After the Great War and the beginnings of electoral politics in India, educationally backward or otherwise underprivileged communities began to rise up. Dalit leaders challenged untouchability. So called 'criminal' castes and tribes demanded 'denotification'. Almost everybody demanded affirmative action quotas. By and large, these movements succeeded. More and more Legislators and then Ministers and then Chief Ministers came from the previously 'backward' castes which had little voice in the administration. There were some false starts. Naxalites (extreme Maoists) thought they could use Tribals & Dalits as cannon fodder so as to come to power by 'encircling the cities'. They failed, factionalized and most of them joined mainstream politics.
The 'Subaltern Studies' clique pretended they were giving voice to the tribals & Dalits in a manner which would promote the Maoist cause. This was glamourous on some Campuses but it was wholly delusional. Still, one could get a PhD by writing nonsense in the illiterate idiom of those cretins. Nobody cared. Smart people don't study useless shite at Uni more particularly because genuine 'Subalterns' were becoming Chief Ministers, founding dynasties, and getting as rich as fuck. They had their own propagandists who wrote in the vernacular language. They didn't need- or even know about- stupid Professors teaching nonsense on Western Campuses.
A Swedish meatball- Axel Andersson- didn't get the memo. As late as 2013, he wrote an article in the LARB titled-
Obscuring Capitalism: Vivek Chibber’s Critique of Subaltern Studies
Chibber is from India. He knows Subaltern Studies is shit. Naxals don't want it. Indian Communist Parties have no use for it. The thing is a waste of time.
Vivek Chibber's latest book challenges the theoretical fundaments
fundament can also mean anus
of the
utterly useless, not
influential Indian Subaltern School.
THE AIM OF NEW YORK UNIVERSITY sociology professor Vivek Chibber’s latest book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (Verso, 2013) is to challenge the theoretical fundaments of the influential Indian Subaltern School.
it has zero influence in Indian politics. Thus it is useless shite.
This new departure in South Asian historiography was an attempt to write a “history from below,”
Those from below were making history by taking over politics & the perks of office. They could manufacture their own mythology easily enough. They didn't need stupid Bengali Kayasthas or Baidyas or Brahmins to do it for them. But those darkies might be able to get a bit of affirmative action on Western Campuses. Then the Left Front in Bengal collapsed and these guys were shown to be useless tossers with zero support in their native countries.
unburdened by colonial biases.
Different Brits had different biases. It was easy enough for an Indian from a particular community to pick the British official who had praised it while disparaging its rivals.
In particular it sought to re-interpret the subcontinent’s tortured road to industrialization
Slow, not 'tortured'. The truth is, Indian industrialists were a bit crap and, in any case, successive Governments showed little interest in helping them flourish.
and inclusion in the modern capitalist economy.
That happened long ago. The East India Company was Capitalist and pretty fucking modern. British India was the first truly secular administration in world history. Holyoake, the guy who invented the word 'Secularism' pointed this out about a century after British rule in India got off the ground.
Subaltern Studies rose to prominence in the 1980s
when the Left Front had taken power in West Bengal. Would the CPM be replaced by the CPML? No. The Naxals had shit for brains.
and was part of a wave of postcolonial critique of an ongoing essentializing gaze
which is wholly imaginary like the little old lady who thinks muscular men are trying to get into her bathroom to see her naked.
used when discussing formerly colonized cultures.
Whining about being a darkie is all very well if you live in a White majority country. It is utterly mad if you live in a country populated by darkies from which Whites had run away long ago.
Chibber formulates his critique of the critique (by way of Karl Marx) through the affirmation of Enlightenment universals.
Fuck off! Enlightenment thinkers like Hume, Smith, Kant etc. thought darkies had shit for brains. The big question facing them was whether Catholic Irishmen or Slavic people had brains. The answer was- not fucking likely, mate.
He argues that we are all endowed with reason and that this is not merely a “Western” construct.
Even Swedish meatballs can reason. Sadly, they lose that ability if they have a PhD in shit.
It was a book that he did not want to write, as he admits in the preface, believing that there was no space in “intellectual culture” for a “serious engagement with postcolonial theory.”
Because it is shit. But so is Chibber's Marxism.
But he wrote it all the same. The result is not without its ironies: parts of Chibber’s language and arguments are not so far from the postcolonial theory he attacks.
Shit is like other shit. That isn't ironic at all. It's simply a fact everybody discovers by the time they are about two years old.
His text, both engrossing and at times infuriating, mounts an eminently useful barrage of arguments against Subaltern Studies and raises the stakes of the debate. It is not the first such attack, but it is maybe the most forceful in its curious combination of erudition and, on the other hand, a tendentiously narrow definition of the subject matter.
It is tendentious to say shit is shit just because it issued from a fundament. Maybe it is chocolate cake.
Let me begin with a story that does not feature in Chibber’s book, even if “Postcolonial Theory” makes up the first and most important half of its title.
Meatball's story is about Colonialism, not Post-Colonialism.
The Joinville psychiatric hospital at Blida, Algeria,
which was a French Colony
constituted a society on the margins of the surrounding one, without for that reason being very different.
No. It was very different because its inmates were mad.
It was a city within the city.
It was a lunatic asylum, not a city.
An unmistakably colonial air hung over
an un-mistakeable French colony
the whitewashed buildings, from the patients’ pavilions to the staff villas and the grand main entrance, and permeated the institution’s organization. Two thousand patients were separated according to sex but also according to ethnicity. Algerian inmates were in the “native,” or, later “Muslim” wings. But French-Algerian and native alike were united in the misery of their situation and condition.
Because they were mentally ill.
The incarceration of the ill of Joinville was accompanied with a brutality that raised the question of how punishment could exist so freely without crime.
No it didn't. Asylums were like prisons or concentration camps. Inmates could be dangerous. Punishment was dished out pour encourager les autres.
Frantz Fanon
a black man from Martinique which chose to remain with France in 1946. That was a sensible decision.
arrived in Joinville in 1953 with a rare display of sartorial elegance, monogrammed handkerchiefs ready to wipe his brow, and progressive notions of mental illness. He was black, from Martinique, and a recently graduated psychiatrist who had not yet turned 30.
He had studied nonsense and was trying to write in the style of Sartre. What he should have done was research lithium salts.
He had, however, the previous year published his groundbreaking Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), an analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonial racial discourses in which the “native” others had to wear the “mask” of whiteness to succeed.
In other words, guys from Martinique were only black on the outside. Inside, they were trying to control their natural inclination to rape and rob just like White Frenchmen. This is called 'civilization'.
Already during the introductory tour of Blida-Joinville Fanon criticized the wide array of repressive measures wielded at the hapless patients. The new colleagues observed him with curiosity. What mattered more than his history and style of radical engagement was that he was a newcomer, green, for all intents and purposes a Frankaoui (a term with locally flavored Arab ending used by the Franco-Algerians to describe their kin from the mainland) in foreign waters. His enthusiasm would soon succumb to the blistering sun
Martinique gets pretty hot. It isn't on the same latitude as Sweden.
and the reality on the ground.
as opposed to the reality underneath it.
Influenced by the work of François Tosquelles at the asylum of Saint-Albain in Lozère, Fanon began with a program of “sociotheraphy” in the European women’s wing under his charge, in order to break the confinement and apathy of the patients. A number of collective activities were organized. Religious holidays were celebrated, workshops started and cultural events offered. There were also meetings with doctors, nurses and patients in which all were allowed to raise their concerns. The turn from repression and isolation to social engagement, to the irritation of his upstaged colleagues, soon proved to have been a success. Already after one month a large and elaborate Christmas celebration took place with staff and patients.
Fuck has this to do with 'subaltern studies' or post-colonial theory?
The subsequent move to repeat the experiment with the native men under his charge proved more difficult, as Alice Cherki chronicled in her Fanon biography from 2000 (in English translation 2006). Fanon spoke neither Arabic nor Kabyle and had to resort to an interpreter when explaining his project to the interns who remained impassive as the activities got underway. The detractors among his colleagues saw it as a clear case of not understanding an inherent backwardness of the Muslim mind. Fanon soon realized the problem: he had insensitively implemented a Western program on a society whose difference he did not grasp.
Did he resign and fuck off back to some place where everybody spoke French? No. I suppose he was already trying to help the Algerian liberation movement.
The political situation compounded the challenge as Fanon’s invitation was easily understood as a colonial imposition. The Muslim men had interpreted the experiment as a call to live up to a western model of behavior by the dominant power and preferred, Bartleby-style, not to participate. Fanon concluded that there was nothing atavistic in this reaction; it was a sign of resistance.
It was sensible. It was obvious that this guy couldn't help them. Muslim dudes- like Christian dudes- like Doctors who give them a pill which makes them feel better. They aren't interested in childish games.
As Fanon continued his explorations at Blida-Joinville the surrounding society was thrown into turmoil by the nascent war of Algerian independence. The fallout soon reached the institution. More and more of the patients became those having suffered torture at the hand of the French authorities, neatly mirrored by an influx of torturers who had suffered as a consequence of their trade.
That's the problem with torture. Shooting people is cheaper and more effective.
Fanon began working with the clandestine opposition to colonial rule and eventually quit his post at Joinville in 1956, two years into the bloody war.
Why be a psychiatrist when you can get paid to be a crazy politician?
Though he had only a few years left to live before succumbing to leukemia in 1961
he was smart enough to go to the US for medical treatment
he wrote the important works L’An V de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism) and Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth).
Lots of Muslim Algerians became more wretched after Independence. The smart ones emigrated to France. Fanon's white wife stayed behind. She killed herself.
Fanon’s analysis of the racially divided universe of colonialism and the forms of resistance against its formidable physical and noetic power would form one of the building blocks in “postcolonial” thought.
No. Postcolonial thought is what succeeded Anti-colonial thought. In the Fifties, it was expressed by things like the Bandung Conference or opposition to the Suez invasion. Fanon was irrelevant. People noticed that Martinique had chosen to stay with France.
His world was drastically changing and these, often violent, upheavals would have far-reaching political and intellectual consequences.
Anticolonial agitators became post-colonial administrators or intellectuals unless the wrong faction gained power and they had to run away to somewhere still ruled by Whites.
Political maps were entirely redrawn.
Some were as portions of a former colony broke away- e.g. Pakistan from India. Most were not- e.g. Algeria, though there was a brief 'Sand War' with Morocco which ended when Cuban troops landed in Algeria.
The 19th-century scramble for colonizing the Global South had reached such frantic levels that by 1900 more than 90 percent of Africa, 56 percent of Asia and 99 percent of the Pacific was under colonial rule.
Which led to anti-colonial movements which began establishing relations with each other such that a common anti-colonial ideology came into existence. This continued to burgeon as post-colonial ideology in places like Algiers, New Delhi & Djakarta.
The movement began to reverse after World War I and the reversal intensified after the World War II. By the late 1970s formal territorial colonialism was practically over, mostly thanks to wars of liberation like the one in Algeria.
No. Algeria was unusual because it had a lot of French settlers. In most other places there was a peaceful transition of the Indian sort. Dutch Indonesia and French Vietnam and Portuguese African possessions were exceptions.
The human cost of both colonialism and its dissolution begs belief.
beggars not begs.
In one of the most infamous cases, the Belgian Congo,
no. That was the 'Free State of Congo'. Once Belgium established direct rule, things got better.
between 10 and 13 millions Africans died.
sadly, Independence didn't do much to help the people though their kleptocratic leaders got very rich.
Today the poverty of the Global South remains as the deep scars in the landscape through which the disaster traveled.
There are no such scars.
The work of understanding colonialism
was done by economists and military strategists.
and the process of decolonization that
was presided over by lawyers, politicians and administrators
Fanon had been so instrumental in developing
Fanon didn't develop shit. He wrote hysterical Sartrean shite.
would take an unexpected turn when Edward Said published Orientalism in 1978.
The departure of the Brits turned out to be a fucking disaster for Palestinians- especially Protestant ones like Said.
The volume on the construction of the image of the “Orient” by Western scholars at first seemed so marginal that Said had difficulties interesting a serious publisher.
The book was shit. It referenced French dudes like Massignon whom nobody had heard of.
It appeared as a highly specialized discussion apt to only interest the experts in the field.
It was nonsense. Still, at that time Arafat & the PLO seemed very important. The Americans were trying to get Israel to return to the pre-67 borders. Anyway, his book might piss off the Jews. Nobody really likes them you know.
In a matter of a few years, however, the colonial “other” and the process of “othering” became commonplace in academic parlance.
Because only very stupid people were doing PhDs in that shite. Back in the 50s & even the 60s, a Phd on a shithole country could get you a gig with the State Dept. Then, it was discovered, shithole countries don't matter. Even if they turn Commie, they will need to export raw materials to get hard currency. Still, Oil Sheikhs had plenty of that commodity. If they liked Said, why not promote him? After all, he went to the right Schools & Colleges and fantasized that he'd slept with Candice Bergen.
At the same time literatures from previously colonized areas were read more extensively and analyzed in the West as a counter-canon, a means to question the continuing “hegemony” (after the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci) of the “occidental” logic that had underpinned the colonial enterprise.
No. What happened was that illiterate kids who needed a Comp Lit credit could be spoon fed the childish scribblings of darkies from shithole countries. Previously, Comp Lit meant actually reading a French or Spanish book in the original.
The colonial reality of the majority of the world would in earnest become part of the discussions of Western academia, thanks to pioneers such as Said who had studied and challenged the previously reigning stereotypes of the colonized mind.
In other words, you could pretend that you were the equal of Vasco da Gama coz you had read a story by R.K Narayan and thus had discovered India all over again.
A returning question became: who was it that had been denied a voice
Dumb people. Nobody else. Under Colonialism, there were law courts. If you witnessed a murder, you were supposed to provide testimony before the Magistrate.
and had only been spoken for?
Spivak pretended that her great-aunty hanged herself while on her period because she was actually a Ninja assassin but couldn't say so. The truth is, Aunty was pissed off with her Daddy because he hadn't married her off, as is required by Hindu scripture, and was sending her to skool instead.
Marxist “history from below” was, importantly, given a new lease on life as it turned to the vast, poor and oppressed underbelly of the Global South.
If there was oppression, it was a case of darkies doing it to darkies. Incidentally, plenty of the new leaders came from poor families- e.g. Idi Amin, Emperor Bokassa, etc.
The vague and empathic posture that had characterized the Third-Worldism of the 1960s and 1970s
The Fifties and Sixties was characterized by 'Developmentalism'- i.e. economists, agronomists etc. advising on how to raise productivity. The problem was 'immeserizing poverty'- i.e. demand for primary products can be inelastic and thus raised output lowers revenue. Could a global 'North-South' deal be done to improve the terms of trade for the poorer countries? No. Thus, over the course of the Seventies, Developmentalism curled up and died. Stupid shitheads were welcome to teach paranoid nonsense under the pretense of engaging with Turd World countries. This involved saying 'my research shows that in 1875, a White dude said 'darkies suck ass big time'. This caused darkies to become utterly shit because they had been 'objectified' as the alterity of the catachresis of the constipation of the oesophagus of Neo-fucking-Liberalism.'
was replaced by seemingly more refined theoretical tools that also helped uncover continuing colonialism in a way of thinking:
Indians had been doing that since about 1757. It involved saying 'that dude drinks wine rather than desi daru. This shows his brain has been colonized. Also, he probably takes it up the arse from Governor General Sahib.'
the Western essentialising of natives, which could be as present in the metropole as among the Western educated postcolonial elites themselves.
Boko Haram is right to demand the banning of books. Why? Books are Western. If you read a book your brain will be colonized and you will end up sucking Donald Trump's dick.
Formal independence had not been enough to free either the west or the former colonies from a legacy that showed a remarkable resilience and still shaped the relationship between north and south.
In 1963, President Kennedy failed to wipe my bum probably due to I iz bleck. This terrible crime still haunts America and has caused the election of the Donald. I should be paid billions in reparations.
According to Vivek Chibber, it was around this time, the early 1980s, that everything started going wrong.
By then, everybody knew that Communism doesn't work for a Hayekian reason. Not just Thatcher & Reagan, even Mitterand, elected with Communist support, went in for a tournant de la rigueur- i.e. an economic U-turn. The Left was dead in the water.
Chibber does not pretend to supply an intellectual history of the larger field of “postcolonial theory,”
I have done so. The thing is easy enough.
but there is a mini-history of origins that places its occurrence at the “cultural turn” in academia in which anthropologists and historians started to interest themselves in a brand of cultural analysis focused on the discursive formation of reality, taking the cue form literary theory.
Why? It is because 'Developmentalists' had given up because their dog wouldn't hunt. Crazy nutters were welcome to move in and squat in the condemned building they had evacuated. Incidentally, at one time 'anthropologist' didn't mean drug-addled, unemployable, shithead.
Postcolonial theory had first reached academia through departments of literature and cultural studies.
Because Professors of Literature had become wholly illiterate. Said had pointed out that when he was young a Lit Professor knew two Classical and half a dozen modern European languages. By the Seventies, you had Eng Lit Professors who hadn't even read Hamlet.
Chibber would have preferred it not to spread from there. He reduces its role to having brought literature from previously colonized and marginalized voices into the canon.
Sir William Jones brought Hafiz and Kalidasa into the Western canon in the eighteenth century. That was a big factor in the Romantic movement. What was unusual about the Eighties was that shite writers- not good ones- gained acclaim amongst a narrow academic coterie. But Tagore was popular everywhere. Mahashweta Devi, who wrote like shite, was not.
This he calls a “salutary achievement.”
It was meaningless. Good wine needs no bush. People read Marquez & Borges because they were good.
But the leakage of models and techniques from literature departments into its more socially scientific minded neighbors spelled trouble.
No. Sociology, Anthropology etc. had already turned to shite. There were some stupid Marxist Economists but they taught Econometrics which can be quite useful.
The postcolonial theories did not only claim to analyze but also to guide political action.
Useless people boycotting shite aren't engaged in political action. They are merely making a nuisance of themselves.
This familiar combination made it possible for its proponents to take over an academic Marxism that had found itself in a rut in the 1980s.
It had failed and everybody was abandoning it.
Although profoundly Marxian in background, many postcolonial scholars took issue with the universalist assumptions of historical materialism
Post-modernists took the extra step and questioned the universalist assumptions of Physics. Why are so few Voodoo practitioners getting Nobel Prizes? Is it because they iz bleck?
To believe that capitalism would function in the same way in the south and the north was,
not an assumption any Development Economist made after about 1965. Corrupt shitholes would have more rent seeking.
according to many, another result of the arrogant Western assumption that its models and history were the blueprints for the rest.
Marx may have assumed something like this. Mill did not. Why? Darkies must have shit for brains- right?
The agenda of bringing excluded voices into the discussion
we must bring the excluded voice of the Dalit woman into the discussion. What's that? Mayawati is a Dalit Woman and has been Chief Minister of India's largest province four times? Oh. Well, in that case, why bother?
or, at least, questioning the existence of such exclusion
which ceased to exist before these cunts got to Collidge.
gives much of the field of postcolonial theory its most important justification.
It existed so as to get credentials to cretins.
Its proponents argue, however, that the colonial wound does not constitute a historical wrong that can be cured just by the admittedly political act of adjusting the canon and the reading lists and bringing into visibility the previously oppressed.
Reading lists for shite subjects are shite. Nobody cares about them. On the other hand, it is very important that schizophrenic hobos read Mahashweta Devi as translated by Gayatri Spivak. Otherwise they would be guilty of excluding a shittier and stupider voice than any of the ones they already have in their heads. That's fucking Racist mate.
Chibber surely does not believe so either, but still puts his money on a standard Marxist approach to a world that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called “post-colonial” and at the same time “neo-colonized”.
Because she is stupid. Still, it is true that, when she was a little girl, some stupid Commies said 'Nehru is the puppet of Wall Street. Let us kill all the kulaks so as to achieve true independence'. Sadly, since soldiers are the sons of kulaks, they were quickly beaten into submission..
He fears that the Enlightenment universal of reason will become collateral damage in the postcolonial critique of “Western” epistemic dominance, that such theories will undermine their own instruments of radical critique when they move from a study of culture to political activism.
In other words, saying 'Whitey be debil' won't help you in a White majority country. Sadly, it won't help you in Hindu majority India either unless you add 'Muslims be debil'.
However, his premise that postcolonial theory can be kept in neat isolation in literature departments is erroneous.
Because it is a virus endemic amongst the terminally stupid- i.e. the only kind of student these cretins get to teach.
Fanon, to begin with, would tell us that psychiatry was politics,
It is no such thing. It is about medication and/or stuff like CBT.
especially so in the colonial context.
Never in that context. It was a disease like leukemia which has a genetic component.
Said would add that academic practices were equally permeated by colonial politics.
I suppose there were former colonial administrators or experts who were still alive and who had tenure back then. But that was long ago.
To be fair, Jewish Professors of the period probably weren't greatly enamoured with Arabs more particularly after they had got as rich as fuck.
But this evidently does not automatically mean that postcolonial research, whatever discipline it might find itself in, should be excused any inconsistencies just because of its politics.
There is no post-colonial research. There was, however, some State sponsored post-colonial ideology and praxis underpinning various 'South-South' or 'Non-Aligned' institutions. Some Universities in the capital city would have retired diplomats etc. holding Professional Chairs for this purpose.
The “salutary achievement” of Chibber’s book lies exactly in highlighting some of the failures of postcolonial theory,
Post-colonialism could have been useful if a 'North-South' deal to more equitably share the gains from trade had been feasible. But if even the Bretton Woods straitjacket broke down (i.e. exchange rates could not remain fixed) then what hope was there for something far more elaborate?
although this does not mean that this theory should retreat to the implied “fussy world” of the humanities.
shitty world of the sub-humanities.
Chibber will unwittingly drive the second point home himself.
Let it simply die already.
If there is one true adversary in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital it is a use of postcolonial thought in India.
It is used as a way to escape India and gain affirmative action on a Western Campus.
The author shares many of its concerns, having worked on the topic of the country’s industrialization,
which depends on getting rural girls into giant factory dormitories- though Chibber won't say so.
explaining more directly this need to write a book that he did not want to write. The theories under attack came into being in relation to the annual series Subaltern Studies that was first published in 1982. The main thinkers associated with the school were, to name a few, Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabba and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
all of whom emigrated as soon as they could
They had all come of age in post-independence India, completing their first degree there before moving on to western academia (Guha, born 1928, being the exception).
Bengal became autonomous when he was 9 years old.
Both Subaltern Studies and the individual volumes on Indian historiography produced by the members would have a profound impact on postcolonial theory.
In other words, the guys doing that stupid shit had a profound impact on that same stupid shit.
Chibber directs his critique mainly against Guha’s Dominance Without Hegemony from 1997
The Brits had hegemony in directly ruled territory. That's why Guha spoke English.
and Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe from 2000.
Europe was provincialized by the US after it tore itself apart in two bloody wars.
He stealthily avoids direct confrontation with Spivak
she is crazy
and her engagement with poststructuralist French theory,
which was crazy
though he indirectly delivers a familiar incrimination of concept creation and neologisms in general. Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language” from 1946 hovers menacingly in the background as yet another specter.
It is irrelevant. Chibber is an old fashioned Marxist- i.e. retarded rather than crazy.
Subaltern Studies tried to understand the divergent developmental paths of India
India didn't go in for oceanic trade. The West did. So did the Japs and then the Koreans and now the Chinese. They are the biggest ship builders in the world. By contrast, India has only now achieved parity with Colombo port which ranks only about 25th in the global ranking.
and the West and argue that the model of capital’s universalizing drive fails in India,
because Capital neither has a drive nor a hive. Countries fail if they are lazy or if they do stupid shit. India was both lazy and inclined to do stupid shit.
leaving a different image of the power relations created by capitalism.
Money can only create 'power relations' if it isn't stolen or confiscated by the State. Still, we get that Chibber, being Indian, wants to blame some abstraction rather than India's laziness or stupidity for its currently being as poor as shit.
The implication is that the Western model of studying the nation’s development has to be questioned as it is permeated by Eurocentric assumptions.
Like the assumption that people will work hard and do sensible stuff? But immigrants to the West do both where and when it is 'incentive compatible' to do so.
The main among these assumptions is that part of capital’s universalizing tendency is to bring with it political and cultural changes all around the world.
That happens through 'Tardean mimetics' which itself is associated with higher productivity leading to superior status.
Guha and other subaltern theorists agree that this happened in Europe where a capitalist bourgeoisie rose to hegemony,
Fuck that. What happened was that the parts of Europe which did well had more incentive compatible mechanisms. Sadly, it was shit at resolving conflicts peacefully and thus got 'provincialized' by two world wars. America, after its Civil War, didn't have this problem.
the position of being able to represent all the other classes like the proletariat, overturned the feudal order and moved towards liberal democracy.
This is magical thinking. Incentives matter. Ways of classifying people don't.
If this supposedly happened in Europe, it did not happen in India.
Because Indians didn't and still don't give a shit about incentive compatibility. It is a 'scarcity economy' where the big political issue is reservations for a paltry number of shitty Government jobs.
The native bourgeoisie failed to press for revolution,
Why didn't they demand the slitting of their own throats? Plenty of bourgeois dudes supported land reform and always bought land, if permitted to do so, when big estates were broken up.
worked alongside the landed classes,
The bourgeoisie owned land. It was a safe enough investment. Everybody who is anybody has a bit of land in his portfolio. That's why Amitabh Bacchan was classed as an 'agriculturist' for legal and administrative purposes.
and did not take it upon themselves to speak for those without a voice, the subalterns (following Gramsci’s terminology).
Nonsense. Many a middle class lawyer set up as a Trade Unionist because that was a profitable business.
Capitalism was implemented not through bourgeois hegemony but by colonial dominance,
As Gandhi pointed out, plenty of Indian 'banias' were happy to lend to the East India Company because their hoondis (bills of exchange) were highly liquid. But then, many a General or Prince was happy to surrender to the Brits in return for a pension. BTW tax farming (zamindari) is a capitalist enterprise. That's how Tagores and Guhas got rich.
physical force in other words.
You can buy plenty of 'physical force' with money.
Dominance without hegemony came to identify the colonial condition,
even though there was hegemony even when there wasn't much display of 'dominance'- e.g. in Princely States or big zamindaris.
and by extension, also the postcolonial.
How? The Brits had fucked off. They couldn't dominate shit. Did they have 'hegemony'? No. If McMillan said 'suck my cock', Nehru would tell him to fuck the fuck off.
The evident ironies in Guha’s position are not lost on Chibber. Guha puts forward a critique of the liberal idea of universalizing categories,
there were none such. Classical Liberalism wanted a restricted franchise. Let those who actually paid the property or income tax decide how that money should be spent. One proviso. Voters must have a penis.
that produce the exclusion of the subaltern,
Not having the vote excluded them.
through a decidedly Whiggish argument that it is the bourgeoisie that necessarily creates liberal politics.
Swedish meatball doesn't know that the Whigs were big landed magnates. Tories were smaller squires.
But the premise, in Subaltern Studies, that the European revolutions were the result of a capitalist bourgeoisie that started to reform society in a more democratic direction is not correct.
i.e. they were ignorant shitheads who knew nothing of either India or Europe or anywhere else.
The long-lasting effect of the British Civil War
There was an English Civil War not a British one. Swedish meatball is as ignorant as shit.
and the French revolution was, as Chibber points out, to strengthen the state rather than capitalism or democracy.
No. The Brits weakened the State and curbed Stuart absolutism by bringing in stupid Hanoverians to rule the country. Napoleon strengthened the French State but France ended up weaker than under the Sun King.
The advances towards democracy were the result of
rising productivity (higher tax yield from workers) or conscription (equal sacrifice) as well as rival parties striving to outflank each other. Once you had universal franchise, after the Great War in the case of UK, the Liberal party was displaced by the Labour party.
the subaltern working classes rising and pressuring the bourgeoisie rather than following their lead.
Fuck off! The Earl of Derby was persuaded by Disraeli that doubling the franchise would benefit the Tories. He wasn't pressured by his stable-boy. Short run, Disraeli's gambit appeared to have boomeranged but, long term, it was a brilliant piece of strategy. Similarly the Tories gained long term from universal franchise. Workers & women tend to be quite sensible and nationalistic.
The subaltern studies vision of the universalizing drive of capital
which doesn't exist.
is flawed and there is thus no reason to say that it does not apply to India.
There is no reason for cretins to talk about India- a country they know nothing about, even if they are Indian by birth.
Chibber convincingly argues that capital’s universalizing drive exists, but that it is merely a matter of capital extending to more and more markets.
If there is a market, there is a market-maker (arbitrageur) and thus a Capitalist.
Capitalism is not supposed to bring democracy, capitalists are happiest the more control they have over their workforce.
Managers want to control workers whether they work in the public or private sector. Capitalists are concerned with the rate of return, volatility, beta, etc.
The preeminent example of the nature of capital’s universalizing drive to make all local markets dependent on it,
Capital runs away from 'local markets' which aren't profitable.
we might add, is obviously China.
In 2013, when this meatball wrote this, China was a net Capital importer to the tune of a quarter of a trillion dollars. Now it is a capital exporter to the tune of half a trillion.
Capitalism fits perfectly with state communism as has been made evident for all to see.
We think the opposite now. Can Xi rebalance the economy? We don't know.
The difference between the ex-colonies and the West was
they had been colonized by people from a different continent. Still, if they did sensible things, they could overtake the West. Look at Singapore. Its nominal per capita income is about 70 percent higher than the UK. It is double in purchasing power terms.
thus not that capitalism failed to universalize.
The UK got lazy and did stupid shit. Thus it fell behind Singapore. Brexit as motivated by the desire to create a 'Singapore-on-Thames'. It failed miserably. Dyson, who supported Brexit ended up moving his operations to Singapore.
Rather, the colonial problem was that it was allowed to universalize all too well.
Colonies differed greatly from each other. Nothing can be 'universalized' where things are ideographic, not nomothetic.
If capitalists only rule by consensus when forced to, otherwise being quite at ease in relying on coercion, the key question is, as Chibber points out, that of subaltern agency, given that it is only this class that can force politics to take a radical direction.
Yet, it has never actually done so partly because 'radical directions' cause poor to die of starvation.
But this thesis becomes problematic in the framework of Subaltern Studies, where the psychology of the Indian peasant is heralded as impossible to comprehend through western, and falsely universal, categories.
That was a myth exploded by econometric work on the 'rational peasant' which, in the case of India, was proved by the Green Revolution in the Sixties. Even the fucking Sociologists knew about it by 1979.
The discipline has described the Indian subaltern as motivated by a sense of community rather than utilitarian calculations.
Because it was ignorant.
It is these kinds of statements that Chibber dismissively refers to as “canards” with such frequency as to risk his narrative sounding like a culinary digression.
He is right. Peasants were known to be rational by the time he grew out of short pants.
Familiar with the topic, he convincingly argues that the Indian peasantry was motivated by the same range of material concerns that can be found all around the world. The arguments of Subaltern Studies on the contrary, and this is Chibber’s coup de grâce, contributes to an orientalising image of the “East.”
It is backward shite from the Fifties. Nehru firmly believed that peasants were as stupid as shit. If they got hold of some money they would blow it on a big wedding or religious feast.
The charge of postcolonial orientalism becomes even more pronounced in Chibber’s discussion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe. Chakrabarty sought to contrast two ways of understanding history. The first was dominated by universal categories framed in “Western” discourses of rationality.
From which the East was excluded.
According to this model the postcolonial world will reach the same level of modernity and industrialization as the West, eventually.
Fuck off! Some Eastern countries will rise higher- unless they have done so already. This became obvious at the Tokyo Olympics back in the Sixties.
It just got on a later train.
Japan's bullet train was the fastest in the world. It was launched in 1964. China & Japan are now way ahead in developing mag-lev.
All local dissonances and particularities that do not fit in with this universal trajectory will be shed at some point or another as the world homogenizes.
Lazy peeps can chose to remain poor.
But this idea is based on a specific notion of how capitalism should spread. Having rejected capital’s universalizing tendency, the subaltern scholars turned to a study of the particularities of the lower classes of India, the second mode of understanding history, contributing to a descent to what Chibber calls a “seemingly fascination endless with religion, ritual, spirits, indigeneity, and so on.”
Ignorant shitheads made up stories about people they considered more ignorant yet. But those dudes were becoming Chief Ministers of newly created States. They were also getting very rich.
If they had placed more emphasis on the relationship between capitalism and dominance, rather than hegemony, in both the Global North and the Global South, the analysis might have looked very different.
It would still have been shit because they had shit for brains.
Subaltern Studies would not have had the same need to insist on the Eurocentric, and colonial, nature of rationality and all-universal theories.
Yes they did. If anyone said 'you are stupid', they could reply 'I can't help being a darkie. Darkies have shit for brains, mate. Boo hoo! Kindly give me tenure for the sake of DEI.'
The critique of the post-independence nationalist leaders might also have been different. Nehru did not press for “industrialization, scientific research, modern administration techniques, and similar practices” because he was in the thrall of a colonial Enlightenment rationality, as Chibber objects, there was simply no way to feasibly make an alternative path outside of capitalism.
Yes there was. It involved Stalinist 5 year plans. Sadly, Nehru couldn't do collectivization of land which would have killed off half the population.
It is hard not to sympathize with Chibber’s two charges against Subaltern Studies of “obscuring capitalism” and “resurrecting orientalism.”
Why not simply admit that the thing was stupid, ignorant, shit?
His case is well argued and the notion of a shared rationality makes possible any kind of meaningful dialog about arguments in the first place. But Chibber also neatly trips himself up in his attempt to indict the entirety of postcolonial theory through the specific example of Subaltern Studies. His insistence on the pitfalls related to idealizing the European bourgeoisie as harbingers of democracy and orientalising the Indian peasantry as community and tradition oriented subalterns outside of the Western logic is an eminently postcolonial analysis made possible through postcolonial practices.
Chibber is a Mohyal Brahmin. He knows very well that the Brits kept gassing on about how productive the Punjabi peasant was. Indeed Punjab was a big wheat exporter between 1880-1910. The Brits wanted to settle Punjabis in Canada and other agricultural regions. Those who settled in California did very well. Bengali cunts may have thought the Indian peasant was shitty. Punjabis know different and, what's more, they know the Brits both knew and said different.
Arguments about the impenetrable divide between the West and the East belong to the murky Manichean universe of colonialism.
No. They belong to boring Bengali blathershites. Kipling identified with the Punjab. He said West & East meet when strong men work together doing something useful.
Exploring “othering” only makes sense
if you think everybody is saying mean things about you behind your back and refusing to invite you to orgies.
with the presupposition of a shared humanity. Chibber thus proves that postcolonial theory is well able to formulate its own debates, even by employing those voices that, like his, profess to stand outside the field of the same postcolonial theory.
Julian Go is a sociologiest within it. He is shit. So is Chibber but Chibber is Punjabi- i.e. a bit thick- whereas Go is the smart sort of Asian.
Chibber does a good and important job criticizing some of the fundaments of Subaltern Studies. Postcolonial Theory is a book that should be read by all engaging with postcolonial theory,
i.e. shitheads
though keeping in mind that the biggest canard in Chibber’s text is that postcolonial theory would necessarily have to stand in antagonism with Enlightenment rationality.
Very true. It could get down on its knees and suck it off.
It is on the contrary the case that postcolonial critiques often deal with colonial failures to extend notions of the universal to the colonial world,
or to extend them to women and poorer workers in their own country. 40 percent of men didn't have the vote in the UK in 1914. Middle class darkies, on the other hand, couldn't just vote in the UK, they could stand for Parliament. Two Indians got elected to Westminster before the Great War.
instead treating this world as an economic, political and ethical exception. It also points to the fact that all colonial, and postcolonial, interactions have to undergo complicated processes of translations and mediations because of the history of violent colonial domination.
Not in India. There wasn't a lot of violence while the Brits were around.
These processes of translation often have the aim, as in the example of Fanon at Joinville with which I began, of repairing the application of universal systems of values that colonial systems have interrupted.
Fuck off! Fanon didn't repair shit. He should have resigned because he was unqualified to treat Arabs. Incidentally putting lunatics in asylums aint an Arab practice. Let them wander around as 'fools for God'. They'll be well enough looked after.
Fanon, faced by the refusal of the Muslim patients of Blida-Joinville to participate in his sociotheraphy, did not content himself with the colleagues’ explanation that it was the consequence of an “oriental” Muslim mind.
They knew that if they were simply allowed to wander around, they'd get enough to eat and have a higher quality of life. The sad thing is that 'Franz Fanon hospital' expanded during the Sixties and Seventies at a time when European asylums were being shut down and 'care in the community' was gaining favour. Apparently, the place is quite horrible now.
After first concluding that it was rather a healthy resistance against a colonial imposition Fanon began to reflect over his own program together with the local nurses and his co-worker Jacques Azoulay. The holidays around which he had proposed that the patients celebrate held no meaning for them. They had not wanted to participate in the choir because singers were seen as itinerants and outcasts. Basket weaving was a female activity and therefore problematic for them. Fanon revised the program and built up a traditional teahouse for the patients, replicating the meeting place of the men in society. He also started to celebrate Muslim holidays and brought in troubadours from the outside. His idea of therapeutics was both rational and universal but it had to take into account cultural difference as well as the wound of colonial domination.
No. Fanon was merely catering to the tastes of his patients. Medicine is a service industry. Since he was shit at it, it is fortunate that he gave up the profession quite soon.
Postcolonial theory naturally reflects the society around it, much like Blida-Joinville.
Now called the Franz Fanon Hospital.
It exists in a world, a shared universe, preoccupied with the vexed notions of difference and translation just as Fanon’s clinical work was.
The vexed question is where the money is supposed to come from. When oil prices were high, conditions were better in the hospital. When they fell or when money had to be diverted to fighting the rebels, it deteriorated.
Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital is an important engagement with Subaltern Studies.
Why engage with shit? Just pull the flush already.
Rather than negating the premise for the analytical framework of postcolonial theory, however, it reinforces its raison d’être.
Darkies have shit for brains. Thus the raison d'etre for Whining about Whitey or Capitalism or Neo-Liberalism. What else can darkies do if they have shit for brains?
The categories developed in postcolonial scholarship, instigated by forerunners such as Fanon
who was a French citizen and would have remained so had he lived into our own day
and Said,
an American citizen. Neither was 'post-colonial' save in the sense that Said's country had once consisted of 13 Colonies.
have given invaluable tools to probe failed drives to universalize and identify those that show more promise to be able to take colonial history into account.
That was done long ago by people like Macaulay.
In a twisted final irony it is the postcolonial term ‘orientalism’ that will colonize Chibber’s language and argumentation, inscribing him in a tradition whose breadth and importance he underestimates.
That's not so bad. What Chibber should worry about is the word 'canard' turning into a Muscovy duck and roosting up his fundament.
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