Volume 8, No. 7, July 2026
Editor: Rashed Rahman
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Toward the end of his interview, Chibber notes that his ideas are based on the work of Robert Brenner, “who made this point most forcefully.” Later, when Naschek mentions Ellen Meiksins Wood, Chibber responds that “she was building on Brenner’s arguments.” It is important to introduce this view of the world to the reader who might not be familiar with the Brenner Debate of the 1970s and 80s and the revival of that debate with Wood’s several books in the 1990s.23 For Brenner and Wood, the latter of whom adopted the term “Political Marxism” to describe their approach, capitalism arose not from trade, markets, or population growth, and did not benefit from colonialism, but arose from historically specific agrarian class relations that compelled both landlords and producers to reproduce themselves through competitive market dependence. The agrarian class relations in England are key to this process, and it is when the agrarian classes are subjected to market pressures that the origins of capitalism can be marked. From this account, Ireland either vanishes (as in Brenner) or reappears (as in Wood) only to be distinguished from other colonial experiences, but then so does Asia, Africa, and, of course, the Americas – and, surprisingly, so do the rest of the British Isles and Europe. This is merely an English story, with England being the originator through its own specific social history of capitalist social relations.
In a brief note on the Brenner Debate, the distinguished Indian historian Irfan Habib writes that Brenner’s is a “fairy-tale view of the process leading to the English industrial revolution and the turning of England into the first industrial-capitalist economy of the world.”24 Habib offers several important reasons why this is so: first, that Brenner ignores the role of machinery and the factory, the position of which in the capitalist transformation of agriculture is, therefore, equally ignored. Second, Brenner obfuscates the role of Ireland as a reserve from which food could be procured at lowered prices not only for the industrial working class, but also for the agrarian population, which otherwise faced a collapse of their incomes due to the destruction of their home crafts and their own subsistence farms. Third, Brenner overlooks the income from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the trade of goods produced by the slave plantations, and the tribute from India. Fourth, Brenner ignores the class struggle against the peasantry (such as the violence of the enclosure movement of the 18th century) and the class struggle by the peasantry (from Kett’s Rebellion of 1549 to the Captain Swing riots of 1830-1831).25
In Capital, Marx writes: “Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century.”26 Brenner retains the time period but locates the origin solely in the English countryside. Chibber states that capitalism emerges “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.” This is the classic Brenner approach, which ignores the process of capitalist development that must include the machine (which Habib mentions). The machine is not just a productivity enhancer, but a materialised social relation that reorganises labour discipline, time, and skill, as well as enhances surplus extraction. The machine allowed for the creation of new social relations and did not merely express existing ones. As Marx insisted in Capital, machinery is not a neutral technical advance but “the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes” and for transforming the labour process itself, subordinating living labour to dead labour and making relative surplus value systematic.27 If we take the machine seriously, then we must understand its role in colonial production as well: first, in the sugar mills of Madeira, the Canary Islands, São Tomé, and the Caribbean from 1450 onward; and second, that of mining machinery in Potosí, Zacatecas, and Central Europe from 1500 onward.28
These developments take place before the invention of the main elements of textile machinery, such as the Spinning Jenny (1764), the Water Frame (1769), the Mule (1779), the Power Loom (1780), and the Steam Engine (1763). In fact, it is fair that Chibber does not know of the importance of social relations being utterly transformed in Maderia or in Zacatecas by the machine and being shaped into capitalist social relations, because the literature on these developments is either not in English or not published by metropolitan publishing houses.29 The absence of the machinery in this literature for its role in expanded reproduction, and the absence of the early plantations in the Mediterranean and in the Atlantic, reveals the narrowness of perspective of Political Marxism, content as it is with English manorial and seigneurial records (ignoring even parish records as sources of demographic material, engineering handbooks, factory inspectors’ reports, account books and ledgers, estate archives, and technological manuals).
Political Marxism, or at least the early work of Brenner and the later work of Wood, shows how capitalist social relations disciplined labour in England and in other parts of the North Atlantic world. What it does not show is the relationship of this disciplined labour to the expanded reproduction of capital and to the dispossession of land, labour, and minerals in the colonies. An accurate account of the complex origins of capitalism would not so precisely give it a date and a birthplace, but would locate it in the plantation, in the mine, in the colony, on the slave ship, and, of course, in the fields of England and in the factories of northwestern Europe.
The Role of Colonialism
Early into the interview, Chibber says that he is going to dismiss the “idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder,” which he says, “had been pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1980s and ’90s.” The argument I am advancing here is not that colonialism mechanically ‘created’ capitalism, but that capitalism emerged as a global social relation (through the creation of an international division of labour) with internal dynamics in Europe that were inseparable from colonial expropriation, coerced labour, and machine-mediated production elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is significant that at several points in the interview, Chibber talks about “plunder”, which is an important part of the rhetorical arsenal of national liberation: drain being the term in the 19th century, then plunder, with tribute being a word developed into a critical concept by Amin. What Chibber does not seem to allow with the use of the word plunder is that colonialism is not just theft of silver, but the expropriation of land and bodies. It is worth recalling that Marx, in Value, Price, and Profit (1865) – written originally in English – observed the use by the classical political economists of “Previous, or Original Accumulation” and then noted that this “ought to be called Original Expropriation.” This original expropriation, Marx wrote, “means nothing but a series of historical processes, resulting in a decomposition of the original union existing between the labouring Man and his Instruments of Labour.”30 These historical processes can be precisely seen in the history of colonisation that goes back to the late 15th century. After Marx lists them in Capital, volume 1, chapter 31 (“The Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist”), he says, “These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation” – in other words, the basis of the emergence of the industrial capitalist.31 If you ignore colonialism and the machine, you do not get the genesis of industrial capitalism, only the emergence of certain social relations that enfold into the vast behemoth of capitalism.
The question raised by Chibber’s intervention is not whether capitalism could have existed without colonialism in the abstract, but whether Marxism can explain capitalism as it actually emerged without confronting empire, slavery, and machine-mediated domination. On this question, Political Marxism, and Chibber’s popular rendering of it, falls short. By confining the origins of capitalism to English agrarian class relations and treating colonialism as analytically secondary, it mistakes an abstraction – an emphasis on political and national power as opposed to global political-economic relations – for a historical explanation. If you start out by analytically abstracting from the world, it is hardly surprising that your conclusions lead to the view that the world is unimportant.
Capitalism did not arise as a self-enclosed national system later projected outward. It emerged through global processes of dispossession, through the violent reorganisation of labour and nature across continents, and through the early deployment of machines in plantations, mines, and extractive complexes that disciplined labour long before the English factory became dominant. These were not peripheral episodes or mere ‘plunder’, but constitutive moments in the formation of capitalist social relations and the international division of labour.
If these histories are taken seriously, then the question of reparations cannot be dismissed as a moral appeal or a backward-looking demand but must be understood as a material and political necessity. Reparations are not about assigning guilt for past crimes alone, but about confronting the ongoing structures of accumulation that were founded through colonial expropriation and continue to reproduce global inequality in the present. This is the argument of the new book written by Kwesi Pratt Jr., the leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, with a foreword by Ghana’s President John Mahama. Chibber’s interview comes out just as Pratt’s book has begun to draw attention not only in Ghana, but across the continent, with Mahama pledging to rally support for this idea through the African Union’s Reparations Agenda.32 The wealth of the Global North was not merely accelerated by empire; it was constituted through processes of dispossession that destroyed alternative paths of development, reorganised social reproduction, and locked much of the Global South into relations of dependency that persist through debt, trade, and financial domination. To reject reparations while acknowledging these histories is to naturalise an unjust world order as if it were the outcome of neutral market processes rather than centuries of organised violence. A Marxism that takes imperialism seriously must therefore insist that reparations – whether through debt cancellation, the restitution of stolen resources, the transfer of technology, or the rebuilding of public capacities destroyed by colonialism and structural adjustment – are not acts of charity, but moments of struggle over the redistribution of historically expropriated social wealth. Without such a politics, critiques of capitalism risk becoming analytically sharp but politically inert, unable to connect historical truth to the demands of anti-imperialist transformation in the present.
To deny this is not simply to misread history, it is to disarm Marxism politically. A theory that severs capitalism from imperialism cannot account for the persistence of unequal development, racialised labour, and ongoing forms of primitive accumulation. A Marxism adequate to our world must therefore begin where capitalism itself began – not only in the English countryside, but in the plantation, the mine, the colony, and the machine.
Notes:
23. For Robert Brenner: “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe”, Past & Present, no. 70 (1976); “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism”, New Left Review, I/104 (1977); “The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism”, Past & Present, no. 97 (1982). For critiques of his view and his responses, see The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, eds. T H Aston and C H E Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For Ellen Meiksins Wood, see The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991); Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002).
24. Irfan Habib: “The Rise of Capitalism in England: Reviewing the Brenner Thesis”, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 74 (2013): 741.
25. Andy Wood: The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé: Captain Swing (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969).
26. Karl Marx: Capital, vol. 1 (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2010, 506).
27. Ibid., 290.
28. João G Araújo et al.: “Sugar Production in the Atlantic: Ceramic Moulds from Madeira, Cape Verde, and São Tomé (15th-17th Centuries)”, Instalaciones y paisajes azucareros atlánticos, Gaëlle Dieulefet and Catherine Losier, eds. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2023); Peter Bakewell: Minería y sociedad en el México colonial: Zacatecas, 1546-1700 (México: FCE, 1976).
29. Geraldo Gomes: Engenho y Arquitetura – tipologia dos edifícios dos Antigos Engenhos de açúcar de Pernambuco (Recife: Editora Fundação Gilberto Freyre, 1998); Modesto Bargalló: La minería y la metalurgia en la América española durante la época colonial, con un apéndice sobre la industria del hierro en México desde la iniciación de la Independencia hasta el presente (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955).
30. Karl Marx: Value, Price and Profit in Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 38-39.
31. Marx: Capital, vol. 1, 531.
32. Kwesi Pratt Jr.: Reparations: History, Struggle, Politics, and Law – Reparations for Africa (Accra: Printer Excel, 2025); Mikaela Nhondo Erskog and Vijay Prashad: “The Actuality of Red Africa”, Monthly Review 76, no. 2 (June 2024): 37-50.
The writer is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. His latest books are On Cuba (with Noam Chomsky, The New Press, 2024) and The International Monetary Fund Suffocates the World (with Grieve Chelwa, Inkani Books, 2025).
The author is grateful to Eduardo Rodriguez, John Bellamy Foster, Maisa Bascuas, Miguel Stedile, Shiran Ilanperuma, and Tings Chak for comments. The overall approach is deeply indebted to Aijaz Ahmad (1941–2022), from whom emanated elements of a living and breathing Marxism.
Courtesy Monthly Review, March 2026.
(Concluded)