Pluralizing Capital, Challenging Eurocentrism: Toward Post-Marxist ...

Pluralizing Capital, Challenging Eurocentrism: Toward Post-Marxist Historiography John T. Chalcraft History is a discipline widely cultivated among nations and races. It is eagerly sought after. The men in the street, the ordinary people, aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it. —Ibn Khaldun

We were sure to take our seats early as the renowned philosopher Jürgen Habermas had come to speak in Cairo. Sure enough, his command of the Western canon was deeply impressive. But some of his pauses, smiles, and qualificatory asides were revealing enough. For what may have passed off in Germany had a different articulation in Egypt. Habermas’s assumption of the West’s automatic ownership of texts generated by Greek philosophers just across the Mediterranean seemed a little uncomfortable before a non-Western audience, particularly in a country where the Greek presence had proven important for centuries, a fact vivified by interwar Egyptian nationalism, and in a room where many were strongly aware of the importance of Hellenism in Islamic thought. Was this awareness dawning on the great philosopher, accentuating his disarming modesty? Moreover, Habermas’s statements about the historical changes that had created modernity had to be hastily qualified as referring to Europe. His deep-seated, historical “us” had to be hurriedly clarified: Radical History Review Issue 91 (Winter 2005): 13–39 Copyright 2005 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

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“I mean in the West, in Europe,” he said, with a charming smile. Wasn’t there some uneasiness in the audience? For what was this but a folding of history itself into Europe; a claim that “the modern” referred only to Europe; an admission of a “Self ” residing in a Western modern, and by implication, an “Other”—applying to many in the audience—residing in all that was unmodern, unhistorical, and Eastern? Worst of all: what was this but profoundly irrelevant to those listening, Western and nonWestern alike, who sought ways of tackling in a radical way their own imperial and interconnected pasts—and thus their present and their future? A sense of history narrowly based on the dramas and transformations of Europe and its settler-colonial offshoots, a history that traces the march of freedom and progress, or a journey toward salvation radiating from Europe in the shape of capitalist development and the socialist revolution, forms a powerful “selective tradition” in the sense meant by Raymond Williams. That is, “a deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order,” which in turn forms a key part of a larger and complex process of the hegemonic incorporation of the subjects of that order. Such a tradition, according to Williams, is immensely powerful. Yet it is also vulnerable to critique “since it has in practice to discard whole areas of significance, or reinterpret or dilute them, or convert them” and “it is always tied . . . to explicit contemporary pressures.” Moreover, “its selective privileges and interests . . . including complex elements of style and tone and of basic method, can still be recognized, demonstrated, and broken.”1 A radical world history can inhabit these discarded areas, make connections where connections are sundered, pull together fragmented and apparently disjointed practices and meanings, resist conversion, and expose privileges, interests, and assumptions in ways that destabilize the selective traditions on the basis of which the West enshrines its past, present, and future. This article attempts to make some of these gestures with regard to the figure of capitalism, on the basis that, no less than Habermas’s vision of the modern, it forms part of this selective tradition. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that ‘“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.’ ”2 The argument here is that invoking the Marxian notion of capitalism constitutes one of the peculiar ways in which this form of history becomes established. Its fundamental explanatory failures, which obscure themselves by erasing non-European agency, and its ability to define historicity, rationality, and progressive politics in ways that unjustifiably privilege the European, are elements of this mechanism. Invoking capitalism involves specific varieties of Eurocentrism, and it does far more (and far less) than account for the nature and dynamics of Western power and domination. Attributing a singular and universal history to capitalism in fact forms part of this very dynamic of power

Chalcraft | Toward Post-Marxist Historiography

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and domination.3 This article attempts to contribute to ways of pluralizing and disaggregating notions of capitalism. In the first half, I discuss problems with theories of capitalism. In the second half, I explore the idea of multiple regimes of production and exploitation and foreground ways in which such forms of economic activity can be embedded in polity and society. The aim is to contribute to the making of nonteleological, noneconomistic, post-Marxist historiography. Capitalism in the Marxist Tradition In the Marxist tradition, capitalist production—to offer a crude shorthand—means the application of capital stock (accumulated labor) to the production and circulation of commodities for sale on the market, an application especially involving the exploitation of legally free wage labor. The point at which capital drew social labor within its orbit and took on the risks of production previously run by the direct producer — usually associated with the growth of cotton spinning and weaving in England after 1760—is often identified as the decisive moment in the development of capitalism, especially industrial capitalism.4 Capitalist production generates a surplus that is then reinvested to revolutionize the means of production, resulting in increased productivity and relative surplus extraction. Competing capitalists are forced to continuously reorganize, lower costs, and increase production. As capitalism develops, all inputs into the production process—finance, land, machinery, materials, labor—are transformed into commodities: they can be bought and sold on the basis of exchange value in an expanding market. Rational calculation and the cash-nexus become key principles of social organization. Workers are stripped of their independent means of subsistence and are left with only their labor power to sell to capitalists. They become commodities. As such, their exploitation by capitalists has an objective basis. As their numbers multiply, a clash develops between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The world is divided increasingly into these two hostile camps, and the swelling ranks of the working class, alongside a process in which capital digs its own grave, are eventually sufficient to allow workers to engage in a revolutionary seizure of control of the means of production, thereby instituting communism. In most conceptualizations of how capitalism links Europe to non-Europe, the latter is either destroyed or incorporated, through violence and trade, into a global capitalist economy based on Europe, the power of which rests on ever more productive and exploitative capitalism, based on the extensive commodification of labor power. Those favoring destruction argue that the whole world eventually becomes capitalist, the “barbarian” having no choice but to adopt the bourgeois mode of production on pain of extinction. This view stems from the Communist Manifesto, which envisions “a more or less direct and inevitable process of capitalist expansion: undermining old modes of production, replacing them with capitalist social productive relations and, on this basis, setting off a process of capital accu-

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mulation . . . more or less following the pattern of the original homelands of capitalism.”5 The principal variant of a view based on destruction asserts that this process is taking far longer than originally envisioned and that the world economy continues to undergo a lengthy period of transition.6 Those favoring incorporation, who depend far less on the Communist Manifesto, argue that the expansion of capitalism incorporates non-Europe, but does not necessarily recreate it in the image of European capitalism. Dependency theorists argued that “development and underdevelopment are the same in that they are the product of a single, but dialectically contradictory, economic structure and process of capitalism,” in which the metropole seized the surplus of systematically underdeveloped satellite areas.7 Immanuel Wallerstein developed this formulation with the idea of a capitalist world economy, emerging since the sixteenth century, divided into core, semiperiphery, and periphery according to a worldwide division of labor, a system that ensured—partly because of the growth of strong states in the center—the transfer of surplus to the core.8 Within this framework, notions of peripheral capitalism as a distinct form of incomplete capitalism were developed.9 A further version of incorporation argued that pre- or noncapitalist modes of production are retained unevenly within the expanding capitalist world economy, subordinated to the interests of capital, and preserved/dissolved because of them. First, such modes are said to provide cheap goods and services, which can be used for flexible subcontracting, and, more important, to drive down subsistence costs (and thus wages) of industrial workers. Second, precapitalist modes provide a cheap safety net for a reserve army of underemployed, who can be absorbed by industry during boom periods and sacked during busts.10 The Inadequacy of Destruction and Incorporation The way capitalism is supposed to link Europe to non-Europe, however, raises serious problems. Few continue to espouse the idea that the capitalist mode of production without qualification is established across the globe more or less rapidly. Even the advocates of extended transition have hardly garnered serious support in recent years. The transition, it is said, is too long to have any real meaning as a transition, and the forms of economy that have emerged in the meantime involve actual innovation and transformation — they are not placed on a straightforward continuum between precapitalism and capitalism. Problems also arise from the fact that notions of indefinite transition are virtually unfalsifiable. Finally, even if, several centuries hence, “pure” capitalism is to be realized, as John Maynard Keynes said, “in the long run we are all dead.”11 Theories of incorporation have also seen serious challenge. Long ago, both Ernesto Laclau and Robert Brenner persuasively criticized André Gunther Frank and Wallerstein’s “neo-Smithian Marxism.” The former argued that although capitalist relations of exchange had been universalized across the globe since the six-


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teenth century, capitalist relations of production were much more unevenly distributed, having a far denser presence in the core than the periphery.12 The problem, therefore, as Brenner convincingly maintained, is that since Marx had attached enormous importance to relations of production, it was far too simple to straightforwardly identify the existing world economy as capitalist. If there was no extensive commodification of labor leading to capitalist accumulation, the extraction of relative surplus value, and the self-generating revolution in the means of production, then the dynamics of Marxian capitalism could hardly be said to be present, in spite of the fact that extensive market relations had indeed developed. In this case the dynamics of the world capitalist economy remain actively misunderstood where Marxian notions of capital’s laws of motion are used to supposedly explain the system.13 This is the contradiction standing at the heart of the (self-)contradictory unity approach, which relies by definition on the erasure of dynamics supplied to the world economy by only partially capitalist relations of production. Articulation of modes-of-production analysis has also come under a withering barrage of criticism. On the one side, there are many difficulties in identifying precapitalist and capitalist modes of production as distinct spheres of activity with their own social or productive logic. Precapitalist is arguably far too tight, monolithic, and continuous a label for production that at least since the sixteenth century has been transformed in various ways through interaction with world markets, commodification, the use of wage labor, and modern social and political systems. To add to the problem, there has been considerable fuzziness over whether a narrow concept of mode of production (Lenin’s technical process of production) or a larger concept of mode of production (referring to a world-historical stage of development) is intended.14 There exists, in addition, an analytical thicket of problems regarding the meaning and forms of articulation between different modes of production. Etiologically speaking, modes-of-production analysis still does not adequately explain why capitalism does not destroy noncapitalism in the periphery. This is because even if one allows capital’s larger interest in desiring noncapitalists to subsidize industrial wages, it is still not clear how capitalism’s cheap commodities do not, nonetheless, put noncapitalists out of business. This, after all, was what transpired in the core economies. Why not in the periphery too?15 Just as urgently, why do capitalists — if they be truly such—hold back from the profits to be made by taking over and reorganizing noncapitalist production?16 Historicity, Rationality, and Progressive Politics Versions of destruction and incorporation have not only been unable to identify and explain economic transformation. The unproblematic application of Marxist theories of capitalism in the non-West has also worked to define historicity, rationality, and progressive politics in Eurocentric and problematic ways.

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Even Aijaz Ahmad’s trenchant defense of Marx on India cannot obscure the fact that Marx only granted a limited and derivative historicity to precapitalist and becoming capitalist Indian subjects.17 It is true that Marx spoke scathingly of European feudalism and the peasantry, which might imply that he was equally critical of all precapitalist formations. But this is grossly mistaken. Marx declared that all history is the history of class struggles, but for him such class struggles had not occurred in India—not to mention the rest of Asia, Africa, and precolonial Australia and the Americas. The “Asiatic mode of production” was effectively located outside of history and class struggle and involved “centuries of despotism, superstition and vegetative life.”18 In other words, for Marx, European precapitalist history was distinctive in that it contained within it the self-propelling historical dynamics given by class struggle. Marx’s scheme does not therefore simply privilege the technical processes of industrial capitalism that, say, happened to take place in the West, but an essential historicity belonging to Europe and Europe alone. As a consequence, nonEuropeans are barely considered historical subjects at all until their contact with capitalism, and they only become historical subjects in and through their acquisition of capitalist organization and activity and the beginnings of class struggle. Even hermeneutic approaches to Marx cannot fully recuperate the limited, incomplete, and derivative historicity that Marx accords here to the non-European. Small wonder, then, that even in sophisticated Marxian accounts explicitly setting out to give agency to the histories of those “without history,” non-European societies are either “penetrated, subordinated, destroyed, or absorbed.”19 Marxist narratives have long had problems with the rationality of subjects absorbed and penetrated by capitalism. Marx’s capitalist, in order to compete and boost production, qua capitalist, acts in an entrepreneurial way, reorganizing, innovating, and transforming relations of production. Analysts of the capitalist world economy, constantly faced with colonial subjects who did not apparently conform to this idealized model, were forced to give an account of the nonconformity of their subjects. In other words, the peculiarity belonged to the non-Western, the norm to the Western. Such peculiarities could easily be explained by recourse to ethnic, cultural, or psychological factors, which added up to derogations from capitalist rationality. Others attributed them to factors such as colonial rule or systemic processes of underdevelopment. These latter explanations deflected attention from individual irrationality, placing considerable emphasis on structural factors, but this deflection could only last as long as structure overwhelmed agency in the theoretical framework deployed. Thus it made for an unstable solution, a vulnerable way to save the peripheral subject from the charge of irrationality. The European sits under no such sword of Damocles. Further, where the whole point of the detailed analysis of relations of production was to derive some useful knowledge about the construction of the overall system, it is unconvincing and even circular to reinvoke the system in order to seal


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the causal account. Where the capitalist model remains normative, it continues to reproduce recalcitrant and seemingly exceptional or backward subjects. This issue surfaces with most clarity in the best work on the subject. For example, working perfectly logically within the confines of the model, Roger Owen finds himself constrained to conclude that Egypt’s nineteenth-century agricultural economy involves “capitalism without capitalists.”20 In other words, Egypt’s landowners were extensively incorporated into a capitalist world economy, but they did not revolutionize their means of production in the way that Marx predicted of capitalists. Why, then, the model demands, did these peculiar Egyptian landowners fail to behave as economically rational capitalists surely should? Owen carefully weighs various explanations, such as the conviction among landowners that the best way to exploit the soil was through peasant families bound by debts and rents to landholders, or the fact that landowners preferred pursuing an aristocratic lifestyle to acting as farmer-entrepreneurs. He ultimately explains the puzzle in terms of the notion of “retarded colonial capitalism.”21 The point here is not to dispute on its own terms Owen’s conclusions. I must also gloss over extensive debates about colonial capitalism, noting only that Marxian scholars have found it enormously difficult to produce a coherent version of a colonial mode of production.22 The point instead is, first, to notice the naturalized production of the non-European as the exception that has to be explained, a production that powerfully occludes contrasts and similarities with socioeconomic forms in other parts of the colonial world. Second, it is to note that Owen’s explanation reproduces the Egyptian subject as backward, as somehow in a temporal space anterior to that previously occupied by a European, and either on the road to becoming European, or permanently located “behind.”23 Under the sign of capitalism, history becomes singular, progressive, and judged by the European. The Marxian tradition often assumes far too much about European capitalists. As many have pointed out, capitalists do not necessarily organize relations of production according to a single model. For example, in the diplomatic wrangling that preceded the grant by Said Pasha (ruler of the Ottoman province of Egypt, 1854– 63) of the concession to build the Suez Canal to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the preeminent French capitalist and entrepreneur, the latter promised that he would use the latest machinery to dig the canal. This meant, according to de Lesseps and his promoters, not only that no forced labor would be required but also that Egyptian engineers would learn how to use dredging machines, which would lead to widespread mechanization and the more general abolition of coercion. D. Mackenzie Wallace, however, an intelligent British imperialist who found it relatively easy to identify the double-dealing of his French imperial rivals, noted in the early 1880s that “somehow, when the work began, for reasons technical or pecuniary . . . he [de Lesseps] thought it better to teach his French engineers . . . how to dig and clean canals by forced labor without machinery” and “ere long the fellaheen felt the ter-

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rible consequences.”24 The point is that the exemplary capitalist, de Lesseps, sought to accumulate through the violent and relatively inefficient extraction of what Marx called absolute surplus value. Everything depended on the particular conditions of the enterprise. In this case, an important factor was the cost of labor. Workers were so cheap — forty thousand coerced peasants living and sometimes dying in squalor and deprivation—that the provision of machines and wages did not prove cost effective.25 As Lady Duff Gordon, a British resident in Upper Egypt during the 1860s, sardonically remarked, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité must sound well to the tune of the courbash cracked upon the backs of the fellaheen!”26 Marxian theories also have difficulty with the rationality of third world workers. Marxist theories of capitalism generate in advance the paradigmatic action of the working class considered as a unified actor.27 Where these expectations are confounded, a good deal of energy goes into the explanation for such an outcome—seen as unexpected or paradoxical. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, for example, is persuasively critical of this tendency in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s important work Rethinking Working-Class History.28 The former is particularly critical of the fact that Chakrabarty falls back on culturalist explanations for the apparently exceptional behavior of his Indian workers — their personalism, propensity to violence, and so on. It is worth pointing out that again, whether the resulting explanation is cultural, psychological, or structural, Eurocentric discourse is reproduced where Marxian expectations of the working class as an actor are confounded, and recourse is had to particularities to explain the situation.29 Less remarked is the way the hegemony of Marxist models of capitalism work to negate the very possibility of non-Western progressive politics. This negation is achieved by the extraordinary power of Marx’s theory to define both the root of all social evil — the exploitation of labor by capital — and the principal means of salvation — the overthrow, first, of feudalism by the bourgeoisie and, second, of capitalism by the proletariat. The paradigmatic model of European capitalism thus contains within it a hegemonic version of the meaning of both exploitation and salvation.30 Non-European Others can only — within the terms of the model — aspire to relive these dramas, but they often fail to do so. The principal prerequisite for progressive politics, the hegemony of the capitalist bourgeoisie and the complete overthrow of the feudal or precapitalist modes of production, remains endlessly unachieved in the non-West. Hence the colonized is condemned to a perpetual “becoming,” given that capitalist development outside Europe and its settler colonies has not (and arguably will not) repeat the European trajectory. Such a becoming—in which non-European subjects are relegated to what Chakrabarty has called the waiting room of history, while the West is constituted as an actor unbound by any such constraints — may have been acceptable to those in the thrall of prior linear notions of historical progress, or to those willing to accept the imperial tutelage of the West, but where


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these assumptions are jettisoned, and where North/South relations appear primarily as power relations, patience in the waiting room is likely to fray.31 Of course Marxian activists and intellectuals — especially those outside of Western Europe — have long felt the burden of this state of becoming and have struggled against it, all the while drawing strength from the Marxian critique of capitalist modernity. Leon Trotsky was perhaps the first great figure among them. Too strong-minded to languish in the waiting room of history and shocked and impressed by the forging, in “backward” Russia, of the workers’ Soviets in 1905, Trotsky formulated his theory of “combined and uneven development,” which was intended to show that the Russian proletariat could leap over the liberal bourgeois stage of development and establish full-blown socialism in Russia in spite of the “backward capitalism” then reigning in the land. Trotsky radically asserted that capitalism was not the same everywhere and that Russian capitalism combined local conditions with imported forms of capital and social organization and would not repeat Western Europe’s trajectory because of the impact of Western Europe’s political economy on Russia. He also complicated Marxian class analysis in exciting ways and brought in the Russian state as an important historical actor.32 But for many, Trotsky’s formulations were too unorthodox in point of Marxist doctrine (although Trotsky always insisted they were not in point of Marxist method), and few theorized further the really radical point — which was the notion that capitalism was not the same everywhere—in point of relations of production and exchange and their dynamics. Trotsky’s work did not help the cause because he does not anywhere explain, and perhaps never intended to, how Marx misconstrued the dynamics of capital and relations of production. Trotsky also retained a focus on the proletariat and its socialism as the sole carrier of salvation, used extensively the language of backward and advanced, as if to imply the existence of some inherent, progressive direction in which secular history rode, and retained a dismissive tone regarding non-European social organization. His Russian capitalism therefore remained a particularity, a variation on a universal model, and those who either did not know of, or were unconvinced by Trotsky’s formulations, were likely to return to the more hegemonic Marxist account of capitalist world-historical transformation, with all its implications for historicity, rationality, and progressive change. Even after Trotsky, those working in the Marxist tradition are constrained to indicate that in the non-West, the transition to full-blown capitalism remains incomplete, not only in point of economic relations, narrowly conceived, but also in point of class formation. Given this incompleteness, and the burden of salvation placed on the bourgeoisie and the proletariat by Marx, the struggle for progress is perceived as hampered and misshapen where these two fundamental classes do not match their modular, European counterparts.33 This constitutes another key way in which the non-West becomes robbed of progressive agency. But it is not plausible to endow

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the bourgeoisie with a transhistorical mission, tearing it from the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, where the battle against the ancien régime was fought by diverse groups and determined by diverse alliances, forms of statemaking, empire-building political struggle, culture, and social change. It is not convincing, as E. P. Thompson argued long ago, to rip a class — as if it were an object preconstituted and separable from the multitude of struggles and political and social relations in which it is embedded — from its historical context and expect it to play the same role in other social contexts. In any case, the Marxian account arguably idealizes the bourgeoisie of 1789 – 1848. Whether or not this class led the attack on the ancien régime, it simultaneously presided over the making of empire and its racially inferior “savages.” A vast literature has now grown up on the question of slavery and its relationship to capitalism, but C. L. R. James provided one of the first systematic accounts of how slavery was integral to the forms of accumulation organized by the French bourgeoisie and their allies in the Caribbean during the later eighteenth century. As James writes: “In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two-thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age. . . . The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves.”34 The French bourgeoisie held responsibility in large measure both for this slavery and for preventing the extension of the “Rights of Man” to slaves in the French Assembly, as James details. This class, in other words, was not only liberal and rational; it also consisted of slave owners and racists. This history — now quite extensively recognized35— is constantly erased in models hankering for a progressive bourgeoisie under full capitalist development in order to deliver “backward” societies from the mire of feudalism. Where the success and possibility of progressive politics rests on the development of the proletariat, again the non-West and its underdeveloped and insufficiently conscious working class condemns non-Europe to a lack and a deviancy in progressive politics. In third world contexts, where historians note again and again the “large group of the population which is simultaneously and ambiguously ‘semiproletariat’ and ‘semipeasant’ ” and the “large numbers of individuals . . . intermittently employed performing services or in small workshops employing a handful of workers and apprentices” and others simultaneously self-employed or employees, there is no easy way through theories of capitalism to link such groups to progressive politics.36 Ken Post’s “scuffling” petty bourgeoisie, for example, remains “a transition class,” and his peasants and workers suffer a “crucial [political] inhibition” because of “backward capitalism” and “retarded and uneven development” in Jamaica of the 1930s.37 Even where uneven development is explicitly avowed, therefore, shackles are placed on the ability of non-Western subjects to play a progressive role in world-


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historical transformation.38 Maoist socialism certainly involved the idea that the task of establishing socialism could fall to the peasantry. This program, however, tends to retain the form and goal of Marxism, while merely shifting the dramatis personae. It has not been made clear, moreover, how this formulation is adequately linked to actual transformation in the dynamics of relations of production. In addition, while many have seen the peasantry as a site for revolutionary activity, just as many have condemned them in more orthodox Marxist terms.39 Thus the cast of villains and heroes in third world social formations is in large measure derivative of the dramas already theorized in nineteenth-century Europe. The imperialists and feudalists so castigated in third world Marxism may initially appear to be non-Europeans who add some new form of antiprogressivism, some new form of historical agency (albeit negative), to the theater of change. But this is often not the case. The non-European is not even granted the dubious (but actually important) privilege of owning this negative agency.40 The feudalist only wears the clothes of, say, an Indian zamindar. In substance, he is a villain plucked from a view of eighteenth-century Europe: his role is to retard “proper” capitalist development and to stymie the triumph of the liberal bourgeoisie. Likewise, the imperialist (who is only a capitalist striding on the world stage anyway) distorts and blocks normal, read European, capitalist development. He puts a break on the right and proper course of history — that pioneered by Europe.41 In these ways, both non-European progressivism and antiprogressivism are constituted as derivative on the one side, and not fully formed on the other. Where to Jump? To emphasize the inadequacies of destruction and incorporation, and the Eurocentrism implicit in the Marxian constitution of historicity, rationality, and progressive politics, is to problematize the account that capitalism gives of relations between Europe and non-Europe. But where to go from here? Not, I argue, by abandoning tout court the material social process and adopting a version of idealism. Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s brilliant interrogation of Marxist essentialism and economism ends with a position that risks just such idealism. They close by relinquishing wholesale the effectiveness of relations of production and exchange, and plunge into a process of articulation defined by ideology and politics. Instead of trying to reconnect forms of capitalism to power/culture (and thereby transform the former), they reduce the former to the latter.42 Here we have no genuine response to Raymond Williams’s old challenge. Williams wanted to break not only with a mechanical, base/superstructure model and accompanying notions of reflection but also with any method that created categorical distinctions between the “material social process,” on the one side, and “language” on the other. He sought to see “language and signification as indissoluble elements of the material social

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process itself, involved all the time in both production and reproduction.”43 Laclau and Mouffe, and other poststructuralists besides, have too regularly taken the social process — including relations of production and exchange — as entirely soluble within language and signification.44 Others, free of linguistic idealism, who explore the importance of culture in empire, often hold capitalism and /or conquest in the background, while foregrounding culture. The weakness here, however, is that often, even when culture is said to be “imbricated both in the means and the ends of colonial conquest,” the resulting scholarship, for all the new arenas it has opened, does not fundamentally break down the prior categories of capitalism and /or conquest in ways that would show exactly what imbrication means.45 In other words, these categories linger to some degree unscathed. And yet they remain paradoxically integral because they work to seal the causal account where doubts arise over the explanatory efficacy of culture in imperialism. Chakrabarty’s suggestive attempt to escape developmentalism and historicism in Provincializing Europe builds on aspects of Marx’s thought to develop two historical imaginaries: History 1 and History 2. History 1 is the analytic and critical history of the reproduction of the life process of capital, contains within it the juridically equal subject of Enlightenment thought, and is written under the sign of Marx. History 2 is hermeneutic, multiple, and lovingly details the particularities of more affective and diverse histories of belonging, of the ways in which different groups “world” and dwell within political modernity. History 2 is written under the sign of Heidegger. These histories do not remain separate. History 2 is either oppositional or neutral to History 1 and constantly interrupts the latter’s totalizing narrative thrust, modifying it and thereby giving grounds for claims of historical difference.46 I cannot give the critique here that Chakrabarty’s discussion deserves. I simply note that he does not get to the radical point in which I am interested, which is to think of capital itself in a more plural way. Chakrabarty instead appears to retain the singularity, universality, and inevitability of the history posited by capital, and still, in spite of noting the possibilities of interruption and modification, holds culture and capital apart, a fact betrayed in the very terms modification and interruption. As he argues, History 1 is “the universal and necessary history posited by the logic of capital.”47 The “self-realization of capital,” writes Chakrabarty, is modified by History 2s. But this modification does not, apparently, impugn History 1’s singular, necessary, and universal form, a form indicated in the teleological formulation selfrealization itself, as if capital had a mission and a direction over and above the political, economic, and social forms in which it is arguably embedded.48 In fact, it is not clear how precisely History 1 is modified by History 2, given that the former remains universal and necessary. Chakrabarty adds culture to Marx, but he does not radicalize or disaggregate Marx’s own concepts of the life process of capital, which remain


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universal and singular. The only real room for plurality, in fact, inheres in struggles to belong and to gain a sense of community, but not, it seems, in the history of capital. Timothy Mitchell’s recent book, Rule of Experts— which departs from the key premise that poststructuralism has failed to critique the category of the economy—grasps the essence of the problem and points to new directions. He writes: The picture of rural Egypt that emerges was not a system of small commodity producers incorporated into a larger capitalist economy. Nor, however, was there a separate noncapitalist sector in articulation with a market system. Rather, the so-called capitalist agriculture encouraged by the free market reforms included and depended upon a far wider range of practices that do not fit with any common definition of the essential nature of capitalism. These apparently noncapitalist elements were so numerous and so central that they shaped the outcome of the reforms.49

Thus Mitchell makes the key move, impossible under the usual analysis indebted to the concept of capitalism: he grants a range of apparently noncapitalist practices historical agency in political-economic transformation. Such practices are thus not figured as simply penetrated and destroyed by capitalism, but as active, shaping elements, characteristic, moreover, of “what is called advanced capitalism just as much as they are of situations labeled transitional.”50 Such a position has dramatic ramifications since, given the “dependence of so-called capitalist arrangements on such a multitude of seemingly noncapitalist logics . . . [such] logics no longer deserve the label of noncapitalist. But once we introduce them into the dynamic of capital, any attempt to attribute an essence to capitalism has to be abandoned.”51 In short, once putatively noncapitalist agency is established, the concept of capitalism is threatened with some form of pluralization. Only such pluralization, arguably, can make the “becoming capitalist” or the “noncapitalist” become historical. In fact, the Eurocentrism, developmentalism, and economism of Marxian theories of capitalism can be tackled by a strategy that pluralizes notions of capitalist activity and embeds such activities firmly within state, society, and culture, simultaneously demoting them (in the eyes of orthodox Marxists) and promoting them (from their lack of status in cultural determinism). A small subset of this strategy at a fairly low level of theoretical abstraction is offered in the remaining pages. That is, I will not produce new theory, but draw attention instead to suggestive historical/sociological arguments that help tell a more plural story about capitalist activity, the growth of the market, multiple forms of production and exploitation, and changing worlds of labor. The aim is thus to bolster a loose historical framework (not a grand theory of world-historic transformation) in which the dynamics of capitalist activity are not exactly as they are often imagined in the Marx-

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ian tradition: they are not given in advance; they do not tend inevitably in a progressive direction; they do not simply begin in Europe and then spread to the rest of the world; and they do not necessarily have a special priority in defining class structure, the whole of a society, or an historical epoch and its progressive politics. Defining Capital and Labor Generously A first step is to draw attention to work that has successfully given generous definitions of capital and labor. Charles Tilly defines capital “generously” as “including any tangible mobile resources, and enforceable claims on such resources.”52 Here, capitalists are those who “specialize in the accumulation, purchase, and sale of capital. They occupy the realm of exploitation, where the relations of production and exchange themselves yield surpluses, and capitalists capture them.” Such capitalists have existed for millennia, mostly as merchants and financiers who did not directly control the organization of production. In this formulation, those capitalists who, after 1500, started to seize “control of production” were simply another group of capitalists.53 Even after their appearance, numerous capitalists continued to accumulate capital without directly organizing relations of production —financiers, merchants, petty creditors, landlords, landowners of various kinds, heads of households, slave owners, and so on. Labor may also be defined more expansively. Labor is transformative work and its product accumulates to become capital. Those who labor provide a surplus extracted by the capitalist, broadly defined. Labor not only refers, therefore, to Marx’s cloth-cap proletariat but also to the great variety of what some (attempting to retain a Marxian framework) have called “disguised wage labor”: women involved in putting-out networks in connection with merchants, petty crafts or service workers on contract, landless agricultural laborers, seasonal workers, migrants, and peasant workers retaining links to means of subsistence through ties to village and kin. Smallholders whose work is locked into creditor and/or merchant accumulation can also be considered labor. Slaves are labor too, in as much as their output provides a surplus seized by the capitalist (as defined above). Included also are other forms of coercion-intensive work—degrees of unfree labor—indentured labor, contract slavery, forced labor, and so on. Extending the meaning of the word labor in this way, hardly an original move (whether theorized or not), does far more justice to the varieties of labor found across modern empires.54 Commodities and Markets Capitalists in the broad sense—those who specialize in the purchase, sale, and accumulation of capital — greatly extend their field of activity as commodities and market relations are more extensively distributed in society. As property rights are more firmly entrenched, as calculability and quantification deepen, and as diverse groups—


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from peasants growing olives for cash in Ottoman Palestine, to feudal lords purchasing trinkets in Adam Smith’s early modern Britain — engage in or stimulate trade in exchange values rather than use values, so the commodity form and market relations are established. The market results from the activities of all kinds of capitalists (not just Marxian capitalists or Europeans), as well as from state officials (especially those starting to extract taxes in coin), consumers, and others. Property rights result from state formation and social struggle, as well as from the actions of diverse capitalists (broadly defined). Forms of calculation and quantification are promoted by capitalists of various kinds and by the growth of modern bureaucracies, especially through what James C. Scott calls the creation of “state simplifications,”55 which in turn result in part from popular struggle.56 Markets themselves are always segmented and transformed by empires, commercial agreements, monopolies, and subsidies. The market in turn does not automatically generate specifically Marxian capitalist relations of production in which capitalists constantly revolutionize the means of production. As has long been pointed out, commerce by itself may have transformative or preservative effects on relations of production. In other words, an important transformation — the very long, drawn-out process of commodification — was not produced by the sudden appearance of an especially Marxist breed of industrial capitalists. As historians have been insisting for decades, the industrial “revolution” was a much more drawn-out, complex, and less dramatic affair than was once believed.57 Most important for my purposes here, it is too simple to say that Europe imposed the market and the commodity form on the rest of the world. The Marxian image of the European battering down all Chinese walls grants far too much power to the apparently indefatigable European and ignores the often vigorous activity of actors outside Europe. The market was one of the things that the rest of the world both made by itself and appropriated from Europe.58 Scholars have been explaining for years that market features — merchant activity, market relations, de facto property rights, wage labor, consumption patterns, stratification based on property, and so on in non-Western societies have been consistently downplayed or underestimated.59 An important measure of the importance of non-European agency here is the fact that markets were appropriated by capitalists, state actors, and others outside the West—while much else that was Western was rejected. To pick a small but telling example: the Muslims, Jews, and most of the Christians of Ottoman Palestine rejected the gospel of Scottish Christian missionaries, in spite of the resources and forms of persuasion brought to bear on them over decades during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.60 But as Beshara Doumani has shown, this same population was quick to engage in market relations with French and British merchants, an engagement that propelled integration.61 World economic integration was thus not simply imposed by Marxian capitalists on a passive non-Europe.62 Certainly vast

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numbers of non-Europeans were driven from their livelihoods by the extension of the market, but this kind of violence was felt in Europe as well as beyond, whether among the hand-loom weavers of England or the pearl-divers of Kuwait.63 And criticism of the market was not the special preserve of either the European or the nonEuropean — hence the writings of figures as diverse as D. H. Lawrence and Mahatma Gandhi, for example. Criticism, conflict, and social crisis are common to and central in the making and transforming of the market, which will continue to be contested, incomplete, and reversible. Multiple Regimes of Production and Exploitation The more market relations were extended and deepened, the wider the field of social activity for capitalists (broadly defined), the greater their significance within society as a whole, and the more extensive the reordering of social relations by the regimes of accumulation over which they have presided. But these reorderings, stimulating and stimulated in part by the market, do not all take the same form; they do not necessarily progress in the same direction. They do not involve a simple transition to wage labor; they do not strip all workers of their access to the means of subsistence; they do not necessarily involve continuous increases in productivity per head; and they do not all involve intensive factor accumulation and heavy mechanization (many involve hand technology). As many have pointed out, the factory model has not taken over production, and exploitation has taken many forms—from plunder to the extraction of “absolute surplus value” to sweating to outworking to self-exploitation to labor squeezing to superexploitation to different degrees of unfree labor to slavery and so on.64 In short, multiple regimes of production and exploitation have been established and have depended for their construction not only on the commodity form but also on war making, the state, empire building, political struggle, citizenship, capital/labor relations, unionization, racism, gender, and so on.65 Allow an illustration of how some elements of this variety can be usefully depicted: Sugata Bose’s survey of the different ways in which, since the eighteenth century in India, assorted claimants to the rural surplus aimed to “hold down . . . the share of labor [in this case, working peasants] in the total social product.”66 Bose aimed to “lay the groundwork for alternative global models of transition whose nuances have been inadequately grasped by models resting for the most part on [an idealized version of] the European historical experience” (2–3). He aimed to escape the “teleological assumptions underlying . . . studies of capitalist development in agriculture.” As Bose argues, “historical evidence from colonial India belies any notion of unilinear progression, or even drift, towards the quintessence of agrarian capitalism.” And Bose rightly rejects the alternative in which a capitalist world market “skimmed cash crops off a stagnant agrarian base” (42).


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On this basis, Bose elucidates the emergence of “a number of significant and durable forms of the relationship between production and the market” (41– 42), involving several different ways in which production is reorganized as markets become more extensive and several different forms of exploitation. I will mention two such ways here. One is subsistence commercialization, which took place among smallholding jute producers in east Bengal in the late nineteenth century. It involved “poor peasants driven by their concerns of securing basic subsistence in a context of demographic and social pressures . . . [turning] to the cultivation of high-value and labor-intensive cash crops in an attempt to eke out a larger gross income from their diminishing smallholdings.” Under these conditions, “moneylending landlords and traders emerged as major claimants of the peasants’ surplus,” deploying “a wide array of methods [involving prices, rents and credit] . . . to short-change the jute-growing peasant” (58). Bose called a second form dependent commercialization, established among indigo producers in West Bengal in the 1800s. It involved “intrusive foreign merchant capital which brings the agricultural production process firmly under its sway but stops short of capitalist accumulation and consolidation of land” (41– 42). Here the peasant was reduced through debt on advances to a condition “little better than a bond-slave,” especially where indebtedness became actually heritable in a widespread fashion (47).67 Here, then, are two “durable forms” not necessarily evolving in a direction given in advance and involving particular ways in which production was organized and surplus extracted. The constitution of these different regimes of production and exploitation owed to a number of political, social, and economic factors, including British rule. The latter, because central to colonialism, Bose argues, was the strengthening of “individual rights of property while depriving and denying individual rights as citizens.”68 On the one hand, therefore, colonialism fostered the rule of the market, but on the other, it denied peasants the citizens’ rights they might have used to break down the various violent, coercive, and destructive forms of exploitation they faced (which in part resulted from market forces). Certainly peasants, according to Bose, had little recourse against a labor process that from the eighteenth century to the present utilized “the unpaid and underpaid work of family labour.”69 The intense racism of English officials in India probably also diminished peasant success in protesting their crushing exploitation. Further, and as Alice Conklin argues for French West Africa “the racist belief that Africans were inherently lazy and unable to think for themselves was too ingrained to ever make free labor the only option.” 70 Labor/Capital Relations How, more precisely, however, are productive regimes transformed and (re)produced? As noted, the dynamics of market emergence, and of multiple regimes of production and exploitation, are not solely given (as in many strands of Marxism) by

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the relations of production themselves; such economic activities are firmly embedded within and internally constituted by empire, state, society, and culture. They do not comprise a fully distinctive sphere of social activity with their own, selfcontained history and dynamics. My aim in this section is to illustrate just one possibility of how this constitution might work. I aim to link wider sets of social relations to the organization of production by focusing on the importance of labor/capital relations: the question of how and on what terms labor is made available to capital for exploitation. The formulation labor/capital relations may sound quintessentially Marxist, but in fact, surprisingly perhaps, this question is dealt with unsatisfactorily in much Marxism. In Marx’s work, intolerable alienation under capitalism reduces commodified labor to a machinelike bundle of muscles, nerves, and energy, bought and sold as so many enumerated quotients of labor power, and thoroughly subordinated to factory discipline.71 As Chakrabarty has rightly pointed out, the “insubordination”— note Marx’s use of this apolitical term — of “living labor” in Marx springs from the individual worker’s capacity to will, rooted not in workers’ collective history, organization, politics, or culture, but in a vitalist and physiological conception of “the many-sided play of muscles.”72 Indeed, this wrestling between capitalist and worker is fundamental to the “structural being of capital” as it propels capitalists to replace labor with machinery. No wonder that those writing labor history under the sign of Marx locate the sources of worker resistance (as opposed to mere insubordination) not within the epoch of capitalism, but within the twin external imaginaries of precapitalist moral economy and/or postcapitalist socialist utopia. The argument here, however, is that this analysis grievously underestimates the sources and forms of worker resistance under and within a more plurally conceived capitalism. What is missed is the fact that “labour-power differs from the other necessary elements of production in that the capitalist must do more than simply purchase it; he must also make it produce labour.”73 There is a gap between the existence of labor power as a commodity and the active cooperation of workers. As Michael Burawoy has it, “Marx had no place in his theory of the labor process for the organization of consent, for the necessity to elicit a willingness to cooperate in the translation of labor power into labor.”74 The fact that the capitalist must, in fact, “exercise his domination at the very heart of the labour process,”75 irreducibly connects living labor — beyond its commodification — to history, collectivity, politics, gender, citizenship, race, culture, and the like. Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly write that “workers and employers engage in bargaining out the terms of work, using . . . material and organizational resources . . . [and drawing] on previously existing social relations. . . . They interact within strong limits set by their shared culture and by the previous history of the productive organization at hand.”76 In short, the fact that the action and dynamics of labor cannot be reduced to the language and “science” of


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economism, even under capitalism, delineates one area (among others) where the constitution of productive relations and exploitation simultaneously involves economy, society, and polity. All exploitation is therefore what Paul Sweezy called “social” exploitation.77 This understanding of labor has far-reaching implications. As Laclau and Mouffe put it, “The evolution of the productive forces becomes unintelligible if this need of the capitalist to exercise his domination at the very heart of the labour process is not understood.”78 In other words, labor’s relative ability to bargain out the terms of work, and its resistance to full commodification, impacts regimes of production and exploitation. Patrick Heller captures the point: “The social conditions under which labor is made available to the market . . . directly shape the logic of surplus extraction and hence accumulation.”79 There is a labor history, in this sense, behind all the varieties of work. I illustrate this point here by considering its relevance to relative rates of productivity-raising mechanization. As economists since David Ricardo have noted, hands are in constant competition with the machine. Where workers can produce much more cheaply than machines, capitalists will—all other things being equal— attempt to employ the former.80 Hence, as is commonly observed, where cheap, unprotected labor is extensively available, the pressure on capitalists to engage in productivity-raising mechanization is reduced. Witness this logic at work in sugarcane cutting processes in South Gujarat, India, in the 1970s: Labour is so cheap that for the time being the need to mechanise is slight. Interestingly enough, the factory managers are thoroughly abreast of the newest technological developments in other sugarcane producing countries. The Chairman of factory X and the manager of factory Y both gained their degree in agronomy in the USA. . . . The management of both the factories above took part in study trips during recent years. . . . On one of his most recent journeys the manager saw a harvester in operation that has a capacity of 80 tons an hour. He waxes enthusiastic about it but at the same time realistically states that the very low cost of labour prevents the use of such machines in the campaign in South Gujarat.81

As elsewhere, labor competes with the machine and directly impacts rates of mechanization in Gujarat. This operates decisively even where capitalist-entrepreneurial acumen is not impugned. In other words, this is not a case of capitalism without capitalists, but just another regime of production and exploitation, influenced in part by the cheapness of labor. The key point here, however, is that labor is not cheap in Gujarat simply by nature, or because of the inexorable workings of capitalism, narrowly conceived. Jan Breman showed how capital/labor relations (linked to state and society) helped con-

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stitute this regime of crushing exploitation. Capitalists had to dominate over their labor force. This domination involved a number of elements. First, the settlement of accounts only at the end of the season meant that workers were disciplined through fear of being sent away prior to payment. Second, the fact that the companies sought out workers who were migrants from a far poorer region racked by period crises of subsistence increased workers’ desperation and facilitated their “anonymous and ruthless treatment.” Third, managers held ingrained conceptions of the cane cutters as “inferior people” who could be treated as animals without much compunction. Fourth, local elites and provincial and central governments professed ignorance and maintained a noninterventionist stance. Finally, the cane cutters were weak in organizational and political terms.82 These factors therefore involved a regime (not simply the less power-laden-sounding organization) and worked to constitute from the inside relations of production in cane cutting, diminishing rates of innovation. They did not articulate from an external point to an economic base, but were internally constitutive of the dynamics of capitalist activity, broadly defined.83 Conclusion The great value of the Marxist tradition for radical and anti-imperialist critique is that by delving into the workings of capitalism, it has unmasked European claims to altruism, liberalism, and civilization. Such demystification has inspired radicals from C. L. R. James to Ali Shariati. Nonetheless, this article has argued that at a more fundamental level, the Marxian selective tradition ultimately bestows on Europe the burden of world-historical salvation by depicting a singular capitalism with an inbuilt progressive history spreading from Europe to non-Europe, which only secures itself through the systematic erasure of non-European (mapped onto noncapitalist) historical agency. Marxian definitions of historicity, rationality, and progressive politics unjustifiably privilege an idealized European model, one that cannot explain or capture what appears as the complexity of world-historical transformation. Radical history, in other words, must try to think beyond such a nineteenth-century Eurocentric formulation. The foregoing has sought to give some illustrations of ways of historical thinking better able to capture such variety and to tackle Eurocentrism and economism without introducing an excessive cultural determinism. Principally, I have argued for the fruitfulness of more generous definitions of capital and labor, of a more plural and less economistic conception of the construction of the world market, and a nonteleological conception of the emergence and transformation of multiple regimes of production and exploitation. The idea that such regimes are not simply the product of the internal workings of relations of production and exchange but are simultaneously shaped by forms of domination, accommodation, and resistance at the site of capital/labor relations, analytically locates state, society, and culture as interior to


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(and not either reflecting, mediating, or even shaping from the outside) relations of production and exchange. This means that capitalist activity is always shaped and transformed by social relations more broadly conceived. It has no given, inherent, or missionary power to remake those relations, but is heavily embedded. In Chakrabarty’s terms, History 2 is internal to History 1 and remakes and constitutes the latter from the inside. This gesture works to root the dynamics of the world economy within the social, political, and economic relations of the whole, rather than granting historicity to a West that then spreads out and confers historicity on a nonWest. It indicates that those seeking to explain the concentration of power in the global North must look to the dynamics of more plural notions of capital and to forms of social and political organization beyond the economy, narrowly conceived. It suggests that one must think of North/South relations not in terms of temporality (one being ahead of the other), but in terms of power. And in as much as capital/ labor relations are influenced by the history, organization, networks, activism, and culture of workers themselves, this approach underlines—even (and perhaps especially) after the crisis in Marxism — the seminal importance of diverse histories of labor. Notes 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

Raymond Williams, “Selections from Marxism and Literature,” in Culture/Power/History, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 601–2. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27; emphasis added. Timothy Mitchell makes this point: “The power of what we call capitalism rests increasingly on its ability to portray itself as a unique and universal form, on reproducing a view of history and of economics in which the market is the universal system, constituted and propelled forward by the power of its own interior logic.” Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 271. As Eric Wolf puts it, merchants “were drawn—rapidly and irresistibly—into the realm of production” (268). “Money-as-capital accomplished what money-begetting money had been unable to achieve: the capacity to affect and regulate the quantity and quality of social labour embodied in commodities” (305). Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (1982; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review, no. 104 (1977): 25. Marx himself noted that in certain cases the “work of dissolution proceeds very gradually. And still more slowly in China, where it is not reinforced by direct political power.” Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967), vol. 3: 333–34. “The satellites remain underdeveloped for lack of access to their own surplus and as a consequence of the same polarization and exploitative contradictions which the metropolis introduces and maintains in the satellite’s domestic structure.” André Gunther Frank,

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.


Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 9. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For example, Hamza Alavi, “The Structure of Peripheral Capitalism,” in Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies,” ed. Alavi and Teodor Shanin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 172–94. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (1972; London: Verso, 1978); Pierre-Philippe Rey, Les alliances de classes (Class Alliances) (Paris: François Maspero, 1973); Claude Meillasoux, Maidens, Meal, and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community, trans. Felicity Edholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Harold Wolpe, ed., The Articulation of Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980). A useful review is Aidan Foster-Carter, “The Modes of Production Controversy,” New Left Review, no. 107 (1978): 47–78. John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1923), 80. Ernesto Laclau, “Feudalism and Capitalism in Latin America,” New Left Review, no. 67 (1971): 19–38; Brenner, “Origins of Capitalist Development.” Asking tentatively if “the laws of motion of capital are not, within certain limits, compatible with ‘barbarous forms of labour’” is insufficient and too bound to the economism of “laws of motion.” Jairus Banaji, “Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History,” Capital and Class 3 (1977): 12. For a useful discussion see ibid., 4–12. Here the fact that the Marxist analysis of capitalism involves assumptions about attitudes, social structure, the direction of transformation, and progressive politics is never more exposed and vulnerable. Here the danger is of what Hamza Alavi has called “a voluntarist conception of the intentions and purposes of capitalism.” Alavi in “Structure of Peripheral Capitalism,” 189. As Pierre-Philippe Rey noted: “Let us cease to reproach capitalism with the one crime that it has not committed, that it could not think of committing. . . . all the bourgeoisies of the world burn with desire to develop the ‘underdeveloped’ countries.” Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 233. Rey ultimately defended modes-of-production analysis on the basis of sociopolitical factors, an important departure from economism. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1994). Quoted in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 22–23. Wolf, People without History, 23. As Talal Asad noted of Eric Wolf’s work, “Is this [Wolf’s book] essentially a history of the origin and growth of world capitalism, or of the societies affected by it?” (595). Asad was raising the question of the extent to which a history based on capitalism in fact erased non-European histories. But Asad explicitly ducked the next step, which was to interrogate the concept of capitalism itself. Talal Asad, “Are There Histories of Peoples without Europe? A Review Article,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29 (1987): 594–607. Roger Owen, “The Development of Agricultural Production in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: Capitalism of What Type?” in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900: Studies in Economic and Social History, ed. A. L. Udovitch (Princeton, NJ: Darwin, 1981), 537. Ibid.


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22. See, for example, Nazih N. Ayubi, Over-stating the Arab State: Politics and Society in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1995), 91–99. 23. Owen’s explanation reproduces what Chakrabarty criticizes as historicism. See Provincializing Europe, 6–16, 22–23. 24. D. Mackenzie Wallace, Egypt and the Egyptian Question (London: Macmillan, 1883), 309–10. 25. Gyan Prakash homogenizes too much where he asserts that the myth of the freedom of “free wage-labor” is indissolubly linked to a Western hegemonic discourse. Western hegemony did not rely in any inherent way on free wage labor (as Marxists would insist), but was happy to use slavery and/or forced labor where conditions permitted. Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xi–xii. 26. Lady Duff Gordon, Letters from Egypt (1862–1869) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 89. The British had used much forced labor in the construction of the CairoAlexandria railway in the early 1850s. 27. Such problems are extensively discussed in Zachary Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 28. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Rajnarayan Chandavarkar usefully avoids a cultural turn and instead weaves together the state, the economy, neighborhood politics, class, and discourse in complex ways in his Imperial Power and Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1. Chakrabarty has recognized these problems in his own work. See Provincializing Europe, 91–92. 29. The model does not even map very well onto European history, as historians of Europe have long argued. For example, “skilled artisans, not workers in the new factory industries, dominated labor movements during the first decades of industrialization.” William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 1. 30. The objection that Marxists have long since abandoned a narrow meaning of the term exploitation is not persuasive. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s discussion of how “the base of exploitation” is “enlarged” in ever more complex ways and transformed capitalism fails to specify if there is anything genuinely new in the concept of exploitation implied. Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1972), 10. 31. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 8. 32. See Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934); Leon Trotsky, 1905, trans. Anya Bostock (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972); Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978). 33. Numerous authors expect the bourgeoisie to perform a certain world-historic role given in advance by Marxian theory (for example, Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 43–48). Even more markedly, see Ranajit Guha’s inquiry, premised on the idea of the “failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation” defined against the bourgeoisie’s putative success in this realm in Europe. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), xii. Guha’s debt to a Marxist bourgeoisie model is vivid. Hence his remarks on the misshapen nature of Indian liberalism and the “rather peculiar condition of its development within colonial power

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34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.


relations,” which meant that perhaps it did “indeed belong to an ideological and cultural category altogether distinct from its Western prototype” (116–18; emphasis added). C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1963). The book first appeared in 1938. Political scientists and postcolonial theorists have successfully argued that bourgeoisies are by no means consistently liberal or democratic across the world. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). For a useful recent discussion, see Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden, eds., “‘Peripheral’ Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization,” International Review of Social History, supplement 4.41 (1996): 2. Ken Post, Arise Ye Starvelings: The Jamaican Labour Rebellion of 1938 and Its Aftermath (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), 107, 472. As Chakrabarty reminds us, theories of uneven development “all retain elements of historicism in the direction of their thought.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 12. Vague references to the fact that Marx expected the capitalist mode of production to show “infinite variations and gradations in appearance” are too superficial. Wolf, People without History, 302–3. Mao himself condemned aspects of parochial peasant consciousness. See Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 279. Guha depicts peasants as exhibiting a “somewhat inchoate and naïve state of consciousness” (10–11). See also 19, 28, 50, 170. Guha even refers to the “inertia of an age-old pre-capitalist culture” (335). In Provincializing Europe, 13–15, Chakrabarty notes the same problems in Guha’s work. The idea that Europe is the root of all evil has been rightly condemned as “inverted European narcissism.” Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, eds., Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 3. For example, Mahmud Hussein, Class Conflict in Egypt, 1945–1970 (1968; New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Williams, “Selections,” 593–95. See Mitchell’s homologous discussion of the way the category of the economy has remained unscathed in much poststructuralist critique. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 3. Nicholas B. Dirks, Colonialism and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 3–4. See also the rich and suggestive work of Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 18, 30, 50–51, 63–67, 70–71, 250, 254. Ibid., 250. Chakrabarty’s illustration of capitalist relations of production remains rooted in the rather hoary imaginary of the factory (55–57). Ibid., 71. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 270; emphasis added. Ibid., 271.


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51. Ibid. 52. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States A.D. 990–1990 (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1990), 17. 53. Ibid. 54. For a useful volume, see Ray Bromley and Chris Gerry, eds., Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 1979). It may be objected that this definition of labor takes all the analytical and explanatory muscle out of Marx’s formulations, but this is precisely the point—one aimed not simply at providing a catchall terminology but at clearing the ground for alternative foci. 55. That is, “a state’s attempt to make a society legible” to keep order, tax, and conscript. Scott notes “the creation of permanent last names, the standardization of weights and measures, the establishment of cadastral surveys and population registers, the invention of freehold tenure,” and so on. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–3. 56. Scott examines how “every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations” involving “struggles between aristocrats, clergy, merchants, artisans and serfs.” Ibid., 27. 57. For example, N. F. R. Crafts challenged the theory of a sudden take-off. N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985). Or see Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985). 58. This is to abandon the idea that the spread of capitalism involved something like Michael Taussig’s titanic and monolithic struggle between societies based on exchange value and those based on use value. See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). It is instead to suggest that the power of capitalism, broadly defined, rested precisely on the fact that exchange-value forms were actively appropriated in so many parts of the globe. 59. The scholarship on this regarding the Ottoman Empire is extensive. See, for example, Halil Inalcik, “Capital Formation in the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 97–140; Ibrahim Metin Kunt, “Dervis Mehmed Pasa, Vezir and Entrepreneur: A Study in Ottoman Political-Economic Theory and Practice,” Turcica 9 (1977): 197–214; Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 (1979; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa, 1600–1700 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1988); Kenneth Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Nelly Hanna, Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and Times of Isma’il Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 60. Michael Marten, “Attempting to Bring the Gospel Home: Scottish Presbyterian Churches’ Missionary Efforts to the Christians, Jews, and Muslims of Palestine, 1839–1917” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2003). 61. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine. 62. Those such as Gyan Prakash, who continue to claim that the extension of the “rule of commodities and markets” was a matter of the universalization of capitalism, are therefore making an important Eurocentric slippage and retain a homogenizing understanding of

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63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.


capitalism. Gyan Prakash, “Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Discourse of Freedom,” in Amin and van der Linden, “Peripheral Labour,” 9–25. Nels Johnson, “Ahmad: A Kuwaiti Pearl Diver,” in Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 91–100. See, for example, Colin A. Palmer, ed., The Worlds of Unfree Labour: From Indentured Servitude to Slavery (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 1998). Chris Allen and Gavin Williams, “Peasants, Poverty, and Patrons,” in Sociology of “Developing Societies”: Sub-Saharan Africa, ed. Allen and Williams (London: Macmillan, 1982), 67–68. Sugata Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 112. Marx noted that where moneylending intersected with peasant agriculture, “the producer pays the capitalist his surplus labour in the form of interest.” Quoted in Banaji, “Modes of Production,” 36. Debt peonage resulting in something close to slavery emerged in many parts of the world, for example, in geographically isolated and unindustrialized areas in the southeast of Mexico during the late nineteenth century. Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974): 38–39. Bose, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital, 142. Ibid., 110. Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 244. See, for example, where Marx writes that “it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water, steam could just as well take man’s place.” Quoted in Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 57. Ibid., 57, 60. “The ‘worker,’” notes Chakrabarty, “is an abstract and collective subject by its very constitution” and is formed, in Marx’s words “out of the combination of a number of individual specialized workers” being “the item of machinery . . . characteristic of the manufacturing period” (emphasis added) (60). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Strategy, 78. Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 26–27. Ibid., 78. Chris Tilly and Charles Tilly, Work under Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1998), 19. Paul M. Sweezy, “Center, Periphery, and the Crisis of the System,” in Alavi and Shanin, Introduction to the Sociology of “Developing Societies,” 210–17. Sweezy defines such exploitation in contrast to the strictly Marxian relative surplus value extraction, noting that it involves workers in the periphery “exploited directly and indirectly by landlords, traders, and usurers” (213–14). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Strategy, 78. Charles Sabel has given a useful reading of how to make transformations in work organization intelligible in terms of political and shop-floor struggles. Charles F. Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Patrick Heller, The Labor of Development: Workers and the Transformation of Capitalism in Kerala, India (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 41.


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80. Surprisingly, perhaps, this means that there is no inherent tendency in capitalist activity toward more efficient production, given that labor-intensive work might be cheaper to organize than capital-intensive work, even where the latter is more productive per head. Even granting severe competition between capitalists, the latter could increase output and thus compete by employing more and more workers, as long as such workers were sufficiently cheap in comparison to machines. 81. Jan Breman, “Seasonal Migration and Co-operative Capitalism: The Crushing of Cane and of Labour by the Sugar Factories of Bardoli, South Gujarat—Part 2,” Journal of Peasant Studies 6 (1979):168–209. 82. Ibid., 179, 185, 195, 198–99, 200–201. 83. It is worth noting that regimes exhausting their labor power—through coercion, lengthening hours, driving down wages, raising the intensity of work, and so on—restrict the size of the mass market, which in turn diminishes the field for extensive and large-scale capitalist activity and encourages the existence of small units of production and service provision. I tried to show that this dynamic was at work in Egypt during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. John T. Chalcraft, The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories: Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863–1914 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2004). A more ambitious hypothesis would propose that such a dynamic, intimately tied to the denial of citizenship, is present extensively in the colonial world. Certainly Sweezy notes that this kind of exploitation (intimately linked to authoritarian rule) “perpetuates poverty and at the same time prevents the growth of a mass market for consumer goods that would attract and justify investment.” Sweezy, “Center, Periphery,” 214.