Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies

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Bringing capital back in: a materialist turn in

postcolonial studies?

Sandro Mezzadra

To cite this article: Sandro Mezzadra (2011) Bringing capital back in: a materialist
turn in postcolonial studies?, Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies, 12:1, 154-164, DOI:
10.1080/14649373.2011.532987

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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 12, Number 1, 2011
Bringing capital back in: a materialist turn in postcolonial studies?
Sandro MEZZADRA
Participating as a plenary speaker at the 8th
sandro.mezzadra@unibo.it
Inter-Asia
10.1080/14649373.2011.532987
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1464-9373
Original
Taylor
102011
12
SandroMezzadra
00000March
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Francis
Cultural
(print)/1469-8447
Francis
2011Studies (online)
Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference
has been for me a privilege and an exciting
experience. I do not come from the field of
cultural studies, but rather from political
theory and philosophy. Nevertheless in the
last decade I have become more and more
engaged in discussions with scholars work-
ing in cultural and postcolonial studies, and
I can say that these trans-disciplinary fields
have become part of my anxious locations
both as a scholar and as an activist. This is
the reason why I felt particularly honored in
having the chance to address the plenary
session of the ACS Crossroads Conference.
Being in Hong Kong was a further reason of
intellectual excitement for me, since conver-
sations with ‘Asian’ scholars – above all,
Indian and Chinese – have been key to my
engagement with cultural and postcolonial
studies, and particularly to my attempt to
reframe the temporal and spatial coordi-
nates of ‘modernity’. I will return to this
point later.
‘Bringing Capital Back In’ is the title I
have chosen for my article. The reference
to a quite famous and successful book
edited by Peter B. Evans, Dietrich
Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol in
1985 is justified in my eyes by some
formal similarities between their research
project and the one I would like to outline
here. As Theda Skocpol wrote in her
introduction to that book (Bringing the
State Back In), ‘society-centered theories’
in comparative social sciences and history
were giving way in the early 1980s to a
‘new interest for the state’ (Evans et al. 1985:
4f). The ‘new theoretical understanding of
states in relation to social structures’ she
and her co-editors were looking for could
ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/11/010154–11 © 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2011.532987
not nevertheless emerge from a step back
with regard to ‘society-centered theories’
(Evans et al. 1985: 4f). It was, rather, imag-
ined as the result of a step forward capable
of further developing the most important
achievements of the latter and integrating
them in a new theoretical paradigm as well
as in new empirically grounded research
programs. Similarly, I contend that in
recent years, and even more so under the
pressure of the current global economic
crisis, several books, essays, research
projects and conferences have witnessed
the emergence of a new interest in capital
and capitalism (two concepts that should of
course be distinguished in a far more
precise way than I will be able to do in this
short text) within cultural and in particular
within postcolonial studies. The names of
Robert Young, Kalyan Sanyal, Couze Venn,
Ranabir Samaddar, Stefano Harney and
Miguel Mellino will suffice here to give you
an idea of the very diverse epistemic and
also political community within which
theoretical work on ‘postcolonial capital-
ism’ is currently being done. While I also
participate in this ongoing conversation, I
would like to try here to sketch some of
the reasons why it makes sense to speak
of a postcolonial capitalism, to mention
some of the basic problems and difficul-
ties this concept involves, and to outline a
very broad research project within which
the main achievements of cultural and
postcolonial studies so far can be main-
tained and further developed.
Echoing the terms employed by Theda
Skocpol, we can consider hegemonic theo-
retical paradigms not only in cultural stud-
ies but also in postcolonial studies as
‘culture-centered theories’. Looking back

with a kind of genealogical gaze at the
origins of cultural studies in the UK, it is
easy to understand how important and
productive the emphasis on ‘culture’ was. It
was this emphasis that allowed such hetero-
geneous scholars like Raymond Williams,
Stuart Hall and Edward P. Thompson to
break with the objectivism and economicism
that shaped Marxist orthodoxy in the 1950s
and in the early 1960s, opening up new
‘continents’ for theory and research and
making it possible to radically displace and
innovate the very concept of capitalism. A
new understanding of culture was the flip-
side of a new understanding of the political
(Hall 2010: 186f), and both allowed the
discovery of the rich fabric of struggles,
resistances, negotiations and tensions that
make up history and structure of capitalism.
These new theoretical developments and
achievements challenged and eventually
blew up the rigidity and ‘objectivity’ of the
orthodox Marxist theory of capital and capi-
talism. As Stuart Hall said several years
later in an interview with Kuan-Hsing
Chen, ‘it was the spirit of 1968, avant la lettre’
(Hall 1996: 495). And the development of
cultural studies was in this sense actually
anticipating the ‘cultural revolution’ that
developed in the West after 1968, echoing
and interpreting – as both Rey Chow (1993)
and more recently Andrew Ross (2009),
although from different perspectives, have
written – the Chinese ‘cultural revolution’.
At stake in these developments was a new
understanding of subjectivity, of its place
within capitalism and of modern structures
of power, as well as of the possibilities of its
transformations. The search for the ‘new
man’ was not only key to Maoist rhetoric
during the ‘cultural revolution’, but also to
the theoretical work of Antonio Gramsci,
which became so important for the develop-
ment of cultural studies in the UK and later
on elsewhere.
My point is nevertheless that, in the
following decades, the concern with
‘culture’ has been progressively disentan-
gled from any concern with the material
transformations of capitalism, while ‘iden-
tity’ has progressively substituted ‘subjec-
Bringing capital back in 155
tivity’ as the main theoretical and political
stake in the development of cultural stud-
ies, with a theoretical shift that has led to
further foreclose the space for a critical
investigation of capitalism. One of the
conceptual consequences of this move has
been a focus on power rather than on
exploitation, as Stuart Hall wrote in 1992.
But more generally it has lead many
scholars engaged in cultural and postcolo-
nial studies (I cannot discuss here of
course the relations between these rela-
tively diverse and internally heteroge-
neous projects and developments) to take
capitalism for granted, to assume it as the
neutral background of their research. While
1968 was a crucial year for the politiciza-
tion of the concept of capitalism, 1989 can
be taken as the symbolic date of the
beginning of its neutralization. Paradoxi-
cally enough, this has produced a kind of
reinforcement of the ‘economicism’ that
was so effectively criticized at the origin of
‘cultural studies’. What I mean is that, by
renouncing a direct theoretical engage-
ment with capitalism, many scholars
working in the fields of cultural and post-
colonial studies have in a way uncon-
sciously validated the ‘objectivity’ of its
‘structural’ developments and laws, while
many of their critics limited themselves to
oppose precisely this objectivity to the
‘culturalism’ prevailing in their work.
Capitalism – whose contradictory and
dynamic nature was emphasized not only
by Marx, but also by sociologists and
economists such as Weber, Keynes and
Schumpeter – has been therefore trans-
formed in a kind of unchanging moloch.
Needless to say, the development
sketched above is oversimplified. Several
scholars engaged in cultural and postcolo-
nial studies have offered brilliant criticisms
of contemporary capitalism, trying to
investigate what Jean and John Comaroff
called at the dawn of the new century the
‘experiential contradictions at the core of
neoliberal capitalism, of capitalism in its
millennial manifestation’ (Comaroff and
Comaroff 2000: 298). Since she has also
participated in the Crossroads Conference in
156 Sandro Mezzadra
Hong Kong, let me also remember the book
published in 1996 by Katherine Gibson with
her alter ego Julie Graham, The End of Capital-
ism (As We Knew It) (Gibson-Graham
2006[1996]). Independently of the fact that I
do not totally agree with their concept of
capitalism, the very fact that they effectively
challenged the myth of capitalism’s almighty
presence so widespread in the 1990s was
both inspiring and reinvigorating for every-
body interested in a critical investigation of
capitalism. I should also recall Larry Gross-
berg’s (2010a, 2010b) rigorous engagement in
the project of a cultural studies of economy,
within a critical conversation with the emerg-
ing field of ‘cultural economy’, as well as the
challenging ethnographic work on finan-
cial markets done, for instance, by Caitlin
Zaloom (2006).
Nevertheless it seems to me that
these and many other powerful interven-
tions did not really produce a change in
the research agenda of cultural and post-
colonial studies, and in particular that
they were not successful in displacing the
opposition between ‘culturalism’ and
‘economicism’ that continues to frame
discussion and research in many fields. I
will limit myself here to one example, that
is to the field of critical migration studies,
in which I am directly involved.1 As, for
instance, John Chalcraft (2007) has
recently shown in an essay on Syrian labor
migrants in Lebanon, critical debates on
migration continue to be dominated by
the polarity between an economic consid-
eration of migration under the headline of
‘exploitation’ and a more positive view,
mainly proposed by cultural studies theo-
rists, which highlights the destabilizing
effect of migrant agency and hybridity on
‘foundationalist metanarratives’ and
‘simple binaries of Self and Other’. This
often leads on the one hand to ‘culturalist’
analysis that seems unaware of the
general economic framework within which
migration takes place (and within which
cultural dynamics themselves are increas-
ingly a strategic stake). On the other hand
it leads to an ‘economicistic’ view of
exploitation, in which social and cultural
processes of subjectivation do not play
any role. I am convinced that a way out of
this deadlock can only be found through a
different understanding of capital and
capitalism – as well as of the very concept
of exploitation.
‘Bringing capital back in’, in my mind,
does not simply mean to make the case
for a more direct engagement with ‘the
economic’ in cultural and postcolonial
studies: I rather consider capital and capi-
talism, to use the terms proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari (1987), as an ‘axiom-
atic’, as the abstract matrix that articu-
lates (and constantly reshuffles) the
relations between economy and culture
(and politics, and law, etc.). The domi-
nance of this axiomatic produces indeed
an ‘isomorphy’ that has to be investigated
both intensively (that means, within each
‘social formation’) and ‘extensively’ (that
means on the world scale of modern capi-
talism). But, as Deleuze and Guattari
remind us, ‘it would be wrong to confuse
isomorphy with homogeneity’: it rather
allows, ‘even incites’, a great deal of social,
temporal, and spatial heterogeneity (1987:
436). This is for me a very important point,
to which I shall soon return.
The privileging of power rather than
exploitation in cultural studies corre-
sponded to the privileging of modernity
rather than capitalism in postcolonial
studies. While the deconstruction of
(Eurocentric) master narratives on moder-
nity has been at the core of several and
diverse theoretical projects in the last
three decades, the contribution of postco-
lonial studies in challenging what I termed
at the beginning of my article the spatial
and temporal coordinates of such master
narratives has been outstanding. The
multiplication of modernities, the discov-
ery of alternative paths and experiences of
modernization are usually considered to
be characteristic results of the develop-
ment of postcolonial studies. I share the
importance of these points, and I am
interested here in deepening the meaning
of these multiple modernities, of the very
transposition of the singular ‘modernity’

into the plural ‘modernities’. Pluralizing
modernity helps us, first of all, to under-
stand modernity itself not so much – in
Habermasian terms – as an ‘unfinished
project’, but rather as a contested field, criss-
crossed by a multiplicity of struggles in
which the definition of modernity itself is
at stake. Secondly, to quote Sibylle
Fischer’s important book on Haiti and the
cultures of slavery in the age of revolution,
it reminds us that ‘heterogeneity is a
congenital condition of modernity, and
that the alleged purity of European
modernity is an a posteriori theorization or
perhaps even part of a strategy to estab-
lish European primacy’ (Fischer 2004: 22).
At the same time, I agree with Wang
Hui that an effective critique of Eurocen-
trism as ‘a kind of universalistic monism’
should be rather different from a simple
pluralistic view of civilization (that I find
reflected in some postcolonial theories of
‘alternative modernities’). This pluralistic
view of civilization, Wang Hui writes in his
last book in English, ‘also runs the risk of
falling into the trap of essentialism as well,
one that sees civilizations – and especially
modern civilizations – as systems isolated
from one another, each with their own
unique essence’ (Wang 2009a: 83). While
we must be able to recognize and analyze
the fragmentary, contested and heteroge-
neous nature of modernity, we must also
recognize its common characteristics,
which have been interpreted and elabo-
rated in very diverse ways in the different
cultural, historical and geographical land-
scapes in which the encounter with moder-
nity took place – and due to the results of
the multiple clashes in which this encoun-
ter resulted. From this point of view, I tend
to agree with Kuan-Hsing Chen when he
writes that the very concept of multiple
modernities is in itself ‘redundant’, since
the heterogeneity of modernity is implicit
in the necessity for ‘modernizing forces’ to
‘negotiate and mix with local history and
culture’ (Chen 2010: 244). At the same
time, I want to emphasize that this process
of negotiation and mixing (which is also,
as Chen rightly contends, a process of
Bringing capital back in 157
translation), although it gives rise to contin-
gent constellations, is far from being itself
totally contingent. What I mean, to use
again the term proposed by Deleuze and
Guattari, is that there is an ‘axiomatic’
inherent to modernity, and that this
axiomatic permeates the encounters, the
processes of negotiation, mixing and
translation through which ‘modernizing
forces’ operate.2 And, once again, the
notion of an axiomatic accounts for the
common characteristics of modernity
while at the same time highlighting its
structural heterogeneity.
What Giovanni Arrighi calls ‘the
extroversion of European power struggle’
(2007: 320), the global scope that character-
ized European expansion since its incep-
tion, is indeed at the origin of modernity,
as well as the distinct nature of European
colonialism – that means, to quote again
Wang Hui, a colonialism aiming at ‘a
dramatic transformation of the social
structures of colonized lands and at the
imposition of the colonizing countries’
modernizing economic system, which
creates, on a world scale and according to
unjust principles, the international division
of labor’ (Wang 2009b[2004]: 58f). But at the
origin of modernity we also find modern
capitalism, whose space is again global from
the start: as Marx stated in the Grundrisse,
‘the tendency to create the world market is
immediately given with the concept of capi-
tal. Every limit (Grenze) appears as an obsta-
cle to be overcome.’ The traces of the first
two historical elements continue to shape
our postcolonial present, although in shift-
ing geopolitical constellations, making up
the importance of the project of ‘deimperial-
ization’. The global dominance of modern
capitalism seems nevertheless more and
more disentangled from any world order
centered upon the primacy of Europe or
the ‘West’, emerging as the real invari-
able in the axiomatic of modernity. For
me, there is much to learn from Chen’s
alternative discursive strategy to tackle
the issue of the West’s cultural influence
in East Asia, positing it as ‘bits and frag-
ments that intervene in local social forma-
158 Sandro Mezzadra
tions in a systematic, but never totalizing
way’ (2010: 223). When he further adds that
in these social formations the West figures
‘as one cultural reason among many others’
(Chen 2010: 223), my question would be
whether many of the ‘bits and fragments’
that appear as western are not part and
parcel of what I called the axiomatic of
modernity and whether it is not necessary
to distinguish this function from the very
fact of their appearing ‘western’.
While I emphatically contend that
there is no modernity without capitalism,
and that capitalism accounts for the
common characteristics of ‘modernities’, I
do not want to reduce modernity to capital-
ism. The multiple and heterogeneous
processes of transition (and translation)
that make up the transition to capitalism
rather define the ground on which multi-
ple and heterogeneous lines of fracture
and conflict, clashes, hierarchies and
negotiations fabricate the texture of
modernity, opening up a critical space
that is constitutive of it – a space in which
‘traditional’, ‘pre-modern’ and even ‘anti-
modern’ elements can acquire new mean-
ings in the contestation or negotiation of
modernity itself. I would need much more
time to develop, at least a bit, this image
of modernity. Let me just add some words
– although necessarily schematic – on the
way in which I use the term ‘heterogene-
ity’, which I picked up here first from
Deleuze and Guattari and then from Siby-
lle Fischer. Combining such diverse
sources as Karl Marx’s German Ideology,
the conceptual history approach of Rein-
hart Koselleck (2004), and the work of
Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), I tend to look
especially at modern political concepts as
‘real abstractions’, which means abstrac-
tions that produce concrete effects in the
life of concrete men and women living in a
world increasingly dominated by abstract
powers such as money and the commodity
form – but also the state and sovereignty.
If you take a concept such as the modern
European notion of citizenship in its claim
to be valid beyond and against all ‘particu-
lar’ belongings and loyalties, you can
easily see that, to use a term introduced
by Louis Althusser (2006), a specific form
of interpellation is constitutive of it – and
that the modern concept of citizenship (let
me add: as all modern political concepts)
has a constitutive outside, the heterogeneity
of the ‘forms of life’, of the ‘habitations of
the world’, that define its addressees. This
is what I have in mind when I talk about
the strategic role of ‘encounters’ and
‘heterogeneity’ in the fabric of modernity.
Further elaborating on this idea of the
constitutive outside of modern political
concepts, and paraphrasing Chakrabarty,
we can distinguish ‘two histories of moder-
nity’. ‘History 1’ would be the history
constructed as the mere development of
the logics inherent in those concepts (e.g.
the history of modern citizenship as the
mere projection of its intrinsic logics of
abstraction), while ‘history 2’ would be the
history of the multiple encounters and
clashes between those logics and the
heterogeneous forms of life, ‘habitations
of the world’, it interpellates – and seeks to
‘subsume’ – in its development. It would
nevertheless be wrong to think of ‘history
1’ as merely abstract and ‘history 2’ as
merely concrete, since what matters is
precisely the encounter between the two
and the clashes, negotiations and hybrid
constellations to which the encounter
gives rise. Needless to say, this means
that an effective critique of modernity
cannot take the shape of a simple opposi-
tion between concrete and abstract.
As you all know, the chapter I have been
paraphrasing in Chakrabarty’s Provincializ-
ing Europe (2000) does not bear the title ‘Two
Histories of Modernity’, but rather ‘Two
Histories of Capital’. In my opinion,
however, that chapter offers a brilliant
theoretical framework for understanding
the relation between modernity and capital
precisely because it shows that the logic
inhabiting modern capital (what I tried to
grasp through the concept of encounter) is
the blueprint for the logic of modernity as
such. When Marx defined capital not as a
‘thing’ but as a ‘social relation’ oriented
toward the private (or even public, we may

add) appropriation of surplus produced by
social labor, he had, according to me, this
idea of a ‘constitutive outside’ in mind: and
it is not by accident that the concept of
‘encounter’ plays such an important role in
his thought, as the late Althusser (2006) has
particularly emphasized. As we know from
many distinguished scholars (from
Fernand Braudel to Giovanni Arrighi),
market economy and commodification
alone do not make up capitalism. A defini-
tion of modern capitalism as a specific and
unique mode of production and social
formation should rather combine the idea
of capital as a ‘social relation’ with the
tendency to ‘endless accumulation of capi-
tal’ as a totalizing norm of social and political
organization – both from an intensive and
from an extensive point of view, that means
both with regard to social time and to space.
Not just the market – even capital and capi-
talism have existed in many different histor-
ical and ‘cultural’ contexts. As Max Weber
discussed ancient agrarian capitalism in
Rome, we can surely find capitalist
elements and structures in China in the
Song age (960–1279), following the Kyoto
school of the 1930s. But what matters to me
is to stress the specificity of modern capital-
ism, as it results from the combination in a
new axiomatic of the two characteristics I
mentioned above.
Let me briefly elaborate on the
proposed definition of capitalism. First of
all it may seem paradoxical. While the
first element of the definition (capital as
‘social relation’) points to a ‘constitutive
outside’ (we could define it with Marx:
‘labor as not capital’), the second element
(‘endless accumulation of capital’) has
been presented as a ‘totalizing’ norm. I
think that it is worth maintaining this para-
dox, since it lies at the core of modern
capitalism and it makes up its contradic-
tory and dynamic nature. Capital must
totalize itself (that means, it must organize
the whole fabric of society, politics,
culture, etc. according to its norms, to the
imperative of its ‘endless accumulation’
and valorization), and at the same time
this attempt to totalize itself cannot but be
Bringing capital back in 159
partial, since the existence of a ‘constitu-
tive outside’ is a necessary condition for its
valorization.3 And if defining this outside
in terms of ‘labor’ may seem outdated to
some, just think of the role of US
subprime mortgages in the current finan-
cial crisis: it was precisely the compulsion
to ‘include’ in the financial markets
‘excluded’ subjects such as the working
poor, single black mothers and new immi-
grants that lead to the financial crash in
2008! One could even contend, with
Christian Marazzi (2010), that one of the
most distinctive features of contemporary
global capitalism lies precisely in the key
role played by financial capital in the
continuous opening up of ‘outsides’ (in
the continuous setting of limits, in
Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) that finan-
cial capital itself ‘captures’ and translates
in the language of value.
Secondly, the paradoxical nature of
capitalism is mirrored by the paradoxical
nature of capital’s ‘constitutive outside’.
The ‘outside’ is always already constructed
by capital as its ‘inside’, as subsumed by
it; it is always already exposed to its ‘take’.
It is constructed by capital, to quote the
title of a book by Peter Handke (1969), as
‘die Innenwelt der Aussenwelt der Innen-
welt’ (the interior of the exterior of the
interior). More than opening up spaces of
alternative social, economic and cultural
organization within modern capitalism,
the relevance of the ‘constitutive outside’
points therefore to the continuity of antag-
onism along its whole history. And at the
same time, the social intensity and the
political crystallization of the clashes that
criss-cross capital’s encounters with its
constitutive outsides account for the
continuous transformations of capitalism,
which is compelled to change its shape
under the pressure of struggles and
conflicts that signal the impossibility of
capital’s totalizing drive.
It is time to move toward the conclu-
sion. Let’s ask ourselves: what is at stake in
the multiple encounters between capital
and its ‘constitutive outside’? My answer to
this question is pretty easy, and it allows
160 Sandro Mezzadra
me to pick up again the topic of ‘cultural-
ism’ and ‘economicism’: at stake in these
encounters is the production of subjectivity. In
his own language, Marx posited the
production of subjectivity (‘production of
capitalists and of waged workers’) as the
fundamental stake in the scene of the ‘so-
called primitive accumulation’. Reading
Marx against the grain and going well
beyond him, I would propose to take the
whole set of problems and contradictions
that define the so-called primitive accu-
mulation as characteristic of the entire
history of modern capitalism – and partic-
ularly of its present, global shape, where
old and new commons are once again the
fundamental stake in the development of
capitalism and social struggles are increas-
ingly confronted with old and new enclo-
sures.4 And I would further propose to pick
up two fundamental concepts of the
critique of political economy – money and
labor power – disentangling them from a
long history of ‘economistic’ reading.
What we need to do is to bring these
concepts back to their original ‘political-
anthropological’ meaning, which means to
their deep implication within the theoreti-
cal scene that I tried to evoke with the
term ‘production of subjectivity’. Money
and labor power denote for Marx the two
fundamental modalities – let me say it
using Marx’s own terms: power and potency
– of subjectivation resulting from capital’s
encounters with its multiple constitutive
outsides. The ‘bearer’ (Träger) of money
has his or her ‘social power’ in his or her
own pocket, Marx writes, and his or
her relationship with the world (his or her
‘habitation of the world’) is going to be
mediated by this social power. The
‘bearer’ of labor power is on the contrary
compelled to depend on human potency,
as Marx defines labor power itself: ‘the
sum of all physical and intellectual atti-
tudes contained by a living body’ (Marx
1988[1867]: 181). Needless to say, his or her
relationship with the world (his or her
‘habitation of the world’) is going to be
mediated by this potency and by the
compulsion to commoditize it.
Once defined in these terms, money
and particularly labor power (life as such,
in its potential shape) are concepts that
could open up space for a critical investi-
gation of contemporary capitalism beyond
the opposition between an ‘economistic’
and a ‘culturalist’ approach, considering
the inscription of life within the concept of
capital and the related production of
subjectivity is its fundamental stake. We
should further note that, in the history of
Marxism, the concept of labor power has
been closely associated with such
concepts as ‘abstract labor’ and ‘produc-
tive labor’ – leading to a homogeneous
image of the working class as social and
political subject. It has been first of all the
history of struggles and of such important
political and theoretical developments as
feminism and anti-racism that blew this
image up. We know very well that, for
instance in the history of the United
States, as Lisa Lowe writes in her Immigrant
Acts, ‘capital has maximized its profits not
by rendering labor “abstract” but
precisely through the social production of
“difference” … marked by race, nation,
geographical origin, and gender’ (1996:
28f). While I propose to take the concept
of labor power as a critical tool for the
analysis of the production of subjectivity
under capitalism, I do not forget this
crucial point (that means, once again, that
I do not take the concepts of money and
labor power to be at the origin of funda-
mentally homogeneous processes of
subject formation). I rather stress that the
modalities through which ‘bearers’ of
labor power access their ‘potency’ is struc-
turally and originally (that means, not
secondarily!) ‘marked by race, nation,
geographical origin, and gender’. Hetero-
geneity is therefore not only constitutive of
production of subjectivity under capital-
ism; it should also shape the language of
any project of liberation and critique of
capitalism.
At the same time, the way in which I
propose to use the concept of ‘labor
power’ implies a further critical stance
with regard to Marx, Marxism (and, one

should add, liberalism). What we should
abandon once and for all is the idea that
modern capitalism is defined by some-
thing like a ‘normal labor relation’ – that
means ‘free’ wage labor. Postcolonial
studies, ‘global labor history’ and critical
labor studies have taught us that a multi-
plicity of forms of ‘dependent’ labor (that
means, of modalities of exploitation of
subjects produced as ‘bearers’ of labor
power), ranging from slavery to informal
labor, from wage labor to formally inde-
pendent labor is rather characteristic both
of historical and of contemporary capital-
ism.5 Needless to say, acknowledging this
has enormous consequences, which go
well beyond the fields of labor history and
studies – challenging for instance the
traditional understanding of citizenship
and development, just to mention two
rather important political concepts whose
elaboration has been closely tied with the
notion of ‘free’ wage labor. The radical
heterogeneity of labor relations that I
have previously mentioned was long
considered as a characteristic of the colo-
nial and postcolonial world, a sign of
‘backwardness’ to be overcome by devel-
opment. In the last three decades, the
crisis of ‘Fordism’ has led to the re-
emergence of this heterogeneity also in
the former ‘metropolitan’ territories,
where it is often discussed under such
labels as ‘precarity’ and ‘flexiblization of
labor’. If one looks at so-called emerging
powers, from China to India, from Brazil
to South Africa, one will find again this
deep heterogeneity of labor relations and
conditions as a hallmark of contemporary
global capitalism. It is under these condi-
tions that speaking of ‘postcolonial capi-
talism’ as a result of the globalization of
what Ranabir Samaddar (2008) would call
the ‘postcolonial predicament’ makes
sense to me.
How can we develop a methodology
capable of grasping this hallmark (and
more generally the common characteris-
tics of global capitalism) while at the
same time allowing us to remain sensitive
to the specificity of local contexts and
Bringing capital back in 161
differences that has been so important for
the development of cultural studies? This
is a question I asked myself listening to
Pun Ngai’s (2010) talk at the Crossroads
Conference in Hong Kong, and particularly
reflecting upon her impressive descrip-
tion of the ‘dormitory labor system
regime’ in contemporary China. There is
of course a lot of comparative work to be
done here: as Pun (2009) herself writes in
a recent article, ‘the dormitory use for
labor has a long history both in a western
or eastern context of industrialization’.
Nevertheless I think that comparative
analysis, although important, is not
enough. There is something else to be
done, a strategy of knowledge production
that, as far as I am concerned, I learned
in an ongoing conversation with my
friends of the ‘colectivo situaciones’,6
based in Buenos Aires. I will call this, for
want of a better definition, letting
concepts and images ‘resonate’ in
contexts different from the ones where
they have been forged, without losing the
sense of their historical and geographical
specificity but remaining open to the
(often unforeseen) effects precisely
produced by their ‘resonating’ in different
situations. At stake in my discussions with
the ‘colectivo situaciones’ has been, for
instance, the possibility of making the
experiences of the Argentinean unem-
ployed movement politically productive in
the European discussion on ‘precarity’,
and vice versa. But from a more theoreti-
cal point of view, my idea of ‘resonating’
is surprisingly close to what Kuan-Hsing
Chen calls the method of ‘inter-referenc-
ing’ – and to what he has done in his
recent book reading Partha Chatterjee’s
analysis of ‘political society’ through the
lens of mínjian, and once again vice versa.
In the case of the dormitory regime
described by Pun, letting ‘resonate’ her
analysis in a western European context
leads me to situations that are pretty
different from her case studies – for
instance, to temporary dormitories arising
for migrant workers in Italy close to
construction sites or in rural zones in the
162 Sandro Mezzadra
time of harvest, or, even more pointedly,
considering the gender dimension of Pun’s
work, to the carceral modes of labor and
life discipline to which a multitude of care
and domestic migrant female workers are
subjected. This allows us to not forget the
absolute specificity (the ‘uniqueness’ in
Pun’s terms) of the Chinese dormitory
labor system regime, while at the same
time highlighting an element of ‘common-
ality’: facilitating at the same time ‘the
temporary attachment or capture of labor’
and its ‘massive circulation’, dormitories
are key devices in producing the mix of
mobility and immobility that is one of the
most important stakes in contemporary
labor regimes.
At the same time, research and theo-
retical results on the transformations of
labor and capitalism that have developed
in western Europe surely do not ‘explain’
the conditions of labor and the regime of
accumulation in China, as though they
were part of some universal theory.
Nevertheless, letting them ‘resonate’ in
the Chinese special economic zones can
help to better understand some hidden
characteristics of the dormitory regime.
What I have in mind is in particular the
fact that contemporary dormitory regimes
in China are contributing to create a
‘hybrid, transient workforce’ not only
‘circulating between factory and country-
side’ (the main reason why they are
‘unique’ for Pun) but also moving through
different labor regimes (from sweatshop to
factory, from formally independent labor
to the circuits of shan-zhai – and often back
to the sweatshop…) without ceasing to be
exploited. This is the reality that emerges,
for instance, from the book by Leslie
Chang, Factory Girls (2008), once it is read
against the grain, which means against
the apologetic intentions of its author.
Under these conditions the dormitory
labor regime seems to me to work in a
rather different way than in previous
historical processes of industrialization –
and it seems to be part of the new multi-
scalar assemblage between heteroge-
neous labor regimes that appears to be
one of the defining features of contempo-
rary global and postcolonial capitalism.
The contemporary and structurally
related existence of the ‘new economy’ and
sweatshops, ‘pre-Fordist’ factories and
cognitive labor, corporatization of capital
and accumulation in ‘primitive’ forms,
processes of financialization and forced
labor point to a deep heterogeneity of
subjective positions and experiences within
the composition of contemporary living
labor, at the global as well as national
levels. This means that a critical theory of
postcolonial capitalism, another name for
global capitalism, must handle with care
‘universal’ concepts when the urgent need
of a new foundation of the perspective of
liberation is also at stake. It must, to put it
with Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘acknowledge the
“political” need to think in terms of totali-
ties while all the time unsettling totalizing
thought by putting into play nontotalizing
categories’ (2000: 21f). This is particularly
important when we try to describe and
anticipate the dynamics of subject forma-
tion that contest capitalism, producing in a
localized and situated way the conditions of
its overcoming. Far from looking for old or
new universal subjects, we should rather
investigate the tense and conflict-ridden
processes of production of common condi-
tions that can make way for new ‘habita-
tions of the world’.
Acknowledgement
This paper was presented at the plenary
session of the 2010 ACS Crossroads
Conference, Hong Kong, Lingnan Univer-
sity, 17–21 June. While I maintain the form
and the style of the oral presentation, I try
to take the lively discussion that followed
into account in this revised version.
Notes
1. See, for instance, Mezzadra (2010a).
2. See also Mezzadra (2010b).
3. This is, by the way, the point grasped by
Deleuze and Guattari, when they write with a
slight difference from the Marxian quote cited

above, that capitalism ‘continually sets and then
repels its own limits’ (1987: 472).
4. Cf. also Mezzadra (2008).
5. See, for instance, Linden and Roth (2009).
6. www.situaciones.org
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Author’s biography
Sandro Mezzadra works as an Associate Professor of
Political Theory in the Department of Politics, Insti-
tutions and History at the University of Bologna.
He has been research fellow at the Humboldt
Universität, Berlin, in the Centre for Cultural
Research of the University of Western Sydney, at the
Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris,
and at Duke University. His research work has
focused on the classical modern European political
philosophy, as well as on the history of political,
social and legal sciences in Germany between the
19th and 20th centuries. In the last decade his work
has particularly centered on the relations between
globalization, migration and citizenship, as well as
on postcolonial theory and criticism.
Contact address: Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni,
Storia – Strada Maggiore 45–40125 Bologna, Italy.