Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capitalism. Vivek Chibber
from that of its European predecessors. Colonialism created a bourgeoisie, but one that would not, or could not, forge a recognizably modern political order.
The error of liberal historiography, then, is its assumption that the colonial order was built around real bourgeois hegemony, as was the case in Western Europe. It construes the colonial state as an extension of the liberal state of Great Britain. On the nationalist side, historians have assumed that the Indian bourgeoisie secured the ability to “speak for the nation,” much as English and French capitalists had done during the classic bourgeois revolutions. Both of these formulations, however, fail to appreciate the “structural fault” between the bourgeois project as it took shape in Europe, and its local manifestation in the Subcontinent. What, then, explains this fault line separating the trajectory of the classic bourgeois transitions in the West from the bourgeois transitions in the colonies? To explain the disjuncture between the two experiences, Guha must proceed by first establishing the nature of the paradigmatic transformation in Europe and then by examining why a similar transformation was forestalled in India, even though actors of the same kind dominated the scene.
2.4 CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY AND THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
For Guha, Europe’s political modernization issued from the same underlying forces as its economic modernization—the rise and subsequent ascendance of the capitalist class. Having arisen within the confines of feudal agrarian structures, the emergent bourgeoisie found its further economic expansion blocked by the ancien régime. In order to remove the obstacles to its further expansion, the capitalist class undertook a political struggle against the feudal monarchy. Once in power, the nascent capitalist class consolidated its economic program through legislation that enabled a more rapid spread of markets into the agrarian economy. They also initiated an ambitious program of political and cultural liberalization to round out the process of economic liberalization. As we will see, the central components of this dimension of European development were, for Guha, the creation of liberal political institutions and the eventual forging of a national political identity. More to the point, because the construction of these institutions is an achievement attributed to the bourgeoisie, it constitutes the standard against which Indian capital’s agency is measured.
Guha, as well as the Subalternists in general, insists that this modernizing project was in turn driven by a deeper structural force, namely, the universalizing drive of capital. This concept occupies a central place in their theoretical work; at times they refer to it as a drive, at other times as an urge or even a mission, and sometimes as a tendency. They do take the universalizing drive to have propelled Europe’s political and economic transformation, but they also see it as having governed the emergence of the dominant ideologies of the era: liberalism, secularism, and socialism. Thus, while the bourgeoisie’s political struggle is the proximate cause of the ancien régime’s demise, the struggle is in turn the expression of a deeper motor force. It is necessary, then, to examine what Guha has to say about the connection between capital’s universalization and the bourgeois-democratic transformation of Europe. This examination will enable an analysis of why a parallel process could not occur in India, and what the consequences were of this “structural fault” in the bourgeois project.
CAPITAL’S UNIVERSALIZING TENDENCY
At its core, capital’s universalizing tendency is simply, for Guha, the drive by capitalists to expand their scope of operations. Although this is an economic imperative, it also brings along with it certain political and cultural transformations. Guha draws directly on Marx’s theory in this regard, and his summary statement reads like an introduction to the Moor himself:
This [universalizing] tendency derives from the self-expansion of capital. Its function is to create a world market, subjugate all antecedent modes of production, and replace all jural and institutional concomitants of such modes and generally the entire edifice of precapitalist cultures by laws, institutions, values, and other elements of a culture appropriate to bourgeois rule.20
We should note that the transformative urge has two distinct components for Guha: the economic, which pushes capital to expand into the world, create a global market, and then supplant antediluvian economic forms that stand in its way; and the politico-cultural, which refers to the construction of bourgeois norms and practices in areas where capital takes root. We will have more to say on this distinction later in the present chapter, and a great deal more in chapters 4 and 5. For now, it is enough to underline that Guha is aware of this distinction, and seems to suggest that the two dimensions should be coextensive.
The propulsive force of capital’s self-expansion has some important consequences. The first of these is that it creates an interest in overthrowing the ancien régime. In the orthodox Marxist account, which Guha takes for granted, early modern capitalists found their expansion blocked by the feudal nobility’s political and cultural dominance. Feudal lords used their influence within the state to enact legislation that obstructed the further consolidation of capitalist production. Thus, through the use of state levers, premodern economic forms were kept artificially alive—the protection of noble privileges, the grant of monopoly rights to particular merchants and regional lords, the numerous price and quantity controls allowed to guilds, and so on. The fact that such obstacles were encountered by the vast majority of capitalist economic units generated a corresponding consciousness around a collective project, both political and cultural—a project to seek state power in order to fashion juridical structures aligned with the needs of the multiplying capitalist enterprises and to push aside the class of nobles kept on life support by the state’s protection. This is the sense in which capital’s universalizing drive created, for the nascent bourgeoisie, an interest and motive to launch a political struggle against the feudal order.
Another consequence of capital’s universalizing drive was to complement the interest in initiating a political campaign with the capacity to effectively wage the campaign. Drawing again on his reading of Marx, Guha argues that it is
[this universalist] drive which, as Marx argues in The German Ideology, makes the emergence of “ruling ideas” a necessary concomitant of capital’s dominance in the mode of production and enable [sic] these ideas, in turn, to invest the bourgeoisie with the historic responsibility to “represent” the rest of society, to speak for the nation.21
In other words, the emergent bourgeois class is able to rise above its sectional outlook and build upon its common interests with other classes—especially workers and peasants—to forge a collective political project against the ancien régime. Its interests are successfully represented as universal interests—indeed, at the moment of struggle, they are universal, inasmuch as they are the condition for the furtherance of the interests of its allies.22 This is the basis for bourgeois hegemony in the antifeudal struggle. Having achieved this popular hegemony, it mobilizes the broad political coalition of allied classes against the feudal monarchy in order to replace it with the new bourgeois order.
THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTIONS
The dynamic described in the preceding section was, for Guha, most clearly captured in what he calls the “comprehensive character of the English and French revolutions respectively of 1648 and 1789.”23 Apparently he takes the social analysis of these revolutions to be uncontroversial. Despite their central place in his analysis, he expends little effort in explaining their origins; nor does he defend his interpretation of their significance. He seems to take the interpretation he offers as apodictic. This generates a stark imbalance in his presentation of the contrast between the European bourgeoisie’s rise to power and that of colonial capital. While the latter is described in great detail, the former is relegated to condensed and rather cryptic statements. Nevertheless, the main elements of Guha’s analysis are clear enough. To encapsulate his views, he approvingly quotes Marx’s characterization of the revolutions as having heralded “a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of the rule of landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition,” and so forth.24 The bourgeois revolutions