Third World nationalisms, Chibber would probably not approve of Harootunian’s use of the Zasulich letters or his endorsement of the peasant communes. Moreover, Chibber asserts that it is only the conflict between labor and capitalism that constitutes a potential threat to capitalism, while the structural crisis of capitalism only leads to its spatial expansion.97 However, Chibber overlooks another aspect of the crisis of capitalism that is temporal and would be an important part of an immanent critique of capitalism. We can now return to the problem of immanent critique, which Postone calls locating the “ought” in actually existing capitalism. If the Vera Zasulich narrative stresses History 2, we need a more dynamic notion of how History 1 actually provides a possibility beyond itself. One needs to show how the existent society itself points beyond itself toward a postcapitalist society. The spatial crisis that Chibber delineates gets us only halfway there. Many Marxists have pointed out that the expansion of capitalism causes capital to exhaust the resources of nature, which consequently will eventually threaten the human species.98 This, along with the ways in which capitalism oppresses and dominates people in various ways, might not give us an “ought,” but it does provides us with an explanation of how this “ought” is possible. Chakrabarty had already touched on the passage that showed this possibility but did not dwell on its implications.
Capital itself is the moving contradiction [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour-time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence it posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition—question of life and death—for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse in order to make the creation of wealth. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the sole measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value.99
This passage shows a contradiction between living and dead labor, where it is actually dead labor that makes living labor cease to be the prime creator of wealth. Put simply, although many Marxists, including Chibber, focus on the contradiction between labor and capital, therefore emphasizing living labor, they overlook that it is the potentiality of dead labor that could make a new society possible. In other words, the increase of machines and technological mediation makes living labor obsolete for the creation of actual use values. At the same time, as long as society remains capitalist, capital will continue to exploit labor to create value, regardless of the extent of technological mediation. The result will be various forms of crises and unemployment, of which the history of capitalism has provided ample evidence.
This brings us back to points made, respectively, by Gullì and Chakrabarty, namely, that workers have histories other than being bearers of labor power. In the above context, this problem is not just one about the subjectivity of the worker but concerns the logic of capitalism as well. In advanced capitalism, workers do not need to do as much work to produce wealth, but the problem concerns how they could turn their daydreams and movements toward the creation of a society where wage labor does not dominate our existence.
This goal or vision of the future provides the tools for us to rethink working-class movements in order to realize this goal.100 This is what Postone has in mind when he writes: “If a movement, concerned with workers, were to point beyond capitalism, it would have to defend workers’ interests and have to participate in their transformation—for example, by calling into question the given structure of labor, not identifying any longer in terms of that structure, and participating in rethinking those interests.”101
As with Chibber, worker movements begin with interests, but they must rethink these interests. In some ways, Postone also anticipates Chakrabarty and Gullì, since the above passage implies separating a workers’ interest qua worker and his or her interest qua being in the world. The issue is not to oppose working-class politics with the politics of belonging or other forms of politics but to try to think of both these politics together in relation to the struggle for a postcapitalist world. For this reason, Postone does not use the term “working-class movement” but rather “a movement concerned with workers,” which involves a politics of naming to avoid reifying the identity of the working class. The concern with workers is separate from the identity of workers as workers, which enables us to conceive of a movement dealing with workers that potentially transcends working-class identity. This is where the solidarity between working-class movements and the subaltern movements could come into play.
In short, a serious politics that wanted to challenge capitalism would have to take into consideration the above temporal dynamic of capitalism while at the same time drawing on interests and various dimensions of History 2 and then connecting with various movements on the periphery of capitalism, which might offer ideals of community but will not be able to be realized without a larger global transformation. In this context, we can return to the problem of History 2.
V. CONCLUSION: A CRITIQUE OF PURE ROMANTIC ANTI-CAPITALISM
The hope to realize capitalism by drawing on History 2s or remnants is clearly a form of romantic capitalism, because it posits resistance to capitalism without grounding this impulse in contradictory social relations and dynamics. In this sense, one could say that I have proposed a critique of pure romantic capitalism. But when the critique of romantic anticapitalism goes to an extreme, we become incapable of imagining a future beyond capitalism. In this context, romantic anti-capitalism, and Löwy’s discussion in particular, might have something to offer.102
In addition to the above philosophical reasoning, there are structural reasons to attempt a synthesis of romantic anti-capitalism with more concrete visions of politics and analysis. In particular, the temporal dynamic of capitalism toward greater levels of productivity does not imply a homogeneous world of capitalism. On the contrary, as Alex Callinicos points out, socially necessary labor time is radically different in various regions of the world, and this difference is structurally reproduced.103
In this context, scholars such as Vijay Prashad have documented the struggles in the peripheries of global capitalism, such as the Chiapas and other movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, which entail “local resistance against transnational firms.”104 David McNally sympathetically examines worker movements in various societies on the periphery of capitalism, especially those in Latin America.105 The immediate goals of these movements are often not something in the distant future, such as a postcapitalist society, but connected to subsistence and land relations. Hence it would be inaccurate to claim that such forms of peasant and worker resistance directly point beyond capitalism. However, perhaps the inspiration that we can continue to take from Maoism is the attempt to connect these issues of the everyday, which at some level are confronting global capitalism, to the hope and practices for a world beyond capitalism. The revolutions of the twentieth century were clearly faced with such a question, and it was clear to most socialists that the various movements on the periphery would not succeed without some attempt to create alliances with “movements concerned with workers” both in their own region and elsewhere.
However, there is often mutual hostility between leaders of peasant movements and more mainstream communist parties, such as we see in the contemporary Maoist movement in India.106 Such examples show that, even in one nation, it is difficult to unite movements closer to History 1 (mainstream Communist parties) and those that to different degrees resist aspects of the Enlightenment. At a global level, the spatial dynamics of capital and the state make transnational unity more difficult, especially for the lower classes, whose mobility is more restricted. For such a unity to begin and for it to move in a direction beyond existing paradigms of social democracy, we must transcend narrow perceptions of identity and interest. While one cannot be optimistic today about the future of socialist movements, we can hope that Mao will be correct when he said in 1945: “The path has many twists and turns, but the future is bright.”107 The twentieth century has already proved the first part of this statement true, perhaps for reasons that Mao could not have realized. Although theory perhaps cannot completely outline a practice to create a brighter future, it could inspire political practice by showing how the contradictions of capitalism make a better future possible.