THE CHIBBER DEBATE: AN INTRODUCTION—ACHIN VANAIK
1Perry Anderson, “Modernity and Revolution” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and Interpretations of Culture, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Modernity exists where there is a “still usable classical past, a still indeterminate technical present, and a still unpredictable political future.” Again, modernity is at the junction between “a semi-aristocratic ruling order, a semi-industrialised capitalist economy, and a semi-emergent … labour movement” (pp. 317–38, esp. p. 326). As a characterization of colonial and postcolonial India, this would hardly be out of place where the hierarchies of caste have always been even more important than those of “royal blood.”
2This discourse of Multiple Modernities may have been initiated at the turn of the millennium by S. N. Eisenstadt. “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129, 2000, 1–29. But a number of Indian origin contributors have implicitly or explicitly endorsed this paradigm shift, such as S. Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” European Journal of Sociology 46: 3, 2005, 497–526, and H. Mukhia, “Subjective Modernities,” Occasional Papers in History and Society, New Delhi: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, 2013, 1–20. Another school is also characterized by an unbalanced culturalism but is critical of MM, deeming it methodologically incapable of developing a genuine post-Western global historical sociology. This is the “Connected Histories” approach, whose key figures include Professor S. Subramanyam at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor G. Bhambra at Warwick University in Coventry, England. See G. Bhambra, “Talking Among Themselves? Weberians and Marxist Historical Sociologies as Dialogue without ‘Others’,” Millennium, March 2011; “Historical Sociology, Modernity and Postcolonial Critique,” American Historical Review 16: 3, 2011; “The Possibilities of, and for, Global Sociology: A Postcolonial Perspective,” Postcolonial Sociology, Political Power and Social Theory 24, 2013, 295–314.
3See Terry Eagleton, After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003, esp. Chapter 5 on “Truth, Virtue and Objectivity.”
1. SUBALTERN STUDIES AND CAPITAL—PARTHA CHATTERJEE
1Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989.
2Ibid., 13–30.
3Ibid., 15.
4Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 84.
5As a matter of fact, although Guha does not cite them, his use of the concept is perfectly consistent with Laclau and Mouffe’s interpretation of the Gramscian concept of hegemony, with the proviso that hegemony is constructed on the plane of the fundamental classes and that the hegemonic center ceases to hold in periods of organic crisis. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack, London: Verso, 1985, 136–8.
6Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 111.
7Ibid., 125.
8Ibid., 139.
9Ibid., 143.
10Ibid., 139.
11Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1990, 275.
12Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
13Ibid., 217.
14Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 153.
15Ibid., 166.
16Ibid., 162.
17Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?, London: Zed Books, 1986.
18Partha Chatterjee, Bengal 1920–47: The Land Question, Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, 2012, first published 1984.
19Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 191.
20Ibid., 197.
21Ibid., 231.
22Ibid., 197.
23Ibid., 201–2.
24Ibid., 200.
25Amartya Sen, A Theory of Justice, London: Penguin, 2009.
26Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
27Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 275.
28Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
29Karl Marx, ed., Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1979, 491–2.
30Sudipta Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity,” Archives européennes de sociologie 46: 3, 2005, 497–526.
31Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, New Delhi and New York: Routledge, 2007.
32Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 202.
33Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, 338–63; Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
34Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Post-Colonial Criticism,” American Historical Review 99: 5, December 1994, 1475–90.
2. SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITED: A RESPONSE TO PARTHA CHATTERJEE
1Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 44–5, 91–2.
2Partha Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” Chapter 1 of this volume, 32.
3Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, 19, emphasis added.
4Ibid., 6–11.
5Ibid., 6–7.
6Ibid., 7.
7Ibid., 13, emphasis added.
8Ibid.
9Ibid.
10Ibid.
11Ibid., 17, emphasis added.
12Ibid.
13Ibid., 18.
14Ibid., 19.
15Ibid., 5.
16Ibid., xi–xiii, 3–5.
17Ibid., 4–5.
18Ibid., 38, emphasis added.
19Ibid., 130–1.
20Ibid., 133.
21Ibid.
22Ibid., 134, emphasis added.
23Ibid., 135.
24Ibid., 95, emphasis added.
25Ibid., 95–6, emphasis added.
26Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” 38.
27See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 225–6. These are the only pages on which Chakrabarty actually discusses abstract labor.
28Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” 38.
29Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, ch. 8.
30Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” 39.
31I will not directly address Chatterjee’s rather amusing objection to my use of “psychology” to refer to subaltern consciousness. I did so only because it is common parlance in social science and philosophy. Readers made anxious by concepts like “psychology” may rest assured that the two words refer to the same object.
32Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital” 000[[x-ref]]***.
33Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 163.
34Ibid., 163–4. Also see Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 162.
35Partha Chatterjee “Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–1935,” in Subaltern Studies I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 9–38, quotation on p. 37.
36Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 157–66.
37Ibid., ch.7, sections 4 and 5.
38Ibid., 172–4.
39There is another such resort to authority, which I will not address at any length. Briefly: Chatterjee defends Chakrabarty’s culturalist argument—the target of my criticism in Chapter 8 of PTSC—by pointing to its “solid Marxist provenance” in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital” 42). Only three points need be made: first, its being found in Hegel is a bizarre basis for calling it Marxist; second, even if it can be found in Marx, this has no bearing on whether or not it is a defensible position; and third, I address the very distinction to which he alludes, criticize Chakrabarty’s use of it, and provide actual arguments in favor of my view in PTSC (Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, ch. 8, particularly pp. 187–200). I do not reject his argument on the grounds that it is a deviation from Marx. In fact, I never make any claim about its lineage one way or another, since it is of no relevance in assessing its soundness. Chatterjee’s appeal to authority is therefore not only a little sad, but also utterly irrelevant.
40See Michael Brown, “Cultural Relativism 2.0,” Current Anthropology 49: 3, June 2008, 363–83, and the ensuing discussion.
41The research on this subject is enormous. Some of it is summarized in Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, eds, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. See also Michael Gurven, “The Evolution of Contingent Cooperation,” Current Anthropology 47: 1, February 2006, 185–92; Michael Gurven and Jeffrey Winking, “Collective Action in Action: Prosocial Behavior in and out of the Laboratory,” American Anthropologist 110: 2, June 2008, 179–90; Walter Garrison Runciman, “Stone-Age Sociology,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 1, March 2005, 129–42; Michael Price, “Pro-community Altruism and Social Status in a Shuar Village,” Human Nature 14: 2, 2003, 191–208.
42Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 281–3.
3. POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE SPECTER OF CAPITAL
1Cry of the children as the effigy of Guy Fawkes, the guardian of the gunpowder, was burnt on November 5th, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to blow up the English House of Lords with King James I of England in it. Since Ranajit Guha, at ninety, is our “old guy,” and Vivek Chibber burns him for misreading the English Revolution, this child’s cry seemed an appropriate title.
2I have long wanted to admit that I forgot this lesson when I was in my thirties twice (with reference to Jürgen Habermas and James Wolfensohn) and have bitterly regretted it. For consciousness-raised ideologically bound feminist readers of this review, of a book that has no feminist concern, I mention that part of this forgetfulness was because I felt unself-consciously obliged to prove to my then partner that I was not a “bourgeois proto-fascist” (his repeated phrase). This book is by a resolutely non-identitarian South-Asian American. The personal may be political.
3Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 296.
4Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978.
5John Thompson, Studies in the Theory of Ideology, London: Polity Press, 1985.
6Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
7Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, New York: Verso, 1992.
8Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, vii.
9Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 80.
10Ibid., 101.
11Ibid., 81.
12Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement, Paris: Mouton, 1963.
13Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009.
14Compare Kirti Chaudhuri’s impatience: “While it is possible to criticize Braudel’s works on matters of factual detail or interpretation, to do so is rather like standing in front of Michelangelo’s statue of David in Piazza Signoria in Florence or looking up at his paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome and saying that the artist’s grasp of the human anatomy was all wrong” (K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 6, emphasis mine).
15Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989.
16Ibid., 6, emphasis added.
17Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976.
18Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 109.
19Ibid., 280.
20Ibid., 217.
21Ibid., 233.
22Ibid., 125.
23Ibid., 250.
24Ibid., 6.
25Ibid., 6.
26W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation, New York: Athenaeum Press, 1968, 385–414.
27Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 8.
28Kathleen Collins, Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
29Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 200–2.
30Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998, 27–48.
31Edward W. Said, “Permission to Narrate,” Journal of Palestine Studies 13: 3, 1984, 27–48.
32Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlements and Deprivation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. His work was enriched by Esther Bostrup’s work on famines since the 60s.
33Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books, 1990.
34Rosa Luxemburg, The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revelation and Mass Strike, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007.
35Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 35.
36Ibid., 119.
37Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 52.
38Ibid., 291.
39Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1975.
40Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 291.
41Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 1.
42Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 286, emphasis in original.
43W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, New York: Free Press, 1998.
44Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 275.
45Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 37.
46Unpublished conversation, 1989; I cannot reproduce his persuasive and thunderous accent, alas.
47Shahid Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2,” Subaltern Studies 3, 1984, 1–61; Partha Chatterjee, “Gandhi and the Critique of Civil Society,” Subaltern Studies 3, 1984, 153–95.
48Sumanta Banerjee, “Gandhi’s Flexible Non-violence,” Economic and Political Weekly 48: 31, 2013, 4.
49David Hardiman, “Gandhi’s Adaptable Non-violence,” Economic and Political Weekly 48: 33, 2013, 4–5.
50Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 287.
51Ibid., 140, emphasis in original.
52Marx, Capital.
53Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
54Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Writings, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New York: International, 1971.
55Ibid., 52.
56Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 268.
57Teun Van Dijk, Discourse and Power, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
58Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 75.
59Ibid., 54.
60Ibid., 152–3.
61Ibid., 79.
62Susan M. L. Wong, “China’s Stock Market: A Marriage of Capitalism and Socialism,” Cato Journal 26: 3, 2006, 389–424.
63Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 220.
64Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1968, 253–64.
65Ibid., 255, 261.
66Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Readings, ed. Lara Choksey, Calcutta: Seagull, 2014.
67Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 17.
68Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 89.
69Ibid., 178.
70Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 3.
71Ritu Birla, Stages of Capital: Law, Culture, and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
72Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
73Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 98.
74Kant, Immanuel, “The Metaphysics of Morals,” Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 139.
4. MAKING SENSE OF POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
1Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013.
2This essay is the author’s response to a review previously published by the Cambridge Review of International Affairs (Chapter 3 of this volume).
3Both concepts originate in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.
5See Chapter 1. For a rebuttal of Chatterjee, see Chapter 2 of this volume, where I provide detailed textual evidence against his claims.
6Chapter 3 of this volume, 79.
7Ibid., 74.
8Chapter 3, 80–2.
9Chapter 3, 75.
10Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 130.
11Vivek Chibber, “What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Marxist Theory of History,” Historical Materialism 19: 2, 2011, 60–91.
7. INTRODUCTION: REVIEW SYMPOSIUM
1Chapters 7–13 emerged from a symposium on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital.
2Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Incomplete Project,” New German Critique 22, 1981, 3–15.
3Janet Ajary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seduction of Islamism, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005.
8. ON VIVEK CHIBBER’S POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND THE SPECTER OF CAPITAL
1Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
2Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989.
3Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
4Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 27, 40.
5Ibid., 250, 71.
6Ibid., 66.
9. BACK TO BASICS?
1Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 295.
2Ibid., quoted on p. 8.
3For example, see ibid., p. 87.
4Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
5Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989.
6Ibid., 35.
7Ibid.
8Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 292.
9Ibid., quoted on page 13.
10See my Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American–East Asian Relations, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002, ch. 6.
11Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
12Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 291.
13Ibid., 108.
14Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 48.
15Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.
16Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 25.
17Ibid., 49.
18Ibid., 80–1.
19Ibid., 176.
20Ibid., 206.
21Ibid., 212.
22Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983, 128.
23Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987, 367.
24Stephen K. White, “Reason, Modernity and Democracy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 9.
25Max Weber, General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Knight, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981, 312–14.
10. ON THE ARTICULATION OF MARXIST AND NON-MARXIST THEORY
1See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985.
2See, for example, Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
3See, for example, Robert Jessop, “Zur Relevanz von Luhmanns Staatstheorie und von Laclau und Mouffes Diskursanalyse für die Weiterentwicklung der marxistischen Staatstheorie” in Joachim Hirsch, John Kannakulam, and Jens Wissel, eds, Der Staat der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt: Nomos, 2008, 157–79.
4On neo-historicist social epistemology see my “Charles Tilly, Historicism, and the Critical Realist Philosophy of Science,” American Sociologist 41: 4, 2010, 312–36; on critical realism in this context see my “Critical Realism and Historical Sociology,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40: 1, 1998, 170–86.
5Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993.
6Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, and In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, 1998.
7Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994.
8Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anti-Colonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
9For an excellent overview see Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
10George Steinmetz, “Decolonizing German Theory: An Introduction,” Postcolonial Studies 9: 1, 2006, 3–13.
11Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 217.
12Ibid., 123.
13David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Lukács (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, vol. 1, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973, 41) claimed that the German bourgeoisie from the sixteenth century onward was “characterized by a servility, pettiness, baseness, and miserabilism” which distinguished it from other European bourgeoisies. See George Steinmetz, “German Exceptionalism and the Origins of Nazism: The Career of a Concept,” in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 251–84.
14Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 112, 123.
15Ibid., 123. A similar criticism can be made of Bourdieu’s state theory, which twists the stick too far in the direction of symbolic domination (Pierre Bourdieu, Sur l’état: cours au Collège de France 1989–1992, Paris: Seuil, 2012). See George Steinmetz, “État-mort, État-fort, État-empire,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 201, 2014, 112–19.
16Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 144.
17Pace Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.
18Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
19Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 123.
20Ibid., 125.
21Ibid., 224.
22Ibid., 226.
23Ibid., 230.
24Ibid., 233.
25Ibid.
26Ibid., 239.
27Pierre Bourdieu, “Séminaires sur le concept de champ, 1972–1975,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 200, 2013, 4–37.
28Kent C. Berridge and Piotr Winkielman, “What Is an Unconscious Emotion? (The Case for Unconscious Liking),” Cognition and Emotion 17: 2, 2000, 181–211; Kent C. Berridge, “Pleasure, Unconscious Affect and Irrational Desire,” in A. S. R. Manstead, N. H. Frijda, and A. H. Fischer, eds, Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 43–62; and Piotr Winkielman and Kent C. Berridge, “Unconscious Emotion,” Current Directions in Psychological Sciences 13: 3, 2004, 120–3.
29Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
30I provide evidence of efforts to limit capital’s universalization in various colonial contexts in The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. The British and French colonial development policies after World War II were the result of a particular political-economic conjuncture and cannot be seen as the inevitable breakthrough of capital exerting its universalizing power. Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
31Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 125.
32Ibid., 227.
33Talcott Parsons, “Sociological Elements of Economic Thought,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 49: 3, 1934, 446.
11. CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT, STRUCTURAL CONSTRAINT
1Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, New York: International Publishers, 1972, 10.
2Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 286–93, 285.
3In particular, ibid., ch. 9.
4Ibid., 174.
5Ibid., 132–4.
6Ibid., 145.
7Ibid., 232.
8Richard Williams, Hierarchical Structures and Social Value: The Social Construction of Black and Irish Identities in the U.S., New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
9Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 250.
10Jeffrey M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution, New York: Free Press, 1978.
11Another building block toward this analysis can be found in Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
12Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 285.
13Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, New York: New Left Books, 1980, 20.
12. MINDING APPEARANCES
1Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, xii.
2See Bruce Robbins’s review, “Subaltern-Speak,” Chapter 5 of this volume, and the online post by Chris Taylor of the University of Chicago, “Not Even Marxist: On Vivek Chibber’s Polemic against Postcolonial Theory,” April 29, 2013, available at http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html.
3On the significance of “specters” with respect to both the figure of Marx and his work, see Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, New York: Routledge, 1995, delivered in 1993 as the plenary address for a conference at the University of California, Riverside’s Center for Ideas and Society. Nine critical commentaries on the book and Derrida’s response to them are collected in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, New York: Verso, 2008, edited by the late Michael Sprinker.
4I borrow this term from Roy Bhaskar (Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, New York: Verso, 1986) as a way to refer to the combined task of explaining the workings of capitalism and the falsity of its necessary self-representation.
5Klaus Peter Köpping, Adolf Bastian and the Psychic Unity of Mankind: The Foundations of Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Germany (History and Theory of Anthropology/Geschichte und Theorie der Ethnologie), Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2005.
6George W. Stocking, Jr., The Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883–1911: A Franz Boas Reader, New York: Basic Books, 1984, 14. Bastian was Boas’s senior advisor at the Ethnographic Museum in Berlin.
7William Ascher and Barbara Hirschfelder-Ascher, Revitalizing Political Psychology: The Legacy of Harold D. Lasswell, Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003.
8In a presentation on Chibber’s book later published in Economic and Political Weekly (see Chapter 1 of this volume), Partha Chatterjee suggested that “political psychology” was not an appropriate category, because it had never been used by the Subaltern Studies authors, particularly Ranajit Guha.
9Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 153.
10Ibid., 154.
11Ibid., 185.
12Ibid., 196.
13Ibid., 199.
14Ibid., 197.
15Ibid., 198.
16Ibid., 200.
17Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds, The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.
18Chibber cites an essay that I co-authored on the relevance of Marx’s value-theoretic inquiries for the anthropological study of capitalism. He includes our piece along with others that he claims make the error of interpreting “abstract” labor as referring to the empirical homogeneity of actual laboring people. However, our only reference to “homogeneous” was the same as Chibber’s on page 135 in his book where he draws on the famous quotation from Capital, vol. 1, on the oddity of the objectification of abstract labor that is specific to capitalism: “Let us look at the residue of the products of labor … they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous labor.” In the introduction to my book American Value, Migrants, Money and Meaning in El Salvador and the United States, I make the same critique of Lowe and Lloyd as Chibber.
19Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Marx after Marxism: History, Subalternity, and Difference,” in Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds, Marxism Beyond Marxism, New York: Routledge, 1995, 60.
20There are at least two compelling critiques of this project written by anthropologists: Fernando Coronil’s “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories,” Cultural Anthropology 11: 1, 1996, 51–87, and Michel Rolph Trioullout’s “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991, 17–44.
13. CONFRONTING POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
1I offer a more elaborate explanation for my decision to focus on Subaltern Studies in Chapter 4 of this volume, which I do not want to repeat here.
2Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 228–9.
3Ibid., 229.
4Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism, London: Verso, 1980.
5See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 125 fn. 39, 144–5, 145 fn. 31.
6Ibid., 183–200, particularly 193–6.
14. SUBALTERN STAKES
1Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, London: J. Foulis, 1909–13, 12. Nietzsche loathed subalterns, denouncing Socratic dialectics for placing the lower classes at center stage.
2I would like to thank Keya Ganguly for her help with this essay.
3Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013.
4For a sense of how “theory” affected the reading of Gramsci in India, see the proceedings of a workshop on Gramsci and South Asia at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta 1987, repr. Economic and Political Weekly, January 30, 1988.
5Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
6Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 3.
7Chibber, Locked in Place, 85.
8Among the most balanced and informative discussions of the book is Pranav Jani’s “Marxism and the Future of Postcolonial Theory,” International Socialist Review 92, Spring 2014. For a highly informed scholarly treatment, see the Ho-fung Hung roundtable, featuring George Steinmetz, Bruce Cumings, and other social scientists, in “Review Symposium on Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital” Journal of World-Systems Research 20: 2, July 2014. For critiques of Chibber from the Left that demonstrate real familiarity with postcolonial theory—many reviews do not—see, for example, Julian Murphet, “No Alternative,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1: 1, March 2014, and Axel Andersson, “Obscuring Capitalism: Vivek Chibber’s Critique of Postcolonial Theory,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 6, 2013. For a defense of Subaltern Studies against Chibber, see Partha Chatterjee’s “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” Chapter 1 of this volume, and Gayatri Spivak (cited below).
9For instance, Tom Brass, “Moral Economists, Subalterns, New Social Movements and the (Re-) Emergence of a (Post-) Modernized (Middle) Peasant” and Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, London and New York: Verso, 2000, 127–62, 300–23.
10Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 5.
11Susie O’Brien and Imre Szeman, “Introduction: The Globalization of Fiction/ the Fiction of Globalization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 100: 3, 2001.
12Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage, 1993, xix.
13M. N. Roy, in a familiar kind of criticism, rightly excoriated the Third International for its “defective understanding of the situation in other countries,” and for “projecting Russian problems” onto their realities (The Communist International, Bombay: Radical Democratic Party, 1943, 42–3). But like others, he recognized that the International created networks, devised rhetorical weapons, and gave material assistance that became models for postwar decolonization.
14Friedrich Nietzsche, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, London: J. Foulis, 1909–13, vol. 9, 215–17; vol. 10, 78; vol. 12, 196; vol. 13, 224.
15Edmund G. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row, 1965, first published 1935, 149–92.
16Published during the first surge of postwar decolonization, Bataille’s The Accursed Share (vol. 1, New York: Zone Books, 1988, first published 1949; vols. 2 and 3, New York: Zone Books, 1993, first published 1976), seized upon the watchwords of the independence movements—freedom, political representation, development—in order to explode them from within. Alluding to the new “world situation” of decolonization—and his own fear of its Sovietization (vol. 1, 147–68)—his study took as its central term “sovereignty,” which he wrested away from its associations with the independence movements so that it came to mean rather the cruelty of sexual freedom.
17Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969, 160–1.
18I make this argument more fully in “Humanism, Philology, and Imperialism” (in Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) and in “Edward Said as a Lukácsian Critic: Modernism and Empire,” College Literature 40: 4, Fall 2013.
19Chibber’s argument would have benefited from exploring the bases of subaltern essentialism in the broader circles of “theory” itself. See Ian Almond’s provocative study The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007.
20Erich Auerbach, “Einleitung,” in Giambattista Vico, Die neue Wissenschaft, Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 1924, 23 (my translation).
21Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, vol. 2, ed. Valentino Gerratana, Turin: Einaudi, 1975, Q11, §25, 1429 (my translation).
22Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999, 476.
23Keston Sutherland, “Marx in Jargon,” World Picture 1, Spring 2008.
24Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 55.
25Lafargue, Le déterminisme économique de Karl Marx: Recherches sur l’origine des idées de justice, du bien, de l’âme et de Dieu, Paris 1911; Sorel, Études sur Vico et autres textes, ed. Anne-Sophie Menasseyre, Paris: H. Champion, 2007.
26Edward Palmer Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978.
27Marx refers to Vico at least three times in his writings, although what is Vichian about his thought—as later commentators observed—has more to do with its systematic parallels to Vico borne out in common sources (Varro on Roman Law, for instance [Grundrisse, London: Penguin, 1973, 834]), and by way of Hegel, whose Vichian influences have been well marked. See Capital, vol. I (London: Penguin, 1990, 493), and the letter to Ferdinand Lassalle (Collected Works, vol. 41, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1985, 355), where Marx praises Vico and observes that he was at “the foundation of comparative philology.” For more on this tradition, see Timothy Brennan, Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014.
28For example, Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin in their brilliant introduction to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1944), where they point out that the attribution is as old as Georges Sorel’s Études sur Vico; a more contemporary example, one of many, can be found in Lawrence H. Simon, “Vico and Marx: Perspectives on Historical Development,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42: 2, 1981.
29The Vichian lineages of Marxism have been enthusiastically discussed, at least, outside the Anglo-American academy. See, for example, David Roldán, “La recepción filosófica de Vico y sus aporías filológicas: El caso del marxismo occidental,” Pensamiento 68: 253, 2012; Alberto Mario Damiani, La dimensión política de la “Scienza Nuova” y otros estudios sobre Giambattista Vico, Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1998.
30Respectively, Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, 36; Fernando Coronil, “Can Postcoloniality Be Decolonized? Imperial Banality and Postcolonial Power,” Public Culture 5: 1, Fall 1992.
31Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 4. The work of Vasant Kaiwar is very interesting in this context. From 2004 onwards he anticipated many of Chibber’s later lines of attack, demonstrating peculiar strengths missing in the latter’s efforts: for example, wider reference to previous scholarship, exhibiting a feel for the textures and flavors of everything from Bengali adda to the holistic blend of sociology and literature that animates the best postcolonial work. He too attributes to Guha an “orientalist enthusiasm,” criticizing him for sidestepping the Muslim question and for expressing views that at times come uncomfortably close to the “organicist fantasies of the contemporary Hindu right about ‘tradition’”: The Postcolonial Orient: The Politics of Difference and the Project of Provincializing Europe, Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2014.
32See Priyamvada Gopal’s “Reading Subaltern History” (in Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 139–61), which I follow here. The quotation is from Guha’s “Chandra’s Death,” in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies V, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, 141.
33Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989, 14–16.
34Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 243. The appropriation is derived from Homi Bhabha, as Keya Ganguly has pointed out in “Temporality and Postcolonial Critique,” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, 174. Quotations from Bloch are from this essay.
35Kaiwar, The Postcolonial Orient; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital” Chapter 3 of this volume.
15. REVIEW ESSAY
1Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 150.
2Ibid., 250.
3Ibid., 288–9.
4Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989, 134.
5Ibid., 14.
6Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
7Ibid., 63–4.
8Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 145, fn 31.
9Ibid., 291.
10Partha Chatterjee, “Subaltern Studies and Capital,” Chapter 1 of this volume.
16. LOOKING FOR RESISTANCE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES?
1I would like to thank Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nandini Chandra, Ron Radano, Saul Thomas, Max Ward, and especially two anonymous reviewers and the editors at Critical Historical Studies for reading and discussing this essay with me. Any mistakes that remain are of course my own responsibility.
2In a review of Chibber’s book, Gayatri Spivak takes Chibber to task for not exhaustively looking at the postcolonial corpus: “In a 306-page book full of a repeated and generalized account of the British and French revolutions, and repeated cliches about how capitalism works, and repeated boyish moments of ‘I have disproved arguments 1, 2, 3, therefore Guha (or Chakrabarty, or yet Chatterjee) is wrong, and therefore subaltern studies is a plague and a seduction, and must be eradicated, although it will be hard because careers will be ruined, etc.’, there could have been some room for these references to describe the range, roots and ramifications of postcolonial studies, so that the book’s focused choice could have taken its place in Verso’s protective gestures towards the preservation of ‘Little Britain Marxism’, shared to some degree by the journal Race and Class. Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory (1992) was such an attempt. Postcolonial theory is the blunter instrument, and its attempt to disregard the range of postcolonial studies in order to situate subaltern studies—confined to three texts—as its representative can mislead students more effectively” (Gayatri Spivak, Review of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, Chapter 3 of this volume). Spivak is correct to say that Chibber only looks at three authors and ignores African and Latin American postcolonialists. However, he has honed in on three extremely influential postcolonial theorists and has clearly read some of their representative texts carefully. Perhaps the best critical essay so far on Chibber’s work is Timothy Brennan’s piece “Subaltern Stakes,” Chapter 14 of this volume. Brennan accepts the force of many of Chibber’s arguments but contends that he fails to deal seriously with culture.
3Chris Taylor, “Not Even Marxist: On Vivek Chibber’s Polemic against Postcolonial Theory,” April 29, 2013, available at http://clrjames.blogspot.com/2013/04/not-even-marxist-on-vivek-chibbers.html.
4Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London: Verso; New Delhi: Navayana, 2013, 5.
5Neil Larsen, “Literature, Immanent Critique and the Problem of Standpoint,” Mediations 24, Spring 2009, 48–65, 57.
6Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 87.
7Elizabeth Clemens, “The Lessons of Failure,” Comparative and Historical Sociology 18, Spring 2007, 6.
8Vivek Chibber, “Response to Clemens, Paige and Panitch,” Comparative and Historical Sociology 18, 2007, 9.
9Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 286.
10Chibber, “Response to Clemens, Paige, and Panitch,” 9. In his analysis of imperialism as well, he separates capital from geopolitics. “American planners in the decade following World War II propped up rival empires where it might have been expected to shove them aside—Southeast Asia, Africa, and especially the Middle East—sometimes against the wishes of US capitalists, who saw a golden opportunity to move in. This is difficult to explain except through a framework which accords a great deal more autonomy to policy planners than Lenin and Luxemburg seemed to.” Vivek Chibber, “The Return of Imperialism to Social Science,” Archives de Europeenes de Sociologie/European Journal of Sociology 45, December 2004, 430.
11Compare Jacques Bidet’s distinction between the functionaries of the state and the capitalists, Explication et reconstruction du Capital, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004, 228, and L’État-monde: Libéralisme, socialisme et communisme à l’échelle globale, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011, 10.
12Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 163. Cited in Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 158.
13Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982, and Democracy’s Discontents: America’s Search for a Public Philosophy, New York: Belknap Press, 1996.
14Watsuji Tetsurō, “Gendai nihon to Chonin Konjō” [Contemporary Japan and the nature of the cities] in Keizoku nihon seishin shi [A continuation of a history of the Japanese spirit], in Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū, vol. 4, Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976, 435–505.
15Mao Zedong, cited in Yan Hairong and Chen Yiyuan, Hairong, Yan, and Chen Yiyuan, “Debating the Rural Cooperative Movement in China, the Past and the Present,” Journal of Peasant Studies 40: 6, 2013, 955–81, 963.
16Wen Tiejun has become something of a phenomenon in Chinese peasant studies, especially because of his critique of modernity. For an introduction to his work, see Wen Tiejun, Jiegou xiandai xing: Wen Tiejun Jiangyan lv [Deconstruction of modernization: A collection of speeches by Wen Tiejun], Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2004. For a sympathetic discussion of Wen’s work in English, see Alex Day, “The End of the Peasant? The New Rural Reconstruction in China,” Boundary 2, Summer 2008, 49–73.
17Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 165. Compare Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, 190.
18The text in question here is Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, New York: W. W. Norton, 1959. Chibber contends that Guha misreads this text, but I will not address this issue.
19Guha, Elementary Aspects, 225.
20Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 13.
21Compare Guha, Elementary Aspects, 99.
22Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 49.
23Ibid., 48; Edward Palmer Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” in Essays in Social History, ed. M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout, Oxford: Clarendon, 1974, 66, 61.
24Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 50.
25Bidet, Explication, 165.
26Moreover, he also provides a way to historicize the issue of individual interests, since capitalism posits individuals selling their labor power and consequently pursuing their interests. To the extent that colonial India was incorporated into capitalism, we should not be surprised that peasants in colonial India are pursuing individual interests. In this way, Chakrabarty can avoid the question that Chibber poses about whether people in precapitalist societies pursued their individual interests.
27Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 54.
28Ibid., 55.
29Ibid., 60.
30Ibid.
31Ibid. Here Chakrabarty’s reading overlaps with that of the Japanese Marxist Uno Kōzō. Gavin Walker writes: “This is what Uno referred to as the ‘mantra’ of Capital (Shihonron no ‘nembutsu’): the ‘impossibility’ of ‘nihil reason’ of the commodification of labor power (rōdōryoku shōhinka no ‘muri’).” See Gavin Walker, “The World of Principle, or Pure Capitalism: Exteriority and Suspension in Uno Kōzō,” Journal of International Economic Studies 26, 2012, 15–37, 17.
32Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 60–1.
33Ibid., 63–4.
34Ibid., 63.
35Jacques Derrida and R. Klein, “Economimesis,” in “The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel,” special issue, Diacritics 11: 2, Summer 1981, 2–25, 21.
36Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, 3:468. Compare Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 63–4.
37One could of course read use-value as having a different temporality, but I am not going to pursue this line of argument here.
38Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie, Berlin: Dietz Berlin, 1953, 25–6, and Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1993, 105.
39Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 64.
40Ibid., 71.
41Ibid., 67.
42Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination.
43Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 67.
44Bruno Gullì, Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Culture and Economy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005, 63.
45Ibid., 12.
46Of course, Gullì himself would like to avoid merely being transhistorical and contends that “this transhistoricality must be understood not as a realm outside of history but, rather as history itself, as what in history sustains and makes possible the coming to be and passing away of stages, ages and modes.” Gullì here expands the History 2–like description of labor such that it creates not only History 1, but even history before and after capitalism. Ibid., 12.
47Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 66.
48As Gullì writes, “even when the worker is working, he or she is also not working, also not a worker. Concretely, during the labor process the worker may choose to spend time daydreaming, organizing the next struggle, implementing an act of sabotage against production itself.” Gullì, Labor of Fire, 18.
49Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 280; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge, 1989. Translation amended by the author.
50Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 71.
51Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 13. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, first published 1989.
52One could of course say that total real subsumption is never complete, as does Harry Harootunian, and in this way, History 2s would always exist. However, Chakrabarty does not take this road. See Harry Harootunian, “Remembering the Historical Present,” Critical Inquiry 33, 2007, 471–94, 474–5.
53Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 66.
54Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 233.
55We could think here of religious subjectivities that support capitalist practices, such as Weber’s famous discussion of Protestantism.
56Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe: A Study of Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heany, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, 16.
57Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 250.
58In the Canadian context, we can think of liberals such as Will Kymlicka’s multiculturalism as protecting the History 2s of the Quebecois, indigenous people among others. If one wanted to push History 2 in a liberal direction, one might propose a “right to one’s History 2.” This is not an argument I will address, but see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
59Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 67.
60In a footnote, Chibber writes: “My understanding of not only the English case, but also the contrasting French experience, owes an enormous debt to Brenner’s pathbreaking scholarship” (Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 57 fn 6). See Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” and “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism” in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Chibber also cites Ellen Wood’s The Pristine Culture of Capitalism, which is largely inspired by Brenner’s work (Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 70 fn 37). See Ellen Wood, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States, London: Verso, 1996.
61Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 69–70. Chibber draws on William H. Sewell, Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyès and What Is the Third Estate?, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994; and T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois?, London: Macmillan, 1987.
62Wood responds to conservative scholars such as François Furet. See François Furet and Denis Richet, La Révolution Française, Paris: Fayard/Pluriel, 2010, first published 1965. See also Keith Michael Baker, Essays on the Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
63George C. Comninel, “Marx’s Context,” History of Political Thought 21, 2000, 467–83. Ellen Wood, “Capitalism or Enlightenment?,” History of Political Thought 21, 2000, 405–26.
64I would like to thank Max Ward for mentioning this formulation to me.
65Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 64.
66Ibid., 47.
67Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 224.
68Ibid., 111.
69Ibid., 116.
70Ibid.
71Ibid.
72Ibid., 231.
73Ibid., 231–2.
74Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley, ed. Seymour Feldman, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992, 108.
75Compare Jacques Bidet, Explication. With this I am admittedly trying to sidestep an issue, namely, Chibber’s commitment to rational choice Marxism, which has been criticized by a number of Marxists from different perspectives. I am not going to delve into these criticisms here due to limitations of space. However, a brief look at the literature shows that proponents and critics often understand different things by “rational choice” or “analytical” Marxism. Part of the problem is that the critics often do not grasp the range of analytic Marxism. For example, Daniel Bensaïd has a perceptive critique of much analytical Marxism in Chapter 5 of his Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 2002. But much of his critique is geared against those who use Rawls and ideas of justice, which is not so relevant to the issue at hand. Critics of rational choice Marxism, such as Ellen Wood, seem to exempt Eric Wright from scrutiny because they believe that his conception of rational choice is fairly thin. Eric Wright himself makes the following disclaimer with respect to individualism: “This identification of Analytical Marxism with methodological individualism is, I believe mistaken. Indeed, a number of Analytical Marxists have been explicitly critical of methodological individualism and have argued against the exclusive reliance on models of the abstract rationalism as a way of understanding human action. What is true, however, is that most Analytical Marxists take quite seriously the problem of understanding the relationship between individual choice and social processes” (Eric Wright, “What Is Analytical Marxism?” in Rational Choice Marxism, ed. Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas, University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1995, 11–31, 21). Perhaps because Chibber uses an approach similar to Wright’s, he acknowledges the importance of building solidarity, and while he sees the pursuit of interest as universal, he does not deny mediation by other factors. This approach has problems and entails a number of questionable conclusions, including the rejection of dialectics. However, this would require a separate paper to deal with.
76By stressing universal interests in well-being, Chibber draws on scholars such as Martha Nussbaum. See Nussbaum, “Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism,” Political Theory 20: 2, 1992, 202–46. Chibber explicitly cites Nussbaum in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 197.
77Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 232.
78Ibid., 232.
79Ibid., 224.
80Vasant Kaiwar, “Towards Orientalism and Nativism: The Impasse of Subaltern Studies,” Historical Materialism 12: 2, 2004, 189–247.
81William H. Sewell, Jr., “Connecting Capitalism to the French Revolution: The Parisian Promenade and the Origins of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France,” Critical Historical Studies 1, Spring 2014, 5–47, 11.
82Bidet, Explication, esp. chs. 1–3.
83Sewell, “Connecting Capitalism,” 10.
84See Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 263 fn 24.
85Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 40.
86Ibid., 41. Manu Goswami does not follow Arrighi in separating state from capital but premises her arguments on the doubled character of space-time matrices produced by capital as a global formation. This would be another interesting avenue of research, which I will address in another essay.
87David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, London: Verso, 2006, 399. Harvey goes on to argue that the circulation of capital supports certain infrastructures rather than others (399). But at the same time, the state is a general field of class struggle, which again shows that its relation to the capitalist social relations is underdetermined.
88Neil Brenner, “Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of State Productivism,” in Space, Difference and Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, ed. Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgram, and Christian Schmid, London: Routledge, 2008, 231–49, 239.
89Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6, cited in Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 278.
90This might be too antagonistic for Chakrabarty, but it might be what has to happen when one mobilizes History 2.
91G. W. F. Hegel, Phänemonologie des Geistes, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992, 491, para. 668.
92Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 279.
93Jacques Bidet and Gérard Duménil, Altermarxisme: Un autre marxisme pour un autre monde, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007, 161.
94Karl Marx, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and “The Peripheries of Capitalism,” ed. Theodor Shanin, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983, 105–6.
95Harry Harootunian, “Who Needs Postcoloniality: A Reply to Linder,” Radical Philosophy 164, November/December 2010, 43.
96This point supports Prasenjit Duara’s thesis that some separation between inside and outside is implied by all nationalisms, not merely anti-colonial nationalism. For this reason, fear of contamination could be a possibility in any nationalism. See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modernity in China and India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
97Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 232.
98See, e.g., Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden: Brill, 2004, 77.
99Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Nicolaus, 706. Compare Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 62.
100Karel Kosík points out how a conception of the future influences the forms in which movements are organized in the present. See his discussion of the future as an “incomplete happening” in Karel Kosík, The Crises of Modernity and Other Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era, ed. James Shatterwhite, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995, 131.
101Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination, 371–2.
102See Löwy, Redemption and Utopia. See also Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, “Figures of Romantic Anti-Capitalism,” New German Critique 32, 1984, 42–92.
103Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy, London: Polity, 2009, 89.
104Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, London: Verso, 2012, 239.
105See David McNally, The Global Slump, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011.
106For a sympathetic discussion of the Maoist movement in India, see Robert Weil, Is the Torch Passing: Resistance and Revolution in China and India, Delhi: Setu Prakashani, 2013.
107Mao Zedong, “Chonqing tanpan,” in Mao Zedong xuanji, Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1991, 4:1163.