Prince Kapone vs Vivek Chibber

 Prince Capone, a musician and Marxist intellectual, challenges Vivek Chibber's assertion that Capitalism was not connected to Colonial 'plunder' in an article on the 'Weaponised Information' blog. It gives an insight into the thinking of the Mamdani generation who are sick and tired of gerontocratic politics.

How Western Marxism Turns Colonial Violence into “History Theory” to Save the Settler Order

The Mamdani generation may feel that they are the indigenous people and that Billionaire 'settlers' (e.g. Musk!) have taken over their land and marginalized them.  

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | December 14, 2025
When “History Theory” Becomes an Alibi for Empire

Under Trump, America's Imperial power is being used to extort surpluses- or so the younger generation may feel. Trump does sometimes say 'I will send poorer Americans a big fat 'dividend check'' But his party won't let him do it.  

This essay is a polemical intervention into a recent Jacobin interview with NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber, published as a transcript of an episode of Confronting Capitalism. In the exchange, Chibber advances a now-familiar Western Marxist position

Chibber is from India. Indian Marxists quote Gandhi to make the point that the 'banyans' (capitalists0 of Surat financed the expansion of the East India Company. The current ruling party supports billionaires like Ambani & Adani. So did the previous ruling party. Indeed, every ruling party in every State supports billionaires who can provide utilities or infrastructure. 

: that capitalism emerged primarily from an internal agrarian transition in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England,

The Black Death caused serfdom to weaken. 'Farmers'- i.e. people who borrow money to rent agricultural land and who pay money wages to attract labourers- grew in importance relative to the old feudal magnates who were frequently at war with each other. The State needed revenue and transferred land from agriculture to sheep raising. Wool was initially exported. This meant that there was a growing financial sector whose members were related by marriage to lawyers, civil servants, prosperous tenant farmers and the wealthier members of artisanal guilds and Trading Companies.  

that colonial plunder played no constitutive role in its rise, and that contemporary attempts to link capitalism’s development to colonialism represent a confused, empirically unsustainable, and politically reactionary drift into “race reductionism.”

Vivek is aware that, in India, politicians love to pretend that India was very rich. Then Viceroy came and stole all the money. Did he also anally rape all the Indians? Probably. That's why anybody wot spicks Inglis gud is nothing but Macaulay's bastard progeny. Obviously, guys who say this make sure their kids go to College in America or Australia.  

The interview is presented as a sober correction to a supposedly “trendy” left argument, but what follows is not neutral clarification. It is an ideological boundary-setting exercise—

useful enough in the Indian context. However, maybe the Mamdani generation see themselves as 'indigenous' and Musk as a rapacious 'settler'.  

one that narrows Marxism to a settler-safe political economy, evacuates empire from the core of capitalist analysis, and disciplines anti-colonial socialism back into academic respectability.

In other words, you are screening out the nutters who demand that 'Turtle Island' be returned to its original inhabitants- e.g. Mamdani or Ilhan Omar. 

What follows is a systematic refutation of that line, grounded in historical materialism, anti-colonial political economy, and the lived realities of imperial domination.

Jacobin introduces this conversation with the tone of a referee who has already decided who deserves the trophy. The host tells us there is a “trendy” argument circulating on the Left — that the West became rich through colonial plunder — and then hands the mic to Vivek Chibber, who answers like a landlord swatting at tenants: “utter nonsense,” “not a shred of truth,” “can’t even get off the ground.”

Because it is self-evident that may Colonial powers weren't capitalist while many non-colonial powers became capitalist.  

That opening is not simply a debate style. It is an ideological posture. It does not begin by clarifying what is actually being argued and what is at stake. It begins by ridiculing a whole anti-colonial tradition as if it were a social media fad, a moral panic, a youth culture glitch in need of adult supervision.

It is hysterical nonsense.  

Weaponized Information starts from a different place: not from manners, not from academic fashion, and not from the polite mythology that capitalism can be explained without the blood ledger of conquest.

Sadly, a lot of Imperial expansion involved very little bloodshed. Populations began to rise because there was less internecine conflict.  

If you want to understand capitalism, you do not start in the seminar room. You start where the system started: in the violent reordering of land, labor, and life — in the transformation of human beings into “hands,”

We think this happened at the time of the agricultural revolution.  

territories into “property,”

Man is a territorial animal. A clan or tribe chases off other clans or tribe from its territory. The first evidence of records being kept of private property ownership dates back to Mesopotamia over 5000 years ago.  

and whole continents into an open-air mine guarded by law, guns, and the cross. And you do not treat colonialism as an unfortunate side story, like a bad chapter you skip so you can get to the “real” plot of English farms and market incentives. Colonialism is not an accessory to the capitalist story. It is one of the methods by which the capitalist world was built and maintained — not because money is magic, but because power is organized.

Power may be very well organized without there being any market for the allocation of investible funds.                        

Chibber’s move, right from the start, is to shrink the question until it becomes easy to dismiss. He wants the argument to mean: “plunder created capitalism” in the crude sense that a pile of gold automatically turns a feudal lord into an industrial capitalist. Then he declares victory over that cartoon. Fine. We can agree that money does not miraculously become capital just because it changes hands through theft. But that is not the central anti-colonial claim, and it never has been. The core claim is that capitalism’s rise and reproduction required a coercive world-making: the forcible separation of people from land,

which is what the slave-trade did. But that happened in Africa. England wasn't selling its own people as slaves. However, Englishmen who fell into the hands of the Barbary Corsairs were sold in the slave markets of Algiers.  

the manufacture of dependency, the creation of disciplined labor, the construction of a world market on imperial terms, and the steady siphoning of value from colonized labor into metropolitan accumulation. In other words, not “loot causes factories,” but “conquest and coercion build the conditions under which factories, markets, and wage labor become dominant, expandable, and enforceable.”

Very true. That is why Mongolia, at the time of Genghis Khan, became the biggest capitalist and most industrialized country in the world.  

What Jacobin is really policing here is not a technical disagreement about medieval accounting. It is a political boundary. Because once you admit that capitalism is inseparable from colonial conquest and settler land theft

In other words once you affirm a stupid lie 

— once you admit that “primitive accumulation” is not a metaphor but a regime of expropriation — you are forced to confront uncomfortable questions that Western Marxism has spent generations avoiding.

Similarly once you admit that eating your own shit is the way to attain perfect health and longevity, you are forced to confront the uncomfortable question as to why you don't eat your own shit? 

Questions like: who benefited, materially, from the colonial ordering of the world?

Sadly, in the case of India, it was the colonised. The guys living in the big palaces had an ancestor who was smart enough to accept British suzerainty. The ordinary people benefitted from the decline in internecine warfare, the suppression of banditry, and the increasing spread of the rule of law.  

What class formations were stabilized inside the imperial core by the super-exploitation of the periphery?

None. Classes simply weren't stable anywhere. Also, super-exploitation means population collapse. You have to keep bringing over more and more slaves who die before they can reproduce. It's not a good business model. That's why the US rose and rose while Brazil fell behind.  

What does “solidarity” mean when the social wage and cheap consumption of the metropole have been historically tethered to the unfree labor, coerced labor, and dispossessed labor of the colonized?

It means 'bread and circuses'- e.g. in ancient Rome. Egypt sent the corn which allowed the population in the capital to grow to over a million. But this had nothing to do with Capitalism.  

And what does socialism even mean if it refuses to break with the property relations, borders, and national myths that were forged in conquest?

It means Socialists will be electable and can run an administration well enough.  

This is why the opening insult matters. It is not simply arrogance; it is discipline. The goal is to pre-empt the anti-colonial indictment before it becomes a program.

It is an attempt to curb a nuisance or, at the very least, distance oneself from it.  

To make the colonized argument sound like a trendy moralism, so the reader can feel “materialist” while remaining politically harmless — the kind of harmless that can quote Marx fluently while treating the colonial world as scenery.

Marx understood that if you make stuff which you can sell to the colonies which are sending your primary products, then you can gain economies of scope and scale and can invest in R&D which raises productivity even further. This is how great fortunes were being made. Capitalism was about buying and selling not just looting or extracting resources.  

But Marxism, when it is alive, does not function as a speech filter for respectable radicals. It functions as a weapon:

which explodes in your own hands 

it names expropriation,

I am the true King of England. King Charles stole my crown. I've been expropriated! Why will the police not help me? Is it coz I iz bleck?   

it identifies the class forces behind the narrative,

upper class is against me coz I iz bleck. Lower class is against me because I talk bollocks. Sad.  

and it asks what line is being advanced and for whom.

Some silly Professor is talking senile bollocks. So what? Ignore the cunt.  

So before we even touch Chibber’s historical claims one by one, we have to name the operation being performed:

Is it neuro-surgery? No. It is brainless shite.  

the conversion of colonialism from structure into background,

not for Vivek. He was born in a country which had been colonized.  

from constitutive violence

there wasn't much of that in India. Mohyal Brahmins, like the Chibbers, were alarmed at the lawlessness and atmosphere of intrigue which followed the death of the great Ranjit Singh. British rule proved beneficial. The Punjabis were happy to sack Delhi in 1857 alongside the Brits. Sadly, Independence meant Partition and great suffering for many Punjabis.  

into optional commentary, and from living political question into a bad argument that has been “discredited.”

Section by section, we are going to reverse that conversion. We are going to take the argument out of the safe little box Jacobin builds for it, and put it back where it belongs: in the real world, where the transition to capitalism was not a tidy English documentary about markets learning to rule society, but a global war over land, labor, and sovereignty

that 'global war' began with the agricultural revolution. Arable land is scarce.  

— a war whose aftershocks still organize who eats, who works, who migrates, and who dies.

There is an actual war going on in Ukraine.  

And we are going to show that the function of this Jacobin line is not just to win a debate, but to make Western socialism compatible with the settler order

American Socialism must be compatible with 'the settler order' because most Americans are 'settlers'.  

by dissolving the colonial contradiction into “history theory.”

There were no 'colonial contradiction'. When colonies became too much of a financial drain, they were abandoned.  

The Strawman That Saves the Settler: “Gold Didn’t Create Capitalism”

Now we can put Chibber’s core maneuver on the table with a cold eye. He takes a real and serious anti-colonial indictment — that Europe’s rise cannot be separated from conquest, slavery, and the construction of an imperial world market — and he collapses it into a childish formula: “plunder created capitalism.”

Whereas this nutter thinks 'violence' did so. But there was plenty of violence in places where there was no capitalism. Equally, there were peaceful places- e.g. Switzerland- which became capitalist.  

Then he fights that formula like it is the whole case. This is the oldest trick in the respectable-left playbook: take a structural argument about power, turn it into a cartoon about money, and then declare the cartoon defeated. The audience leaves thinking they have witnessed a serious materialist demolition, when what they have really witnessed is a political exorcism: the removal of colonialism from the center of the capitalist story, so that the story can return to its comfortable European home.

The author thinks there is a demon which must be exorcised. But there is no demon.  Not everything you see on TV is a documentary. 

Look closely at how he frames Marx. He says Marx’s remarks about robbery and colonial plunder in the chapters on primitive accumulation were a “rhetorical ploy,” even a “rhetorical error,” a side note that misled people into an argument Marx supposedly spent the next chapters disproving. This is not a minor interpretive difference; it is a deliberate shrinking of Marx’s historical method. Marx is not writing a sermon about whether the first capitalist was frugal or criminal. Marx is tracing how a new social order is born through coercion, law, state violence, and expropriation — the separation of producers from the conditions of production — and how that separation is not a private domestic event but a world-historical process. When Chibber calls Marx’s colonial emphasis a rhetorical mistake, he is not correcting Marx. He is correcting the political implications of Marx.

Marx was stupid. Chibber can't come out and say this but we get the picture.  

Here is the honest version of the debate, in plain language. Nobody serious is arguing that a shipment of silver automatically turns a feudal lord into a capitalist, like a fairy tale where bullion kisses the frog of feudalism and out jumps the prince of industry. Money is not an engine by itself. It becomes capital only within a social order that compels and rewards accumulation, competition, and expansion.

Nonsense! A bunch of Capitalists can take over a territory and extract profit from it. That's what happened in King Leopold's Free State of Congo. The place was so badly run, that the European powers demand that the Belgian Government take over.  

Fine. But what Chibber refuses to confront is how that social order was made,

We know how it was made in England. America took a different course after Independence. Thus it does not have a hereditary aristocracy.  

how it was stabilized, and how it was globalized. He wants to keep the violence local and the explanation narrow: enclosure here, market dependence there, and the rest of the world as background scenery. But capitalism did not rise inside England like a plant growing in a sealed greenhouse.

English Capital Markets rose under Mercantilist laws- which did try to seal off the island for certain purposes.  

It rose as a system of coercive world-making,

No. It arose spontaneously, non-coercively, and without any common constructive understanding of reality.  

a system that produced “market dependence”

No. It reduced it by providing alternatives- e.g. emigration or changing occupation.  

not only by kicking peasants off English land,

which turned out to be good for the peasants.  

but by kicking whole peoples off their land,

which turned out to be great for 'settlers' like Trump, Biden, Mamdani etc.  

breaking communal reproduction, and forcing the colonized into the circuits of empire through taxes, monopolies, slave labor regimes, and gunboat “trade.”

Taxes and monopolies and Slaves have existed for millennia. Henry the Navigator created a better type of gunboat and so Portugal soon had an Empire stretching to China  and Brazil.  

The anti-colonial Marxist claim, properly stated, is structural and relational: capitalism’s transition and expansion cannot be understood without the violent construction of a world market,

This guy is obsessed with violence. No doubt he thinks the market for crypto involved the sodomization, enslavement and decapitation of trillions of flying unicorns.  

and without the systematic transfer of value from colonized labor and colonized land into metropolitan accumulation.

Post-colonial labour transferred more value to the guys who make luxury cars. In Africa the term 'wa-Benzi' means the ruling class which drives around in Mercedes cars and which has accumulated property and Bank Accounts in Western countries.  

This is not a moral slogan. It is political economy. The Atlantic slave system is not a sad sidebar;

It was a product of the eagerness of Africans to enslave and sell each other.  

it is a labor regime that generated commodities, profits, and state capacities on a scale that reshaped the accumulation possibilities of the metropole

Only if people in the metropole were thrifty, innovative and very hard working. But this was also true of countries which never had Colonial possessions- e.g. Switzerland.  

and built the infrastructure of modern finance, shipping, insurance, and industry.

smart peeps did that. It wasn't the peasant or the proletarian.  

Settler colonial land theft is not “pre-capitalist brutality”;

White Settlement in Kenya and Zimbabwe was done under the auspices of Commercial Trading Enterprises before the Government took over.  

it is the creation of a gigantic property base, a resource frontier, and a racial order of labor control that becomes a long-term platform for capitalist development.

No. Back in the 1880s, there was some notion that Colonies would help you industrialize but experience showed that most colonies ran at a loss.  

Imperialism is not the after-party that starts in the late nineteenth century; it is the extension and maturation of the same coercive logic by which capital secures labor, resources, and markets when “free exchange” is not enough.

It is the same coercive logic which forces women to have babies. Also, it is the reason Death has not been abolished. It is a fact that eating your own shit will make you immortal. Yet, Chibber- evil bastard that he is- refuses to admit this elementary truth.  

Chibber tries to escape this by insisting that the real secret is “market dependence,” that capitalism begins when people are forced to compete to survive.

The Neanderthals were forced to compete with our species. They didn't survive. This was the fault of Neo-Liberalism.  

Good. Let’s accept that definition. Now the question becomes: by what means, and on what scale, was that dependence manufactured?

The answer is that the ruling class spread the rumour that eating your own shit was bad for you. Thus people became dependent on the market for food.  

And once you ask that honestly, his neat separation collapses. Because market dependence was not created by English landlords alone; it was enforced by imperial states.

No. Imperial states were perfectly content for subsistence farming to continue. They might impose a poll tax so as to encourage peasants to grow some cash crops on the side but once the peasant saw that he could buy nice shiny things by producing cash crops he eagerly did so.  

It was imposed through enclosures and vagrancy laws at home, yes

But emigration was an option. My impression is that there was high net emigration from England into Scotland and Ireland during the early Middle Ages though this trend was reversed at a later time. 

— and through conquest, dispossession, slavery, indenture, forced cultivation, tribute systems, unequal treaties, and colonial taxation abroad.

Which is why Mongolia became the most Capitalist country in the world under Genghis Khan. Shaka Zulu too was a big fat Capitalist.  

The whip and the contract are not opposites in this history; they are partners.

Very true. Every time you sign a contract, somebody shoves a whip up your bum.  

Capital does not merely “discover” markets.

Capital is used for 'market making'- either arbitrage or entrepreneurship.  

It breaks societies until markets become unavoidable.

It doesn't break a Society. It makes it more affluent and better able to defend itself.  

And the colonized world is where that breaking was often the most direct, the most brutal, and the most revealing.

Not in India. The British Raj was a period of peace and somnolence.  

This is why the Spain-and-Portugal story, which Chibber uses like a hammer, does not actually hit the nail he claims it hits.

True. The Spanish 'School of Salamanca' was ahead of Jacobean England because its markets were more developed. 

Even if bullion did not transform Iberian class relations into English-style agrarian capitalism, it does not follow that colonial extraction was irrelevant to the rise of capitalism as a world system.

It is obvious that Spain and Portugal extracted resources from their colonies. Arguably, this retarded the formation of 'Civil Society' and a flourishing private sector.  

It only shows that plunder can be absorbed and misused within particular class structures — that a feudal-rentier order can burn treasure in war, court luxury, and stagnation. But the system does not end at national borders. The question is not whether treasure “made Spain capitalist,” but how the imperial reshaping of trade, prices, state finance, war-making capacity, and global commodity circuits created the conditions in which certain capitalist formations could consolidate and then dominate.

Different countries pursued different paths. In some places 'capitalist formations' did dominate but not in others. Next to the town, where the burghers ran things, was the feudal estate which preserved the traditional social order.  

Chibber’s method relies on treating countries like sealed jars and then pretending the world economy is a footnote. That is not materialism. That is methodological nationalism dressed up as rigor.

Chibber doesn't have a 'method'. He merely warns against gassing on about Colonialism. This is because he comes from India where Narendra Modi denounces Lord Macaulay and the English speaking elite to which Chibber himself belongs. 

So our task then is to restore the real argument that Chibber is trying to bury. The dispute is not about whether money alone can create capitalism. The dispute is about whether capitalism’s “economic structure” can be told truthfully without centering the colonial manufacture of property, labor, and dependency on a world scale.

The answer is 'yes'. People get paid a lot of money to analyse the economic structure of capitalist countries and to make predictions on that basis. If these smart people don't think colonies are important (which is why the British or French or Dutch Stock Market didn't collapse when those countries gave up their Colonies) then you look a fool for pretending otherwise.   

Chibber wants colonialism to be either irrelevant or merely supplementary — something you can acknowledge as “an abomination”

but the Raj wasn't an abomination.  It kept minorities safe. Plenty of Chibber's own people paid a high price in 1947/48. 

and then politely move past. Weaponized Information insists the opposite: colonialism and settler conquest

began to happen at least 6000 years ago 

are not just crimes committed alongside capitalism;

Swiss Capitalism caused Switzerland to colonize Swaziland.  

they are among the material processes through which capitalism was built, expanded, and defended, and they remain embedded in how value is captured, how labor is disciplined, and how the imperial core reproduces itself today.

Endlessly repeating nonsense won't make it true.  

England Was Not an Island: How “Internal Transition” Myths Smuggle Empire Through the Back Door

Having reduced the anti-colonial argument to a strawman, Chibber then advances his centerpiece: England became capitalist before it had an empire, therefore colonialism cannot be constitutive to capitalism’s rise. Spain and Portugal had empires and stagnated; England had no empire and surged.

England needed a kick-ass Navy and Merchant Marine to keep its independence. But ships and canons are expensive. To pay for the navy England had to get into 'repugnancy markets'- initially piracy, then the slave trade, the opium trade etc. But as it became more affluent, the English could get out of piracy and the slave trade. The opium trade collapsed when China started growing its own opium and taxing it.  

Case closed. This is presented as devastating empirical common sense. In reality, it is a historical sleight of hand that depends on aggressive omission,

why is Chibber omitting to mention that eating your own shit will make you very healthy? 

selective chronology, and a refusal to theorize empire as a system

which suppresses the eating your own shit. 

rather than a flag planted on distant soil.

The soil can be contiguous to your own. 

Let us begin with the most obvious falsification. England did not develop in splendid isolation,

but it did develop with full political sovereignty and sufficient military power to keep foreign powers at bay.  

patiently inventing capitalism while the rest of the world happened elsewhere. Long before the formal empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England was already a colonial power in practice.

It had planted colonies in Ireland.  

Ireland was its laboratory.

No. It was sui generis.  

The violent conquest, plantation, land seizure, and demographic engineering imposed on Ireland were not peripheral episodes; they were rehearsals.

No. In Ireland there was the question of religion and loyalty to the Stuart dynasty. This was not the case in India or Africa. The East India Company's territory was the first wholly secular polity.  

Techniques of enclosure, property law, forced market dependence, and counterinsurgency were refined there before being exported outward.

No. They remained confined to Ireland.  

To narrate England’s transition while bracketing Ireland is not an innocent simplification. It is a settler move: erase the colony so the metropole can appear self-generated.

Vivek actually knows something about British colonialism because his parents were born under it. Ireland had a lot of seats in Westminster. India didn't.  

The same applies to England’s early integration into the Atlantic system. Piracy, privateering, slave trading, chartered companies, and naval warfare were not late imperial luxuries; they were constitutive practices through which the English state learned how to fuse accumulation with coercion.

The England soon gave up piracy and played a role in suppressing it world wide. Oceanic trade is more profitable, long term, than piracy. 

Merchant capital, state violence, and overseas plunder were already intertwined as England’s agrarian transformation unfolded.

Recent research keeps pushing back the date for this. But, by 1500 AD, it was clear that there had been big changes.  Much depended on the fate of the Church. If it remained under Rome, there would be a powerful lobby for keeping or reverting to the old system. It was the new commercial middle-class which was most attracted to Protestant ideas. They also thought there was nothing unnatural about usury and rejected the notion of a 'just price'. 

The idea that England’s capitalism was born “before empire” only works if

Capitalist enterprises hadn't played a big part in Colonialism. In other words, if there had never been a 'Virginia Company' or a 'Massachusetts Bay Company' or a 'Newfoundland Company', we could say first there was an Empire and then there was joint stock Companies with tradeable shares which is the hallmark of Capitalism. Incidentally, Queen Victoria only gained the title of Empress of India some 13 years after the Crown in Parliament had taken over the East India Company. 

empire is defined narrowly as formal territorial possession rather than as a mode of organized expropriation operating through trade monopolies, slave markets, war, and settler expansion.

The Mafia and various other criminal cartels meet this definition. They may enslave and traffic women, they may monopolize the cocaine trade, they may fight wars with each other and they may bring in illegal immigrants on an industrial scale.  

That definition is not historical rigor.

It is founded in law and historical fact. 

It is ideological hygiene.

Why don't people eat their own shit? Is it because of 'ideological hygiene'?

Chibber’s Spain-and-Portugal example collapses under the same scrutiny. He treats each country as a sealed container,

No. Chibber comes from India. As a kid, he had teachers with names like Lopez. D'Souza, Fernandes etc. It was obvious that Spanish and Portuguese people settled all over the world. They weren't 'sealed containers'. Both did have a lot of Capitalist development at particular points in their history. Lisbon had a dedicated Stock Exchange from 1769 onward. In London, it was only in 1773 that a special building for trading stocks was set up.  

as if capitalism were a national chemistry experiment whose results can be compared by holding everything else constant. But capitalism did not emerge as a collection of national experiments. It emerged as a world system.

Very true. It wasn't the King who granted the charter to the Virginia Company. It was the World System as represented by a flying unicorn.  

Iberian bullion inflows reshaped European price structures, state finance, military competition, and commercial circuits across the continent.

They also reshaped the Mughal and Chinese Empires.  

Even if Spain’s internal class structure channeled that wealth into war, rent, and stagnation, the effects did not stop at the Pyrenees.

or the mountains of Peru.  

Capitalist development elsewhere fed on those disruptions. To say “Spain stagnated, therefore plunder is irrelevant” is

false. Spain stagnated when Kings did stupid shit or there were wars of succession. There were also some non-market institutions like the Spanish Mesta which some blame for holding the country back. 

like saying a fire did not cause a city’s growth because the ashes settled unevenly.

Fire does not cause a city to grow. New York won't get bigger if Mamdani burns it down.  

More fundamentally, Chibber’s entire argument depends on isolating “the transition” as a purely internal agrarian event.

He merely means that ending serfdom created a market for labour power. That's perfectly Marxist. However, there were workarounds for slavery or serfdom such that the invisible hand allocated labour.  

Enclosures force peasants onto the market;

wanting to buy stuff forces us into the market. We should stay at home eating our own shit. Capitalists will cry and cry.  

market dependence generates competition;

wanting to be a winner rather than be a whiny bitch of a loser generates competition.  

competition drives productivity. End of story. But this story collapses the moment we ask how that market was sustained, expanded, and stabilized.

Very true. Once we understand that market dependence sodomized, decapitated and slut shamed everybody we will feel ashamed of ourselves for not eating our own shit.  

A market is not a self-winding clock.

I don't need to wind my watch because it is an automatic. Markets exist thanks to market-makers.  

It requires demand, inputs, outlets, and enforcement. Colonial conquest supplied all four.

Very true. If only Neil Armstrong had colonized the Moon, it would have a growing population. 

Colonies provided land, labor, raw materials, and captive markets.

So did non-colonies. You can lease land in Madagascar or Maryland and bring in labour and raw materials. If what you produce is essential to some people, you have a captive market.  

They absorbed surplus goods, disciplined labor through racial terror,

Not in India. If a guy didn't like his job, he was welcome to quit.  

and generated super-profits that lubricated accumulation.

unless it generated super-losses which didn't.  

The English working class did not confront capitalism inside a closed loop.

Yes they did. That's why they formed Trade Unions and lobbied Parliament to improve their wages and working conditions.  

It confronted a system already extending outward, already feeding on colonial violence, already building a world market whose center of gravity lay in Europe but whose lifeblood flowed from elsewhere.

We could say the same today. American Marxists should stop caring about American workers. It should spend all its time screaming itself hoarse about slave labour in Myanmar or Mauretania.  

This is where Chibber’s invocation of “market dependence” turns against him. He insists that capitalism begins when people have no choice but to sell their labor to survive.

That is the essence of Marxism. You might say 'nobody is being exploited if they voluntarily chose to do a particular job for a specific payment'. The reply would be 'people who refuse to take shitty jobs are beaten, sodomized, decapitated and subjected to slut shaming by evil Capitalist bastards. Wake up sheeple! Can't you see that trillions of people are, even as we speak, being sodomized by flying unicorns at the behest of Wall Street?'  

Correct. But how was that condition reproduced beyond England’s fields?

Flying unicorns. They really are a terrible nuisance. The pink elephants I didn't mind so much.  

How were millions across Africa, Asia, and the Americas made dependent on markets they did not control?

why did African Chieftains capture and sell slaves to Arabs and Europeans? It was because they wanted nice, shiny, things. This is also why muggers hit you on the head and run away with your wallet. Market dependence is very evil. We should all eat only our own shit. 

Through taxation payable only in colonial currency,

which was cheap at the price if it meant internecine conflict was curbed. Look at Uganda. It wasn't till about the year 2000 that its per capita income returned to its 1960 level.  

through forced cultivation of export crops,

which continued after Independence 

through the destruction of communal land systems,

see above 

through slavery and indenture,

the Brits suppressed slavery. Indentured workers in Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa, West Indies, etc. did very much better, over the generations, than their kinfolk back home.  

through the gunboat and the whip.

Whips already existed. Gunboats represented merely a qualitative improvement over what went before.  

Market dependence did not politely expand outward from England like ripples in a pond. It was imposed, unevenly and violently, by imperial power.

How the fuck did tiny England manage to do so? Were the Brits born under the Red Sun of the Planet Krypton?  

To describe that as “supplementary” to capitalism’s core is to confuse geography with structure.

It is a fact that till quite recently Capitalism existed only in some parts of the world. The question was whether Command Economies would do better- at least militarily- than 'the Free World'.  

Chibber wants us to believe that because England’s agrarian class relations changed first, empire must be secondary.

Chibber is from India. He may know that Indian 'agrarian class relations' changed before the foundation of the Mauryan Empire.  

But chronology is not causality, and priority is not purity.

But shit remains shit. Don't eat it.  

Capitalism’s internal transformation and its external expansion were not sequential chapters in a textbook;

They were in England. Joint-Stock Companies were responsible for colonial expansion. Even if the first share-holders were military or naval officers, what enabled these ventures to prosper was that merchants were willing to supply finance on the security of shares.  

they were mutually reinforcing processes. Enclosure at home produced surplus labor;

No. Improved transport and rising productivity meant that England's last famine occurred in 1620 and was localized. The absence of 'Malthusian checks' on population meant there was surplus labour and a steady stream of emigrants. But England's rising prosperity also attracted immigration.  

colonies absorbed surplus goods and capital; colonial profits strengthened the state; the state enforced property relations; and the cycle intensified.

In other words, States then were like States now. If productivity rises, the State gets more revenue. If it falls, the State is able to do less and less. 

To tear these elements apart and rank them as “essential” versus “incidental” is not materialist analysis.

It is what analysis of any type must do.  

It is a political choice about which violences count as foundational and which can be treated as unfortunate consequences.

No violences were 'foundational' of anything. It now appears that we didn't even kill off the Neanderthals. We simply had more rapid demographic expansion.  

This is where settler colonial analysis becomes unavoidable, and where Western Marxism begins to panic.

Because gassing on about foundational violence entails handing Europe back to the Neanderthals.  

Settler colonialism is not just extraction; it is replacement. It creates durable property regimes, racial labor hierarchies, and territorial control that anchor capitalist accumulation over centuries.

Settlers should return Turtle Island to the turtles. Our species should get the fuck out of Europe. It belongs to the Neanderthals.  

England’s transition cannot be understood without acknowledging that the same state power that enclosed peasants also conquered lands, expelled peoples, and constructed a racialized global labor order.

What's more that same State Power is being used to persuade even innocent young toddlers that they should not eat their own shit.  

The “internal” and the “external” are not separate spheres. They are two faces of the same class project.

In which case, Swiss Capitalism can't be anything like English Capitalism. My friend from Yorkshire who now works in Zurich for Credit Suisse is lying when he assures me that Swiss gnomes aren't incessantly sodomizing him. On the other hand, his manager keeps putting an apple on his head and then tries to shoot an arrow at it. He often misses and hits Heidi. This causes her to yodel something fierce.  

The insistence that England “had capitalism before empire” is therefore not a neutral empirical claim. It is a narrative firewall. Its function is to preserve a version of Marxism that can critique landlords without indicting settlers,

i.e. all Americans not descended from indigenous people.  

that can analyze class without confronting colonial property,

i.e. which can say 'boo to the billionaires!' without also admitting that all White and Black and Asian people should fuck the fuck off from 'Turtle Island'.  

and that can imagine socialism emerging from the imperial core

Anglo Saxons should fuck off from England. So should the Celts. The place properly belongs to Neanderthals.  

without a reckoning with the structures that made that core possible.

What makes babies possible is Daddy putting his pee peee in Mummy's chee chee place. That's totes gross.  

Weaponized Information rejects that firewall. Capitalism did not grow up in England and then accidentally wander into the world.

There have been market mechanisms for allocating investible funds throughout recorded history.  

It was forged through enclosure and conquest together,

France didn't have anything similar to Enclosures. Holland is more interesting. There land reclamation gave rise to bigger estates which were scientifically managed. Some Dutch engineers were brought into Seventeenth Century England to oversee similar projects- e.g. draining the fens. The greater efficiency of bigger estates had a Tardean mimetic effect. It is a good thing is more food is grown on less land and using less labour.  

stabilized through settler colonialism and slavery, and expanded through imperial domination. Any account that separates these processes does not clarify capitalism’s origins; it sanitizes them.

Also failure to mention the role of invisible flying unicorns in sodomizing, decapitating and slut shaming the proletariat sanitizes the truly Satanic aspects of Neo-Liberalism.  

“Consensus,” Eurocentrism, and the Art of Declaring the Case Closed

At this point in the argument, Chibber reaches for the ultimate academic cudgel: consensus. We are told that the question of capitalism’s origins has been settled, that the data are in, that serious economic historians agree England and the Low Countries diverged first, and that anyone who continues to insist on colonialism as constitutive is either confused, ideological, or flirting with “Eurocentrism” in reverse. This is not analysis; it is authority speaking in the passive voice. “There is a mountain of literature.” “There is a strong consensus.” Translation: stop asking the wrong questions.

Instead you should eat your own shit.  That will make Wall Street cry and cry. 

But consensus is not truth, and it is certainly not innocence. Every consensus is built by deciding which questions are legitimate and which are dismissed as noise. Political Marxism’s consensus rests on

stupidity.  

a prior exclusion: colonial relations are treated as external to the “real” transition story.

Because it occurred in countries which didn't have colonies. Marx and Engels were German. Germany got its first colonies a year after Marx died.  

Once that boundary is drawn, it becomes easy to proclaim victory. England’s agrarian transformation explains capitalism; empire explains something else.

The Germans and the Japs did think they needed colonies to rise. They were wrong.  

The problem is not that the English agrarian transition did not happen. The problem is that this framework turns a world-historical system into a national morality tale and then congratulates itself for methodological rigor.

Capitalism is a morality tale about the virtue of thrift and abstinence and innovation and enterprise. Also, if you treat your employees well and run your business in a honest and conscientious manner, your credit rating improves. People help you out in bad times. Equally important, you have 'Voice'. The powers that be listen carefully to your opinions of commercial and industrial matters.  

When Chibber scoffs at the charge of Eurocentrism, he deliberately misdefines it. Eurocentrism does not mean “locating an event in Europe when it happened there.” Eurocentrism means treating Europe as a self-generating engine of history, while the rest of the world appears only as background, resource pool, or passive recipient. It means narrating capitalism as if Europe developed first and then later interacted with the world, rather than as a system that emerged through world-scale coercion, conquest, and reorganization.

done by Europeans. Columbus was a white dude. So was Vasco da Gama. On the other hand, Captain Cook was a Zulu lesbian.  

You can acknowledge England’s early divergence

actually it was the Germans who were ahead in metallurgy, mining etc.  

and still be Eurocentric

No. If you think England was really special then you also buy into American exceptionalism. Ultimately, you end up voting for Brexit and becoming Trump's bitch.  

if you treat that divergence as internally sufficient

as opposed to the product of the machinations of the Spanish Inquisition 

and analytically complete.

No analysis is complete till everybody eats their own shit.  

The sleight of hand is subtle but decisive. Chibber asks: did something recognizably capitalist exist elsewhere before England?

Yes. It existed in many places at different points in time. Nothing as sophisticated as the Roman financial system would be seen in Europe till about the thirteenth century.  

If not, then locating capitalism’s origin in England cannot be Eurocentric. But this shifts the issue from structure to chronology. The anti-colonial argument is not that China or India had factories identical to Lancashire in 1500.

Lancashire only had factories from the mid 1700s. India had factories from about 1850.  

It is that Europe’s capitalist trajectory cannot be explained without the violent incorporation of the rest of the world into a hierarchical system of value extraction.

It was only America & Australia which weren't already connected to global markets.  

Capitalism does not require identical forms everywhere to be constitutive. It requires asymmetric relations. It requires centers and peripheries. It requires zones of cheap labor, coerced labor, and stolen land. To deny this is not to defend materialism; it is to amputate it.

Most of all, it needs people to believe that they shouldn't eat their own shit.  

Chibber’s growth-rate narrative performs the same ideological labor. England takes off; Asia and the rest of Europe fall behind; therefore capitalism is explained.

England's navy protected it from invasion and enabled it to become rich enough to subsidize European allies. But for the Navy to 'pay for itself', England had to do a lot of trading. Did it also need to take over the administration of vast territories in India, Africa, etc? The answer was- if a profit can be made by doing so, there was no harm in doing so. Still, there was always a 'Little England' party which feared that the Empire would become a drain on the nation. The best way forward was to make the colonies self-administering and self-garrisoning.  

But growth curves do not explain themselves. They describe outcomes, not causes.

They help establish 'Granger causality'.  

What they obscure is how those curves were produced and sustained. England’s “explosive” growth did not occur in a vacuum.

It was steady, not 'explosive'. England grew as a great trading nation which then industrialized and thus had even more high value added good to trade with. It also became a big capital exporting nation.  

It coincided with the consolidation of Atlantic slavery,

Britain got out of that repugnant trade.  

the expansion of settler frontiers,

by settlers 

the militarization of trade routes,

i.e. piracy was suppressed 

and the subordination of vast populations to imperial rule.

Which, speaking generally, was better than what went before or, in the case of many African countries, what would come afterwards.  

These were not coincidental backdrops. They were the global conditions that allowed growth to continue rather than choke on its own contradictions.

Growth continues if leaders do smart things. It chokes not on 'contradictions' but on doing Chavez/Maduro level stupid shite.  

This is where the Patnaiks,

who say India was drained of trillions of dollars even though its national income was less than a billion.  

Samir Amin,

He was an adviser to the Minister of Planning in Mali from 1960-1963. One problem he faced was to persuade soldiers not to burn the bales of currency which had been sent from Paris.  

Hosea Jaffe,

a White South African. I suppose his people will soon run away from there, if they haven't left already. 

and John Smith become indispensable — and where Chibber’s framework collapses. Capitalism’s growth in the core required mechanisms to manage demand, secure cheap inputs, and extract surplus value beyond national borders.

Which is why there was no Capitalism in the Germany of Karl Marx.  

Imperialism is not an after-effect of successful capitalism; it is a solution to capitalism’s internal limits.

That was the 'Imperialism is the final stage of Capitalism' story. Capitalism is a fucking vampire. If it is no longer sucking the blood of the proles, it must be sucking the blood of niggers. You just wait. The moment Africa becomes free, Capitalism will collapse. Sadly, the reverse happened. Africa became free and turned into a shithole. Capitalism rose and rose.  

From Political Economy to Moral Panic: How “Race Reductionism” Replaces Analysis

Having narrowed capitalism to an English agrarian transition and insulated that transition from empire, Chibber makes his sharpest political turn. He tells us that the return of colonial explanations is not driven by evidence or history but by a slide into “race reductionism,” by talk of “global white supremacy,” by a Left that has supposedly abandoned class for identity.

This is true enough. The author is African American. He could benefit if 'reparation' payments are made to his people. This may also be good for the economy. Indeed, if AI eats up the real economy, our only way to survive might be through reparation payments for historical injustices our ancestors may have suffered. Chibber comes from India where virtually all castes want more and more affirmative action on the basis of some supposed historical discrimination or oppression they suffered. 

This move is not an aside. It is the ideological keystone of the entire argument. Once colonial analysis is recoded as racial moralism, it can be dismissed without engaging its material claims.

But the historical record does not support this caricature. Anti-colonial Marxism did not begin as a language of moral outrage about whiteness.

In East Africa, there was also moral outrage about brownness. After the Zanzibar revolution, Arabs and Indian men were murdered and their women forcibly married off to the descendants of slaves. This revolution was led by a Ugandan. Asians felt grateful to Idi Amin for quietly bumping off the fellow. Indeed, Amin did the Asians a favour by booting them out of a doomed country. The son of an East African Asian couple became the Prime Minister of the UK. I protested against this Punjabi 'settler' oppressing indigenous Tamil peeps like myself. 

It emerged from concrete struggles over land, labor, and sovereignty.

There were such struggles in some places- e.g. White Highlands of Kenya- but not others- e.g. Uganda or Ghana.  

Nkrumah was not theorizing “identity”; he was analyzing how political independence without economic control reproduces dependency.

He was crazy. He should have listened to Arthur Lewis. His own people got fed up with him and a military coup put an end to his reign.  

Rodney was not counting moral sins; he was tracing how Europe’s development was materially linked to Africa’s underdevelopment.

He was lying. Africa's underdevelopment was directly linked to its leaders doing stupid shit.  

Amin was not gesturing at race; he was mapping a world system structured by unequal exchange.

He was white though his Dad was Egyptian.  

These analyses were forged in confrontation with colonial administration, forced labor regimes, cash-crop coercion, and imperial state violence.

Communist countries- including African Communist countries- did all this on an industrial scale.  

They are grounded in political economy, not confession.

No. They were grounded in ignoring the obvious fact that African leaders were kleptocratic cretins. Smart Africans or Asians lost little time in migrating to somewhere still ruled by Whitey. Incidentally, Liberia- which was run by an Afro-American elite- was a total shitshow.  

Chibber’s accusation works

because it is true. Some Whites did smart things. They rose as did Koreans or Chinese people who did smart things. Mauritius is brown and black. It did smart things. That's why it now has higher per capita income than Nigeria or South Africa (since 2011. The gap has widened considerably since then).  

only by collapsing nation, race, and class

don't forget gender 

into a single muddle and then blaming his opponents for the confusion. The anti-colonial claim is not that exploitation happens because Europeans are white. It is that capitalism developed through a colonial world order in which racialization became a technology of labor control, property legitimation, and political rule.

So much so that my generation of educated Africans and Asians preferred to migrate to White ruled countries.

Race is not the cause; it is the instrument.

Obama was whipped and beaten till he agreed to pluck cotton in the 'White House' garden.  

To acknowledge that is not to abandon class analysis but to

tell stupid lies 

specify how class domination actually operated across a global terrain shaped by conquest and settlement.

by Whites unless it was the Japanese who were doing it.  

The concrete historical sequence matters here. In the settler colonies, land was seized and populations were displaced or annihilated to create a territorial base for accumulation.

No. A territorial base for settlement was created. But this has been happening since the agricultural revolution. 

In plantation zones, enslaved and semi-enslaved labor generated export commodities under regimes of absolute coercion.

The ancient Greeks and Romans etc. had plantations. There was a black slave revolt in Abbasid Iraq.  

In colonized agrarian societies, taxes payable only in colonial currency forced peasants into market dependence and wage labor.

This continued after independence. But most countries had monetized agricultural taxes by the seventeenth century.  

These processes were organized by imperial states and justified through racial ideologies, but they were driven by the requirements of accumulation.

It was driven by the need to pay for Public goods and services.  

To describe this as “race reductionism” is to invert causality and erase the machinery that produced both race and class in their modern forms.

Which is just as bad as refusing to eat only your own shit.  

What disappears in Chibber’s framing is the question of incorporation. Capitalism did not simply exploit colonized labor abroad while leaving the metropole untouched. It reorganized class relations inside the core as well. Settler access to land, imperial super-profits, and cheap commodities reshaped the political economy of Europe and North America, altering wage structures, consumption patterns, and the balance of class forces.

In the case of England, wealth from the Indies was used by people like Alderman Beckford or Pitt the elder to champion progressive causes in Parliament. The nouveau riche 'Nabob' tended to be Radical in this thinking. The 13 Colonies, of course, were even more radical. They got rid of a hereditary aristocracy. 

This is not a claim that all workers in the core were uniformly privileged, nor that class struggle vanished. It is a claim that the terrain of that struggle was conditioned by imperial relations.

If this were true, then Marx & Engels were stupid. Germany or Belgium couldn't possibly have Capitalism of the English type. True America and Germany went in a 'Listian' direction. But England had been Mercantilist for a long period. 

Ignoring this conditioning does not preserve class analysis; it impoverishes it.

almost as much as refusing to eat your own shit.  

The charge of “race reductionism” also performs a forward-looking function. It delegitimizes contemporary struggles that target borders, land theft, carceral control, and imperial militarism by portraying them as distractions from “real” class politics.

In other words, stuff which might get the working class to vote for you. I think Mamdani won because he was offering to levy a tax on the rich and redistribute the money to the poor. Also there would be higher minimum wages and free child-care and so forth.  

Yet these institutions are not cultural residues; they are mechanisms through which market dependence is enforced today. Migration regimes discipline labor on a global scale.

Unless the migrants prefer to deal drugs and rape young girls so as to get them into prostitution.  

Debt and austerity reproduce dispossession in the postcolonial world.

If you refuse to lend me money, you are just as bad as Hitler.  

Militarized policing and prisons manage surplus populations inside the core.

No. They manage criminal populations. There would be no fucking 'surplus' population if criminals weren't punished. People would run the fuck away.  

To treat these as secondary to an abstract wage relation is to mistake the surface form of exploitation for its total structure.

as bad a mistake as not eating your own shit.  

Historically, the Left has seen this maneuver before. Whenever colonized or oppressed peoples insist that their specific conditions matter — that land, nation, and state power are not interchangeable with factory relations — a section of the metropolitan Left accuses them of parochialism, nationalism, or now, racialism.

Gassing on about Vietnam rather than figuring out ways to raise wages and improve working conditions harmed the Left in the late Sixties.  

The real question, then, is not why some people talk about race too much,

if they can get reparations out of it, good luck to them. 

but why a certain Marxism insists on talking about capitalism as if empire were an external irritant rather than an organizing principle.

The British Labour Party found out in 1922 that if you keep gassing on about the suffering of Ireland or India, then workers vote Tory.  That's why, once in power, they abandoned their manifesto promises given some 5 years previously. I recall reading Churchill's first election speech. I thought it would be about the Boer War and the glorious British Empire. It was about worker's comp. Even when he mentioned the Army (this was during the 'khaki' election) he did so only in the context of worker's comp. He won the election.

Chibber’s answer is to moralize the problem and declare it a deviation. Weaponized Information insists on a different approach: return to the concrete history of how capitalism actually organized labor, land, and power on a world scale,

People with capital used different methods in different places. Sometimes they failed and gave up. Henry Ford wanted to produce rubber in Brazil. His 'Fordlandia' was a miserable failure.  

and let theory answer to that reality rather than policing it.

Theory is being policed too much. That is why it isn't eating its own shit.  

That is not identity politics. It is materialism without blinders.

It is paranoid nonsense.  

When the Metropole Eats the World: Imperial Value Transfer and the Reproduction of “Domestic” Class Peace

Chibber tries to end the controversy by conceding a moral point while blocking the material one. Colonialism, he says, was “an abomination.”

For his people in West Punjab, it was a great blessing.  

It was driven by “material incentives.” Fine. Then he draws a hard line: you can admit that, but you cannot say capitalism in the West came out of plunder, and you certainly cannot say the West stays rich through the continued extraction of the South.

There was a time when Punjab exported a lot of Wheat. Its people became prosperous. Then after Independence, both Pakistan and India decided to beg for PL 480 wheat. This was bad for Punjabis. The 'drain theory' was stupid. It led people like Nehru or Nkrumah to think that since 'drain' had ended, there would be more and more money available for White Elephant projects.  

This is where the argument stops being a medieval debate about England and becomes a modern political economy question: what are the material mechanisms through which wealth is reproduced in the imperial core,

There are no Empires anywhere. There can't be an 'imperial core'. There are global financial centres and there are centres of high value adding manufacturing and services. It turns out, some types of research and development has very high expected present value. That's how come trillions become available for investment in AI, Nanotech, etc, etc.  

and how are those mechanisms tied to the organization of labor, production, and exchange on a world scale?

That is an ideographic matter. The same company may directly employ people in its US campus while using sub-contractors on its Indian campus. In China, it may have a local partner and leave day to day matters in the hands of a Communist Party member.  

The concrete historical conditions of the modern era do not allow the neat separation Chibber wants.

He is a low IQ chap who is simply saying 'American workers won't vote for you unless you say you will get them more money and better working conditions.' Look at Trump & Sanders. They rose because they promised to bring back well-paid blue collar jobs to American cities. Hilary was obliged to do a U turn on TPP. It was too little too late.  

From the nineteenth century forward, capitalism is not merely a national system with occasional overseas adventures. It is a world market organized through imperial power.

No. Napoleon's 'Imperial power' wasn't enough to enforce his 'Continental system'. The Nineteenth century witnessed the rise of free trade and the fall of mercantilism.  

The core does not simply “trade” with the periphery; it structures the terms on which production, prices, finance, and state policy operate.

No. It has no such power. Henry Ford had a fuck ton of money. But his Fordlandia failed. So did the post-War British groundnuts scheme implemented by a Labour government. Head office can make plans and issue orders. But if the thing can't be done, it doesn't get done. Head Office has to eat the loss and recall its employees.  

Colonial administration and, later, neo-colonial leverage were not episodic crimes.

They weren't crimes.  

They were institutional arrangements that made sure the periphery supplied cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and strategic commodities while remaining constrained in its ability to industrialize, to control capital flows, and to set sovereign development priorities.

That sob-story was told by incompetent of kleptocratic leaders of countries which turned into shitholes. If South Korea and Taiwan and Malaysia and now China could rise and rise, then either you admit that East Asians have high IQ and thus are different, or you accept that many African and South Asian countries did stupid shit.  

This is not a slogan about “plunder.” It is the historical architecture of unequal exchange

how come I can't buy a Tesla car with the loose change I have in my pocket? Is it coz I iz bleck?  

and global labor hierarchy. Value is captured not only where it is produced but where it is realized, priced, financed, insured, shipped, and monopolized.

Also, Wall Street Bankers are surreptitiously entering our homes at night and sucking us off- thus depriving us of valuable jizz.  

When production is geographically dispersed but controlled through corporate planning, intellectual property, trade rules, and financial power, the surplus generated by workers in the periphery does not remain where those workers live.

Also the workers don't remain there if they can save or borrow enough money to try their luck at the US border.  

It is appropriated through the structure of the world market.

Very true. If you don't pay your mortgage, the Bank takes over your house and sells it. That Bank is integrated into the global economic system. Thus, it was Capitalism, not your Cocaine habit, which led to your becoming homeless.  

This is not a mystical claim; it is how modern supply chains and monopoly control function in practice: the labor-intensive, low-wage segments are externalized to the South

Trump is against that.  

while the high-margin commanding heights are consolidated in the core.

Till China overtakes us.  

The historical record makes this legible. Under colonial rule, vast regions were reorganized around export economies, forced into cash-crop dependence, and denied autonomous industrial pathways.

The same thing happened after colonial rule- unless it didn't because the country really wanted to industrialize.  

After formal decolonization, the mechanisms changed form but not function: debt regimes,

if you borrow money to set up a factory which is profitable, you can not only service your debt but sell equity so as to expand without leveraging.  

structural adjustment,

as opposed to what? Hyperinflation? The collapse of the State?  

trade conditionalities,

stuff like Human Rights clauses? Thankfully, the Chinese aren't bothered with such things. More and more trade will go to them.  

currency hierarchies,

If your people wipe their asses on your currency, there is going to be a hierarchy between shitty currencies and ones which hold their value.  

military intimidation,

which Trump is actually doing to Venezuela 

and comprador class alliances preserved a pattern in which the periphery remains a reservoir of cheap labor and resources.

As opposed to becoming a reservoir of cannibalism.  

The imperial core’s “advanced” accumulation is inseparable from this arrangement because it continually cheapens the inputs of production, expands the arena of exploitation, and supplies outlets for surplus capital.

This was the Immeserising Growth theory of Bhagwati, Prebitsch etc circa 1958. But nothing was stopping any primary producer from moving up the value chain. Sadly, it turned out, borrowing money and spending that money on White Elephant projects makes you worse off. 

This is where the question of “domestic” class compromise becomes concrete. In the core, the social wage, cheap consumer goods, and periods of relative stability were never generated by domestic productivity alone.

Yes they were. Even if you are using your army to plunder foreign countries, there is still high productivity in the military sector.  

They were also conditioned by an international division of labor in which colonized and dependent regions bore a disproportionate share of coercion, repression, and immiseration.

That's what happened to Stalin's Russia or Mao's China. The reverse happened in British ruled Punjab or Tamil Nadu.  

This does not mean workers in the core lived comfortably or that class struggle was fictional. It means the balance of forces and the material terrain of struggle were shaped by imperial relations.

This could be said of Franco's Spain. 'Moorish' troops spent a lot of time raping Spanish women while the Germans and Italians did the fighting.  

When cheap commodities flow in from super-exploited labor abroad,

as when Chinese good flooded the market 

capital gains room to manage wages and maintain political stability without surrendering control.

No. What happened was that China rose and rose. A Punjabi friend of mine who worked for a big Accountancy firm would often complain bitterly to me of how he was forced to work long hours and given shitty jobs because of his colour. He may well have been 'super-exploited'. But he is now as rich as fuck. 

When super-profits are available through overseas extraction and monopoly advantage,

managers get complacent. Sooner or later, rivals rise up and drive them out of business. The best of monopoly profits is a quiet life. But while you sleep, the competition is awake and beavering away. Soon, they will overtake you.  

reform becomes more affordable, and social peace becomes more purchasable.

In which case, Britain and France- which had huge Empires- should have escaped unscathed from the Great Depression.  

Chibber’s insistence that the “global North collectively exploits the global South” is “empirically mistaken” depends on restricting exploitation to a narrow picture:

i.e. actual exploitation rather than fairy stories 

direct coercion by a colonial state, visible theft of bullion, the literal image of a conquistador with a chest of gold. But capitalism is more sophisticated than the cartoon he wants to defeat.

Indeed. People who understand it become very very rich. Say to them 'I'm sorry to hear that the Global South has a plan by which it will end exploitation by the North. I suppose you will now sell your stocks and shares and put the money into gold'. What would they reply? The answer is they would say 'the Global South doesn't matter in the slightest. Still, if Bill Gates can build a reputation by giving money to shithole countries, good luck to him.'  

The modern mechanisms are structural: price-setting power, financial dominance, unequal bargaining positions, corporate control over technology and markets, and the political enforcement of these arrangements through sanctions, coups, and military pressure when necessary.

This could certainly have been said of the Anglo-American coup against Mossadegh. But it failed in its economic objective. Similarly, the Suez expedition was a fiasco because the Brits didn't understand that oil pipelines are easy to sabotage. My point is that anybody can make plans. Implementing them is difficult because other people don't react in the way you want them to react.  

The question is not whether every Western worker receives a dividend check stamped “imperialism.”

The question is whether Western workers were paid more than their marginal product. The answer was 'no'. However, it is possible that some 'transfers' were funded by the export of invisibles (e.g. oil rich Sheikhdoms paying for military support). 

The question is whether the reproduction of accumulation in the core is conditioned by systematic value transfer from the periphery. On that question, the historical evidence points in one direction: yes.

But this happens without colonialism. Why is New York a financial centre rather than some remote Appalachian mining town?  

There is also a deeper contradiction in Chibber’s own framework. He acknowledges that capitalism constantly seeks to expand commodification and that struggles over decommodification — the welfare state, social rights, access to necessities outside the market — remain central.

This is just collective insurance. Vivek is Indian. He knows that if the Government promises everybody a minimum income of 5000 dollars per annum, it will soon run out of money. Very few people will get the benefit before it is withdrawn.  

But in the real history of capitalism, the ability to tolerate partial decommodification in the core has often been linked to the continued commodification and coercion of the periphery.

Sadly, if people in the periphery are good at fighting, they do the coercing. The place may revert to anarchy.  

In other words, the imperial world system

which doesn't exist. It is not the case that I am secretly the Emperor of Planet Earth.  

does not merely enrich “some capitalists.”

What enriches them is doing smart things. If they do stupid shit they end up as poor as me.  

It helps structure the conditions under which capital can negotiate, concede, and retreat within the core while continuing to advance globally.

Why not say the Zionist Occupied Government of the US is structuring the conditions under which I exchange a blow job for a burger?  

Domestic reforms have repeatedly been bought with external domination. That is not moral condemnation; it is historical accounting.

It is paranoia.  

Once you grasp this, you see the function of Jacobin’s line more clearly. If colonial extraction is treated as historically brutal but structurally secondary,

just like the extraction of the jizz of my ancestors by successive Viceroys 

then socialism can be imagined as a purely internal redistribution project within the imperial core: organize workers, tax the rich, expand the welfare state, and treat the global system as a humanitarian concern rather than a constitutive economic relationship.

In other words, American Marxists will have to focus on bread and butter issues of concern to American voters.  

That is not an accident. It is the class-national utility of this framework. It produces a politics that can be radical inside the metropole while remaining vague, cautious, or evasive about the imperial mechanisms that make the metropole what it is.

Worse yet, it produces a 'politics' which refuses to endorse eating your own shit.  

Weaponized Information insists on a stricter materialism. Capitalism reproduces itself

by doing smart things. Even so, if rivals do smarter things, a capitalist enterprise may go under.  

through a world hierarchy of labor and value capture.

and refusal to eat your own shit even though it is super tasty.  

The “domestic” class terrain in the core cannot be separated from the international structure of exploitation and dependency. If you sever that connection, you do not get a cleaner Marxism. You get a Marxism that cannot explain why the periphery remains systematically constrained,

Why is Antarctica not a great financial centre like London or New York? Is it because penguins aren't White ? 

why coercion repeatedly concentrates there,

Coercion is impossible if a big mob soon assembles and beats the shit out of the coercer.  

and why the core retains structural advantage even as it preaches free markets.

It only does so if it does smart stuff. If it does stupid shit, smart people run-away. The place turns into a shithole. Incidentally, there was a time when Calcutta was the second city of the British Empire. Smart people went there to set up businesses. Then the Commies took it over and it turned into a shithole.  

In the next section, we will bring this to the ground level: how state power, borders, labor regimes, and counterinsurgency enforce this world system in practice, including inside the imperial core itself.

Why not just say 'black helicopters' belonging to the Zionist Occupied Government are killing and eating trillions of disabled lesbians of colour? 

The State Is Not a Referee: Coercion, Borders, and the Enforcement of Capitalist Reality

To complete the demolition of Chibber’s paradigm, we have to confront what his framework systematically dissolves into abstraction: the state. Not the state as an umpire of markets or a neutral container of class relations, but the state as an active instrument that engineers, enforces, and reproduces capitalist domination across space.

Using black helicopters. Also the Post Office is a cover for a paedophile ring. Wake up sheeple! David Icke was right! The Lizard People have taken over!  

Chibber’s story treats the state as a facilitator of an already-given transition — enclosures here, markets there — while the world beyond England fades into a blur. But capitalism has never existed without organized coercion.

No. Capitalism crossed borders without any enforcement mechanism. How it worked was this. If you defaulted, word got around. Nobody would do business with you again. Moreover, there was a class of arbitrageurs who took on the default risk- for a price. But that's how Ebay or Paypal work.  

It has never expanded without borders, police, prisons, armies, and law.

It has always done so. Look at the Radhanite trade network. Jews were then a persecuted minority with zero coercive power.  Yet, for two centuries, their network connected Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of India and China. 

And it has never survived crisis without counterinsurgency.

Very true. FDR launched a counterinsurgency during the Great Depression. He personally sodomized, decapitated and slut shamed trillions of American workers.  

Historically, the capitalist state did not merely respond to market dependence; it manufactured it. Vagrancy laws,

enforced by the parish 

workhouses,

paid for by the parish 

debtors’ prisons,

paid for by creditors 

and the criminalization of subsistence

which never happened anywhere.  

were not side effects of market logic but deliberate mechanisms to discipline labor once access to land and commons had been destroyed.

What worked better was paying more to the disciplined and sacking the undisciplined.  

This coercive scaffolding did not disappear after the “transition.” It intensified. As capitalism globalized, state power followed, not as a benevolent escort but as an occupying force that reorganized entire societies to meet the requirements of accumulation.

That was what Stalin did. America and England didn't. It turned out people will save money and invest it if they get wealthier as a result.

There is an old joke from the 1930's of a Soviet delegation which has come to a factory town in the West to negotiate the sale of equipment. They hear the factory whistle and become startled. Then they see a vast number of workers leave the factory. They think 'taking advantage of our presence, the proletarians are escaping! How will the Capitalists recapture them. The next morning, they hear the factory whistle blow again. They are amazed to see the same workers returning to work. The Soviet delegation says to the Capitalist- 'forget about the machinery. Please sell us the factory whistle!' They don't understand that workers spontaneously come to work because they want to get paid.

Colonial states were not simply extractive administrations skimming profits off otherwise autonomous economies. They were total social engineers.

They lacked the manpower to do very much- at least in India.  

They rewrote land tenure systems,

along the lines of previous land tenure systems 

imposed cash taxes to force market participation

as had previously been done 

, reorganized agriculture around export monoculture,

as opposed to lots of people starving to death periodically.  

suppressed indigenous industries,

e.g. enslaving and selling people.  

and violently crushed resistance when populations refused to comply.

Stalin and Mao never crushed resistance.  

The point was not only to extract surplus, but to break alternative forms of social reproduction that threatened capitalist discipline.

If so, colonies, at independence, would have been super Capitalist. They should have risen very rapidly because labour was already disciplined and there was an open market for land. Sadly, this is a fairy story. There wasn't much Capitalism in the Colonies. Life remained traditional for the vast majority. That is why the leaders of the new countries did such crazy shit.  

This is not “external” to capitalism’s logic. It is capitalism’s logic operating at the scale of empire.

Genghis Khan was an expert in the logic of Capitalism. Indeed he had an MBA from Wharton.  

Borders emerge here as central, not peripheral. Capitalism does not abolish borders;

Nor does Communism or the Caliphate.  

it weaponizes them.

I was just walking home from the pub last night when the border between Thailand and Cambodia, which had been weaponized by Trump, beat me senseless and stole my wallet.  

Borders regulate the movement of labor while allowing capital to roam freely.

Plenty of Capitalist countries had Exchange Controls till the Eighties or Nineties.  

They create differential legal statuses, segmented labor markets, and pools of super-exploitable workers whose vulnerability is politically produced.

Very true. The border between Switzerland and Germany has caused trillions of Europeans to starve to death in factories. 

Migration regimes are not humanitarian failures; they are labor-control technologies.

American workers want immigrants to drive down wages. They hate Trump because he wants to seal America's borders.  

Markets do not rule society because people consent to them.

Markets don't rule society. That is why Elon Musk can't buy the throne of England from King Charles.  

They rule because alternatives are systematically destroyed and punished.

The author was quietly eating his own shit. His Mummy made him stop. She is totes bougie and in cahoots with Neo-Liberalism.  

The state is the instrument that ensures this destruction remains orderly, legal, and permanent.

The state is raping and killing trillions of disabled Lesbians of colour using flying unicorns. Why does Chibber not admit this? Is it because he doesn't eat his own shit?  

This is why anti-colonial Marxists have always insisted on linking political economy to state power.

M.N Roy was an anti-colonial Marxist. He ran away from Stalin's 'state power'. Chatto wasn't so lucky. He either starved to death or was killed during the Great Purge.  

Lenin did not theorize imperialism as a moral outrage but as a state-mediated system of monopoly, finance, and territorial control.

Poor fellow, he really believed the Germans were smart to grab African colonies. The Brits were happy to let them do so because they knew those territories were money-pits.  

Nkrumah understood that without control over the state

he couldn't squander money on stupid shit 

and economy, political independence was hollow.

Ghana discovered that his skull was hollow. They got rid of him. Sadly, the damage had been done.  

Black revolutionaries in the United States recognized that the police functioned as an occupying force in internal colonies, enforcing labor discipline and racial hierarchy.

Sadly, Blacks subsequently felt that the biggest danger to their own lives was the 'gang-banger'. Most supported 'three strikes'.  

These were not deviations from Marxism; they were its extension into the real conditions of capitalist rule.

The real conditions of Black rule in Sub-Saharan Africa tended to be fucking horrible.  

The false paradigm we are dismantling relies on a sanitized vision of capitalism that can be narrated without prisons, without borders, without counterinsurgency, and without empire.

The problem with whining about Capitalist oppression is that everybody now knows about Gulags and Chinese 're-education camps'. China's territorial claims are based on tribute paid to ancient Chinese Emperors.  

It imagines markets expanding through rational adaptation rather than through broken bodies and shattered communities.

Most American workers are missing a foot or an arm or an eye because of remorseless whipping by the boss class.  

Breaking with the Alibi: Why Socialism Without Anti-Imperialism Is Not Socialism

Since Imperialism n longer exists, Socialism too can't exist. 

We can now state the conclusion plainly, without hedging or academic theater. The paradigm advanced by Chibber and laundered through Jacobin is not merely incomplete; it is politically disabling.

Mamdani's New York has a high percentage of foreign born voters. But what works in New York won't work in places where most voters are indigenous and have no interest in distant lands.  

By isolating capitalism’s origins within a narrow English agrarian transition,

which is fine if you are talking about American Capitalism since it was English Joint Stock companies which established some of the original American Colonies. 

by treating colonialism as morally reprehensible but structurally secondary,

which it is for America.  

and by recoding anti-colonial Marxism as “race reductionism,” this framework performs a precise ideological function: it makes socialism safe for the settler world.

In other words, it can help Leftists win elections in America. What's so wrong with that?  

This is not an accidental failure of emphasis. It is a line. A line that allows Western Marxism to critique exploitation while remaining evasive about empire.

Americans were always cool with Indians or Africans whining about their Imperial masters.  

A line that allows class analysis to proceed while bracketing land theft, borders, and colonial state violence as unfortunate background conditions rather than constitutive relations.

Just focus on eating your own shit. Why won't Chibber do so?  

A line that permits calls for redistribution inside the metropole without confronting the global structures that make metropolitan redistribution historically possible.

In other words, instead of a universal basic income for Americans lets fund one for the whole world. That way each person will get at least 0.0002 cents.  

Anti-colonial Marxism insists on this rupture because it begins from lived conditions,

the author has lived experience of colonialism. He was born in 1932 in a village in Ghana.  

not academic convenience. It begins from the standpoint of peoples whose land was stolen, whose labor was coerced, whose development was systematically blocked, and whose resistance was met with overwhelming state violence.

Palestinians in Israel? Hindus in Pakistan? Almost everybody in Sudan & South Sudan?  

It understands that class struggle does not unfold on a flat terrain, but within a world system structured by conquest and domination.

and rape and the draining of jizz from starving peasants by evil Viceroys who committed surreptitious acts of fellatio and cunnilingus upon their sleeping bodies.  

And it understands that solidarity cannot be proclaimed abstractly; it must be built by confronting the material privileges and political illusions produced by empire.

This involves travelling back in time to when Empires still existed. Confront Lord Curzon by all means. Tell him to stop sucking off Tagore. 

What Jacobin offers instead is reconciliation without reckoning. A Marxism that speaks fluently about markets and class structure while treating imperialism as a moral tragedy rather than a living system.

Why not say Slavery too is a living system? What about the Spanish Inquisition? Why deny that it continues to burn heretics?  

A socialism that can be discussed endlessly without ever naming the settler state,

America? Israel? Europe which was cruelly stolen from Neanderthals.  

the border regime, or the global machinery of labor control.

Also we must condemn Mummy for not allowing us to eat our own shit.  

This is why the colonial question must be dismissed as “trendy,” “confused,” or “reactionary.” It threatens to turn critique into confrontation.

With evil Viceroys who died long ago.  

Weaponized Information takes the opposite position. The task is not to make Marxism respectable in the eyes of the metropole,

it is to make it ludicrous 

but to make it adequate to the world capitalism has actually produced.

i.e. one where China can challenge the US.  

That requires centering colonialism, not as an add-on, but as a structuring relation.

Which disappeared before I was born. Thus it can't structure shit.  

It requires integrating political economy with state power, borders, and coercion.

In other words, it requires substituting paranoid nonsense for the sort of stuff they teach at Business School.  

And it requires rejecting any socialism that cannot explain — and therefore cannot challenge — the imperial foundations of capitalist modernity.

Empires have imperial foundations. Capitalism has capitalist foundations.  

The false paradigm has now been fully exposed. What remains is not an academic disagreement,

 there has been a long standing disagreement between academics on the role played by Colonies in the rise of financial markets. 

but a strategic choice.

to eat your own shit so as to put the nose of Big Food out of joint.  

Either socialism breaks with empire,

Which happened when Clement Atlee told the Indians that the Brits were determined to fuck the fuck off. If you can't cobble together a government, we will transfer power to anyone who will take it. We just want out of this shithole.  

or it becomes another ideology for managing it.

There is no fucking Empire to manage.  

There is no neutral ground between those positions. History has already rendered its verdict.

i.e. Imperialism was bound to collapse after the Kaiser decided to go to war with his cousin, the King Emperor whose other first cousin was the Tzar of Russia. If Emperors do stupid shit, Empires start disappearing. 

There is only one lesson which 'political economy' teaches us- viz. don't do stupid shit. Also, coprophagy is bad for your health.