{"id":14650,"date":"2026-03-20T07:00:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=14650"},"modified":"2026-03-26T01:46:55","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T05:46:55","slug":"creations-of-the-third-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2026\/03\/creations-of-the-third-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Creations of the Third World"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/span>n a September 2025 interview<\/a> 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\u2019s online magazine subsequently published a transcript of the interview<\/a> 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<\/a> to Chibber through the radical media platform Weaponized Information. Spectre<\/em> magazine is also currently assembling a dossier<\/a> of critical commentaries on Chibber’s provocation.<\/p>\n

The controversy generated by Chibber\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Of those major contemporary critical frameworks, I personally came through postcolonialism, in the sense that my outlook has evolved beyond it but I\u2019m still grateful that I had to move through it. I broadly appreciate Chibber\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I argue that Chibber:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. mischaracterizes Left engagements with colonial capitalism as recent trends and ploys;<\/li>\n
  2. fails to adequately reckon with colonial capitalist world-ecology;<\/li>\n
  3. overlooks how colonial capitalism satisfies his own definition of primitive accumulation;<\/li>\n
  4. risks reproducing dominant discourses about the innate \u201cbackwardness\u201d of the Third World\/Global South;<\/li>\n
  5. reduces anti-colonialism to race reductionism;<\/li>\n
  6. delimits liberatory politics to the horizon set by a mature capitalist welfare state.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Neither trends nor ploys<\/h4>\n

    First of all, Chibber\u2019s characterization of engagements with colonial capitalism as \u201ctrendy\u201d is somewhat misleading: Left thinkers and practitioners, from Vladimir Lenin to Frantz Fanon to Ho Chi Minh to Jos\u00e9 Carlos Mari\u00e1tegui, 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<\/a> in the final stages of his career: In an 1881 letter<\/a>, he described the British extraction of rents from India as \u201ca bleeding process, with a vengeance!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

    Marx did not use plunder as a \u201crhetorical ploy,\u201d 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 \u201coriginal accumulation.\u201d Why else would Marx have memorably remarked that capital came into the world \u201cdripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt?\u201d<\/p>\n

    Chibber compares Spain, Portugal, and England\u2019s imperial exploits over the past five to six hundred years, and he suggests that the latter\u2019s emergence as the world\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n