Vivek Chibber: Professional Eejit
Dedicated to Louis Proyect RIP
I came across Chibber’s article on how colonial plunder did not lead to capitalist development the other day and rather than finding something better to do with my time I decided to write about why it grapples with a strawman.
The headline argument that treasure =/= capitalism, is beside the point. No-one’s arguing this. Nevertheless Chibber dimisses of the work of an array of economic historians or Marxists — Wallerstein, Arrighi, Emmanuel, Braudel, Banaji — who emphasise the importance of extra-national factors to the origins of capitalism such as: trade, slavery, conquest and plunder by disputing this one claim out of a preference for a model which sees capitalism as self-sufficient in England, continuing, in effect, a polemic dispute initiated by his former mentor Robert Brenner regardless of what they said or wrote, which he does not lay out.
Chibber’s story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism is simplistic. The more I read on this stuff the less convinced I am of the idea of modes of production can be separated from the organisational state or ideological regime. I think the policy and cultural mutations of neoliberalism since, say, Hayek published The Road to Serfdom, as well as the character of China’s rise both speak to this. Feudalism -> capitalism is not a thrown switch where capital behaved one way under the former, and another way under the latter. From the article: ‘a change in the social structure of feudalism, so that you move from a feudal class structure to a capitalist class structure’ is a pure tautologism.
Marx wrote a lot of stuff and litigating debates about history via a book and a set of disconnected, often contradictory writings produced by one or two guys almost two centuries ago is for me the real example of the degeneration of debate on the left, but Chibber’s decided he’s the only one who understands Marx, so our counter-argument to some extent has to be that he doesn’t (imo: he’s pretending not to to get attention).
Marx doesn’t draw a hard distinction between capital working qua capital under capitalism versus feudalism. In the Grundrisse Marx says surplus value extraction can be found at any point in history when a particular section of society possesses a monopoly over the means of production, he goes as far back as the Normans. You have capital as such in feudalism with merchants lending, investing or using capitalism’s methods and techniques — rationalisation, subsumption, concentration — in manufacturing. Chibber is absolutely correct to point out there are constraints here: industrialisation doesn’t happen because the countryside is organised along manorial lines rather than being characterised by free labour, he talks about price fixing among the guilds. Another significant blocker is that money has not yet become generalised as a universal equivalent, pace Chibber, silver and other precious metals from the Americas helps here. Whatever constraints there were, they certainly weren’t geographic.
Chibber refers a number of times to a scholarly or academic consensus, but never mentions any names other than his friends who he’s getting all this stuff from: Brenner and Wood. Not incidentally I don’t think the consensus is actually with him on the absolute stagnation and non-capitalist nature of economic life when it was organised around towns, countryside and trade. Domestic markets were small, sure, the bulk of profit rates were derived from a capital-intensive international trade in luxury commodities. If you’re willing, like me, to take a view of capitalism which is not rooted in the highly specific social configuration of England and the Netherlands you could say capitalism emerges first overseas, or it makes no sense to differentiate because they’re related. This is where the slipperiness of dating capitalist construction to 1400 - 1500s comes in. This is two centuries, and it allows a reader to come away with the idea that: ‘oh sure it got bigger but the fundamentals were done and dusted in 1400s, you didn’t need Ireland or the Carribean at all’. Chibber doesn’t expand, he doesn’t offer any detail, no definitions other than class differentiation that arises between property holders and landless labourers, but you have this in Ancient Sumeria.
If we have to insist on a transition, we’ll say when capitalism becomes the dominant activity, just not internationally but domestically and one’s freedoms to invest and to organise are more facilitated than they are restricted by the state, which up until that point operated trade via monopolies, we might ask Chibber where these joint-stock companies were going to and what they were taking back.
Marx dates this moment to the late sixteenth and seventeenth century. He presents England as the hegemonic vehicle, under the tutelage of the Dutch and Chibber might tell me what those two countries had in common. Land seizures, plunder and the deployment of force to get indigenous populations in the West Indies and the Philippines onto plantations producing larger quantities of luxury articles to feed a domestic market and supply domestic industry with raw materials are explicitly mentioned as the means through which large landowners begin accumulating and turn people working their land into waged labourers, i.e. how the manor is eclipsed as a unit of social and political organisation. These enterprises engage in speculative activities — backed by the Dutch state’s innovations in banking and other financial technologies — which facilitates accumulation by dispossession. Chibber doesn’t mention slavery but Marx talks about how ‘the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc’ and its status as a source of surplus value rises in proportion to cotton’s export. Luxemburg writes on capitalism’s rise amidst enduring forms of slavery and serfdom, if she was alive today would Chibber would say her and Marx are the trendy left?
Finally Chibber’s points on Spain’s stagnation don’t stack up. Growth Spanish agriculture and cities was significant and in some cases exceeded England’s; its domestic market for agricultural produce stimulated a process of expansion identical to the processes Chibber derives from Brenner. Over time though, Spain’s silver began to die off; Spain is not a feudal counterfactual, but England if there was no colony.
Chibber’s definition is the ‘historically unprecedented rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in Northwestern Europe’ but it cannot be emphasised enough how this growth is absolutely dwarfed by what’s achieved in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. This is capitalism’s quantum leap in terms of yield ratios, population density, urbanisation, technological and communicational development, productivity, warfare, state capacity, you name it, this is what Brenner’s is trying to explain in the first instance, but at the same time I wouldn’t put it past Chibber to say this had nothing to do with imperialism either.
Taking the most generous interpretation of Chibber’s argument: he is correct that 300 years before England became a regnant industrial power for a century, their countryside can be characterised by a proletarianised peasantry. If we decide this is the characteristic of capitalism, that economic, social and political structures obediently fall along contemporary national boundaries, because they didn’t apply then, sure, this is where it starts. But if we’re honest about these being the disclaimers, there is nothing here of substance.
TLDR: Vivek Chibber walks into a bar. Bartender asks him what brings him to Cootehill. ‘I walked’ he replies. ‘All the way from NYU?’ says the bartender. ‘Would you not fly?’ ‘I did faith’, Chibber answers, ‘but the decisive force is in the relations internal to my legs and feet’.
Conclusions
Where do the politics of this lead us? This is centuries ago we’re talking about, England is in decline, isn’t this just a debate to allow academics like Chibber to pose as radicals with all the answers against other cohorts of radical academics with all the answers?
In the second part of the interview Chibber provides a history [sic] of anti-imperialist liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but without naming names, figures, dates or countries. This contestation is framed as boiling down to two statements rather than a set of material relationships, the white man’s burden line coming from the metropole: ‘this is for your own good / economic development’ and the response: ‘no, your presence and activities here are not altruistic but self-interested’. However the Congolese, the Irish, the Haitians take all this a bit too far and say: ‘all your wealth was taken from us’. Seriously, read the piece it’s that simplistic. This is not the argument made by any anti-imperialist or dependency theorist of which I am aware and this is probably why Chibber doesn’t cite any. What the exploited masses of the Global South have failed to take account of is the Brenner hypothesis, the efficiency and improving impulses of western wage labourers and frankly they should apologise.
Chibber tells us Marxists from the Global South (no names) disproved this idea decades ago but it has come back in two manifestations, firstly with the idea that the Global North as a collective exploits the Global South. That this can, as Chibber claims, be empirically and theoretically disproven remains to be seen, no figures no sources to follow up on, but again, the question as to whether or not the Global South is collectively exploited by the North America and Western Europe does not hinge on whether or not feudal lords would switch to capitalism because they have treasure.
Secondly the race reductionism and the idea of a ‘global white supremacy’, meaning that too many leftists now read capitalism as racial. Again, no examples or sources of where these bad arguments are so I can’t engage, but I see far more kicking of a hugely overstated spectre of black nationalist and white genocide arguments on the left than I do actual instances. On the other hand Chibber’s interviewer Melissa Naschek makes the point that Chinese people aren’t white, which is not only funny but insightful too, it’s both funny and insightful.
What Chibber is trying to do is get away from the idea that workers in the west constitute a labour aristocracy, a phrase used by trendy academic idpol leftists Engels and Lenin to describe how certain workers have more in common with their bosses than other workers. What is on people like Chibber who take this point of view to explain is, if their interests are indeed aligned, why is it that the western working class have not made common cause with workers in low-wage countries making their clothes, electronics, toys and the rest of the cheap consumer catchpennies constituting the crude parody of a collective social life that we all live in.
Books written by Emmanuel and Cope (who died last year RIP) are on my to-read shelf, but from Smith and Amin I have to say I think the case that: oppression of workers in poorer countries is of direct economic benefit for those of us fortunate enough to be born in the west is pretty clear. The tech workers and stockholders of companies like Palantir creating a strata of genocide rentiers. Cheap tourism which allows us to offset the costs of our consumption to parts of the world even less equipped to deal with what’s coming than we are. Dangerous migration routes draining former colonies of their younger generations so they can bring us takeaways and clean us in our old age. Is it worth noting that Hamas have done the most to array the entirety of the western political class against an external threat more than any organisation proceeding solely on the basis of class has in my lifetime? It’s something to think about. Merry Christmas all.