Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber (review)

The capitalism that Marx interrogated in the nineteenth century has changed significantly. Even the basic structural logic of capital as a relation has altered the shape of capitalism’s moving contradictions and the forms of its crises. This underlines Marx’s basic notions that capitalism is revolutionary and historical and that Marxism cleaves to those same principles both in understanding its logic and in seeking the ways in which capitalism’s global hold on the production and reproduction of social relations can be challenged and overreached. Postcolonialism, of course, is neither Marxism nor capitalism, although in its efforts to address myriad forms of anti-imperialism and decolonization, particularly vis-à-vis European and North American hegemonies, it has often theorized the possibilities of socialism in the Third World, the South, the periphery, and the developing world amid other modes of solidarity that stood and stand against oppression, class domination, dependency and matrices of deleterious power. It remains obvious, however, that the projects of Marxism and postcolonialism are of a contrasting form and socialist register and, while there are many thinkers who have explored the political and cultural materialities of their creative imbrication, they are ideologically distinct and resolutely uneven in their contributions to knowledge and to human liberation. If there remain good reasons to connect them in their theoretical vitality, such an endeavor often reveals the shortfalls in both. And, if Marxism and post-colonialism have always been minority discourses in their respective histories, the scale of their influence is of a profoundly different order. While one cannot speak of actually existing socialism in the same tones (or realities) of a quarter century ago, to pronounce on actually existing postcolonialism would be absurd by comparison (there are postcolonial states to be sure, but postcolonialism does not represent a process of production and reproduction of social relations separate from feudalism, capitalism, socialism or communism). Nevertheless, to enjoin the debate between them is not an altogether academic exercise, even if the best we can do is find some uncanny resemblance.

Allegories of the uncanny have a long history in Marxism; indeed, from the Communist Manifesto’s opening hobgloblin on, Gespenstergeschichte or the anxiety of semblance, has ghostly correlatives all the way to Vivek Chibber’s invocation in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (my emphasis). “What is living and what is dead in Marxist theory,” to crib a little from the title of Chibber’s other writing, is always about the messy zone between such states, one that Marx often used to give abstraction a recognizable form (I am thinking here of the labor theory of value from the commodity chapter of Capital) and is a powerful resource in Marxist understanding. Communism cannot haunt alone, however, and as Chris Harman has argued, “zombie capitalism” has its own spirit world that it obstinately believes to be a refuge.

The seeming (or unseemly) Marxism at issue in Chibber’s book is that which girds the fraught relationship of postcolonialism to Marxist thinking; specifically, the spectral or discursive Marxizing of the Subaltern Studies project (198). Obviously, to read Subaltern Studies as the quintessence of postcolonial studies is like reading Capital Volume One as the demonstration of Marx’s reading of capital as a whole. Chibber’s spirited approach to Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Partha Chatterjee is an appreciable assessment of the methodologies and legacies of the Subaltern Studies project, but for many Marxists who have worked within and through postcolonial studies over recent decades and who have attempted in a variety of ways to connect the practice of postcolonial theory with the longue durée of anti-imperialist and decolonizing activism of the global South, Chibber’s substantial intervention openly favors a partial reading over a more comprehensive and agonistic critique. To be fair, some of the critics who have participated in such long-standing debates, like Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, and Timothy Brennan, at least make brief appearances in Chibber’s footnotes. Marxism itself, in all its variegations, wheels around Marx...