The Perils of Comparison in Subaltern Studies and its Critique

In the three years since the publication of Vivek Chibber’s Post-colonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, a number of responses and reviews have appeared, some from scholars in subaltern studies and postcolonial theory whom Chibber criticizes and others from more sympathetic readers and interlocutors (Brennan; Chatterjee; Spivak 2014). Although this essay is a review of Chibber’s book, the debates that emerged around the text are perhaps more revealing of contemporary problems in Marxism and postcolonial theory, because they speak to certain impasses in both fields of inquiry. From the perspective of Chibber, and I suspect many who support his argument, these debates are between, on the one hand, a postcolonial studies field that has left behind its initial interest in Marxism and become mired in poststructuralist platitudes about the virtue of fragmentation and the danger of totalizing theories, and, on the other hand, a Marxist approach that sees fragments and difference—as well as identities other than the proletariat and the intellectual vanguard—as having a conciliatory relationship with the social totality constituted by capital. For Chibber, the situation demands a return to Enlightenment universals and reason as the necessary epistemological bases for a critique of capitalism and the potential liberation from its exploitation. Chibber’s critics, on the other hand, point to his reduction of Marxism to a positivist sociology, the basing of his critiques of subaltern studies almost solely in a reading of the English and French Revolutions, and his tendency to caricature the work of esteemed intellectuals like Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Dipesh Chakrabarty with accusations of essentialism, irrationality, and even Orientalism.

The unfortunate terms of this debate, mostly established by Chibber’s text, make Marxism and postcolonial theory appear at odds by way of a set of old colonial binaries: rational vs. irrational, Europe vs. Asia, universalism vs. particularism, concepts vs. identity, Enlightenment vs. premodern ontology, and so on. While we might consider the reemergence of these binaries as a reflection of two strains of Marxist thinking, one positivist and the other humanist and interpretive (this is Timothy Brennan’s assertion), I will approach them rather through the problem and dialectics of historical, political, and cultural comparison. I do so not to highlight differences between European and Asian capitalism or modernity but rather to think critically about the confluence of Enlightenment universalism and Marxism asserted by Chibber without relying, as subaltern studies does, on the categories of the West and the East, as though these terms can mark an essential cultural, social, or historical difference.

Chibber arrives at his reading of postcolonial theory through a number of general and legitimate concerns about postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory often forgoes a critique of contemporary capitalism for the sake of an analysis of oppression focused on colonial dynamics, even though it is largely practiced in the academies of the former and current imperialist countries. When postcolonialism is understood too chronologically, as the “after” of colonialism, colonialism itself loses its historical specificity and the analysis of postcolonial culture can become tacitly complicit with the imperial political formations that have superseded colonialism. The primary problem that postcolonial theory needs to confront is the relationship between its objects of study and the form of capitalism in the historical present.

For Chibber, responding to these concerns requires confronting the dominant academic fashions in which postcolonial theory partakes and asserting the need to return to Marxian sociological analysis. Therefore, Postcolonial Theory begins with a familiar invective against contemporary philosophy and theory, particularly in the humanities. The primary targets are postcolonial theory and poststructuralism. Despite the capacity for the academic marketplace to subject all manner of thought, including Marxism, to the rule of the commodity form, postcolonial theory and poststructuralism have been brought to task more than other humanities and social science theories for their compatibility with capitalism’s logic of assimilation through differentiation. By now these kinds of arguments against the opacity and meaninglessness of contemporary cultural theory feel journalistic, not to say clichéd, and it would...