The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

Vivek Chibber, Rosie Warren

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786953
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital was hailed on publication as "without any doubt . a bomb," and "the most substantive effort to dismantle the field through historical reasoning published to date." It immediately unleashed one of the most important recent debates in social theory, ranging across the humanities and social sciences, on the status of postcolonial studies, modernity, and much else. This book brings together major critics of Chibber's work to assess the adequacy of his argument from differing perspectives. Also included are Chibber's own spirited responses and reformulations in light of these criticisms.

With contributions by Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Bruce Robbins, Ho-fung Hung, William H. Sewell, Bruce Cumings, George Steinmetz, Michael Schwartz, David Pederson, Stein Sundstol Eriksen, and Achin Vanaik.

Part I.
Debates

CHAPTER 1

Subaltern Studies and Capital

Partha Chatterjee

This is the text of a presentation made at the “Marxism and the Legacy of Subaltern Studies” panel at the Historical Materialism Conference at New York University on April 28, 2013. Partha Chatterjee is a founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective and lives in Kolkata.

From the moment of their appearance in 1982, the series called Subaltern Studies and the work of scholars associated with it have come in for criticism from many quarters. Vivek Chibber’s 2013 book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, is the latest in that line. It is a critical study devoted entirely to the early work of three Subaltern Studies historians: Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chatterjee. I examine below Chibber’s arguments against these scholars whose work he takes, rather inexactly, to be emblematic of post-colonial theory today.

DOMINANCE WITHOUT HEGEMONY

Chibber rejects Guha’s criticism of the bourgeois democracy of post-colonial India as a dominance without hegemony¹ by arguing that no bourgeois revolution, not even the English Civil Wars of the 1640s or the French Revolution of 1789, was hegemonic in Guha’s sense. Chibber’s refutation of Guha is, however, based on a gross misunderstanding of Guha’s claim. It should be obvious from a reading of Guha’s longish essay that it was intended as a critique of liberal historiography and the liberal ideology it represented. It was not the historical sociology of European bourgeois revolutions that Chibber understands it to be. The short section entitled “The Universalising Tendency of Capital and Its Limitations,”² from which Chibber quotes extensively, was meant to draw out two major claims of liberal historiography: that capital has a universalizing tendency and that the revolutions of England and France established bourgeois hegemony in the sense of being able to “speak for all of society.” Both claims, as Guha points out, are supported by Marx: the universalizing tendency appears in the Grundrisse, and the achievement of the English and French bourgeois revolutions in bringing about “the victory of a new social order” is described in the 1848 articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Taken in isolation from Marx’s critique of capital in his larger body of work, according to Guha, these statements “would make him indistinguishable from any of the myriad 19th century liberals who saw nothing but the positive side of capital in an age when it was growing from strength to strength.”³ We know, of course, that Marx also suggests that capital must come up against limits it cannot overcome. More on that later.

OF LIBERAL CLAIMS

The crucial point is that nowhere in the essay does Guha offer any propositions of his own that might be construed as a historical sociology of bourgeois revolutions in England and France. Indeed, he does not need to make any such sociological claims at all. All he needs is, first, an account of liberal claims that the new social order established by the bourgeoisie enjoyed the consent of all classes in society and was therefore hegemonic in its power. Second, he needs an account of liberal claims that British rule in India also enjoyed a similar basis of consent from Indian subjects. Third, he needs an account of claims by Indian liberals that India’s postcolonial order was similiarly hegemonic to the European bourgeoisie because the Indian liberal bourgeoisie could legitimately speak on behalf of the entire nation. Finally, Guha needs to show that these liberal claims to hegemony for the colonial as well as the postcolonial regimes are spurious. That is what the essay is designed to achieve. He needs to make no claims of his own about the real history of bourgeois revolutions in Europe.

Consequently, Chibber’s elaborate exercise of summarizing the real history of the English and French revolutions to show that the English revolution was not anti-feudal (because feudalism in England had already come to an end), or that the French bourgeois revolutionaries were not capitalists, is entirely beside the point. This demonstration does nothing to Guha’s argument. All it does is assert that Marx’s description of the historical character of those revolutions was inaccurate in light of the findings of historians writing at the turn of the twenty-first century upon whose work Chibber draws. Similarly, Chibber’s charge that Guha holds a Whig view of history is also misplaced. The Whig view belongs not to Guha but, unsurprisingly, to historians of the Whig persuasion who are, in fact, the targets of Guha’s critique.

Further, on the specific point about the French Revolution, it is clear that when Guha talks about the Indian bourgeoisie in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he does not mean capitalists in particular. In fact, he does not use the term “capitalist” to describe this group at all. What he means is the political-intellectual leadership of the liberal nationalist movement that came from the intermediate strata—the middle class—wedged between the traditional aristocracy and the lower orders of laboring people: precisely the bourgeoisie in the French sense of the word who comprised the bulk of the Third Estate. In contrast to Chibber’s conclusion, nothing that Guha says about the Indian bourgeoisie is meant to apply specifically to Indian capitalists.

But Chibber’s examination of the assumed counterfactual assumption of European bourgeois hegemony as opposed to Indian bourgeois non-hegemony sheds light on an interesting question regarding the method of historical comparison. Chibber’s exercise requires the assumption that India’s twentieth century shares the same historical time-space as England’s seventeenth and France’s eighteenth. How else could we map the constitutive elements of the French or English revolutions onto the field of victory of the Indian bourgeoisie in the mid-twentieth century and arrive at our comparative assessments? But this assumption is patently invalid, given that the justificatory claims of liberal ideology had permeated deep into the structures of rule in colonial India through the nineteenth century and were inherited by the triumphant Indian bourgeoisie in the mid-twentieth. British rule in India had to be justified before the British parliament and public as well as its potential Indian critics not by the standards of seventeenth-century ideology but by contemporary standards of nineteenth-century liberalism. If ruling India required deviating from some of those standards, the justification could not proceed by rejecting the universal validity of those liberal norms. Rather, arguments had to be constructed on why the specific situation in India warranted an exception to the universal norm. The colonial history of India is replete with such exceptions. As a consequence, when the Indian nationalist bourgeoisie rejected the allegedly exceptional status of colonial India and assumed power in the sovereign postcolonial nation-state, it too justified its rule not by the standards of seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Europe but by the highest standards of twentieth-century liberalism. The best proofs of this are the Indian Constitution of 1950, designed to meet the most advanced liberal constitutional standards available anywhere in the world, and the litany of pro-imperial historians who have described Indian independence as not merely a gift but indeed a fulfillment of liberal British rule.

POSTCOLONIAL STATE

Hence the non-hegemonic character of the Indian bourgeoisie is disproved not by the English bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century or the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth, but by the bourgeoisie of the nations of Western Europe and North America after the Second World War. This is the test to which Guha subjects the postcolonial Indian state—a test that its liberal bourgeois leadership had itself welcomed, and that Guha concludes the Indian bourgeoisie has failed. Its hegemony is spurious; its rule is mere dominance in which the element of coercion far exceeds that of consent. It is also significant, though unnoticed by Chibber, that the whole essay is only a “preamble to an auto-critique.” Returning to the theme of the universalizing tendency of capital, Guha notes in his concluding section that liberal ideology fails to see the intrinsic limits to capital’s self-expansion and the points of resistance it can never overcome. Yet even anti-colonial historiography failed to perceive these aspects of capital, of which it had yet to launch a serious critique. For Guha, the fight against liberal historiography was thus only the first step in constructing an anti-colonial critique of capital.

Before leaving the theme of hegemony, one should also take note of Chibber’s understanding, or rather misunderstanding, of it. Guha argues, echoing Antonio Gramsci, that a hegemonic bourgeoisie succeeds in representing its own interests as the universal interests of society. Nowhere does Guha make the argument that Chibber attributes to him: that the bourgeoisie managed to attain hegemony because “it incorporated the real interests of subaltern social classes into its revolutionary program.”⁴ It would be absurd for anyone following Gramsci’s lead to say so. In fact, the hegemonic move on the part of the bourgeoisie is almost always a response to pressures from the subaltern classes—an attempt to preempt direct resistance and opposition. The hegemonic move is a feat of representation, often accomplished by a successful deployment of political rhetoric: it is constructed in and through ideology.⁵

ABSTRACT LABOR AND CAPITALIST PRODUCTION

Chibber roundly criticizes Chakrabarty for regarding formal equality and impersonal power relations as quintessential aspects of capitalist power. Where Chakrabarty reads the persistence, indeed the reproduction, of coercive methods within the industrial labor process and of the consciousness of religious, caste, and other cultural differences among the industrial working class as a limit that colonial capital has been unable to surpass, Chibber regards those features as entirely compatible with capitalism in general. Chakrabarty derives the essential conditions of capitalist production from a fairly conventional reading of Marx. Chibber, in rejecting this reading, offers an alternative account of capitalist production that does not have any recognizable relation to the Marxist tradition. The differences between the two approaches are striking and deserve attention.

Chakrabarty derived his understanding of the universalizing tendency of capital from Marx’s analysis of the logic of capitalist accumulation. It is the dynamic of accumulation that pushed European capital to seek overseas territories where it could find raw material and labor suitable for employment in production. But capital encountered social forms of labor there that it could not transform into homogeneous abstract labor. Industrial production under colonial conditions thus posed, says Chakrabarty, an obstacle to the universalizing tendency of capital. Chibber offers an entirely different definition of the universalizing tendency of capital. “The universalizing process is under way,” declares Chibber, “if agents’ reproductive strategies shift towards market dependence.”⁶ In other words, as he repeats, “what is universalized under the rule of capital … [are] the compulsions of market dependence.”⁷ Now, it is hard to understand how market dependence alone can be a sufficient criterion for the universalization of capital. For instance, one can imagine a system of simple commodity production by owner-producers completely dependent on the market but not employing wage labor and thus not engaging in capitalist production. Marx was emphatic that capitalist production could only take place when capital owned the means of production but sought a mass of wage laborers who had no means of production of their own. In other words, a so-called primitive or primary accumulation must bring about about the dissociation of a mass of laborers from their means of labor. Without this, there is no capitalist production.

It is only because of the emergence of free and alienable labor power that can be bought and sold like any other commodity that abstract labor can appear as the common measure of all concrete forms of labor employed in capitalist production. Abstract labor is not a meaningful category for anything but the capitalist form of production. While Marx’s definition of abstract labor is a major pillar of Chakrabarty’s argument, Chibber rejects it. Instead, he insists that abstract labor is a measure of the laborer’s productive efficiency which is brought about by the competitive conditions of the production of exchange values.⁸ Abstract labor, for him, measures the “socially necessary levels of efficiency” of the laborer.⁹ Bizarrely, he invokes Marx’s definition of socially necessary labor time as the canonical support for his argument.¹⁰

But how could the production of exchange values itself bring about an abstract measure of socially necessary levels of efficiency? Even in precapitalist modes of production where particular commodities may be produced for exchange in the market, there could exist socially recognized measures of efficiency in specific branches of the concrete labor process. Thus, in small peasant agriculture or crafts manufacture, there may well exist an accepted norm of average efficiency in, let us say, harvesting a specific crop or planing a log of wood. But how could there be a common measure of socially necessary levels of efficiency across all branches of manufacturing in an economy unless labor has been turned into labor-power—that is, a commodity that can be bought and sold in the market? How could capitalists or anyone else speak of “benchmark levels of efficiency” that apply generally to the manufacture of clothes, shoes, automobiles, missiles, and every other commodity unless there is first a common measure for labor as a commodity? That common measure, we know from Marx, is abstract labor.

Marx is so explicit and elaborate in explaining his concept of abstract labor, not only in Capital but in the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value, that there can be little confusion about its meaning. Abstract labor is that common homogeneous element that enters into the production of all commodities by virtue of the fact that they are all products of the employment of labor-power as a commodity. Even though the concrete labor processes are heterogeneous, labor-power as a commodity is the same across all branches of production. Like all commodities, labor-power too has value which, like the value of all other commodities, is given by the value of the commodities required for its production. In the case of labor-power, this amounts to the value of the commodities required to reproduce for the next period of production the labor-power expended in the previous period. In short, the value of one unit of labor-power is the value of the subsistence goods required to reproduce that unit for the next period of production. Marx says that under capitalist production, there is an average labor-time socially necessary for its reproduction: “In a given country in a given period, the average amount of the means of subsistence necessary for the worker is a known datum.”¹¹ In branches of production that require labor of higher skill or efficiency than average, the value of labor-time is expressed as multiples, or complex combinations, of simple or average labor-power. This means that it requires greater expenditure on subsistence goods to reproduce labor of higher or more complex quality; hence those providing higher-quality labor must be paid more.

What this means is that in capitalist production, there can be no independent determination of “socially necessary levels of efficiency” of labor; these levels can only be derived from the prevailing average value of labor-power in the economy—that is, from abstract labor as the common homogeneous dimension of labor-power as a commodity. Following this definition from Marx, the problem that Chakrabarty¹² poses is this: did capitalist industrial production in colonial Bengal succeed in establishing abstract labor as the common measure of labor-power? His evidence suggests, for instance, that the Brahmin worker in the jute mill claimed to need more subsistence goods than his lower-caste fellow workers because of the obligations of his caste. Others needed to keep the women of their families in the village because it was dishonorable for women to live and work in the urban slum. The role of the labor contractor or sardar in controlling, often coercively, the economic and social life of the worker, and the dependence of mill managers on these coercive controls, is a major feature of Chakrabarty’s account. Finally, Chakrabarty details the way in which Calcutta jute mill workers in the 1930s and 1940s, even as they came together under communist trade unions in struggles against their employers, frequently broke into violent religious conflict among themselves on questions of political allegiance.

Chakrabarty interprets this as evidence of the lack of freedom of the industrial worker in colonial Calcutta. In other words, the worker here is not, strictly speaking, proletarianized: he or she still retains organic links with peasant production in the rural areas, and despite worki...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: The Chibber Debate
• How Does the Subaltern Speak?: An Interview with Vivek Chibber
• Part I. Debates
• Part II. Review Symposium
• Part III. Commentaries
• Credits
• References
• Notes