Capitalism Did Not Float In on the Market: Chibber, Jacobin, and the Political Function of Western Marxism

When “History Theory” Becomes an Alibi for Empire

This essay is a polemical intervention into a recent Jacobin interview with NYU sociologist Vivek Chibber, published as a transcript of an episode of Confronting Capitalism. In the exchange, Chibber advances a now-familiar Western Marxist position: that capitalism emerged primarily from an internal agrarian transition in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England, that colonial plunder played no constitutive role in its rise, and that contemporary attempts to link capitalism’s development to colonialism represent a confused, empirically unsustainable, and politically reactionary drift into “race reductionism.” The interview is presented as a sober correction to a supposedly “trendy” left argument, but what follows is not neutral clarification. It is an ideological boundary-setting exercise—one that narrows Marxism to a settler-safe political economy, evacuates empire from the core of capitalist analysis, and disciplines anti-colonial socialism back into academic respectability. What follows is a systematic refutation of that line, grounded in historical materialism, anti-colonial political economy, and the lived realities of imperial domination.

Jacobin introduces this conversation with the tone of a referee who has already decided who deserves the trophy. The host tells us there is a “trendy” argument circulating on the Left — that the West became rich through colonial plunder — and then hands the mic to Vivek Chibber, who answers like a landlord swatting at tenants: “utter nonsense,” “not a shred of truth,” “can’t even get off the ground.” That opening is not simply a debate style. It is an ideological posture. It does not begin by clarifying what is actually being argued and what is at stake. It begins by ridiculing a whole anti-colonial tradition as if it were a social media fad, a moral panic, a youth culture glitch in need of adult supervision.

Weaponized Information starts from a different place: not from manners, not from academic fashion, and not from the polite mythology that capitalism can be explained without the blood ledger of conquest. If you want to understand capitalism, you do not start in the seminar room. You start where the system started: in the violent reordering of land, labor, and life — in the transformation of human beings into “hands,” territories into “property,” and whole continents into an open-air mine guarded by law, guns, and the cross. And you do not treat colonialism as an unfortunate side story, like a bad chapter you skip so you can get to the “real” plot of English farms and market incentives. Colonialism is not an accessory to the capitalist story. It is one of the methods by which the capitalist world was built and maintained — not because money is magic, but because power is organized.

Chibber’s move, right from the start, is to shrink the question until it becomes easy to dismiss. He wants the argument to mean: “plunder created capitalism” in the crude sense that a pile of gold automatically turns a feudal lord into an industrial capitalist. Then he declares victory over that cartoon. Fine. We can agree that money does not miraculously become capital just because it changes hands through theft. But that is not the central anti-colonial claim, and it never has been. The core claim is that capitalism’s rise and reproduction required a coercive world-making: the forcible separation of people from land, the manufacture of dependency, the creation of disciplined labor, the construction of a world market on imperial terms, and the steady siphoning of value from colonized labor into metropolitan accumulation. In other words, not “loot causes factories,” but “conquest and coercion build the conditions under which factories, markets, and wage labor become dominant, expandable, and enforceable.”

What Jacobin is really policing here is not a technical disagreement about medieval accounting. It is a political boundary. Because once you admit that capitalism is inseparable from colonial conquest and settler land theft — once you admit that “primitive accumulation” is not a metaphor but a regime of expropriation — you are forced to confront uncomfortable questions that Western Marxism has spent generations avoiding. Questions like: who benefited, materially, from the colonial ordering of the world? What class formations were stabilized inside the imperial core by the super-exploitation of the periphery? What does “solidarity” mean when the social wage and cheap consumption of the metropole have been historically tethered to the unfree labor, coerced labor, and dispossessed labor of the colonized? And what does socialism even mean if it refuses to break with the property relations, borders, and national myths that were forged in conquest?

This is why the opening insult matters. It is not simply arrogance; it is discipline. The goal is to pre-empt the anti-colonial indictment before it becomes a program. To make the colonized argument sound like a trendy moralism, so the reader can feel “materialist” while remaining politically harmless — the kind of harmless that can quote Marx fluently while treating the colonial world as scenery. But Marxism, when it is alive, does not function as a speech filter for respectable radicals. It functions as a weapon: it names expropriation, it identifies the class forces behind the narrative, and it asks what line is being advanced and for whom. So before we even touch Chibber’s historical claims one by one, we have to name the operation being performed: the conversion of colonialism from structure into background, from constitutive violence into optional commentary, and from living political question into a bad argument that has been “discredited.”

Section by section, we are going to reverse that conversion. We are going to take the argument out of the safe little box Jacobin builds for it, and put it back where it belongs: in the real world, where the transition to capitalism was not a tidy English documentary about markets learning to rule society, but a global war over land, labor, and sovereignty — a war whose aftershocks still organize who eats, who works, who migrates, and who dies. And we are going to show that the function of this Jacobin line is not just to win a debate, but to make Western socialism compatible with the settler order by dissolving the colonial contradiction into “history theory.”

The Strawman That Saves the Settler: “Gold Didn’t Create Capitalism”

Now we can put Chibber’s core maneuver on the table with a cold eye. He takes a real and serious anti-colonial indictment — that Europe’s rise cannot be separated from conquest, slavery, and the construction of an imperial world market — and he collapses it into a childish formula: “plunder created capitalism.” Then he fights that formula like it is the whole case. This is the oldest trick in the respectable-left playbook: take a structural argument about power, turn it into a cartoon about money, and then declare the cartoon defeated. The audience leaves thinking they have witnessed a serious materialist demolition, when what they have really witnessed is a political exorcism: the removal of colonialism from the center of the capitalist story, so that the story can return to its comfortable European home.

Look closely at how he frames Marx. He says Marx’s remarks about robbery and colonial plunder in the chapters on primitive accumulation were a “rhetorical ploy,” even a “rhetorical error,” a side note that misled people into an argument Marx supposedly spent the next chapters disproving. This is not a minor interpretive difference; it is a deliberate shrinking of Marx’s historical method. Marx is not writing a sermon about whether the first capitalist was frugal or criminal. Marx is tracing how a new social order is born through coercion, law, state violence, and expropriation — the separation of producers from the conditions of production — and how that separation is not a private domestic event but a world-historical process. When Chibber calls Marx’s colonial emphasis a rhetorical mistake, he is not correcting Marx. He is correcting the political implications of Marx.

Here is the honest version of the debate, in plain language. Nobody serious is arguing that a shipment of silver automatically turns a feudal lord into a capitalist, like a fairy tale where bullion kisses the frog of feudalism and out jumps the prince of industry. Money is not an engine by itself. It becomes capital only within a social order that compels and rewards accumulation, competition, and expansion. Fine. But what Chibber refuses to confront is how that social order was made, how it was stabilized, and how it was globalized. He wants to keep the violence local and the explanation narrow: enclosure here, market dependence there, and the rest of the world as background scenery. But capitalism did not rise inside England like a plant growing in a sealed greenhouse. It rose as a system of coercive world-making, a system that produced “market dependence” not only by kicking peasants off English land, but by kicking whole peoples off their land, breaking communal reproduction, and forcing the colonized into the circuits of empire through taxes, monopolies, slave labor regimes, and gunboat “trade.”

The anti-colonial Marxist claim, properly stated, is structural and relational: capitalism’s transition and expansion cannot be understood without the violent construction of a world market, and without the systematic transfer of value from colonized labor and colonized land into metropolitan accumulation. This is not a moral slogan. It is political economy. The Atlantic slave system is not a sad sidebar; it is a labor regime that generated commodities, profits, and state capacities on a scale that reshaped the accumulation possibilities of the metropole and built the infrastructure of modern finance, shipping, insurance, and industry. Settler colonial land theft is not “pre-capitalist brutality”; it is the creation of a gigantic property base, a resource frontier, and a racial order of labor control that becomes a long-term platform for capitalist development. Imperialism is not the after-party that starts in the late nineteenth century; it is the extension and maturation of the same coercive logic by which capital secures labor, resources, and markets when “free exchange” is not enough.

Chibber tries to escape this by insisting that the real secret is “market dependence,” that capitalism begins when people are forced to compete to survive. Good. Let’s accept that definition. Now the question becomes: by what means, and on what scale, was that dependence manufactured? And once you ask that honestly, his neat separation collapses. Because market dependence was not created by English landlords alone; it was enforced by imperial states. It was imposed through enclosures and vagrancy laws at home, yes — and through conquest, dispossession, slavery, indenture, forced cultivation, tribute systems, unequal treaties, and colonial taxation abroad. The whip and the contract are not opposites in this history; they are partners. Capital does not merely “discover” markets. It breaks societies until markets become unavoidable. And the colonized world is where that breaking was often the most direct, the most brutal, and the most revealing.

This is why the Spain-and-Portugal story, which Chibber uses like a hammer, does not actually hit the nail he claims it hits. Even if bullion did not transform Iberian class relations into English-style agrarian capitalism, it does not follow that colonial extraction was irrelevant to the rise of capitalism as a world system. It only shows that plunder can be absorbed and misused within particular class structures — that a feudal-rentier order can burn treasure in war, court luxury, and stagnation. But the system does not end at national borders. The question is not whether treasure “made Spain capitalist,” but how the imperial reshaping of trade, prices, state finance, war-making capacity, and global commodity circuits created the conditions in which certain capitalist formations could consolidate and then dominate. Chibber’s method relies on treating countries like sealed jars and then pretending the world economy is a footnote. That is not materialism. That is methodological nationalism dressed up as rigor.

And we have to say plainly what is happening politically when Jacobin sets the terms this way. The strawman is not innocent. It functions as a gate. If the anti-colonial argument is reduced to “gold created capitalism,” then the only “adult” response is to roll your eyes and return to a story in which Europe’s internal class transformations are the main event and colonialism is, at most, a moral stain. That story produces a socialism that can remain loyal to the settler commonsense: yes, capitalism is bad, but the colonial contradiction is not foundational; yes, workers suffer, but the empire is not a living structure that shapes the class terrain; yes, history was violent, but the violence is not the architecture of the present. In other words: a socialism that critiques capital while leaving the imperial property order largely intact.

So our task then is to restore the real argument that Chibber is trying to bury. The dispute is not about whether money alone can create capitalism. The dispute is about whether capitalism’s “economic structure” can be told truthfully without centering the colonial manufacture of property, labor, and dependency on a world scale. Chibber wants colonialism to be either irrelevant or merely supplementary — something you can acknowledge as “an abomination” and then politely move past. Weaponized Information insists the opposite: colonialism and settler conquest are not just crimes committed alongside capitalism; they are among the material processes through which capitalism was built, expanded, and defended, and they remain embedded in how value is captured, how labor is disciplined, and how the imperial core reproduces itself today.

England Was Not an Island: How “Internal Transition” Myths Smuggle Empire Through the Back Door

Having reduced the anti-colonial argument to a strawman, Chibber then advances his centerpiece: England became capitalist before it had an empire, therefore colonialism cannot be constitutive to capitalism’s rise. Spain and Portugal had empires and stagnated; England had no empire and surged. Case closed. This is presented as devastating empirical common sense. In reality, it is a historical sleight of hand that depends on aggressive omission, selective chronology, and a refusal to theorize empire as a system rather than a flag planted on distant soil.

Let us begin with the most obvious falsification. England did not develop in splendid isolation, patiently inventing capitalism while the rest of the world happened elsewhere. Long before the formal empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England was already a colonial power in practice. Ireland was its laboratory. The violent conquest, plantation, land seizure, and demographic engineering imposed on Ireland were not peripheral episodes; they were rehearsals. Techniques of enclosure, property law, forced market dependence, and counterinsurgency were refined there before being exported outward. To narrate England’s transition while bracketing Ireland is not an innocent simplification. It is a settler move: erase the colony so the metropole can appear self-generated.

The same applies to England’s early integration into the Atlantic system. Piracy, privateering, slave trading, chartered companies, and naval warfare were not late imperial luxuries; they were constitutive practices through which the English state learned how to fuse accumulation with coercion. Merchant capital, state violence, and overseas plunder were already intertwined as England’s agrarian transformation unfolded. The idea that England’s capitalism was born “before empire” only works if empire is defined narrowly as formal territorial possession rather than as a mode of organized expropriation operating through trade monopolies, slave markets, war, and settler expansion. That definition is not historical rigor. It is ideological hygiene.

Chibber’s Spain-and-Portugal example collapses under the same scrutiny. He treats each country as a sealed container, as if capitalism were a national chemistry experiment whose results can be compared by holding everything else constant. But capitalism did not emerge as a collection of national experiments. It emerged as a world system. Iberian bullion inflows reshaped European price structures, state finance, military competition, and commercial circuits across the continent. Even if Spain’s internal class structure channeled that wealth into war, rent, and stagnation, the effects did not stop at the Pyrenees. Capitalist development elsewhere fed on those disruptions. To say “Spain stagnated, therefore plunder is irrelevant” is like saying a fire did not cause a city’s growth because the ashes settled unevenly.

More fundamentally, Chibber’s entire argument depends on isolating “the transition” as a purely internal agrarian event. Enclosures force peasants onto the market; market dependence generates competition; competition drives productivity. End of story. But this story collapses the moment we ask how that market was sustained, expanded, and stabilized. A market is not a self-winding clock. It requires demand, inputs, outlets, and enforcement. Colonial conquest supplied all four. Colonies provided land, labor, raw materials, and captive markets. They absorbed surplus goods, disciplined labor through racial terror, and generated super-profits that lubricated accumulation. The English working class did not confront capitalism inside a closed loop. It confronted a system already extending outward, already feeding on colonial violence, already building a world market whose center of gravity lay in Europe but whose lifeblood flowed from elsewhere.

This is where Chibber’s invocation of “market dependence” turns against him. He insists that capitalism begins when people have no choice but to sell their labor to survive. Correct. But how was that condition reproduced beyond England’s fields? How were millions across Africa, Asia, and the Americas made dependent on markets they did not control? Through taxation payable only in colonial currency, through forced cultivation of export crops, through the destruction of communal land systems, through slavery and indenture, through the gunboat and the whip. Market dependence did not politely expand outward from England like ripples in a pond. It was imposed, unevenly and violently, by imperial power. To describe that as “supplementary” to capitalism’s core is to confuse geography with structure.

Chibber wants us to believe that because England’s agrarian class relations changed first, empire must be secondary. But chronology is not causality, and priority is not purity. Capitalism’s internal transformation and its external expansion were not sequential chapters in a textbook; they were mutually reinforcing processes. Enclosure at home produced surplus labor; colonies absorbed surplus goods and capital; colonial profits strengthened the state; the state enforced property relations; and the cycle intensified. To tear these elements apart and rank them as “essential” versus “incidental” is not materialist analysis. It is a political choice about which violences count as foundational and which can be treated as unfortunate consequences.

This is where settler colonial analysis becomes unavoidable, and where Western Marxism begins to panic. Settler colonialism is not just extraction; it is replacement. It creates durable property regimes, racial labor hierarchies, and territorial control that anchor capitalist accumulation over centuries. England’s transition cannot be understood without acknowledging that the same state power that enclosed peasants also conquered lands, expelled peoples, and constructed a racialized global labor order. The “internal” and the “external” are not separate spheres. They are two faces of the same class project.

The insistence that England “had capitalism before empire” is therefore not a neutral empirical claim. It is a narrative firewall. Its function is to preserve a version of Marxism that can critique landlords without indicting settlers, that can analyze class without confronting colonial property, and that can imagine socialism emerging from the imperial core without a reckoning with the structures that made that core possible. Weaponized Information rejects that firewall. Capitalism did not grow up in England and then accidentally wander into the world. It was forged through enclosure and conquest together, stabilized through settler colonialism and slavery, and expanded through imperial domination. Any account that separates these processes does not clarify capitalism’s origins; it sanitizes them.

“Consensus,” Eurocentrism, and the Art of Declaring the Case Closed

At this point in the argument, Chibber reaches for the ultimate academic cudgel: consensus. We are told that the question of capitalism’s origins has been settled, that the data are in, that serious economic historians agree England and the Low Countries diverged first, and that anyone who continues to insist on colonialism as constitutive is either confused, ideological, or flirting with “Eurocentrism” in reverse. This is not analysis; it is authority speaking in the passive voice. “There is a mountain of literature.” “There is a strong consensus.” Translation: stop asking the wrong questions.

But consensus is not truth, and it is certainly not innocence. Every consensus is built by deciding which questions are legitimate and which are dismissed as noise. Political Marxism’s consensus rests on a prior exclusion: colonial relations are treated as external to the “real” transition story. Once that boundary is drawn, it becomes easy to proclaim victory. England’s agrarian transformation explains capitalism; empire explains something else. The problem is not that the English agrarian transition did not happen. The problem is that this framework turns a world-historical system into a national morality tale and then congratulates itself for methodological rigor.

When Chibber scoffs at the charge of Eurocentrism, he deliberately misdefines it. Eurocentrism does not mean “locating an event in Europe when it happened there.” Eurocentrism means treating Europe as a self-generating engine of history, while the rest of the world appears only as background, resource pool, or passive recipient. It means narrating capitalism as if Europe developed first and then later interacted with the world, rather than as a system that emerged through world-scale coercion, conquest, and reorganization. You can acknowledge England’s early divergence and still be Eurocentric if you treat that divergence as internally sufficient and analytically complete.

The sleight of hand is subtle but decisive. Chibber asks: did something recognizably capitalist exist elsewhere before England? If not, then locating capitalism’s origin in England cannot be Eurocentric. But this shifts the issue from structure to chronology. The anti-colonial argument is not that China or India had factories identical to Lancashire in 1500. It is that Europe’s capitalist trajectory cannot be explained without the violent incorporation of the rest of the world into a hierarchical system of value extraction. Capitalism does not require identical forms everywhere to be constitutive. It requires asymmetric relations. It requires centers and peripheries. It requires zones of cheap labor, coerced labor, and stolen land. To deny this is not to defend materialism; it is to amputate it.

Chibber’s growth-rate narrative performs the same ideological labor. England takes off; Asia and the rest of Europe fall behind; therefore capitalism is explained. But growth curves do not explain themselves. They describe outcomes, not causes. What they obscure is how those curves were produced and sustained. England’s “explosive” growth did not occur in a vacuum. It coincided with the consolidation of Atlantic slavery, the expansion of settler frontiers, the militarization of trade routes, and the subordination of vast populations to imperial rule. These were not coincidental backdrops. They were the global conditions that allowed growth to continue rather than choke on its own contradictions.

This is where the Patnaiks, Samir Amin, Hosea Jaffe, and John Smith become indispensable — and where Chibber’s framework collapses. Capitalism’s growth in the core required mechanisms to manage demand, secure cheap inputs, and extract surplus value beyond national borders. Imperialism is not an after-effect of successful capitalism; it is a solution to capitalism’s internal limits. By treating imperial relations as analytically optional, Political Marxism ends up explaining early takeoff while leaving long-term dominance unexplained. It can tell you how the engine started, but not how it kept running without destroying itself.

The appeal to consensus also serves a disciplinary function inside the Left. It tells militants, organizers, and colonized intellectuals that the argument is over, that anti-colonial insistence is anachronistic, and that the only respectable Marxism is one that stays within the bounds of European agrarian history. This is not accidental. A Marxism that treats empire as secondary can safely focus on redistribution within the core, on welfare states and social democracy, without confronting the imperial property relations that make those projects viable. A Marxism that centers colonialism forces a different conclusion: socialism cannot be national, settler, or insulated from the global struggle against imperial domination.

So when Chibber declares the Eurocentrism charge “preposterous,” what he is really saying is that the rules of the game have already been set, and they were set in a way that protects the Western left from a deeper reckoning. Weaponized Information rejects that comfort. The question is not whether England diverged first. The question is whether capitalism, as a system that now dominates the planet, can be explained without treating colonial conquest, slavery, and imperial hierarchy as foundational structures. Any consensus that answers “yes” to that question is not neutral. It is doing political work.

And that political work has consequences. It produces a socialism that can criticize capital while remaining silent on land theft, borders, and empire. It produces theory that is legible in Western journals but useless to the colonized masses who live the afterlife of “primitive accumulation” every day. And today, we are exposing that operation — not to win an academic dispute, but to clear the ground for a Marxism that is finally adequate to the world capitalism has actually made.

From Political Economy to Moral Panic: How “Race Reductionism” Replaces Analysis

Having narrowed capitalism to an English agrarian transition and insulated that transition from empire, Chibber makes his sharpest political turn. He tells us that the return of colonial explanations is not driven by evidence or history but by a slide into “race reductionism,” by talk of “global white supremacy,” by a Left that has supposedly abandoned class for identity. This move is not an aside. It is the ideological keystone of the entire argument. Once colonial analysis is recoded as racial moralism, it can be dismissed without engaging its material claims.

But the historical record does not support this caricature. Anti-colonial Marxism did not begin as a language of moral outrage about whiteness. It emerged from concrete struggles over land, labor, and sovereignty. Nkrumah was not theorizing “identity”; he was analyzing how political independence without economic control reproduces dependency. Rodney was not counting moral sins; he was tracing how Europe’s development was materially linked to Africa’s underdevelopment. Amin was not gesturing at race; he was mapping a world system structured by unequal exchange. These analyses were forged in confrontation with colonial administration, forced labor regimes, cash-crop coercion, and imperial state violence. They are grounded in political economy, not confession.

Chibber’s accusation works only by collapsing nation, race, and class into a single muddle and then blaming his opponents for the confusion. The anti-colonial claim is not that exploitation happens because Europeans are white. It is that capitalism developed through a colonial world order in which racialization became a technology of labor control, property legitimation, and political rule. Race is not the cause; it is the instrument. To acknowledge that is not to abandon class analysis but to specify how class domination actually operated across a global terrain shaped by conquest and settlement.

The concrete historical sequence matters here. In the settler colonies, land was seized and populations were displaced or annihilated to create a territorial base for accumulation. In plantation zones, enslaved and semi-enslaved labor generated export commodities under regimes of absolute coercion. In colonized agrarian societies, taxes payable only in colonial currency forced peasants into market dependence and wage labor. These processes were organized by imperial states and justified through racial ideologies, but they were driven by the requirements of accumulation. To describe this as “race reductionism” is to invert causality and erase the machinery that produced both race and class in their modern forms.

What disappears in Chibber’s framing is the question of incorporation. Capitalism did not simply exploit colonized labor abroad while leaving the metropole untouched. It reorganized class relations inside the core as well. Settler access to land, imperial super-profits, and cheap commodities reshaped the political economy of Europe and North America, altering wage structures, consumption patterns, and the balance of class forces. This is not a claim that all workers in the core were uniformly privileged, nor that class struggle vanished. It is a claim that the terrain of that struggle was conditioned by imperial relations. Ignoring this conditioning does not preserve class analysis; it impoverishes it.

The charge of “race reductionism” also performs a forward-looking function. It delegitimizes contemporary struggles that target borders, land theft, carceral control, and imperial militarism by portraying them as distractions from “real” class politics. Yet these institutions are not cultural residues; they are mechanisms through which market dependence is enforced today. Migration regimes discipline labor on a global scale. Debt and austerity reproduce dispossession in the postcolonial world. Militarized policing and prisons manage surplus populations inside the core. To treat these as secondary to an abstract wage relation is to mistake the surface form of exploitation for its total structure.

Historically, the Left has seen this maneuver before. Whenever colonized or oppressed peoples insist that their specific conditions matter — that land, nation, and state power are not interchangeable with factory relations — a section of the metropolitan Left accuses them of parochialism, nationalism, or now, racialism. The accusation functions to recentralize theory in the metropole and to reassert a universalism that quietly assumes imperial conditions as the norm. What is presented as a defense of class is, in practice, a defense of a particular class position within the world system.

A concrete materialist analysis leads elsewhere. It shows that capitalism’s development required differentiated forms of coercion across space; that racialization was historically functional to that differentiation; and that class struggle has always unfolded within these structured inequalities. To name those facts is not to replace class with race. It is to refuse a flattened abstraction that treats English peasants, enslaved Africans, colonized farmers, and settler workers as interchangeable units in a single schematic transition story.

The real question, then, is not why some people talk about race too much, but why a certain Marxism insists on talking about capitalism as if empire were an external irritant rather than an organizing principle. Chibber’s answer is to moralize the problem and declare it a deviation. Weaponized Information insists on a different approach: return to the concrete history of how capitalism actually organized labor, land, and power on a world scale, and let theory answer to that reality rather than policing it. That is not identity politics. It is materialism without blinders.

When the Metropole Eats the World: Imperial Value Transfer and the Reproduction of “Domestic” Class Peace

Chibber tries to end the controversy by conceding a moral point while blocking the material one. Colonialism, he says, was “an abomination.” It was driven by “material incentives.” Fine. Then he draws a hard line: you can admit that, but you cannot say capitalism in the West came out of plunder, and you certainly cannot say the West stays rich through the continued extraction of the South. This is where the argument stops being a medieval debate about England and becomes a modern political economy question: what are the material mechanisms through which wealth is reproduced in the imperial core, and how are those mechanisms tied to the organization of labor, production, and exchange on a world scale?

The concrete historical conditions of the modern era do not allow the neat separation Chibber wants. From the nineteenth century forward, capitalism is not merely a national system with occasional overseas adventures. It is a world market organized through imperial power. The core does not simply “trade” with the periphery; it structures the terms on which production, prices, finance, and state policy operate. Colonial administration and, later, neo-colonial leverage were not episodic crimes. They were institutional arrangements that made sure the periphery supplied cheap labor, cheap raw materials, and strategic commodities while remaining constrained in its ability to industrialize, to control capital flows, and to set sovereign development priorities.

This is not a slogan about “plunder.” It is the historical architecture of unequal exchange and global labor hierarchy. Value is captured not only where it is produced but where it is realized, priced, financed, insured, shipped, and monopolized. When production is geographically dispersed but controlled through corporate planning, intellectual property, trade rules, and financial power, the surplus generated by workers in the periphery does not remain where those workers live. It is appropriated through the structure of the world market. This is not a mystical claim; it is how modern supply chains and monopoly control function in practice: the labor-intensive, low-wage segments are externalized to the South while the high-margin commanding heights are consolidated in the core.

The historical record makes this legible. Under colonial rule, vast regions were reorganized around export economies, forced into cash-crop dependence, and denied autonomous industrial pathways. After formal decolonization, the mechanisms changed form but not function: debt regimes, structural adjustment, trade conditionalities, currency hierarchies, military intimidation, and comprador class alliances preserved a pattern in which the periphery remains a reservoir of cheap labor and resources. The imperial core’s “advanced” accumulation is inseparable from this arrangement because it continually cheapens the inputs of production, expands the arena of exploitation, and supplies outlets for surplus capital.

This is where the question of “domestic” class compromise becomes concrete. In the core, the social wage, cheap consumer goods, and periods of relative stability were never generated by domestic productivity alone. They were also conditioned by an international division of labor in which colonized and dependent regions bore a disproportionate share of coercion, repression, and immiseration. This does not mean workers in the core lived comfortably or that class struggle was fictional. It means the balance of forces and the material terrain of struggle were shaped by imperial relations. When cheap commodities flow in from super-exploited labor abroad, capital gains room to manage wages and maintain political stability without surrendering control. When super-profits are available through overseas extraction and monopoly advantage, reform becomes more affordable, and social peace becomes more purchasable.

Chibber’s insistence that the “global North collectively exploits the global South” is “empirically mistaken” depends on restricting exploitation to a narrow picture: direct coercion by a colonial state, visible theft of bullion, the literal image of a conquistador with a chest of gold. But capitalism is more sophisticated than the cartoon he wants to defeat. The modern mechanisms are structural: price-setting power, financial dominance, unequal bargaining positions, corporate control over technology and markets, and the political enforcement of these arrangements through sanctions, coups, and military pressure when necessary. The question is not whether every Western worker receives a dividend check stamped “imperialism.” The question is whether the reproduction of accumulation in the core is conditioned by systematic value transfer from the periphery. On that question, the historical evidence points in one direction: yes.

There is also a deeper contradiction in Chibber’s own framework. He acknowledges that capitalism constantly seeks to expand commodification and that struggles over decommodification — the welfare state, social rights, access to necessities outside the market — remain central. But in the real history of capitalism, the ability to tolerate partial decommodification in the core has often been linked to the continued commodification and coercion of the periphery. In other words, the imperial world system does not merely enrich “some capitalists.” It helps structure the conditions under which capital can negotiate, concede, and retreat within the core while continuing to advance globally. Domestic reforms have repeatedly been bought with external domination. That is not moral condemnation; it is historical accounting.

Once you grasp this, you see the function of Jacobin’s line more clearly. If colonial extraction is treated as historically brutal but structurally secondary, then socialism can be imagined as a purely internal redistribution project within the imperial core: organize workers, tax the rich, expand the welfare state, and treat the global system as a humanitarian concern rather than a constitutive economic relationship. That is not an accident. It is the class-national utility of this framework. It produces a politics that can be radical inside the metropole while remaining vague, cautious, or evasive about the imperial mechanisms that make the metropole what it is.

Weaponized Information insists on a stricter materialism. Capitalism reproduces itself through a world hierarchy of labor and value capture. The “domestic” class terrain in the core cannot be separated from the international structure of exploitation and dependency. If you sever that connection, you do not get a cleaner Marxism. You get a Marxism that cannot explain why the periphery remains systematically constrained, why coercion repeatedly concentrates there, and why the core retains structural advantage even as it preaches free markets. In the next section, we will bring this to the ground level: how state power, borders, labor regimes, and counterinsurgency enforce this world system in practice, including inside the imperial core itself.

The State Is Not a Referee: Coercion, Borders, and the Enforcement of Capitalist Reality

To complete the demolition of Chibber’s paradigm, we have to confront what his framework systematically dissolves into abstraction: the state. Not the state as an umpire of markets or a neutral container of class relations, but the state as an active instrument that engineers, enforces, and reproduces capitalist domination across space. Chibber’s story treats the state as a facilitator of an already-given transition — enclosures here, markets there — while the world beyond England fades into a blur. But capitalism has never existed without organized coercion. It has never expanded without borders, police, prisons, armies, and law. And it has never survived crisis without counterinsurgency.

Historically, the capitalist state did not merely respond to market dependence; it manufactured it. Vagrancy laws, workhouses, debtors’ prisons, and the criminalization of subsistence were not side effects of market logic but deliberate mechanisms to discipline labor once access to land and commons had been destroyed. This coercive scaffolding did not disappear after the “transition.” It intensified. As capitalism globalized, state power followed, not as a benevolent escort but as an occupying force that reorganized entire societies to meet the requirements of accumulation.

Colonial states were not simply extractive administrations skimming profits off otherwise autonomous economies. They were total social engineers. They rewrote land tenure systems, imposed cash taxes to force market participation, reorganized agriculture around export monoculture, suppressed indigenous industries, and violently crushed resistance when populations refused to comply. The point was not only to extract surplus, but to break alternative forms of social reproduction that threatened capitalist discipline. This is not “external” to capitalism’s logic. It is capitalism’s logic operating at the scale of empire.

Borders emerge here as central, not peripheral. Capitalism does not abolish borders; it weaponizes them. Borders regulate the movement of labor while allowing capital to roam freely. They create differential legal statuses, segmented labor markets, and pools of super-exploitable workers whose vulnerability is politically produced. Migration regimes are not humanitarian failures; they are labor-control technologies. They ensure that market dependence is enforced unevenly, that desperation is managed, and that competition among workers is structured in capital’s favor. Any account of capitalism that treats borders as afterthoughts has already abandoned materialism.

Inside the imperial core, these mechanisms do not vanish. They are redeployed. As colonial rule abroad gave way to formal independence, the techniques of control migrated homeward. Policing, surveillance, prisons, and counterinsurgency doctrines refined in the colonies were repatriated to manage surplus populations, racialized communities, and rebellious workers. This is not metaphor. It is documented history. The same state that enforces market dependence globally enforces it domestically, particularly against those whose existence exposes the lie of universal citizenship and free labor.

Chibber’s framework cannot account for this without breaking apart. If capitalism is defined primarily as a market imperative arising from class structure, then the constant resort to coercion appears anomalous, excessive, or ideological. But coercion is not a deviation from capitalism; it is one of its conditions of existence. Markets do not rule society because people consent to them. They rule because alternatives are systematically destroyed and punished. The state is the instrument that ensures this destruction remains orderly, legal, and permanent.

This is why anti-colonial Marxists have always insisted on linking political economy to state power. Lenin did not theorize imperialism as a moral outrage but as a state-mediated system of monopoly, finance, and territorial control. Nkrumah understood that without control over the state and economy, political independence was hollow. Black revolutionaries in the United States recognized that the police functioned as an occupying force in internal colonies, enforcing labor discipline and racial hierarchy. These were not deviations from Marxism; they were its extension into the real conditions of capitalist rule.

The false paradigm we are dismantling relies on a sanitized vision of capitalism that can be narrated without prisons, without borders, without counterinsurgency, and without empire. It imagines markets expanding through rational adaptation rather than through broken bodies and shattered communities. It allows Western Marxism to critique exploitation while remaining agnostic about the machinery that makes exploitation durable. In doing so, it produces a politics that is structurally incapable of confronting the modern capitalist state, whether in its colonial, neo-colonial, or domestic forms.

Weaponized Information rejects this abstraction. Capitalism is not an economic structure that occasionally requires force; it is a coercive social order that uses markets as one of its organizing principles. The state is not an accessory to this order; it is its backbone. Any theory that cannot integrate this reality — that cannot explain how borders, police, armies, and counterinsurgency sustain accumulation — is not incomplete. It is misleading. And any socialism built on that theory will find itself disarmed precisely where capital is most ruthless.

In the final section, we will draw the political conclusion that Jacobin avoids: what this theoretical evasion means for strategy, organization, and the possibility of a socialism that does not merely redistribute within empire, but breaks with it.

Breaking with the Alibi: Why Socialism Without Anti-Imperialism Is Not Socialism

We can now state the conclusion plainly, without hedging or academic theater. The paradigm advanced by Chibber and laundered through Jacobin is not merely incomplete; it is politically disabling. By isolating capitalism’s origins within a narrow English agrarian transition, by treating colonialism as morally reprehensible but structurally secondary, and by recoding anti-colonial Marxism as “race reductionism,” this framework performs a precise ideological function: it makes socialism safe for the settler world.

This is not an accidental failure of emphasis. It is a line. A line that allows Western Marxism to critique exploitation while remaining evasive about empire. A line that allows class analysis to proceed while bracketing land theft, borders, and colonial state violence as unfortunate background conditions rather than constitutive relations. A line that permits calls for redistribution inside the metropole without confronting the global structures that make metropolitan redistribution historically possible.

The concrete historical record points elsewhere. Capitalism did not emerge as a self-contained national system that later encountered the world. It emerged through enclosure and conquest, through the violent restructuring of social reproduction at home and abroad, through slavery, settler colonialism, and imperial state power. It consolidated itself by organizing a world hierarchy of labor and value capture, and it continues to reproduce itself through borders, coercion, and counterinsurgency. To deny this is not to defend Marxism; it is to hollow it out.

The real dividing line exposed in this debate is not between “economic” and “cultural” explanations, nor between “class” and “race.” It is between two political projects. One seeks a socialism that can be achieved within the existing imperial order, by managing capitalism’s excesses and redistributing its proceeds among citizens of the core. The other recognizes that capitalism is inseparable from empire, and that socialism worthy of the name requires a rupture with the colonial property relations, state structures, and global hierarchies that sustain accumulation.

Anti-colonial Marxism insists on this rupture because it begins from lived conditions, not academic convenience. It begins from the standpoint of peoples whose land was stolen, whose labor was coerced, whose development was systematically blocked, and whose resistance was met with overwhelming state violence. It understands that class struggle does not unfold on a flat terrain, but within a world system structured by conquest and domination. And it understands that solidarity cannot be proclaimed abstractly; it must be built by confronting the material privileges and political illusions produced by empire.

What Jacobin offers instead is reconciliation without reckoning. A Marxism that speaks fluently about markets and class structure while treating imperialism as a moral tragedy rather than a living system. A socialism that can be discussed endlessly without ever naming the settler state, the border regime, or the global machinery of labor control. This is why the colonial question must be dismissed as “trendy,” “confused,” or “reactionary.” It threatens to turn critique into confrontation.

Weaponized Information takes the opposite position. The task is not to make Marxism respectable in the eyes of the metropole, but to make it adequate to the world capitalism has actually produced. That requires centering colonialism, not as an add-on, but as a structuring relation. It requires integrating political economy with state power, borders, and coercion. And it requires rejecting any socialism that cannot explain — and therefore cannot challenge — the imperial foundations of capitalist modernity.

The false paradigm has now been fully exposed. What remains is not an academic disagreement, but a strategic choice. Either socialism breaks with empire, or it becomes another ideology for managing it. There is no neutral ground between those positions. History has already rendered its verdict.