Vivek Chibber and the spectre of postcolonial theory *

Rhetoric

The first words that we read in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital are the following: ‘This is not a book I was especially keen to write’. Following this bald statement of disdain are 300 pages of unswerving – and sometimes cheeseparing – critique. The inevitable effect of the sheer relentlessness of the approach is to flatten the landscape. The unabating negativity of Chibber’s prose militates against its effectiveness. Less would have been more: there are times when a sledgehammer is used to crack a nut; and times, also, when a certain abrasiveness of tone comes across as tin-eared rather than bracing; dogmatic and hectoring rather than combative and polemical. There is also a stupefying amount of repetition: Chibber seems to believe that if something is worth saying, it’s worth saying at least three times.

I’m not opposed to the genre of the long rant as such. Some long rants are very much worth reading: Marx and Engels’s The Holy Family, for instance – a text bearing the rather wicked subtitle, Critique of Critical Criticism – is almost as long as Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. ² But Vivek Chibber is no Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels. ³ He reminds me, instead, of the protagonist of the ideal-type of the literary genre of the novel, as famously analysed by Lucien Goldmann in Toward a Sociology of the Novel: ⁴ a hero, torn from community, who goes in search of authentic values in a degraded world. Dogged, unafraid and unamused – our solitary hero ventures forth in his modern epic onto the blasted heath of postcolonialism with an avenger’s zeal, to fight the good fight against Subaltern Studies all by himself, but on behalf of all of us.

Let us concede that it is never particularly rewarding or gratifying to produce scholarly work entirely in the mode of critique. An author who writes solely to refute or overturn will find himself spending a great deal of time poring over the papers and books of critics whose scholarship he considers variously muddled, obfuscatory, wilful, even perverse. Chibber’s exhaustive pursuit of Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital keeps him from reading and writing about the work of other scholars, including those in whom he is presumably much more interested. The protracted and unbending exercise of nay-saying tends to turn him into the academic equivalent of a cross between Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name and Peter Falk’s Colombo: in the former capacity, he rides into town as the incorruptible scourge of the faults and venalities of his intellectual antagonists; in the guise of Colombo, he is not merely single-minded, but remorseless and pettifogging – and also ungenerous. He leaves no stone unturned; prosecutes every peccadillo as though it were a capital crime; registers, identifies and labours over every error, misprision, or questionable judgement.

The scholar who ventures forth in his writing as though to war does so, of course, because he is convinced that it needs to be done: his reasoning is that when the emperor who comes before us to show off his latest gown turns out to be stark naked, somebody needs to say that he has no clothes. In these terms, the careful, parsing, systematically disassembling labour of critique might admittedly not be much fun to read or to write, but it remains indispensable – or at least that is what those who work in this idiom, Chibber presumably among them, must fervently believe. The problem in the present instance, however, is that if the emperor in question is ‘postcolonial theory’ (whether in its general form or its tributary manifestation as ‘Subaltern Studies’ – see below), we have not of course had to wait until 2013 for somebody – in analogy with the audacious child of Hans Christian Andersen’s fable – to state the truth about what is paraded before him. Benita Parry’s influential essay, ‘Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse’, appeared as long ago as 1987, for instance; ⁵ Aijaz Ahmad published his barnstorming volume, In Theory, five years later, in 1992; ⁶ and I myself have written a number of articles and books in which I have attempted to develop a materialist critique of ‘postcolonial theory’ in its dominant aspects. (A recent article, ‘What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say’, appeared in this journal in 2011, for instance. ⁷ ) I mention Parry, Ahmad and Lazarus because we are the three authors specifically cited by Chibber in a footnote on pp. 4−5. In this we at least fare better than several other well-known scholars, who are not deemed worthy even of a name-check by Chibber, despite the fact that they have written, and in some cases quite extensively, on the ‘specter of capital’ in ‘postcolonial theory’. In his footnote, Chibber allows that Parry, Ahmad and I have engaged postcolonial theory ‘notably’ ‘on the ‘literary and cultural front’. Yet it’s hard not to feel that this passing mention is to forestall the obvious criticism that – even though his book is ostensibly pitched as a critique of ‘postcolonial theory’ – he has not, in fact, read much of the actual scholarship in the field (including the established dissenting scholarship). ⁸ Certainly, there is next to no engagement with this scholarship in his book. The relegation of our work to the ‘literary and cultural front’, then, works to the same general end: ignoring the output of the postcolonial theorists who have written on the subjects of imperialism, world-system, the degree to which (and the manner in which) colonialism served to impose capitalist social relations on areas hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalised, the necessity of universalism, the limits of the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism, the fetish of ‘the west’ in postcolonial theory, and the weaknesses of third worldism (‘Three Worlds Theory’, in Ahmad’s formulation) – all topics on which he himself has something to say in his book – the marginalising classification of our work as ‘literary and cultural’, all enable Chibber to claim that his study is the first to set out ‘to examine the framework that postcolonial studies has generated for historical analysis and, in particular, the analysis of what once was called the Third World’ (p. 5). ⁹

I do not wish to be misunderstood here. My point in drawing attention to Chibber’s failure to situate his work relative to that of scholars active in postcolonial studies is not to propose the necessary primacy or superiority of the precedent work. Instead, I want to make two ancillary observations. First, that there is something unsettling – even distasteful – about the register of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. What’s at issue here is not merely propriety or academic courtesy. The thought arises, and persists, as one works one’s way through the book, that this is a strange way for an avowedly socialist scholar to be presenting his ideas: to be claiming proprietary rights over them and to be emphasising not only their significance but also their fundamental novelty and difference from the ideas of other progressive scholars, including those who have previously put forward many of the same arguments themselves. One might have anticipated and hoped, on the contrary, that a socialist scholar would want to draw out the collective nature of his intellectual activity, to make the point that he is articulating, refining and crystallising ideas shared by a community of other thinkers with whom he is in broad and solidaristic alliance. Instead, Chibber’s register is that of heroic masculine individualism.

A second observation then follows from this first. Precisely because Chibber is so concerned to insist on the uniqueness of his achievement, he ends up having to reinvent the wheel on quite a few occasions. He perversely chooses not to use the resources already available to him – those developed in the materialist critique of postcolonial studies over the course of the past three decades. The result of this is that quite a lot of what is said and argued in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital is not as new or as unprecedented as the reader might infer from Chibber. Such overarching arguments as the following, for instance, are pretty much standard fare within postcolonial studies by now (at least within its materialist wing):

Subaltern Studies fails as an explanatory framework because it systematically misrepresents the relationship between capitalism and modernity, both in the East and in the West. It does so in two ways. First, it promotes a distorted understanding of what is distinctive about capitalism as a social system … The second way in which the Subalternists misrepresent the relationship between capitalism and modernity is not by obscuring the role of the former but by denying it altogether… (p. 24)

Now, reinvented wheels are of course still wheels. Good arguments remain good arguments: they are telling now, when Chibber makes them in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, just as they had been telling earlier, when dissenting scholars active in postcolonial studies had made them. What we might provisionally conclude, I think, is that while Chibber’s arguments might strike such ‘outside’ readers as Žižek or Brenner or Chomsky as an explosive intervention, both bracing and necessary – a ‘bomb’, as the sociologist Ho-fung Hung calls it in introducing a forum devoted to the book in the journal Symposium ¹⁰ – they are not likely to seem so impressive to those working within postcolonial studies, who have seen such arguments before, and have, indeed, already been working with them themselves for some time. But then Chibber is presumably not writing for ‘postcolonialists’; he writes, rather, for readers relatively unfamiliar with the field; and in these terms the effect of his book – and perhaps even its strategic intention – is to propose to these outside readers that the whole field of postcolonial studies is worthless and need not be engaged with at all. ¹¹

Postcolonial Theory and postcolonial theory

This brings us then to the question of what it is that Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital takes itself to be criticising. As already indicated, the particular object of Chibber’s critique is the South Asian-focused historiographical project, Subaltern Studies. It is the writings of Guha, Chatterjee and Chakrabarty (three of the most prominent Subalternists) that he is especially concerned to contest, dismantle and refute. Almost the entire weight of his critique in the book is directed, narrowly, precisely and specifically, against them. Had his book been entitled Subaltern Studies and the Specter of Capital, Chibber would still not have had everyone agreeing with him, naturally, but he could at least have argued that his book does exactly what it says on the tin.

But of course he insists that his target is wider than this: hence the identification of ‘postcolonial theory’ in his title. The relationship between ‘Subaltern Studies’ and ‘postcolonial theory’ then obviously requires specification. In his opening chapter, Chibber writes that Subaltern Studies is ‘[t]he most illustrious representative of postcolonial studies in the scholarship on the Global South’, asserting further that it was only when the Subalternists began to win a readership for themselves in the social sciences that ‘postcolonial theory’ became discernible as a general intellectual force: ‘There is little doubt that, had it not been for its spread into historical and anthropological scholarship, postcolonial studies would have enjoyed far less notoriety on the general intellectual landscape. Once exported into area studies and historical scholarship, however, the theory gained more general visibility’ (p. 5).

These rationalisations are misleading. It has been pointed out – and not only by those hostile to his work – that, in conflating Subaltern Studies with postcolonial theory, Chibber misrepresents the histories of each of these formations and also the institutional relationship between them. Hence Timothy Brennan, who has drawn attention to Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital’s

lack of contact with the ideological universe it set out to diagnose. To claim, as Chibber does, that subaltern studies is postcolonial theory’s ‘most illustrious representative’ is not only to reverse the order of influence, but to fail to see that internalizing the already entrenched positions of postcoloniality allowed the subalternists to acquire a more general reach. So it is not that postcolonial theory ‘became influential’ – as he writes – when it allied itself with subaltern studies, but the other way around. ¹²

Hence also Benita Parry, who begins her review of Chibber’s book by remarking that ‘the study is not what it purports to be. When commentators accept his invitation to read Subaltern Studies as postcolonial theory, they overlook that a project he names as “the most illustrious representative of postcolonial theory in the scholarship of the global South”, was a recipient and not an initiator of this theory’s epistemological premise.’ ¹³

Chibber fails to recognise that ‘postcolonial theory’ had won a significant beachhead in the social sciences in the Anglophone world – in history, sociology, politics, anthropology, international relations, urban studies, philosophy, geography, development studies, even economics – well before the work of the Subaltern Studies group began to find a wide readership there. He therefore puts the cart before the horse when he maintains that it was the work of the Subaltern Studies group that gave ‘postcolonial theory’ currency in the social sciences. The truth is just the reverse: it was the consecration of the Subaltern Studies historians by the most prominent postcolonial theorists that brought recognition to them, not only in the fields of literary and cultural studies, but even in their own discipline of history. The key event in this respect, as has often been pointed out, was Oxford University Press’s publication in 1988 of a selection of readings from Subaltern Studies, co-edited by Guha and Spivak, and containing a ‘Foreword’ by Edward W. Said, whose book Orientalism, published ten years earlier in 1978, is routinely taken to represent the inaugural text of postcolonial studies. Said’s commentary makes clear that what was at stake in the publication of Selected Subaltern Studies was to bring the work of the Subaltern Studies group to the attention of what he calls ‘the Western reader’ and also to propose their project overall as ancillary to the established postcolonialist commitment to criticising or ‘unthinking’ Eurocentrism: ‘[T]he work of the Subaltern scholars’, he wrote, ‘can be seen as an analogue of all those recent attempts in the West and throughout the rest of the world to articulate the hidden or suppressed accounts of numerous groups – women, minorities, disadvantaged or dispossessed groups, refugees, exiles, etc.’ ¹⁴

As seems characteristic of him, Chibber has not been willing to concede anything to his critics on this matter. Instead, he has restated his opinion that in the social sciences – or in what he sometimes calls the ‘empirically oriented fields’ ¹⁵ – it is Subaltern Studies in particular that has seized the day and that is therefore taken to exemplify ‘postcolonial theory’. And he has repeated his contention that Subaltern Studies distinguishes itself from the larger postcolonial field in being underpinned by a coherent, steadily maintained theory: the field as a whole is seen, by contrast, to lack the rigour of a ‘positive’ theory: ‘Owing in large measure to their roots in poststructuralist theory and its anti-foundationalism’, as he writes in the opening chapter of his book,

many postcolonial intellectuals have eschewed developing the kind of clearly constructed propositions that would normally accompany a research agenda. This would, perhaps, be considered too vulgar a display of truthmongering. Again and again, we find that the proponents of the field present it more as an intellectual orientation than as a theory. It is part of the move to what has been called post-theory. (p. 3) ¹⁶

It is quite true that Subaltern Studies now commands a substantial reputation and wields considerable influence in the ‘more empirically oriented fields’. This can and must be granted. But to acknowledge this is not quite the same as to argue that it is ‘the most successful exemplar of postcolonial theorizing in historical and social analysis’ (p. 284); still less is it to suggest that it is the historians affiliated with Subaltern Studies who today carry the flag for ‘the postcolonial’ whenever ‘historical’ or ‘social’ questions relating to ‘the Global South’ are raised. After all, if you mention ‘postcolonial theory’ to a historian, anthropologist, political scientist, philosopher, geographer or economist today, you are still likely to be directed in the first instance to the work of Edward Said, not to that of Ranajit Guha or Dipesh Chakrabarty; and, following this, to such other writers as Arjun Appadurai, Jean and John Comaroff, James Ferguson, Harry Harootunian, Achille Mbembe, Walter Mignolo, V. Y. Mudimbe, Vijay Prashad and David Scott. In defining texts like Gurminder K. Bhambra’s Rethinking Modernity: postcolonialism and the sociological imagination (2007) and Frederick Cooper’s Colonialism in Question: theory, knowledge, history (2005) – and I evoke these studies as representative of the engagement with postcolonial theory in the disciplines of sociology and history, respectively (Chibber cites Cooper but does not appear to know of Bhambra’s award-winning study) – there is generous recognition of the significance of the work of the Subaltern Studies group, but no methodological centralising of it. ¹⁷ However influential Subaltern Studies might have become in any particular discipline or sub-discipline, it cannot plausibly be made to ‘stand in’ there for postcolonial theory overall. Nor, of course, is it only Subaltern Studies that is predicated on a ‘positive’ theory of society. It is not necessary to agree with the arguments elaborated in Bhambra’s work, or Appadurai’s or Mbembe’s or Scott’s (none of whom is a ‘Subalternist’) to recognise that they are underpinned by just what Chibber says is fundamentally lacking in ‘postcolonial theory’ in general and present only in Subaltern Studies in particular: ‘central theoretical propositions’ capable of being ‘judged with regard to consistency, empirical success, coherence, and so on’ (p. 4). It doesn’t help the critique of postcolonial theory to pretend that it is only a series of scattered speculations, lacking principle and internal rigour.

Substance

Despite these severe deficits, however, the book contains much of value. Some of its central, sustained arguments are powerful and compelling, and contribute importantly to the critique of ‘post-’ theory – especially that branch of ‘post-’ theory having to do, in Chibber’s words, with ‘the analysis of what once was called the Third World’.

Let me begin with what I take to be an important insistence in Chibber’s book: that the modern world is an integrated whole – integrated, though not, of course, uniformly or evenly developed – and that this understanding is fundamental to any adequate sociological or historical account of the capitalist era. So that the world as a whole must be taken as the appropriate unit of analysis, rather than, say, the nation alone (‘France’, ‘the United States’, ‘Nigeria’, ‘China’, for example) or such constructs as ‘the west’ or even ‘the third world’. This might seem perfectly self-evident to readers of Race & Class, since world-scale theory has been fundamental to the journal from the outset – variously indexed through such concepts as ‘world-system’, ‘under-development’, ‘neocolonialism’, ‘globalism’, and ‘imperialism’, among many others. A bare listing of some of the writers who contributed to the journal in its early years, the 1970s and 1980s, already suffices to make this point in shorthand: so, for instance, Eqbal Ahmad, John Berger, Atilio Boron, Malcolm Caldwell, Jan Carew, Cynthia Cockburn, Basil Davidson, Andre Gunder Frank, Barbara Harlow, Thomas Hodgkin, Kumari Jayawardena, Ken Jordaan, Fatima Meer, Gail Omvedt, Cedric Robinson, Nawal el-Saadawi, Edward W. Said, John Saul, Chris Searle, Teodor Shanin and A. Sivanandan. But this commitment to world-scale theory is not widely shared in postcolonial studies: instead, a dominant supposition in the field that there is so fundamental a divide between ‘west’ and ‘east’ – or between ‘north’ and ‘south’: it depends on how a given theorist cuts the conceptual cake – that categories and methods developed with reference to the former are inapplicable to the latter. Chibber puts this very well: in the postcolonialist conception, he observes, it is widely believed that

the colonial and postcolonial social formations cannot be assimilated into the same general framework as those of the advanced West. Not only do they diverge in their basic structure, but they cannot be assumed to be moving along the same broad trajectory of development. From this premise, postcolonial theory draws a seemingly natural conclusion: if the reality of colonial social formations is fundamentally different from that of Western social formation, then theoretical categories generated from the experience of the West cannot be appropriate for an understanding of the East. (p. 17)

Indeed, such foundational notions as ‘class struggle’; ‘bourgeois’, ‘peasant’ and ‘proletarian’; ‘modernity’; ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’ and ‘socialism’ are viewed by many postcolonialists (and ‘post-’ theorists generally) as being irremediably Eurocentric; and such critical methods as historical materialism also. Thus Chakrabarty, one of Chibber’s main antagonists in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, has proposed that the very idea of ‘history’ as a discipline – a mode of knowledge-production – cannot be mobilised with reference to ‘non-western’ societies without falsifying them and subordinating them to ‘western’ epistemic categories. ‘Insofar as the academic discourse of history – that is, “history” as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned’, Chakrabarty has written,

‘Europe’ remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called ‘the history of Europe.’ In this sense, ‘Indian’ history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history. ¹⁸

And we find an analogous argument in V. Y. Mudimbe (not a Subalternist, note), this time with reference to anthropology rather than history, and Africa rather than India: not only is the Eurocentrism of anthropology constitutive and ineradicable, according to Mudimbe, but it is impossible to think about ‘Africa’ itself except in Eurocentric terms. His specific argument is that

Modern African thought seems somehow to be basically a product of the West. What is more, since most African leaders and thinkers have received a Western education, their thought is at the crossroads of Western epistemological filiation and African ethnocentrism. Moreover, many concepts and categories underpinning this ethnocentrism are inventions of the West. When prominent leaders such as Senghor or Nyerere propose to synthetize liberalism and socialism, idealism and materialism, they know that they are transplanting Western intellectual manicheism. ¹⁹

This argument is generalised thus: ‘The fact of the matter is that, until now, Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order. Even in the most explicitly “Afrocentric” descriptions, models of analysis explicitly or implicitly, knowingly or unknowingly, refer to the same order.’ ²⁰

These ideas derive, as Chibber correctly points out, from the deep-set postcolonialist conviction as to the radical difference and incommensurability between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ worlds. ‘Western’ concepts, categories, modes of governance, and social relations are understood to have imposed themselves on ‘non-western social orders: this is how colonialism is commonly understood by those working in postcolonial studies. Chibber’s identification of the conceptual substrate of mainstream ‘postcolonial’ thought is bold and assured. ‘At the heart … of postcolonial theory … generally’, he writes, ‘stands the claim that there is a deep fault line separating Western capitalist nations from the postcolonial world’ (p. 50). He is neither the first nor the only critic of postcolonial theory to have drawn attention to the existence of this ‘fault line’, but his identification and dissection of it are enabling nevertheless – even though, for reasons I hope to be able to spell out later, he does not do quite enough with his own insight. There are many related problems with the postcolonialist conception: the evacuation of the specific agency of capitalism from the civilisational category of the ‘west’; the yoking of the idea of the ‘west’ unilaterally to that of ‘modernity’; the abstract construction of the category of the ‘east’ (and, later, the ‘global south’) as the ‘west’s’ other; and so on. ²¹ The overall effect of this concatenation of idealisms has been to mystify and essentialise both ‘east’ and ‘west’: there has been a general failure both to reckon adequately with the historical unprecedentedness of capitalism; that is, the difference of (capitalist) modernity from all prior universalising projects, and to understand that the ‘worlding’ or ‘universalisation’ of capitalist social relations – their dispersal throughout the world – operates not through the production of sameness everywhere (this had been the assumption of modernisation theorists in the 1950s) but on the basis of uneven and combined development. Their (negative) hypostatisation of ‘modernity’ and the ‘west’ has led some of the most influential postcolonial critics to render the complex structurality of the contemporary global system either arbitrary or unintelligible. Indeed, some of them have chosen to argue that there is no world-system to understand, that the very idea of a (capitalist) world-system is itself a dominating fiction.

Chibber is at his most compelling in his commentary on capital’s ‘universalising tendency’, in which he demonstrates that arguments about capitalist globalisation do not require one to anticipate an increased homogenisation of the world or, more narrowly still, the progressive universalisation of ‘western’ norms, values and modes of social life. ‘[C]apitalism promotes development’, as he puts it neatly in his chapter on ‘The (Non) Problem of Historicism’, ‘but … the development thus promoted is highly differentiated and uneven. Capitalism is anything but a purely homogenizing dynamic’ (p. 245). His critique here is constructive, not merely negative: he correctly diagnoses that the problem with the ‘post-’ theoretical understanding is that it ‘rest[s] on a conceptual slip: that universalizing categories presume a homogeneous social landscape. Universal is thus equated with homogeneous. It is remarkable how often these terms can be found together in the literature. But the coupling of the two is a mistake’ (p. 150). But he then goes on to suggest the theoretical antidote to this widespread misconception:

as capitalism spreads across the globe, it does not inevitably turn every culture into a replica of what has been observed in the West. The universalization of capital is perfectly compatible with the persistence of social, cultural, and political differentiation between East and West. Capital does not have to obliterate difference in order to universalize itself. It merely has to subordinate those dimensions of social reproduction that are essential to its own functioning. These dimensions are the ones directly involved in the production and distribution of use-values’. (pp. 150–1)

What’s at issue here is the question of difference, or, more narrowly, of what in postcolonial studies has sometimes been called ‘colonial difference’. The problem is that within postcolonial theory, the attempt – in its origins, creditable – to identify (and perhaps to support or celebrate) local or indigenous social and cultural forms that pre-existed colonisation and/or the imposition of capitalist social relations, and that have meaningfully survived these, has promoted a widespread misconstrual of both colonialism and capitalism as vast winnowing machines in the service of the world spirit, historical formations whose inherent tendency is to obliterate difference and unevenness and impose homogeneity and uniformity in their stead. In countering this line of argument, Chibber says some excellent things about what is (and is not) involved in the ‘worlding’ of capitalism. Thus in face of the rather clumsy elaboration in Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe ²² of a schematic opposition between two incompatible orders of history – an elaboration that Chakrabarty himself claims is essential if we are to counter the epistemic violence of totalising theory – Chibber points out that an awareness of discontinuity and rupture has always been ‘central to the Marxist framework, as also to several other theories in classical and modern political economy’ (p. 239).

Indeed, an attention to the ‘complex and differential temporality’ of the capitalist mode of production, ‘in which episodes or eras were discontinuous from each other, and heterogeneous within themselves’ is, as Perry Anderson has argued, clearly observable in Marx’s writings from the late 1840s onwards, alert to the fact that even within capitalist or capitalising social formations, vast rural populations continued to ground the persistence not only of pre-existing economic conditions, but of social relations, cultural practices and psychic dispositions also. ²³ Marx’s identification of unevenness then received notable amplification in Trotsky’s writings of the 1930s, in which he formulated his theory of ‘uneven and combined development’, by way of analysing the effects of the imposition of capitalism on cultures and societies hitherto un- or only sectorally capitalised. In these contexts – properly understood as imperialist – Trotsky observed, the imposed capitalist forces of production and class relations tended not to supplant but to be conjoined forcibly with pre-existing forces and relations. The outcome, he wrote, was a contradictory ‘amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’ – an urban proletariat working in technologically advanced industries existing side by side with a rural population engaged in subsistence farming; industrial plants built alongside ‘villages of wood and straw’, and peasants ‘thrown into the factory cauldron snatched directly from the plow’. ²⁴

In opposing himself to the postcolonialist adumbration of colonial difference, Chibber ought to have drawn more systematically on the resources of the theory of uneven and combined development. ²⁵ Over the course of the past decade, I myself have been doing some collaborative reading and writing in a research collective based at Warwick University: ²⁶ our group has been particularly struck by the powerful revisionary elaboration of this theory in Fredric Jameson’s work (not consulted by Chibber, incidentally) where it appears as nothing less than a template for any consideration of modern society, whether in the metropoles or at the peripheries of the world-system. Insisting that it can only be conceptualised adequately through reference to worldwide capitalism, ²⁷ Jameson understands ‘modernity’ as representing something like the time-space sensorium corresponding to capitalist modernisation. In this sense, it is, like the capitalist world-system itself, a singular phenomenon. But far from implying that modernity therefore assumes the same form everywhere, which many postcolonial theorists believe is the default position of any Marxist or ‘historicist’ theory, this formulation in fact implies that it is everywhere irreducibly specific. Modernity might be understood as the way in which capitalist social relations are ‘lived’ – different in every given instance for the simple reason that no two social instances are the same.

Jameson emphasises both the singularity of modernity as a social form and its simultaneity. In the idea of singularity we hear the echo of a hundred years of dialectical materialist discussion of totality, system and universality – as, for example, in Henri Lefebvre’s great essay, ‘What is Modernity?’, which ‘insist[s] upon the need for a general concept of modernity which would be valid for all countries, social and political regimes, and cultures’, while distinguishing between ‘the general and the worldwide’. ²⁸ The idea of simultaneity, meanwhile, he derives from Ernst Bloch’s ostensibly oxymoronic formula, ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’. ²⁹ Modernity is to be understood as governed always, that is to say, definitionally, by unevenness, the historically determinate ‘coexistence’, in any given place and time, ‘of realities from radically different moments of history – handicrafts alongside the great cartels, peasant fields with the Krupp factories or the Ford plant in the distance’. ³⁰ The multiple modes in and through which this ‘coexistence’ manifests itself – the multiple forms of appearance of unevenness – are to be understood as being connected, governed by a socio-historical logic of combination, rather than as being contingent and asystematic.

Following Jameson, it becomes possible to speak of modernity as a globally dispersed general ‘situation’. Modernity does not mark the relationship between some formations (that are ‘modern’) and others (that are not ‘modern’, or not-yet so). So that it is not a matter of pitting France against Mali, say, or New York City against Elk City, Oklahoma. Uneven development is not a characteristic of ‘backward’ formations only. To grasp the nettle here involves recognising that capitalist development does not smooth away but rather produces unevenness, systematically and as a matter of course. Combined and uneven. Modernity is neither a chronological nor a geographical category. It is not something that happens – or even that happens first – in ‘the west’ and to which others can subsequently gain access. Capitalist modernisation entails development, yes: but this ‘development’ takes the forms also of the development of underdevelopment, of maldevelopment and dependent development. The idea of some sort of ‘achieved’ modernity, in which unevenness would have been superseded, harmonised, vanquished, or ironed out is radically unhistorical. Capitalism, as Harry Harootunian has written,

has no really normal state but one of constant expansion; and expansion requires the permanent production of excess, surplus, in order for it to survive. Part of the price paid for continual expansion is the production of permanent unevenness, permanent imbalance between various sectors of the social formations, the process by which some areas must be sacrificed for the development of others, such as the countryside for the city… the colony for the metropole, or even one city for another. ³¹

This formulation stands as a compelling repudiation of the various recent attempts in postcolonial theory to pluralise the concept of modernity through the evocation of ‘alternative’ modernities. ³² Inasmuch as these invariably derive from an initial assumption as to the ‘western’ provenance of modernity, they are both unnecessary and misguided. Of course, if one believes that modernity is a ‘western’ phenomenon, it is only possible to understand its global dispersal in terms of the universalisation of ‘the west’ – to be celebrated or, as in the avowedly anti-Eurocentric conception currently so influential in postcolonial studies, deplored as imperialistic. As Harootunian has argued in outlining his own opposition to the dominant postcolonialist understanding, to postulate ‘the existence of an “original” that was formulated in the “West”’ is inevitably to suppose that the form of appearance of ‘modernity’ elsewhere must be both ‘belated’ and ‘derivative’ – ‘a series of “copies” and lesser inflections’. ³³ No wonder then that postcolonialists who view modernity in these terms and yet are committed to the critique of Eurocentrism should want to argue for ‘alternative’ modernities! Against this line of thought, however – which seeks to make an end-run around the orthodox Eurocentric conception of modernity as a gift to be given or withheld by the capitalist homelands, but succeeds only in ratifying this baleful conception – the account elaborated by Jameson and Harootunian emphasises modernity’s singularity and global simultaneity, while insisting that singularity here does not obviate internal heterogeneity and that simultaneity does not preclude unevenness or marked difference.

The connection between this position and that articulated by Chibber is strong, I think. ‘Capital may spread to all corners of the world’, he writes at one point, ‘but this does not mean that it manages to subordinate all social relations to its particular rules of reproduction’ (p. 217). The conclusion is adduced after painstaking rebuttals of Guha’s work on the exceptionality of colonial class relations and Chakrabarty’s on the incommensurability between History (Eurocentric) and histories (local, fragmentary, etc.). But Chibber could have saved himself a great deal of tedious work had he used the resources of the theory of uneven and combined development. There’s a remarkable formulation in the Conclusion of Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, worth quoting at length:

The history of Marxian analysis in the twentieth century is the history of … understanding the specificity of the East. There is probably no project to which Marxist theorists have devoted more energy and time since the first Russian Revolution of 1905 than to understand the peculiar effects of capitalist development in the non-West … If we draw up a list of the main theoretical innovations to come out of the Marxist tradition after Marx’s death, we see that many of them are attempts to theorize capitalism in backward settings: in the first half of the century, there was Lenin’s theory of imperialism and the ‘weakest link’, his analysis of agrarian class differentiation, Kautsky’s work on the agrarian question, Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, Mao’s theory of New Democracy, Gramsci’s distinction between state legitimacy in Eastern and Western Europe. All of these were attempts to understand social reproduction in parts of the world where capitalism was not working in exactly the way Marx described it in Capital. In the years of the New Left, there came dependency theory, world-systems theory, Cabral’s work on the African revolutionary path, the theory of the articulation of modes of production, the Indian ‘modes of production’ debate – and the list goes on. (pp. 291−2)

I describe this formulation as remarkable not only because it is true – it needs to be stated as clearly as possible in face of postcolonialist presumptions as to the ineluctable Eurocentrism of Marxist thought – but also because none of the theoretical resources so capably enumerated here has, in fact, been mobilised by Chibber in the writing of his book. This, then, is reinventing the wheel in earnest. My own particular interest is in uneven and combined development, concerning which Chibber goes on to write as follows:

Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development was an explicit rejection of the argument that later developers would simply replicate the developmental path of the early ones. For Trotsky, the fact of their later insertion into the capitalist vortex meant that such societies would be able to import the most recent innovations in certain spheres, while preserving a whole gamut of older social relations in others. There is no implication of homogeneous time, no historicism, no ‘stageism’ – indeed, the theory is immune to virtually every accusation that Subalternist theorists make against the Marxian tradition. (p. 292)

Which – again – makes it seem extraordinary that Chibber should make no use of the theory of uneven and combined development in the main body of his study. A failure that simply baffles understanding.

In seeking to defend the idea of radical universalism against its ‘post-’ theoretical antagonists, who see in the idea of totality only the looming politics of totalitarianism, Chibber seeks to cast the postulates of postcolonial theory in the ironic light of ‘a revival and celebration of Orientalist discourse’:

What, then, should be said of the celebration of what Chakrabarty calls, at various points, the East’s heterogeneities, heterotemporalities, incommensurabilities, incommensurable temporalities, and so forth? Once the theoretical heavy breathing is allowed to slow, what it amounts to is just what it seems to be – a license for exoticism. (p. 238)

Elsewhere he suggests that Chatterjee’s theory of nationalism is ‘a quite brazenly Orientalist depiction of the East-West divide’ (p. 250).

This suggestion that the work of the Subaltern Studies historians ‘relentlessly promotes Eurocentrism’ (p. 291) in the guise of combating it strikes me as misconceived. It’s not only that the reasoning here is blunt and undiscriminating. It’s rather that Chibber fails to capitalise on one of his own best insights: namely that in the ‘west’ as much as in the ‘east’, there is abundant evidence of heterogeneity, incommensurability, compressed and juxtaposed temporality, and so on. He could then have put additional pressure on the essentialism disclosed in the Subalternist construction of the ‘east’, which, fetishising colonial difference, finds localism, subalternity and the fragment only in (post-) colonised locations, and fails singularly to grapple with the universality of ‘difference’. Not only uneven, but also combined. As in Bengal, so too in Pomerania and, for that matter, in Lincolnshire.

It is in this respect that Chibber’s book can be accused of not going far enough: having correctly identified the categorical separation of ‘east’ from ‘west’ as a central tenet within mainstream postcolonial theory, he fails to go the extra yard and grasp this theory as what it is, a conjuncturally distinct kind of ‘Third-Worldism’. Had he focused less blinkeredly on the Subaltern Studies group and looked up to see that what he was finding in them was also being articulated elsewhere in postcolonial studies (at least simultaneously, but sometimes in advance of its Subalternist formulation), he would have been able to register the existence of a wider problematic, evident also in Walter Mignolo’s work on ‘decolonial’ thought, Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall’s on ‘Afropolitanism’, Robert Young’s on ‘tricontinentalism’, Abdelkebir Khatibi’s on the ‘thought of difference’, and David Scott’s on the specificity of time-consciousness in the postcolonial world, among others. ³⁴ I’ve written elsewhere about this wider problematic myself, distinguishing between what I have called ‘postcolonialist Third-Worldism’ (a creature of the post-1975 global dispensation) and the insurrectionary version of ‘Third-Worldism’ that flourished in the period between 1945 and 1975. ³⁵ There’s no need for me to reiterate that discussion here. It will suffice to point out that Chibber’s determination to label the Subalternists ‘Orientalist’ both misses the larger issue and serves only as a provocation. (In postcolonial discussions, to call somebody an ‘Orientalist’ is akin to calling him or her a racist!) Ultimately, it seems to me that, for all that Chibber’s work has much to commend it, and has certainly served to raise the temperature of debate within postcolonial studies, a much better and more thoroughgoing ideological critique of Subaltern Studies is to be found in Vasant Kaiwar’s book, The Postcolonial Orient: the politics of difference and the project of provincialising Europe (2014), which offers both a scorching critique of Subaltern Studies in its ‘postcolonial’ aspect and a triumphant and very contemporary counter-statement of Marxism as an ‘unrenounceable project’ within the universe of capitalist modernity. ³⁶ If readers were able to read only one book on the ideology of Subaltern Studies, that book should be Kaiwar’s rather than Chibber’s.