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COLONIAL PLUNDER DIDN’T CREATE CAPITALISM  
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Vivek Chibber, Melissa Naschek
December 14, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Despite what you may have heard, colonial plunder didn’t give
rise to capitalism. In an interview with Jacobin, Vivek Chibber
discusses why the “colonialism-created-capitalism” argument fails,
and why Marxism provides a better account of its emergenc _

Resources brutally extracted from the New World did not bring
capitalism to Spain or Portugal, while England had a rapidly growing
capitalist economy well before it had an empire. Why, then, does the
“colonialism-created-capitalism” argument persist?, Bettman
Archive via Getty Images

 

It’s well understood that capitalist economies are a recent
development in human history. But there is persistent disagreement on
the Left over exactly how and where the transition to capitalism
occurred, as well as what role colonial plunder played in enriching
the West.

On this episode of the Jacobin Radio
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podcast _Confronting Capitalism_, Vivek Chibber explains the origins
of capitalism, what primitive accumulation means, and how colonialism
actually affected European development.

_Confronting Capitalism_ with Vivek Chibber is produced by _Catalyst:
A Journal of Theory and Strategy_ [[link removed]] and
published by _Jacobin_. You can listen to the full episode here
[[link removed]].
This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Melissa Naschek

Today, we’re going to talk about the development of capitalism. And
specifically, we’re going to look at a very trendy argument right
now in left-wing and academic circles about the connection between
colonial plunder and the establishment of capitalism. And the big
argument going around is that, basically, the West became rich and
economically developed directly as a result of colonial plunder —
that colonial plunder was essentially responsible for bringing about
capitalism. So what do you think of these arguments?

 
 

Vivek Chibber

They’re utter nonsense. They don’t have a shred of truth to them.

The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get
off the ground. And it’s interesting — and maybe not surprising
— that this argument is in such vogue today especially within the
activist left. But it’s also coming back in academia, after it had
been pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1980s and ’90s. So I think
it is worth going into it a bit to explain why it’s empirically
unsustainable, but also why even theoretically, it just makes no
sense.

Melissa Naschek

And what’s interesting is that a lot of leftists point to Marx
himself in _Capital, Volume I_ and how he talks about the
relationship between colonial plunder and capitalism, using that as
evidence that there is a deep relationship between the two.

Vivek Chibber

The last few chapters of _Capital_ are on something that Marx calls
the “secret of so-called primitive accumulation.” And in those
chapters, he’s trying to explain where capitalism in fact comes
from. So he calls it “primitive accumulation” because that
expression comes from Adam Smith — sometimes it’s called the
“original accumulation.” And he takes up Smith’s position as a
kind of a springboard from which he then derives his own position.

Smith’s argument said that in order to have capitalism, you need to
have investment. And that investment has to come from some pool of
money somewhere. You need to have a pool of money so that you can
invest it. And that money must have some point of origin if you’re
going to get the system. So Smith says, “Well, there must have been
some original accumulation of capital that launched this new
system.” So where did it come from? And he says it came from people
being really frugal, from saving their money. And then they were able
to derive from that enough investible funds that they then put it to
use as capital.

Now, Marx starts off his chapters on so-called primitive accumulation
by poking fun at this. First of all, he says it’s empirically_ not_
the case that it was this kind of frugality and good customs and
habits that gave you that pool of money. In fact, he says, if
anything, what got you the pool of money was things like robbery, the
nobility thieving people of their money, and, he says, the fruits of
colonial plunder. That’s the context.

So basically what he’s trying to do there is to say, look, insofar
as an initial pool of money was needed, it did not come from savings.
It came from the worst kinds of practices you can imagine. So he’s
indicting capitalism in those terms.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And so rejecting Smith’s savings-oriented argument, he’s
putting out a potential counter that maybe it was this other source of
forcible, often violent wealth extraction.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. Essentially, he’s saying it’s not from decent people using
their Protestant ways to save lots of money. It came from the worst
kinds of things.

But that’s just a rhetorical ploy he’s using. In fact, what he
says immediately after that is it doesn’t matter how much money you
have. It doesn’t matter how much capital you have, because money
only becomes capital in certain situations, in certain circumstances.

What are those circumstances? He says that whatever money these people
had, it could only be put to use for capital accumulation once you had
the social context and the institutional situation that induces people
to use money productively toward profit maximization.

Now, what does that even mean? Why wouldn’t they use it toward
profit maximization prior to capitalism? This is Marx’s main point.
What Marx is saying is that money does not become capital until you
get a change in the social structure of feudalism, so that you move
from a feudal class structure to a capitalist class structure. And the
money itself can’t make that happen.

Feudalism was the economic system that existed prior to capitalism.
Within feudalism, whatever money people got, whether it was from
savings or from plunder, was put to use “feudalistically”, you
might say — i.e., in a _non-capitalistic_ way.

Melissa Naschek

Can you explain that a little bit more?

Vivek Chibber

To begin with, I think Marx made a rhetorical error when he indulged
Smith even to the point of saying that it wasn’t frugality that gave
you the original accumulation, but plunder. Because that’s just a
kind of a side note in the chapter. But people have fixed their sights
on this rhetorical device and used it to justify exactly the argument
he was trying to falsify, and spent the next five chapters doing so.

The core of what Marx is saying is that, first of all, there was no
shortage of savings within feudalism. In other words, there was no
shortage of lots of investable funds in feudalism. How do we know
that? Well, because the feudal nobility, the aristocracy, the people
who had all the money and the power, were filthy rich. If they had
wanted to deploy that money in a profit-maximizing way, which is what
capitalists do, they would have done it long ago.

Furthermore, plunder and colonial expansion were endemic to Europe for
a thousand years before capitalism came around. So, if what it took to
get to capitalism was some kind of original accumulation of money —
even through plunder — you would have had capitalism a thousand
years prior.

The idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder can’t even get
off the ground.

The key is to remember that there was never any shortage of investable
funds within feudalism. So, even if it is the case that lots of new
silver and gold is coming through colonialism, it doesn’t alter the
fact that whatever money you have, you’re going use it in a way
that’s sensible by whatever economic rules there are in your system.

And because feudalism was a system in which the most sensible thing to
do with your money was to use it toward nonproductive,
non-profit-maximizing ends, regardless of whether you were the
peasantry or the nobility, whatever money you had would be deployed in
that particular feudalistic way.

Now, the fact of the matter is that in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries, the two European countries that had the largest
empires were Spain and Portugal. And those empires were explicitly
created to bring lots and lots of treasure from the New World to the
Old World.

This treasure is exactly what Smith is talking about. It’s enormous
hoardings of wealth. And if Smith was right that you needed to first
have this original accumulation of wealth, Spain and Portugal ought to
have had the _first _transitions to capitalism. They should have gone
from being feudal monarchies to being capitalist economies and the
fastest growing economies in Europe. What happened in fact was that
this treasure, as it came into these countries, did nothing to bring
about a change in the economic system. In fact, what it did was it
pushed these two countries into about 150 years of economic
stagnation.

Where you did have a change to a new economic structure was in the
country where there was virtually no empire, which was England. And
let’s get our dates right. England moves toward a new economic
structure that had not been seen in the world before, which we call
capitalism, starting in the mid- to late 1400s. So that by about 1550
or 1560, you’ve essentially got a truly capitalist economy. This is
about a hundred years before England has any kind of real empire at
all.

So, the countries with the largest empires and the largest inflows of
treasure — colonial extraction, you can call it — experienced no
change to a new economic system. The country that _did_ experience a
change to a new economic system is the one that didn’t have an
empire.

So if the question is “What role do treasure and plunder play in the
rise of capitalism?” then the argument that treasure and plunder are
what trigger it can’t even get off the ground, because the countries
where it should have happened — if the argument were correct — are
the countries where it _didn’t_ happen. And where it _does_ happen
is in a country where you don’t have this kind of plunder. And
that’s England.

Now, this is just the empirical record. The theoretical problem is
this: You have to explain what would make a feudal landlord or a
monarch who’s suddenly endowed with this huge pool of money to
change the entire class structure, whether it’s of his feudal
holdings if he’s a landlord or, if he’s the monarch, the entire
national economic structure itself? What would make them do it in,
say, 1550? I’ve never seen a single argument that would explain why
they would do that. What they did, in fact, was use it in a way that
makes sense for a feudal landlord.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And a Smithian-type argument assumes that capitalism has just
always been this little kernel developing in society. They don’t
need to point to any sort of turning point. They don’t need to
explain why suddenly the wealthy class decided to reinvest their money
and pursue a profit-maximizing strategy. And this is a very key point,
that the main strategy among the exploiting class of pursuing profit
maximization through improving and expanding production is specific to
capitalism. That was not the basic imperative of the feudal system.

 
 

Vivek Chibber

That’s right. Now, without getting too deep into the weeds, let me
just make this argument here. In feudalism, you had plenty of money
going around. In feudalism, you had plenty of markets as well. But the
markets were very limited, and the money was deployed in a mostly
nonproductive way. Why?

Well, who were the bulk of the producing class in feudalism? Who
controlled production? It was peasants. Peasants with small plots of
land. And those peasants with small plots of land overwhelmingly were
geared toward what you might call a “safety-first” strategy.
Instead of throwing themselves onto the market, trying their best to
be as efficient as possible, or trying their best to outcompete other
peasants, they tried to steer _away _from market competition and
relied on their own crops, their own land, and even produced as many
of their own manufactured goods as they could.

Now, because they’re making their own food and their own
manufactures, it means that they don’t actually go to the market
very often. They don’t have to buy things very often. Now, if every
peasant is doing this — if every peasant is basically producing for
himself — it means that they only take those things to the market
that are left over after they’ve taken care of their consumption
needs.

But if this is the case, it also means that markets are pretty thin.
They don’t have a lot of goods coming to them because people only
bring the tiniest fraction of all the goods they’re growing or
making at home to the market. But this means, in turn, that the
markets themselves are not very reliable. Peasants can’t count on
finding everything they need there. And that reinforces peasants’
tendency to not rely on the markets.

So you have a situation where there are some markets, but they are not
continually growing. This is the opposite of Adam Smith’s
assumption. The same can be said regarding the nobility. They don’t
control production the way capitalists control production. The way
they get their income is by extracting rents from peasants.

But rent extraction posed a problem. The nobility, like today’s
landlords, could say, “Hey, I’m jacking up your rent a hundred
bucks. Pay it or I’m going to evict you.” But whereas the landlord
nowadays can rely on the fact that whoever’s renting from them is
going to try to raise money to pay these higher and higher rents, the
feudal landlords were not legally allowed to kick peasants off the
land as long as the peasants were willing to pay what’s called a
customary rent. So they couldn’t jack up the rents.

Now, how do feudal landlords increase their income if it’s coming
out of rents? The main way they can do it when they can’t threaten
peasants with eviction is through coercion. Often times, this involved
physical threats and intimidation. But most of all, it involved
raiding other lords’ lands and annexing them. Warfare is the best
way to dramatically increasing your revenue when markets don’t allow
for it.

Warfare and coercion were built into the feudal system. This had a
very important implication: The rational thing to do with your
surplus, if you were a lord, was not to invest it in means of
production, but in means of warfare and coercion. If lords come across
a windfall, a lot of money, what they’re going to use the money for
is a larger retinue, a larger army — that is to say, the means of
coercion.

If what it took to get to capitalism was some kind of original
accumulation of money — even through plunder — you would have had
capitalism a thousand years prior.

So, for both the main classes — peasants on the one hand, lords on
the other — the feudal structure imposed specific economic
strategies. Peasants avoided the market to the extent that they could,
which kept the market small, and they committed to a safety-first
strategy rather than a profit-first strategy. And the lords did not
put what money they had into new machines, new tractors, new trailers,
new plows, but instead put their money into larger and larger armies.

In this situation, if these lords suddenly got lots of physical
treasure, what they did with it was accelerate the intensification
_not_ of production, but of warfare, which is what Spain and Portugal
did. In turn, that system generated its own rationality for what you
do with your money. And no matter if it’s a small pool of money or a
large pool of money, you’re going to use it in a way that makes
sense within that class structure.

So what it required, therefore, for money to become capital,  and
this is what Marx is saying in his chapters on primitive accumulation
— and it’s impossible to miss unless you’re going
quotation-hunting — is if money is to be used in a way that’s
recognizably capitalist, the money itself won’t trigger that change
in class structure. It’s a prior change in class structure that
creates a new function for money. That money now becomes capital,
whereas previously it was just money.

That is what the chapters on primitive accumulation are supposed to
show. They show that Smith’s mistake was not that he was wrong on
where the money came from — plunder versus frugality. He was wrong
in assuming that the money would be used capitalistically at all.

And this is what you just said, Melissa. The key here is Smith assumes
what needs to be proved. He’s assuming that capitalism already
exists. Yeah, if it already exists, then a windfall like treasure
could accelerate your pace of development. But if it doesn’t already
exist, that money is going to be put to other uses, which brings us
back to the question of where capitalism came from if it couldn’t
have come from the windfall?

Melissa Naschek

I want to return to one of the claims that you just made, that you can
really locate in time and geographic space where capitalism
originated, which is fifteenth-century England. That is another claim
that is very trendy to challenge. And typically, the response today is
that it’s a “Eurocentric” claim that capitalism originated in
England. So what do you think of that argument?

Vivek Chibber

It’s preposterous. It has no basis. Again, this is just part of the
general decline in intellectual discourse, not just on the Left, but
generally. For it to be a Eurocentric claim, it would have to show
that the claim is empirically wrong.

Eurocentrism is a kind of parochialism, which means that you’re
ignoring obvious facts about the world because you’re biased toward
Europe. In other words, if you’re biased toward Europe, it has to be
the case that something that is recognizably capitalist could be found
elsewhere, but you’re ignoring the fact that it was found elsewhere
and you’re just focusing on Europe.

All right. So empirically, can one show that something that’s
recognizably capitalist could be found everywhere? That’s going to
come down to how you define capitalism. Now, if you define capitalism
as just the presence of a market, then yeah — it was everywhere. It
would therefore be Eurocentric or racist to say that capitalism was
just in Europe.

But it is not the case that capitalism is just markets. Capitalism is
not the presence of a market, but when the market rules society.
It’s when everybody becomes _dependent_ on markets. So, is it the
case that something different was happening in those parts of Europe
that I’m talking about — Northwestern Europe, which was England,
but also included parts of Holland and what’s called “the Low
Countries” — was something different happening there?

Now, as it happens, in the last thirty-odd years, there’s been an
extraordinary outpouring of economic history. And the leading economic
historians from all parts of the world have converged around some
very, very interesting findings. And those findings are that, if you
just look at growth rates in Eurasia — which is the European
continent, but also Asia, China, and India — the core of the global
economy at this time was the Mediterranean and Asia. If you look in
those countries and you examine the growth rates, whether it’s per
capita income or whether it’s national income — whichever way
you’re measuring it — from say 1300 or 1400 to the 1900s, what you
find is that, from about 1400 to 1600, Spain, Italy, and the Low
Countries quickly take off. And the Low Countries are growing faster
than Spain and Italy by say 1500.

But very quickly after that, the British rates of growth go onto an
entirely new slope, so that by 1600 or 1650, England was visibly
growing faster than any of the other European countries. And China and
India, which were in fact leading from 1500 to 1700 in Asia, are,
along with the rest of Europe, falling behind England and the Low
Countries.

There is a very strong consensus around this. If it is the case,
empirically, that England is on a different growth path than these
Asian countries, then two questions arise: What explains the explosive
growth that England is witnessing? And when I say explosive, these
growth rates were never seen before in the world. Something happens
between 1500 and 1550, right? You have to note this fact. The second
is to say, well, where does it come from? Why does it happen?

This has been the central theoretical question for all of social
science for about three hundred years now: What explains the
divergence of this part of Europe from the rest of the world?

The best explanation for this is that, suddenly, the people in this
country had to follow different sorts of economic activities and
economic strategies just to survive than had been available to them in
the first fifteen hundred years after the death of Christ, which was
the rise of capitalism. Because up until then, as I said earlier, it
had been the avoidance of market activity — safety first and the
accumulation of armies, retinues, and means of coercion (e.g., big old
guns) — that had been the way to get rich.

Now, if it is the case that, empirically, these parts of Europe are
taking off, leaving the rest of Europe and Asia behind — and let me
emphasize, it’s not that Europe is developing rapidly while Asia and
Africa are not, it’s that this _part_ of Europe is leaving the rest
of Europe behind as well. If that is the case, then it is simply
absurd to say that locating capitalism in Europe is parochial or
biased or ignores the facts. It is, in fact, trying to explain the
facts. And by now, there’s not much of a debate about this. It is
pretty clear that by 1600, England and Holland are on a different
growth path than China, India, Africa, and Latin America.

So the claim that it is arbitrary, random, or parochial to locate the
origins of this new economic system in those parts of Europe doesn’t
have a leg to stand on. It’s fashionable, but it goes nowhere.

Melissa Naschek

What happened in England and Holland at that time that basically
shifted their societies into capitalist societies?

Vivek Chibber

What happened was that the economic structure was transformed through
willful action in such a way that peasants in the villages had no
choice but to throw themselves onto the market to survive, either as
wage laborers or as farmers paying competitive rents.

Basically, starting in the 1400s and 1500s in these countries,
everybody had to compete in order to survive. Market competition
became the norm. And as we know, the essence of capitalism is market
competition. What happened in all these precapitalist systems was that
people did not have to compete with anybody else on the market,
whether it was in the labor market or the product market, because they
mostly produced for themselves on their own plots of land to which
they had rights that could not be taken away from them.

As long as you had an economic system in which everybody has rights to
their land and they’re guaranteed a subsistence, they actually
resist being market dependent. This is because market dependence, as
any worker will tell you, is fraught with insecurity and with all
kinds of vulnerabilities. And land was an insurance policy. You’re
not going to give up that land because, come hell or high water,
you’ve got your land.

By the mid-sixteenth century, you’ve essentially got a truly
capitalist economy in England. This is about one hundred years before
they have any kind of real empire at all.

For most people, they had insulation from market competition for
thousands of years. But in these countries, for the first time, you
get masses of people being thrown onto the market. This is what Marx
says is the secret to primitive accumulation. It is not the original
hoarding of wealth at some point in time. It is the changing of your
economic structure through willful acts that, for the first time,
forced people onto the market to compete with each other.

And it’s that competition that gives you these explosive rates of
growth in productivity. Because everyone is having to compete on the
market, they have no alternative but to seek to be more efficient, to
seek to drive down the prices of the goods that they’re selling. And
that is what gives you this constant upgrading of productivity and of
techniques and things like that. That happens in Northwestern Europe.
In the rest of Europe and in Asia and Latin America, they continue to
lag behind for decades and for centuries because it takes them that
long to inaugurate and engineer this kind of transformation
themselves.

This was Marx’s insight — that you needed to have a change in the
class structure in order to bring about modern growth. And among the
more contemporary historians and social theorists, it was Robert
Brenner who made this point more forcefully, I think, than anybody had
in postwar Marxism. And a lot of this credit goes to him for making
this point in a very cogent way.

Melissa Naschek

Yeah. I’d add Ellen Meiksins Wood as another person who really
popularized this argument.

Vivek Chibber

Absolutely. But, you know, as she would have told you, she was
building on Brenner’s arguments. And these two, I think, have played
an absolutely crucial role.

But let me just make an important point clear: It isn’t just them.
This account is the consensus that most of the leading economic
historians have come to, Marxist and non-Marxist. There is a mountain
of economic literature and data supporting it.

The argument is driving home the point that I think was fundamental to
Marx’s epoch-making insight, which is that economic activity is
always constrained and dictated by economic structure. So the economic
structure of the medieval world dictated a different kind of
macroeconomics and microeconomics than the macro- and microeconomics
of the contemporary world. And the reason the two are different is
that the underlying economic structures — what we would call class
structures — are different.

Now, this was pretty well understood into the 1970s and ’80s. And
the argument for colonial plunder had been pretty thoroughly
discredited. It has just come back now for a variety of reasons. But
it really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Melissa Naschek

Something struck me in your comments about the labor market. We’re
talking about the traditional Smithian arguments about the development
of capitalism and what capitalism is, and one of the data points
Smithians cite is the history of merchant capital and the fact that,
during feudalism, there were many trade routes and markets. There was
a lot of wealth creation. But I think one of the things that you’re
pointing to is that markets themselves are not sufficient for a
capitalist society. What happens when you get a capitalist society is
a complete transformation of markets.

Vivek Chibber

The way I would put it, Melissa is markets are not a sign of
capitalism because we know that markets have been in existence for
thousands of years. So, you can call anything you want capitalism —
that’s up to you. But if you want to attach the word
“capitalism” to that which explains the historically unprecedented
rates of growth that we see emerging in the 1500s and the 1600s in
Northwestern Europe and then later across the world — if you want to
say that is what capitalism is, whatever explains that — then it
can’t just be the presence of markets. It is when markets take over_
all_ of production. Between 3000 BC to 1500 AD, markets existed, but
they were on the fringes of society — not geographically, but
economically.

Melissa Naschek

And also, this is not to say that they weren’t generating vast
amounts of wealth.

 
 

Vivek Chibber

No, they were generating plenty of wealth for some people. But the
point is, if you measured economic activity in feudal Europe, what you
would find is that merchant activity, markets, and trade only
accounted for a tiny proportion of national wealth. Overwhelmingly,
national wealth came in the form of production for the household, on
people’s own lands, and production directly for the lordly class by
their serfs. So, the fact that there’s mercantile activity is not a
sign of capitalism.

Second — and this is the really important point — feudalism put
limits on how far markets could expand in the first place. So, the
thing about markets was that it’s not like they were born, say,
three thousand years ago, then they just kept expanding to the point
where you got capitalism. It’s that within precapitalist societies,
there was a place for markets, but there were always also severe
limits on how far markets could go. So there were markets in the
village, as I said, but peasants tended to try to avoid them as much
as they could.

The alternative account of where capitalism might’ve come from —
meaning, maybe not from plunder, but just from the expansion of the
market — is also untrue.

Also, there’s an idea that the cities are where all the merchants
were, and where the markets were, and this is where capitalism grows
out of. Also not true. Urban centers were directly controlled by the
feudal nobility. There was no urban competition in manufacturers.
People weren’t trying to minimize costs and drive costs down. Prices
were completely administratively controlled by the guilds of the time,
which were associations of artisans and merchants, but also by the
feudal aristocrats. Cities were completely controlled and dominated by
landlords, and the merchants were completely dependent on the
landlords to give them access to markets.

There was no question of merchants fighting against feudal lords or
markets eroding feudal priorities and feudal power. The markets were
internal to feudalism. They were limited by feudalism, and merchants
wouldn’t even dream of taking up the cudgels against feudal lords.

So, that alternative account of where capitalism might’ve come from
— meaning, maybe not from plunder, but just from the expansion of
the market — is also untrue. As I said, this was the epoch-making
insight of Marx, that it’s not that the market gives you capitalism,
it’s that capitalism gave you the market. That’s putting it in a
very compressed way.

I don’t mean quite literally that markets didn’t exist before
capitalism. It’s the consolidation of capitalism that finally allows
markets to expand to the point that they have today. So why did it
happen? It happened because, as Marx says, what happened in England
was the expropriation of the peasant classes, which threw them out
onto the labor market and also then the product market.

Melissa Naschek

Right. And this is another jargony but very common line that one hears
about Marxist analysis, which is that, under capitalism, workers do
not own their own means of production. And the distinction here is, in
feudal societies, peasants did directly own their means of production.
There was no alienation of the worker from their labor. They had a lot
of control over the labor process in a way that is unthinkable today.
But, with the transformation of the feudal economy into the capitalist
economy, all of that is taken away from them. And they’re thrown
onto this new thing, which is the capitalist labor market.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. You get capitalism when the economic structure is changed. And
that doesn’t happen on its own. It requires action.

Melissa Naschek

So if we’re rejecting the arguments about colonial plunder and the
expansion of merchant capital, what about the arguments made by
someone like Max Weber about a certain mentality or mindset that led
to this shift into capitalist society?

Vivek Chibber

You mean like Protestantism, for example?

Melissa Naschek

Yeah, the Protestant work ethic.

Vivek Chibber

Weber’s real heyday was the 1950s and ’60s. In economic history,
he didn’t really have much influence, oddly enough.

The real influence was in the sociology of development and in certain
parts of cultural history, where they took seriously the idea that it
was the presence of Protestantism that gave you the rise of capitalism
in the first place. But more importantly, and just as relevant, that
it was some kind of Protestant-like mentality that would be needed in
the Global South in order to get them to develop. Because remember, in
the 1950s and ’60s, much of the Global South was still
overwhelmingly agricultural. And their primary challenge was how to
accelerate and foster development.

Now, Weber’s Protestant ethic argument was that what gave you
capitalism was a prior shift in people’s orientation to the world
and in their mentalities. And so, in the South, you would also need an
orientation of this kind to give you capitalism.

This was a plausible argument in the 1940s and ’50s, because, as I
said, in much of the Global South, you still didn’t really have a
visible capitalist economy because they were all still primarily
agrarian. That argument died a very rapid death by the 1970s and
’80s, when you saw countries like Japan and Korea and Brazil
developing really, really fast, where there wasn’t a whisper of
Protestantism, obviously.

Why was that? What does that tell us? It tells us two things.

I think the experience of the Global South told us that you don’t
have to have a prior shift in mentalities to give you market
dominance. What happens, in fact, is that market dominance gives rise
to the functionally needed mentalities.

Capitalism is not the presence of a market, but when the market rules
society.

So, in all these countries where there wasn’t even a hint of
Protestantism, why did you get a full-fledged roaring capitalism by
the 1980s? Well, it’s because you took the peasantry and you took
their land away from them. And here’s the essence of it: Once you
take the land away from people and you throw them out on the market,
they don’t need to read Calvin or Martin Luther to understand what
to do. They’re going to go out looking for jobs. And once they go
out looking for jobs, and the people who they’re working for find
that they need to sell their products to survive on the market,
they’re going to do what they need to survive on the market, which
involves cost-cutting and efficiency-enhancing activities.

So what you find is that capitalism was emerging everywhere,
regardless of the culture and the religion. And the dynamics of that
capitalism are the same everywhere, at least in the very narrow sense
that profit-maximizing activity and job-hunting took root everywhere
around the world. So by the 1970s and ’80s, it was pretty clear that
if this is what’s happening in the Global South, it probably was
also the case in the original capitalist countries that you didn’t
need Protestantism. And where was the Protestantism in 1480 England
all the way into the 1500s in England, right?

Melissa Naschek

That sounds like bad news for the Weberian argument.

Vivek Chibber

Right. I think that the notion that you needed a prior shift in
mentality to give you capitalism doesn’t hold much water. And
here’s the interesting thing. Weber is very cagey about this. He
says it and then he draws back, because I think he understood that the
empirical basis for it is just too thin. It became kind of the
bubblegum, popular version of his book, where it’s been argued that
there’s a causal sequence going from shifts in mentality to shifts
in the economy. If that is the way in which you interpret Weber, I
don’t think it has much credibility.

And interestingly, if you just read the debates among economic
historians of the past sixty years, that question doesn’t even
arise. And that’s a pretty good sign that they just never take it
seriously. The questions that arise are the ones that Marx raised,
which are: Why did the enclosures happen? Why did productivity take
off? In what way was it linked to market competition? Et cetera.
Weber, fortunately or unfortunately, has not played much of a role in
the contemporary debates among the people who actually study this
business, economic historians.

Melissa Naschek

So, if there’s all this evidence that pretty definitively proves
your argument, where does this other argument about colonial plunder
come from? Why does it keep cropping up?

Vivek Chibber

It really came out of third world nationalism, anti-colonial
nationalism, in the late nineteenth century and then expanding through
the early parts of the twentieth century. The motivation for it, I
think, was a respectable one, because they were trying to counter the
justification for colonial rule that came out of the metropoles from
the European countries. And that justification was, “We’re doing
this out of some sense of moral mission, a moral commitment to
civilize, to educate, to uplift. And so therefore, actually, we’re
bearing the costs of this responsibility that we have, and we’ll go
when we think you’re ready.”

So nationalists had to deal with this rationalization, or a
justification, that says colonial rule is actually a sign of Western
morality and their sense of responsibility. So what they wanted to say
was, “You’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart,
you’re doing it because you’re getting something out of it.
You’re not here to educate us, you’re here for yourself.”

So the weak version of the argument was to say there’s a material
basis for colonialism. And that was 100 percent right.

The British did not go into Africa and Asia, and the French did not go
into the Middle East and into Africa, in order to do right by the
natives. They went there because segments of British and French
capital wanted to make profits and they went there for these profits.

So in this, the nationalists were correct. But then there was a
stronger version of the argument — and I can understand why they
wanted to make that — which is that, “It’s not just that some of
you got rich and that’s why you came to India and to Africa to
enrich yourselves. Your entire wealth has come out of your plunder of
our country.” So you can see how that’s a much more provocative
way of saying, “Screw you. Not only did you not do this out of a
sense of morality, but your actual enrichment, the fact that you’re
so rich has come on our labor, on our backs.”

The argument that Western capitalism itself came out of plunder,
that’s quite wrong. But the _motivation_ for it was correct. It is
the case that colonialism was an abomination.

So that was, I think, the initial motivation. Now, it happens that I
think the argument is quite mistaken. The argument that Western
capitalism itself came out of plunder, that’s quite wrong. But the
_motivation_ for it was correct. It is the case that colonialism was
an abomination. It is the case that it was driven by material
incentives. But you can make all those claims without making the
further argument that capitalism came out of colonial plunder.

Melissa Naschek

So if that’s what the justification was for it back then, what’s
the justification for it now?

Vivek Chibber

As I said, it was Marxists from the Global South and from the West who
had discredited this line of reasoning in the 1970s and ’80s. In the
1960s and ’70s, it had come back in the form of what’s called
“Third Worldism,” which was this idea that the Global North
collectively exploits the Global South. And you can see how that’s
an extension of the view that capitalism in the West came out of the
plunder of the Global South. You can just extend it to say that the
Global North continues to stay rich because of the plunder of the
South.

But empirically, we can show that it was mistaken. And for the reasons
that I said, theoretically also, it’s very hard to account for why
feudal lords would have changed to capitalism just because they had a
bunch of money in their hands. So it was discredited. I’m old enough
now to have seen it go underground or disappear by the 1990s.

But it has, I would say in the last six or eight years, made a
resurgence. Why? In my view, it’s one of the dimensions or
consequences of this flight into race reductionism
[[link removed]]
in the past six or eight years. You see this again and again and again
now, this notion that colonialism and colonial plunder were an
expression of what’s called “global white supremacy.” This idea
that the plunder of the colonial world is what enriched the West is
easy to translate into racial terms. That it is the lighter, whiter
nations which were able to make this traversal into capitalism by
virtue of plundering the darker nations.

Melissa Naschek

So it’s transforming a materialist argument into a sort of
semi-materialist, but at heart, racialist argument.

Vivek Chibber

It’s transforming a class argument into a racial and national
argument. And in today’s left, nationalism and racialism are the
dominant ideologies. It’s quite striking to me how this trope, this
“global white supremacy” has become so current on the Left. And
it’s utterly nonsensical. It has literally no connection to reality.

But it’s become fashionable on the Left because it allows you to
align radicalism with the current wave of racial identity politics.
And the core of this is whatever divisions there might be _within_ the
races, pale — no pun intended — in relation to the divisions
_between_ the races.

Melissa Naschek

Well, maybe China becoming the new global hegemon will kind of help us
out then.

 

Vivek Chibber

But jokes aside, this notion of global white supremacy is really
pernicious. At best, what you _can_ say is that white supremacy was
the kind of rationalizing ideology of colonialism. There’s no doubt
about that. Colonialism justified itself by all kinds of racist
notions.

But the idea that this actually cemented a deep alliance between
Western workers and Western capitalists to the point where Western
workers share more with their own capitalists than with workers of the
Global South, is not only factually wrong — and it’s profoundly
wrong — it is also quite reactionary
[[link removed]]. Because,
until about the recent past, the only people who said this basically
were white supremacists because they saw the world as one of warring
racial tribes. And this is where parts of the Left have come to now
with very heavy doses of race reductionism.

That’s the only sense I can make of it, because the factual basis
for this claim about colonial plunder and capitalism is zero. The
theoretical coherence and plausibility of the argument is zero.
Because, what is a mechanism by which you would say that feudal lords
would actually change their economic rules of production on the basis
of just having a new pot of money? Nobody’s been able to explain it
yet.

So why would you bring this argument back? I think it has to do with
this virtue signaling and race reductionism. And my guess is that
it’s going to dissipate as the Left continues to mature and they
don’t see this as the respectable face of radicalism.

Melissa Naschek

If I’m understanding your argument correctly, basically what
you’re saying is that the way that we should understand primitive
accumulation is not as a hoarding of wealth that was then suddenly
distributed to maximize profit, but instead was the changing of basic
social relations such that the peasantry were kicked off their land
and thrown onto a newly created capitalist labor market. If that’s
the case, was that just something that happened once in England and
then we had capitalism? Or is that a process that continues to happen
within capitalism?

Vivek Chibber

Well, if capitalism is to spread into other parts of the world, that
same thing has to happen everywhere else as well. And since it
doesn’t all happen all at once, over time, as capitalism spreads, it
continues to dispossess the peasantry and bring them into wage labor
and into the cities.

And it is still going on today in that sense, because there are still
parts of the world where you have large agrarian sectors in which
people have their own land and where they’re not engaging in wage
labor. And if capitalism is to spread there, they’re going to have
to be brought into what we call commodity production. So it’s not
just that it happened once and then nowhere else.

But you can also say that the principles behind it continue to be
relevant inside countries like England and the United States, which
went through their agrarian transition centuries ago.

Here’s how to understand how the principle is still relevant. What
is it that primitive accumulation was trying to achieve? It was trying
to take away from the laboring population access to their subsistence,
to their food, to their needs, their housing needs, access to these
things outside the market. Now, the way you did that originally was to
take away peasants’ land, because that’s how they survived.

But one might ask, even inside a mature capitalism, isn’t it still
possible for people to find access to basic necessities outside of the
market? And the answer is, yeah, they still achieve it, whether it’s
through things like having their own plots of land, whether it’s
through things like having their own means of subsistence, but most
importantly it is through things like the welfare state.

You can think of the welfare state as something where people are given
access to basic necessities as a matter of right, which is what they
had in feudalism. They had access to basic necessities because they
had rights to the land. And just like that was a barrier to capitalism
back then, the welfare state is seen by capitalists as a barrier to
their growing expansion and profitability today. And that’s why
capitalists oppose what’s called “decommodification” — this is
when goods that have been bought and sold in the market are taken off
the market by giving them to people as rights.

So in that sense, even while it’s not technically speaking a
“primitive accumulation” that’s going on today, the principle
behind capitalists’ opposition to non-commodified goods today is
more or less the same as it was when capitalism was brought into being
four hundred years ago. In that sense, you can say that it’s an
ongoing process even inside capitalism as well.

The key to it all is this: That what capitalism and capitalists strive
for constantly is the maintenance of the widest expansion of
commodification as is possible. And any movement to restrict the scope
of commodities is going to be resisted by capital. That’s going to
show up in all kinds of political and social conflicts today.

VIVEK CHIBBER is a professor of sociology at New York University. He
is the editor of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

MELISSA NASCHEK is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.

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