Creations of the Third World

In a very concrete way, Europe has stuffed herself inordinately with the gold and raw materials of the colonial countries: Latin America, China, and Africa. From all these continents, under whose eyes Europe today raises up her tower of opulence, there has flowed out for centuries toward that same Europe diamonds and oil, silk and cotton, wood and exotic products. Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961

In a September 2025 interview on the Jacobin Radio podcast Confronting Capitalism, New York University sociologist Vivek Chibber vociferously argued that colonial plunder did not give rise to capitalism. Jacobin’s online magazine subsequently published a transcript of the interview edited for clarity. The latter in particular has spurred heated debate through both formal and informal channels: The comments section under the Instagram post promoting the article received responses for several weeks after it was published. Revolutionary writer and former political prisoner Prince Kapone, meanwhile, penned an equally strongly worded response to Chibber through the radical media platform Weaponized Information. Spectre magazine is also currently assembling a dossier of critical commentaries on Chibber’s provocation.

The controversy generated by Chibber’s article is somewhat unsurprising, given that its author has been a polarizing figure within North American leftist intellectual and activist circles for some time. He has become (in)famous for his polemical responses to many major ideological and political developments, chief among them the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, Orientalism, and identity politics as the supposed cutting edges of progressive thought and action.

Of those major contemporary critical frameworks, I personally came through postcolonialism, in the sense that my outlook has evolved beyond it but I’m still grateful that I had to move through it. I broadly appreciate Chibber’s critiques of postcolonialism, though I think he runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater on certain points. I cannot help but situate Chibber’s intervention on colonial plunder broadly within his larger body of work. However, my primary goal in this critical response is to engage his interview point by point on its own terms and merits.

I argue that Chibber:

1. mischaracterizes Left engagements with colonial capitalism as recent trends and ploys;
2. fails to adequately reckon with colonial capitalist world-ecology;
3. overlooks how colonial capitalism satisfies his own definition of primitive accumulation;
4. risks reproducing dominant discourses about the innate “backwardness” of the Third World/Global South;
5. reduces anti-colonialism to race reductionism;
6. delimits liberatory politics to the horizon set by a mature capitalist welfare state.

Neither trends nor ploys

First of all, Chibber’s characterization of engagements with colonial capitalism as “trendy” is somewhat misleading: Left thinkers and practitioners, from Vladimir Lenin to Frantz Fanon to Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, have been grappling with the colonial question for at least a century and a half. These engagements extend all the way back to Marx himself in the final stages of his career: In an 1881 letter, he described the British extraction of rents from India as “a bleeding process, with a vengeance!” For that matter, numerous anti-colonial revolutionaries across the colonized world were arguably grappling with colonial and imperial accumulation before Marx, even if he developed a far more encompassing and empirically substantiated analysis.

Marx did not use plunder as a “rhetorical ploy,” as Chibber subsequently claims: On the contrary, he was being very empirical in tracing the foundations of capitalism back to the enclosures of the commons in Europe, the conquest of the Americas and the dispossession and extermination of its Indigenous populations, and the enslavement of Africans, among several other processes of “original accumulation.” Why else would Marx have memorably remarked that capital came into the world “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt?”

Chibber compares Spain, Portugal, and England’s imperial exploits over the past five to six hundred years, and he suggests that the latter’s emergence as the world’s first de facto capitalist power and the failure of the former to make the same transition proves that colonial plunder had nothing to do with capitalism. First of all, this argument overlooks both the internal tensions within these European powers and the tensions that emerged when they embarked upon their respective imperialist projects.

Drawing upon decades of research, Italian Marxist feminist Silvia Federici demonstrates in Caliban and the Witch that peasants, Indigenous people, and women disrupted the consolidation of capitalist social relations in their respective parts of the world countless times. Spain and Portugal arguably bit off more than they could chew precisely because they were imperial pioneers, and other European powers subsequently learned from their mistakes and took advantage of the very conditions that the former helped to seed.

These various European colonial powers were neither hermetically sealed off from each other at any point nor were they working under the same conditions throughout the past five hundred years. The emergence of capitalist social relations was arguably bifurcated—but in no way wholly siloed—between late feudal Europe and its colonies: Aristocrats were struggling to hang on to their power in the face of the nascent mercantile bourgeoisie at home, while new racial, gendered, and class hierarchies were emerging in the Americas and, later, Africa and Asia.

Chibber is right that plunder and colonial extraction were “endemic to Europe for a thousand years before capitalism came around.” Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, among many other respected critical scholars and activists, have all demonstrated that these more local and regional forms of colonialism provided many of the blueprints for the colonization of the Americas and the rest of the world. The very first plantations were built off the coasts of Europe and in its internal colonies, such as Ireland, Bohemia, and the Basque Country.

Chibber further contends that lords, nobles, and other feudal ruling elites didn’t use their ill-gotten gains from early colonial ventures in a capitalistic manner, choosing to invest their windfalls into warfare for the sake of conquest rather than developing their productive forces. This overlooks the fact that warfare has been a pre-eminent means of capital accumulation: The present-day military-industrial complex arguably has parallels and precedents in the violent consolidation of bourgeois state power from the seventeenth century to the present and the rise and fall of empires across the world since the dawn of sedentary agriculture. War has always been a racket, and isolating it from the emergence of capitalist production would obscure much of the de facto history of capitalism.

The emergence of a capitalist world-ecology

Chibber then makes a straw-man argument about the supposedly fashionable leftist claim that tracing capitalism back to fifteenth-century England is Eurocentric. Firstly, most of the leftists I know would not contest the claim that capitalism originated in Europe; they would, however, challenge the notion that it did so independent of developments in other parts of the world. Chibber purports to be arguing against “the claim that it is arbitrary, random, or parochial to locate the origins of this new economic system in [England and Holland].” Again, I don’t know any political theorists or historians who would claim that the emergence of capitalism in these countries was arbitrary or random—quite the contrary. However, putting on national or cultural blinders to the interweaving  of these capitalist projects with early imperialist adventurism is parochial.

Capital has been a translocal phenomenon since its inception as a result of its in-built tendency towards expansion. The Iberian extraction of silver from conquered Latin American territories displaced China as the pre-eminent power within the pre-capitalist world-system. As mentioned before, Britain carried out experiments in colonial domination and exploitation in Ireland (as well as Wales and Scotland) for approximately four hundred years before it became the world’s foremost imperial power. The United States grabbed vast swathes of land in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Pacific before it expanded its dominion to the Western Hemisphere and then the whole world. In light of these intricate, inextricable translocal connections throughout capitalism’s history, arguing that it originated in a single country alone seems like a kind of magical thinking, according to which capitalist social relations can just manifest within a purely domestic context.

I concur with Chibber that the relative self-sufficiency of peasants (and Indigenous peoples) inhibited the emergence of capitalist social relations mediated by the market in the feudal / medieval era. “Land was an insurance policy,” he writes. “You’re not going to give up that land because, come hell or high water, you’ve got your land.” Extrapolating this fundamentally ecological line of thinking necessarily requires looking beyond Europe. To cite an infamous historical example, Europe imported millions of tons of guano from the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru in the nineteenth century to fertilize its soils, having rapidly depleted them through intensive industrial agriculture and then largely exhausted catacombs and battlefields as sources of bones for fertilizer. Here, Marxist political ecologist Jason Moore’s analysis of capitalism as a world-ecology is extremely useful for illuminating how this particular mode of production has been an ever-expanding translocal phenomenon from the literal ground up. Frantz Fanon put it even better, and his legendary words, which provide the epigraph to this essay, are worth considering in full. The United States and Europe are, to a considerable extent, literally the creation of the Third World.

The enclosure of common lands in Europe was linked to the settlement of the Americas following their original conquest by the Spanish and Portuguese: The very first lay settlers were, in so many cases, newly dispossessed peasants who were looking to replace the lands they had lost to the emergent capitalist class. This does not, of course, excuse settler colonialism, but it does situate the latter within its proper global context.

The open secret of primitive accumulation

Chibber is essentially trying to reframe the initial or “primitive” accumulation of capital, the supposed prehistory of capitalism as defined by enclosure, conquest, genocide, slavery, etc. He clarifies that “the secret to primitive accumulation… 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.”

Primitive accumulation has been one of the most popular concepts among left intellectuals over the past two-and-a-half decades. British Marxist geographer David Harvey reimagined primitive accumulation as accumulation by dispossession to explain new waves of enclosures in the neoliberal era, in addition to arguing that it has been an ongoing feature of capitalism rather than just part of its historical foundation.

Chibber is right that primitive accumulation isn’t the “original hoarding of wealth at some point in time.” And materialist theorists of primitive accumulation who have necessarily grappled with colonialism as part of examining this aspect of capitalism would agree, too: Colonial plunder was and is a regularized process, not a one-off event, and the hoarding of wealth was neither its only means nor end. It entailed exactly what Chibber considers the “secret of primitive accumulation”: It fundamentally transformed economic, political, and social structures—and, beneath them, foundational land and labor relations—throughout the world.

The backwardness of “backwardness” discourse

Chibber risks reproducing some of the assumptions that clouded some of Marx’s own thinking about colonialism and capitalism in other parts of the world. Marx famously called the peasantry a “sack of potatoes” when assessing their political potential, and he controversially argued earlier in his career that colonial capitalism could help to develop India and other colonies. Chibber defends his view that capitalism truly first emerged in England and Holland on the grounds that these countries witnessed a “constant upgrading of productivity,” whereas “in the rest of Europe 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 viewpoint comes dangerously close to validating long-standing colonial notions of “backwardness” in the Third World or Global South, in the process ignoring the well-established “development of underdevelopment”: the various ways in which Western industrial powers turned back the clocks in their respective colonial territories. For instance, West Bengal on India’s Eastern coast was, according to some scholars, on the verge of its own capitalist revolution, rooted in its robust textile industry. In the wake of the British Crown consolidating its control of India, this industry was dismantled, and India became a net exporter of cotton and a net importer of clothing manufactured in Britain, using technologies suspiciously similar to those that had brought West Bengal to the brink of a potentially region-changing economic revolution. The late Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti put it succinctly: “Poor countries are not ‘under-developed,’ they are over-exploited.”

As a kind of complement to this discourse of backwardness, Chibber points to the rapid development of countries like Japan, Korea, and Brazil in the 1970s and 80s as proof of how the “Protestant work ethic” famously theorized by Max Weber doesn’t serve as an adequate explanation for the emergence of capitalism. In these countries, “where there wasn’t a whisp of Protestantism,” capitalism apparently unfolded in much the same way that it did in Europe: peasants were dispossessed and forced to sell their labor to survive on the market. “So what you find,” Chibber goes so far as to say, “is that capitalism was emerging everywhere, regardless of the culture and the religion. And the dynamics of 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.”

This would be an extraordinary claim to many Marxists and anti-imperialists around the world, to say the least. And the choice of examples doesn’t help: In the latter half of the twentieth century, Japan, Korea, and (if less consistently or obviously) Brazil were all key junior partners to American and more broadly Western imperialism in their respective regions. The first two were and, in many ways, still are US client states, having been refashioned and repositioned in the wake of their devastation by American military bombardment. These defining allegiances render the absence or presence of a Protestant work ethic largely moot.

The exasperating “race reductionist” boogeyman

Towards the end of his interview, Chibber addresses what he considers the roots of the argument about colonial plunder and capitalism. This is where the wheels really come off Chibber’s argument, especially, I would think, for longtime critics of his work. He traces the concept of colonial plunder back to “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,” Chibber concedes, “was a respectable one, because [anti-colonial critics and leaders] were trying to counter the justification for colonial rule that came out of the metropoles from the European countries,” namely, the “civilizing mission.”

However, Chibber emphasizes at several points in the interview that the argument for colonial plunder has no empirical basis, thus denying unequal exchange grounded in imperialist domination as the defining bond between the Global North and South. The empirical proof for this dynamic is, in fact, abundant, and it straddles both production and consumption in the world’s imperial cores: Up until the recent revolutions in West Africa, one third of all lightbulbs in France were electrified with uranium mined in its former colony Niger. Most supermarkets in the United States carry just two brands of bananas: Dole and Chiquita, two notorious companies that respectively supported the U.S. colonization of Hawai’i and multiple right-wing coups in Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

And yet, Chibber insists that attention to colonial plunder is simply “one of the dimensions or consequences of this flight into race reductionism in the past six or eight years.” According to him, race reductionists understand colonialism as an expression of “global white supremacy,” thereby “transforming a class argument into a racial and national argument.” This racial argument apparently maintains that colonialism “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.” This racial argument dangerously parallels white supremacist arguments for this same (potentially fascistic) alliance, as far as Chibber is concerned.

The rise of right-wing authoritarianism across much of the world at the very least reaffirms the disconcerting allure of the previously mentioned Western ethnonationalist worker-capitalist alliance, as contradictory and tenuous as the latter might be. Neocolonial and neo-imperial power operate just as much through ideological obfuscation as material coercion. Many Western workers are indoctrinated—very often using neo-colonial discourses such as Orientalism—into believing that they have more in common with their native bosses than other workers, elsewhere even when this is patently untrue.

This is also to say, as Martinican anti-colonial poet Aimé Césaire observed over seventy years ago, that colonialism has served as a key plank for the construction of fascism. Assuming that a lot of misguided stateside leftists make this same reactionary mistake—conflating the interests of white workers and bosses in a desperate bid to virtue-signal their solidarity with the Global South—is frankly somewhat insulting. Race reductionism can be, has been, and still is an issue within many North American left spaces—but so is class reductionism, and numerous progressive and revolutionary organizations have demonstrated the necessity and value of subverting both in favor of intersectional class analysis. Conflict-riven as they might be, stateside activist spaces can and do mature, including and especially by learning from past mistakes; attempting to reverse progress they have made through self-critique would not only be counterproductive but actively counterrevolutionary.

Revolutionary aspirations beyond the welfare state

For an interview with so many bombastic claims, Chibber concludes on a rather meek note: stressing that people can find access to basic necessities “even inside a mature capitalism,” he proposes that new waves of primitive accumulation can be countered by a strengthened welfare state grounded in the principle of “decommodification,” which is “when goods that have been bought and sold in the market are taken off the market by giving them to people as rights.”

The welfare state is, historically speaking, a bundle of concessions won by worker, peasant, and other movements from below. Following sound bargaining principles, many of these movements have won concessions by pursuing a liberatory horizon beyond the welfare state. Setting a mature capitalist welfare state as a long-term goal speaks to a lack of revolutionary imagination and ambition at best and stands to stifle grassroots energy by centering bureaucratic reform.

Within the context of the West, the welfare state has also been built on a foundation of imperial accumulation. The concept of the Imperial Mode of Living explains how globalized capitalist supply chains solicit the material complicity of working-class people in the imperial core even though they are not the major beneficiaries of imperialism, unlike large corporations, entrepreneurs, and state agencies.

Decommodification everywhere has to involve overcoming colonial paradigms for understanding human relationships to land. This obviously applies to the Global South, but it also very much extends to the Global North, where early colonial ideas first percolated before taking flight. As Federici lays out, European women’s bodies were colonized in combination with the settlement of the Americas and the enslavement of Africans.

Human communities and ecosystems have co-evolved with each other under global colonial capitalism over the past five hundred years. We are, in so many ways, entangled in each other’s chains, which means that we can only break them together. We won’t make any headway if we stand around refusing to accept that someone else’s chains could be heavier than our own, contrary to all historical proof. Chibber’s intervention is a stumbling block to precisely this kind of imperative, historically informed empathy.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”