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reviewESSAY

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. By Vivek Chibber. London:

Verso, 2013. Pp. 306. ISBN 9781844679768. 19.99 (pbk).

A Death Knell?

Readers of Interventions will be by now familiar with the lively and highly

polemical discussions raised by the publication of Vivek Chibbers book.

These included a panel organized with great fanfare at the Delhi conference

of Historical Materialism last April and a conversation between the author

and Partha Chatterjee at the HM conference held in New York City a couple

of weeks later, widely circulated on the Internet and commented upon in

social media. Although this latter debate did not precisely turn out to be a

triumph for Chibber, his book continues to be celebrated by many as a

death knell to Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, as a liberation

from the obscurity of its jargon, imbued with poststructuralism and

postmodernism, and most notably as a long awaited reinstatement of the

crystal-clear substantiveness of the Enlightenment and Marxism (Nigam

2013). The endorsements of no less than Robert Brenner, Noam Chomsky

and Slavoj iek provide an authoritative seal in this regard.

In this review essay I am not particularly interested in discussing the

accuracy of Chibbers critical reconstruction of the subaltern studies project

(for different views, see Chatterjee 2013; Herrnaphta 2013; Levien 2013).

Nor will I directly take issue with Chibbers conflation of subaltern studies

and postcolonial theory, a question that definitely deserves critical scrutiny.

What interests me more is the general topic announced by the title of the

book, which means the ways in which capital has been (or has not been)

interventions, 2014

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addressed within the heterogeneous and in a way elusive field of postcolonial

theory over the last few decades. On a more personal note, I take Chibbers

book as an occasion to take stock of the ways in which my own engagement

with postcolonial criticism has contributed to challenge (in a positive and

productive sense, as I tend to think) and further elaborate a view of capital

and capitalism forged within a specific tradition of Marxist theory, i.e.

workerism or autonomist Marxism.

I will try to take seriously many of the theoretical points made by Chibber,

leaving aside a certain irritation (I have to confess) for the style of his

argument, which often oscillates between arrogance and (needless to say,

enlightened) patronizing tones; for instance, when he repeatedly dismisses as

part of a nebulous jargon and conceptual inflation (3) such a word as

narrative but endorses (I guess as scientific) Hebert Simons definition of

actors as satisficers (199). Having stressed the need to bring capital back

into postcolonial debates and to challenge a widespread tendency to take

capitalism for granted, to assume it as a neutral background of a basically

culture-oriented research and theorization (Mezzadra 2011a), I share some

of the concerns at stake in Chibbers book. I also agree that there is a need to

tackle again such an important question as the one regarding how the entry

of capitalism into the colonial world affected the evolution of its cultural and

political institutions (25), which, according to Chibber, was indeed raised

but not answered by subalternist theorists.

The topics connected with this question and discussed by Chibber

throughout his book, basically revolving around the assessment of

capitals universalizing tendency, are indeed crucial insofar as they invest

the very concept of capital and therefore interpellate any critical theory of

capitalism. What remains to be critically investigated is whether the

universalizing categories of Enlightenment thought and their Marxist

elaborations really emerge unscathed from the criticisms of postcolonial

theorists (Chomskys words in his endorsement) and continue to provide

a solid foundation for the critique of capitalist modernity. In other words

there is a need not simply to discuss Chibbers critique of the subaltern

studies project but also the terms of the alternative he proposes, of what

has been praised by iek (again in his endorsement) as a burst of fresh

air dispelling the stale aroma of pseudo-radical academic establishment.

A phantomlike objectivity

In the seventh chapter of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital

(Culture, interests, and agency), Chibber discusses at length Partha Chatterjees

analysis of the patterns of rural mobilization in late colonial Bengal. He deems

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this analysis illuminating, inasmuch as the actual story that Chatterjee tells is a

thoroughly materialist one (166). What he decidedly contests is the claim that

Indian peasants were motivated by a unique psychology (176), which led them

to act as part of a community rather than as individuals, often privileging

religious and communal ties over their economic (material) interests. Chibber

detects and denounces a distinctly Orientalist whiff in Chatterjees argument

(161). The unique psychology of Bengali peasants, he argues, forms part of

an essentialist East opposed to the West, where, we are told, political

psychology revolves around secular conceptions of the individual and his rights

(153). This is in Chibbers opinion consistent with a general tendency

crisscrossing the project of subaltern studies and particularly apparent in the

work of Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty (while Guhas work is largely free

of it). Far from landing a blow against colonialist and Orientalist presentations

of the East, Chibber writes, Subaltern Studies has ended up promoting

them (26).

Chatterjee (2013: 73) himself has critically taken up this charge, emphas-

izing the efforts of historians of subaltern studies to situate their investigation

of peasants consciousness within specific contexts of space and time,

precisely to avoid reducing the concept of community into some Orientalist

or romantic trope. I will not expand on this point here. More interesting for

me is Chatterjees observation that (to the best of my knowledge, as he

ironically writes) of the few million words that Chatterjee has published in

the last forty years, he has not used the word psychology a single time, let

alone the phrase political psychology (2013: 72). The emphasis placed on

psychology by Chibber is revealing beyond the problems it poses in terms

of the accuracy of his critique of Chatterjee. It rather points to a distinctive

feature of the alternative view he proposes in his book, which means a

peculiar interpretation of materialism, according to which there is a clear-

cut boundary that circumscribes material reality as well as material

interests, sealing their tangible and stable autonomy from other dimensions

of experience (psychology, for instance, or ideology).

I am well aware of the problems connected with the use of the concept of

consciousness, problems that include but go even beyond the ones stressed

by Gayatri Spivak in her well-known essay Deconstructing historiography

(1985). I am even more cautious regarding the widespread use of the term

identity in postcolonial theory. Nevertheless I do think that the concept of

consciousness was deployed in several works of scholars of subaltern studies

in ways that helped to focus on crucial aspects of the production of

subjectivity as a fundamental aspect of any critical theory of capitalism and

politics. The impossible purity of materiality has emerged out of theoretical

developments of the last few decades as an essential theoretical issue precisely

because of the deep implication of the production of subjectivity in the

workings of capital. This is not a reason for giving up materialism.

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The opposite is the case: there is a need for a materialism capable of taking

stock of what I have called the impossible purity of materiality. One could

say that this was a crucial concern for Marx himself, at least since his call for

a new materialism in the Theses on Feuerbach, where he stressed the

importance of subjectivity, of sensuous human activity, practice. His whole

work, which was indeed associated with a certain conceptual inflation, is

dominated by the problem of grasping the material effects of what Sohn-

Rethel (1978) calls real abstraction, which means with the constitutive

power of such abstractions as money and commodity in a capitalist society.

One does not need to be a fan of Jacques Derrida to know that Marx was

haunted by spectres. Among them the commodity form figures prominently,

and it is its nebulous and mystic character that constitutes the root of the

phantomlike objectivity prevailing in the capitalist social formation (Marx

1977: 128). It is the very intertwining of use and exchange value, which

means the material thing and the commodity form, in a table (the famous

example provided by Marx) that anticipates what I have called the

impossible purity of materiality. The constant reproduction of these and

other spectres (with the political and social economy of deception connected

to them) notwithstanding, several decades of the scientific critique of

ideology should make us a bit more cautious than Marx was (and Marx

was indeed quite cautious!) regarding the perspective of a crystal-clear

apprehension of materiality. This is a crucial point, where the emphasis

placed by Chibber on the continuity between Marxism and an idealized

version of Enlightenment does not really help. Materialism, in a way, has to

remain involved in grappling with ghosts, and maybe even more conceptual

inflation will be needed if it is to forge new theoretical weapons for struggles

for liberation. I sincerely doubt that the single universal feature of human

nature, the single basic need that Chibber presents as underlying the

universal history of class struggle (200) i.e. the simple need for physical

well-being (197) will provide a satisfying basis for such a materialism.

Man is what he eats, one could add with Feuerbach, and we are pushed

back to the juvenile starting point of Marxs elaborations.

A language of pure force

Chibber is definitely right in stressing the relevance of class struggle in the

history of democracy in the West. His chapters on the English and the

French revolutions are accurate and often brilliant from a historical point of

view. It was not the bourgeoisie that built democracy in Europe or

anywhere else in the world. There would be no democracy without the

continuous pressure from below, on the part of peasants, workers and

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subaltern movements and struggles. Fair enough. What remains to be

discussed is if, as Chibber believes, this is a definitive blow against the flaws

of Ranajit Guhas theory of dominance without hegemony in colonial

India. It seems to me that Chibber does not really get the problem posited by

Guha, which does not refer that much to the field of historical sociology

(Chibbers words) but rather to the material relevance of knowledge and

discourses (pace Chibber) in history. It is easy to see that this brings us back

to the topics discussed in the previous section, but it also pushes us forwards

towards a critical consideration of the very concept of bourgeoisie, whose

meaning is in a way taken for granted by Chibber.

Let me first of all say something regarding the phrase dominance without

hegemony. One of the polemical targets of Chibber is the idea of a

continuity between anticolonialism and postcolonialism. This is why he

excoriates Robert Youngs book Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction

(2001), where the road from Marx leads straight to Subaltern Studies.

Youngs description is spectacularly mistaken, Chibber writes (290).

Actually, the very phrase dominance without hegemony, which is taken

by Chibber as a kind of founding dogma for the subaltern studies project,

would suggest a bit more caution. Once the Gramscian terminology is put

aside and the sheer meaning of the phrase is considered, it is quite easy to see

that it gives expression to a kind of common sense circulating within

anticolonial movements in the twentieth century. To give just one famous

example, consider this passage from Fanons Wretched of the Earth:

In the capitalist countries a multitude of moral teachers, counselors and bewilderers

separate the exploited from those in power. In the colonial countries, on the contrary,

the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and

direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts

and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the

language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to

hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear

conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home

and into the mind of the native. (Fanon 1968: 38)

Isnt this a quite accurate description of what a couple of decades later Guha

would call dominance without hegemony? One could ask another question,

though: did Fanon provide an accurate description of capitalist countries in

this passage, and particularly in the lines preceding the quote, where he

stressed the atmosphere of submission and of inhibition surrounding the

exploited person in such countries? One of the effects of the multiple

resonances of Fanons words in the 1960s and 1970s in the West was

precisely that a multitude of young people were shaken by them and led not

merely to get involved in solidarity with the struggles in the Third World

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but radically to question consensus and integration in the society where

they lived. I would say that something similar happened, although in a very

different conjuncture, with many scholars in the West when they

encountered the work of subaltern studies. Simply put, rather than being

intrigued by the exoticism of some kind of Orientalism, they felt challenged

to read European history and its present through the lens of the colonial and

postcolonial experience of modernity (see, for my own modest contribution,

the reflections on citizenship and free labour in Mezzadra 2008, 2011b).

Beyond any jargon and let me say that I am aware that jargon is often a

problem in contemporary theory it is this effect of displacement and

decentring that we owe to subaltern studies and postcolonial criticism.

After all, Dipesh Chakrabarty states very clearly that the Europe he seeks

to provincialize is an imaginary figure that remains deeply embedded in

clichd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of thought (2000: 4).

In other words, Europe is considered as the place of origin of a set of norms

that materially steer and shape discourses, policies and even political

imagination. These norms are real abstractions, to pick up again Sohn-

Rethels phrase, and it is really difficult to make sense of modernity without

taking them seriously into account. It doesnt seem to me that Chibber really

engages with this point in his criticism of Chakrabartys Provincializing

Europe (and of Chatterjees writings on colonial nationalism, for that

matter). In my own reading, without necessarily endorsing all their

achievements and theoretical implications, those works have played an

important role in shedding light on the geopolitics of the production of the

aforementioned set of norms, which, I repeat, are characterized by a material

effectiveness. In this sense, it is really difficult to follow Chibbers criticism of

Chakrabarty and to consider historicism a non-problem (238). Suffice it to

think of the temporal structure of theories, rhetoric and policies of

development to grasp the absolutely concrete effects of the specific construc-

tion of historical time that Chakrabarty (following Walter Benjamin) calls

historicism (see Sanyal 2007).

It also seems to me that Guhas phrase dominance without hegemony

needs to be read against the background of this imaginary figure of Europe

and of the norms connected to it. In other words, I do not think that the

question posed by that phrase is disposed of even if we acknowledge, with

Chibber, that dominance without hegemony is, and has been, the normal

face of bourgeois power (91). The Gramscian concept of hegemony, at least

in my understanding, points to the problem of the historical constitution of

the bourgeoisie, a problem that arises precisely because it does not coincide

with capitalists, while Chibber often tends to conflate the two words. As

was emphasized in the Italian workerist historical debate of the 1970s

(Zapperi 1974; Negri 1978), the bourgeoisie is a concept of mediation,

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whose boundaries are quite different from the ones of what Marx called

total capital and are predicated upon shifting geometries of power.

It is from this point of view, and definitely under the pressure of powerful

class struggles, that the bourgeoisie was in a way compelled to attempt to

constitute itself as a hegemonic subject, representing the norms of modernity

where power could not be reduced to pure coercion. It did not happen

everywhere with the same intensity and the same timing, of course, but this

specific meaning of hegemony became part and parcel of Europe as

imaginary figure; it crystallized in the very concept of constitutionalism,

and was enormously influential in shaping and legitimizing (often mobil-

izing historicist arguments) colonial expansion and governance. Needless to

say the imperial prerogative lies in the claim to declare the colonial

exception (Chatterjee 2012: 194) to the metropolitan norms, which means

to produce the colonial difference (Chatterjee 2012: 34) that played a

fundamental role in shaping the so-called law of nations, and defining the

place within it of the modern sovereign nation-state (Chatterjee 2012: 187)

as well as colonial modernity. Dominance without hegemony, or the pure

language of violence as Fanon put it, had thus a wide space for its

operations.

The Politics of Abstract Labour

Although he used the phrase dominance without hegemony in his last book

to describe the predicament of the United States as a world power in the

early twenty-first century (Arrighi 2007: ch. 7), Giovanni Arrighi cannot be

considered a postcolonial theorist. It is therefore even more interesting to

go back to a quite influential article he published in 1990 (Marxist Century,

American Century) to frame the discussion of the last point I want to

address with regard to Chibbers book. Writing in the wake of workers and

proletarian struggles in Poland and South Africa, Arrighi was trying to take

stock of the development of the world labour movement in the past century

and to highlight some of the crucial political stakes for labour politics in the

decades to come. He focused precisely on what Chibber discusses under the

heading of capitals universalizing tendencies (particularly in chapter five).

Sure, Arrighi wrote, recent years have provided enough evidence of the

predisposition of capital to treat labour as an undifferentiated mass with no

individuality other than a differential capability to augment the value of

capital. However, he crucially added, they have also shown that one cannot

infer, as Marx does, from this predisposition of capital a predisposition of

labour to relinquish natural and historical differences as means of affirming,

individually and collectively, a distinctive social identity. To the contrary,

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proletarians have rebelled whenever confronted with that predisposition of

capital. The combined effect of that continuous rebellion and of the

persisting influence of the idea of a necessary process of homogenization of

labour as result of capitalist development was that patriarchalism, racism,

and national-chauvinism have been integral to the making of the world

labour movement (Arrighi 1990: 63).

What is at stake in Chibbers book regarding these crucial political

problems is the interpretation of the Marxian concept of abstract labour

provided particularly by Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe (but this is

one of the few points in his book where he involves in his criticism scholars

not belonging to subaltern studies, such as Lisa Lowe and David Roediger).

Far from blinding us to the heterogeneity of the working class, Chibber

writes, or being unable to accommodate the persistence of caste-based,

racial or ethnic divisions within it, the concept of abstract labor powerfully

illuminates these very phenomena (130). What he criticizes is the conflation

of abstract and homogeneous labour. Although he concedes that this

conflation may be built upon a real ambiguity in Marx (133), he adds

that postcolonial theorists are mistaken in thinking that Marx expects a

homogenization of labor, if they take it to mean that labor ceases to be

instantiated as particular, concrete activities carried out by differently skilled

and differently endowed workers (136).

Chibbers discussion of the concept of abstract labour goes beyond this

rather superficial characterization of the relation between capital and

difference. It would take too long to follow the details of that discussion,

which basically connects abstract labour with capitals tendency to induce,

or compel, labor to perform at socially necessary levels of efficiency by

utilizing, and hence reinforcing, various social divisions (143). Suffice it to

say that whenever he places an emphasis on heterogeneity as a constitutive

aspect of capitalism, I am caught by mixed feelings. On the one hand I tend

to agree with him; on the other hand I am compelled to ask myself: isnt this

the lesson I learned from subaltern and postcolonial studies? Briefly put, far

from pushing me to abandon the Marxian concept of abstract labour,

the engagement with Chakrabartys idea of the two histories of capital led

me to reframe that very concept in terms that highlight the tension with

living labour (Mezzadra 2011b, 2014). And, just to mention another

important name, it was Stuart Halls insistence on the differential modes of

incorporating so-called backward sectors within the social regime of

capital (1986: 24) that motivated Brett Neilson and me to hark back to

Deleuze and Guattari and to revisit the concept of an axiomatic of capital.

The axiomatic operations of capital, they stress, produce an isomorphy that

is not to be confused with homogeneity, since it rather allows, even

incites, a great deal of social, temporal and spatial heterogeneity

(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 436; see Mezzadra and Neilson 2013: ch. 3).

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What remains crucial for me are the tensions and gaps between abstract and

living labour, between capitalist isomorphy and heterogeneity as a

political challenge that emerges in the face of the problems that I have

briefly sketched at the beginning of this section through the words of Arrighi.

Independently of what one thinks of the concept of abstract labour in

Marx, it is indeed hard to deny that the conflation of abstract labour and a

homogeneous image of the working class has been enormously influential in

Marxism and in labour politics across diverse geographical scales and for

quite a long span of time. This is for me a crucial recognition for any critical

theory of capitalism, and while as I have to repeat subaltern and

postcolonial studies have helped me at least to frame the ensuing political

challenges, I do not see a real awareness of its salience in Chibbers book.

What he defends as the real universalizing tendency of capital, which means

the universalization of the compulsions of market dependence (125), is

really too generic to provide something more than an abstract and vague

criterion. Even more importantly, it does not say anything about the ways in

which the universalizing tendency of capital is matched by subjective

experiences and struggles of exploited labour and life.

Outside of books and academic conferences and controversies the problem

of the heterogeneity constitutive of living labour continues to confront us

with challenges that cannot be easily accommodated within the two

universalisms defended by Chibber (the universal drive of capital and the

universal interests of laboring groups to resist it, both in the West and in the

East) (155). This is not to say that the problem of universalism is ruled out.

It is just a reminder of the theoretical and political stakes and challenges

surrounding any attempt to forge new principles of the common, as well as a

new common language of struggles. Both the Enlightenment and Marxism

provide essential archives to draw upon for such an attempt. Contrary to

Chibber, however, I doubt they can be enough. If they are to be made

productive for the present, they rather need to be read against the grain, to

put it in Benjamins words. And this means emphasizing their constitutive

ruptures, lacks, tensions, and even contradictions, rather than their consist-

ency and idealized continuity.

SANDRO MEZZADRA

UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA, ITALY

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http://www.herrnaphta.wordpress.comhttp://www.kafila.org/2013/05/07/partha-chatterjee-on-subaltern-studies-marxism-and-vivek-chhibberhttp://www.kafila.org/2013/05/07/partha-chatterjee-on-subaltern-studies-marxism-and-vivek-chhibberhttp://www.kafila.org/2013/05/07/partha-chatterjee-on-subaltern-studies-marxism-and-vivek-chhibber

A Death Knell?A 'phantomlike objectivity'A 'language of pure force'The Politics of Abstract LabourReferences