Over the past two decades, postcolonial studies has acquired considerable visibility in academic circles.

At the outset, it gained a foothold in literary and cultural studies, where it began as a movement to transcend the marginalization of non-Western literature in the canon.

Later on, postcolonial studies rapidly migrated beyond literary analysis, most visibly into history and anthropology, but its influence soon spread to other scholarly domains as well.

Vivek Chibber'€™s new book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, typifies an extensive challenge to many of the central tenets of postcolonial theory.

Highlighting the strain of postcolonial theory known as subaltern studies, Chibber asserts that it is necessary to conceive the non-Western world through a similar logical line to the one we use to comprehend developments in the West.

He puts forth the idea that there is a continuous defense of theoretical approaches that give prominence to universal categories such as class and capitalism.

Chibber points out that subaltern studies '€” developed by a group of South Asian scholars interested in postcolonial and post-imperial societies, particularly those of South Asia, and the developing world in a general sense '€” is instrumental for criticizing postcolonial theory. It bears down on dimensions of the theory centered on history, historical development and social structures '€“ not on literary criticism.

Standing for critics of Marxism and being exponents of a new way of understanding the global South, Chibber and the Subalternists emphasize those established Western categories cannot be applied to postcolonial societies.

Universalization of capital, which was buttressed by the enlightenment and prompted capitalism to spread across the world, has broken down in the postcolonial world.

This breakdown is closely bound to two important things.

First, adopting Ranajit Guha'€™s idea in Dominance without Hegemony (1998), Chibber states that the bourgeoisie in the East failed to overthrow feudalism and established highly unstable and fairly authoritarian political orders, while in the West the capitalist class erected a new political order, which was not only pro-capitalist in terms of defending the property rights of capitalists, but was also a liberal and consensual order.

Second, referring to Dipesh Chakrabarty'€™s Provincializing Europe (2000), Chibber ascribes the failure of capitalism to take hold to various cultural, social, and political practices in the East that do not conform to what a capitalist culture should look like.

He spent much time exploring this in the book, saying that capitalism'€™s universalization does not require erasing all social diversity.

Though this does not look like anything like what Marx described in Capital (1867), it doesn'€™t matter if capitalists consult astrologers, so long as they are driven to make profits.

Similarly, there is nothing wrong with workers praying on the shop floor as long as they work. The writer strongly believes that these differences are acceptable for the spread of capitalism, as long as agents obey the exhortations demanded by the capitalist structures placed on them.

While paying a compliment to postcolonial theory for largely displacing Marxism as the dominant perspective among intellectuals engaged in the project of critically examining the relationship between the Western and non-Western worlds, Chibber avers that there is real danger when subaltern studies and postcolonial theory are concerned with resistance to universalisms and meta-narratives. There are some common interests and needs that people have across cultures.

Trying to cushion the blow of rejection, Chibber proves that peasants in India, when they engage in collective action, are more or less acting on the same aspirations and drives as Western peasants were. What separates them from the West are the cultural forms in which these aspirations are expressed, but the aspirations themselves tend to be quite consistent.

This is where Chibber'€™s book is at its most important. Against the thesis that Western subalterns are made up of different stuff, Chibber argues that human beings are not that different across different contexts. The winds of history and culture may change many things, but human constitutions do not.

In terms of postcolonial perspective, Chibber does not answer the question of why Western subalterns have been more successful at forming socio-political organizations and winning these gains than their non-Western counterparts.

He would be better off exposing the greater class capacities and larger social product associated with a longer and more successful history of Western subaltern development. This point is essential to show how the institutions of the Marxist left '€” organizations, journals and conferences '€” are now very weak.

What I also find misleading in this book is that he seems to assume that Marxism is an enlightenment philosophy, whereas in fact it is a critique of the enlightenment, particularly its sovereign individual instead of its culminating thinker.

His heavy emphasis on anti-Marxist postcolonial theory makes him overlook the resurgence of a particular kind of Marxism, one that is displaced not by postcolonial theorists but by anti-colonial Marxists.

For those familiar with the works of Fanon, Said or Spivak, this book constitutes the next piece of a superb and devastating critique of postcolonial studies.

Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital
Vivek Chibber
Verso, 2013
306 pages

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