How many histories of labour? Towards a theory of postcolonial capitalism

Abstract

At the beginning of Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty explains that the Europe he seeks to provincialize or de-centre is an 'imaginary figure‘ that remains deeply embedded in 'clichés and shorthand forms‘. Both social sciences and political discourses of development and citizenship continue to be shaped by these. Among these clichés a certain idea of labour plays a crucial epistemic and political role. Both social and economic theory and the theory and politics of citizenship have taken for granted that wage labour is the 'normal labour relation‘ within capitalism, the homogeneous legal scheme that articulates social conflict and integration as well as access to real citizenship. The situation has radically changed nowadays: while wage labour is declining as a standard relation even in Europe and in the 'West‘, the heterogeneity of labour relations that has characterized and characterizes colonial and postcolonial societies paradoxically seems to be more adequate to grasp the history and present of global capitalism. Drawing on a discussion of the second chapter of Provincializing Europe (‘The Two Histories of Capital‘) and on recent developments in postcolonial studies and 'global labour history‘, this article will attempt to outline a theory of postcolonial capitalism and of the lines of conflict and antagonism that crisscross it.

Notes

1. See Rochona Majumdar, Writing Postcolonial History, London: Bloomsbury, 2010, chs 3 and 4.

2. See particularly Sandro Mezzadra, La condizione postcoloniale, Verona: Ombre corte, 2008, as well as ‘The Gaze of Autonomy: Capitalism, Migration and Social Struggles’, in Vicki Squire (ed), The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, London: Routledge, 2011, pp 121–143.

3. See Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 2002; and Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Italy, Operaism and Post-Operaism’, in Immanuel Ness (ed), International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp 1841–1845.

4. See Michael Denning, ‘Representing Global Labour’, Social Text 25(3), 2007, pp 125–145, p 127.

5. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988, p 21. See also Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe’, Radical History Review 83, 2002, pp 146–172 (with an introduction by Duane Corpis, pp 143–145, from which I take the quotation).

6. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. On translation and modernity, see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity. On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, as well as Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude’, in Richard F Calichman and John Namjun Kim (eds), The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, London: Routledge, 2010, pp 121–137.

7. See for instance Étienne Balibar, ‘What is a Border?’, in Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002, pp 75–86.

8. Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War, Adam Sitze (ed), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, p 54.

9. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, part 2. For the reference to the ‘necropolitical’ sides of modernity, see Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15(1), 2003, pp 11–40.

10. See for instance Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed), Alternative Modernities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001.

11. Sybille Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp 24 and 22.

12. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p 4. Subsequent references to this work will be made via page numbers in the text after the abbreviation PE.

13. See Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

14. See in particular Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, K Tribe (trans), New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. On the parallels between Chakrabarty and Koselleck see Sandro Mezzadra and Federico Rahola, ‘The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present’, Postcolonial Text 2(1), 2006, http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/393/819.

15. Johann Gottfried Herder, Verstand und Erfahrung: Eine Metakritik der Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, Leipzig: J F Hartknecht, 1799, pp 75–76.

16. See David Montgomery, Citizen Worker, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

17. See Thomas Humphrey Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950; Antonio Negri, Il lavoro nella Costituzione, Verona: Ombre corte, 2009; Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, p 66.

18. See Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism, London: Routledge, 2007.

19. See Giuseppe Cocco and Antonio Negri, GlobAL: Biopotere e lotte in America Latina, Roma: Manifestolibri, 2006.

20. See Sandro Mezzadra, ‘The Topicality of Pre-history: A New Reading of Marx's Analysis of “So-called Primitive Accumulation”’, Rethinking Marxism 23(3), 2011, pp. 1–20.

21. Robert J Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, p 9, and Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp 4–6 and 10.

22. See W E B Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, New York: Free Press, 1998, p 700; and David R Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London: Verso, 1999.

23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Martin Nicolaus (trans), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp 104–105. This statement is even more striking keeping in mind what Marx wrote on the United States a few years after in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol I, Ben Fowkes (trans), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 (hereafter Capital, I), p 414: ‘Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin.’ Sure, Marx was convinced that Civil War and Emancipation terminated the age in which ‘slavery disfigured a part of the Republic’: but independently of what one thinks of this opinion, the Introduction was written in 1857, when labour was definitely ‘branded in a black skin’. In any case, Marx's engagement with and writings on the Civil War were of course a landmark moment for the refinement of his positions regarding the United States.

24. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, pp 28–29.

25. See Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

26. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890 to 1940, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p 3.

27. Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays Toward a Global Labor History, Leiden: Brill, 2008, p 32.

28. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, p 8. Particularly important among recent works on slavery in the United States for the purpose of our present analysis is the book by Stephen M Best, The Fugitive's Property: Law and the Poetics of Possession, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Best discusses at length the ways in which slave law and intellectual property, as ‘two spheres eccentric to the law of real property and emphatic about property's extension into the fleeting and evanescent, help to redefine the very essence of property in nineteenth-century America’ (p 16). Even more important for our critical analysis of the Marxian concepts of ‘labour power’ and ‘free’ wage labour below is Best's discussion of ‘the slave's two bodies’ and of the distinction made by many apologists of slavery between the person of the slave, which was not to be considered property, and his or her labour, which was (see for instance pp 8–9).

29. Jan Berman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.

30. See Yann Moulier Boutang, De l'esclavage au salariat: Économie historique du salariat bridé, Paris: Puf, 1998; and van der Linden, Workers of the World (p 33 for the discussion of Cornelius Castoriadis's concept of ‘instituted heteronomy’ mentioned in the text).

31. Marx, Grundrisse, p 296.

32. Karl Marx, Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, Vol III, David Fernbach (trans), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, pp 958–959.

33. See Louis Althusser, Philosophy of Encounter: Later Writings 1978–87, London: Verso, 2006.

34. See Marx, Capital, I, p 128.

35. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp 3–32, p 16.

36. Max Weber, ‘Objectivity of Social Science and Social Policy’, available online:http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/method/obje/objectivity_frame.html (accessed 11 December 2010).

37. John Chalcraft, ‘Pluralizing Capital, Challenging Eurocentrism: Toward Post-Marxist Historiography’, in Radical History Review 91, 2005, pp 13–39, p 28.

38. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p 436. It is useful to remember that the dominance of this axiomatic produces according to Deleuze and Guattari an ‘isomorphy’ that has to be investigated both ‘intensively’ (which means within each ‘social formation’) and ‘extensively’ (which means on the world scale of modern capitalism). But, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us, ‘it would be wrong to confuse isomorphy with homogeneity’: it rather allows, ‘even incites’ they write, a great deal of social, temporal, and spatial heterogeneity (p 436). One can see here an interesting parallel with Chakrabarty's emphasis on the ‘common characteristics’ exhibited by global capitalism and at the same time on the fact that ‘every instance of capitalist development has a unique history’.

39. See Marx, Capital, I, ch 14.

40. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic, George Di Giovanni (trans), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p 684.

41. See Eugène Fleischmann, La science nouvelle ou La logique de Hegel, Paris: Plon, 1968, ch 11. Hegel's quotation is taken from §222 of the Encyclopaedia: see The Logic of Hegel Translated from the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, William Wallace (trans), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904, p 362.

42. See the detailed textual analysis of Michel Vadée, Marx penseur du possible, Paris: Meridiens Klinksieck, 1992, pp 269–291.

43. Paolo Virno, Il ricordo del presente: Saggio sul tempo storico, Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999, pp 121–122. Marx writes: ‘The use of labour-power is labour itself. The purchaser of labour‐power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially, namely labour-power in action, a worker’ (Marx, Capital, I, p 283).

44. Marx, Capital, I, p 270.

45. Marx, Capital, I, pp 277–280. It is possible to follow the very making of this distinction in the Grundrisse: the worker, Marx writes regarding the exchange between capital and labour, ‘sells his commodity, labour, which has a use value, and, as commodity, also a price, like all other commodities, for a specific sum of exchange values, specific sum of money, which capital concedes to him’ (Marx, Grundrisse, p 274). Here ‘labour’ is still the commodity ‘sold’ by the worker. But after a few pages we read: ‘the use value which he [the worker] offers exists only as an ability (Fähigkeit), a capacity (Vermögen) of his bodily existence; has no existence apart from that’ (p 282).

46. See Sandro Mezzadra, ‘Bringing Capital Back in: A Materialist Turn in Postcolonial Studies?’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 12(1), 2011, pp 154–164.

47. Marx, Capital, I, p 164.

48. Nicholas P De Genova, ‘The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement’, in Nicholas P De Genova and Nathalie Peutz (eds), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, pp 33–65, p 40.

49. See the editors’ introduction and concluding chapter in Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth (eds), Über Marx Hinaus. Arbeitsgeschichte und Arbeitsbegriff in der Konfrontation mit den globalen Arbeitsverhältnissen des 21. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Assoziation A, 2009, pp 7–28 and 557–600.

50. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (trans), Teddington: Echo Library, 2009, p 68.

51. Marx, Capital, I, p 271.

52. Thomas Kuczynski, ‘Was wird auf dem Arbeitsmarkt verkauft?’, in van der Linden and Roth, Über Marx Hinaus, pp 363–379. The first to make this critical point was to my knowledge Franz Oppenheimer, Die soziale Frage und der Sozialismus: Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Marxistischen Theorie, Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1912, pp 119–122.

53. Marx, Capital, I, p 271.

54. The analogies between slavery and wage labour were of course a key stake in discussions of labour issues in Europe and particularly in the United States in the nineteenth century. The phrase ‘wage slavery’ was very much circulating in these discussions and was also used by Marx. While David Roediger (Wages of Whiteness) has correctly emphasized the ambiguity of this phrase in the United States especially before Emancipation (since it tended to imply an opposition between white ‘free’ labour and enslaved black labour), one should not forget that its meanings were much more complex, involving issues of property in one's own person that had been crucial to the development of liberalism since John Locke, as well as the question of buying, selling and owning human property. ‘In multiple ways’, for instance, writes Ami Dru Stanley, ‘labour spokesmen used the issue to argue that there was no real difference between the commodity relations of freedom and slavery. They claimed not only that wage slaves were unable to sell labour time apart from their persons, but that the sale—to one master or another—lasted for the entire length of their lives. As the long hours of single days stretched on for weeks and years, in perpetuity, the hireling's status edged closer to the slave's’ (Ami Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Freedom: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 93). Stanley's book is particularly important because it places marriage and home life alongside labour in the critical discussion of ‘freedom of contract’ in the United States after Emancipation: although discussing this point lies beyond the scope of this essay it is important to recall here the emphasis put by feminist activists and scholars for the last two centuries on the analogies between slavery, marriage and labour contract.

55. See Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra (eds), Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, New York: Semiotext(e), 2010; and Andrew Ross, Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labor in Precarious Times, New York: New York University Press, 2009.

56. Ranabir Samaddar, ‘Primitive Accumulation and Some Aspects of Work and Life in India in the Early Part of the Twenty-first Century’, Economic & Political Weekly 44(18), 2 May 2009, pp 33–42, The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Benghal, New Delhi: Sage, 1999, and The Materiality of Politics, 2 vols, London: Anthem Press, 2007, especially vol I, ch 5 (‘Stable Rule and Unstable Populations’).

57. The reference is of course to Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35, 2009, pp 197–222.