Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital by Vivek Chibber

Author:Vivek Chibber
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-04-19T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

Culture, Interests, and Agency

In the course of the preceding chapters, two points have been established that set up the discussion in this one. The first is that Subaltern Studies wrongly attributes to the bourgeoisie achievements that were in fact the product of popular struggles. The phenomena that Subalternist theorists include under the rubric of bourgeois forms of power,hegemony, and culture were, to the contrary, brought about by challenges from below. They were not part of the design, or the preferences, of the capitalist class as it rose to power in Western Europe. Hence, the fact that capitalists sought to establish despotic forms in the East is not a sign that capital abandoned its universalizing drive—it was actually a natural expression of its universalizing drive. In other words, capital has always striven not just for economic domination but also for political domination, inasmuch as the latter helps secure the viability of the former.

The second point is that the forms of political power generated by capitalism are many and varied; they extend from highly coercive interpersonal domination to a reliance on impersonal structural forces. Chakrabarty and others within the Subalternist collective erroneously identify “bourgeois forms of power” with just one particular form, and then mistakenly conclude that the persistence of other power constellations in capitalism demands a fundamental reworking of received theory. They make this mistake because they build one specific form of domination into the very definition of capital—a somewhat ironic turn for a theory that claims the mantle of radical critique, since it amounts to a romanticized conception of the bourgeoisie and its strategies of domination and augments the ideological effect of Ranajit Guha’s historical analysis, itself a rather loving portrait of capital in its early years.

If it is the case that capital has a natural preference for narrow and exclusionary political systems, we are forced to wonder what social agent could serve as a force for more egalitarian social relations. In Europe during its modernization, that agent was the labor movement, in alliance with other non-elite groupings. It seems reasonable to infer from the Western experience that in the East, too, subaltern groups might figure prominently as agents for democratic change. Certainly, for the vast majority of progressives over the past century, it was taken for granted that the push for democratization would feature laboring groups at its center. This expectation has not been mere fantasy. For much of the twentieth century, trade union and peasant-farmer groups did in fact figure prominently in struggles for democratization. If we examine the broad sweep of modern political history in the Global South, there is ample evidence that—in nationalist movements during the colonial era, and continuing into the postcolonial era—organizations of the popular classes have pushed in much the same direction as did their counterparts in Europe.

This view of subaltern groups has been virtual orthodoxy within progressive circles since the French Revolution. But it has not just been drawn inductively from the empirical record. It is based on the conviction that

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