In April 2013, at the annual Historical Materialism conference held in New York, Vivek Chibber appeared alongside Partha Chatterjee in a much-anticipated critical debate on the legacy of postcolonial studies and Marxism. At the time this appeared as the critical peak of the fierce critical discussions that Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital ignited. Yet, with Vivek Chibber’s response to Partha Chatterjee, which we publish below, the debate will certainly be rekindled. (a pdf version of the response is available on Vivek Chibber's webpage)
My intention in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (hereafter PTSC) was to assess the theoretical framework generated by the Subaltern Studies collective. To do so involved three distinct tasks – first, to distill from the key writings what the projects’ essential arguments were; since these arguments were in large measure a critique of Enlightenment and especially Marxist theories, it required, as a second task, to assess the validity of their critique on empirical and conceptual grounds; and lastly, I suggested that their own theoretical innovations were a failure, both as theory and as normative critique. To be sure, my verdict was not kind to the project. But I tried, in the book, to reconstruct the Subalternists’ arguments as clearly and generously as possible, and to base my own alternative formulations on logic and evidence, not by appeals to authority.
by Marc Perelman and Patrick Vassort
The places that are chosen to organise large sporting demonstrations make the mind boggle. In 2008 the Olympic Games were held in Beijing; in 2010, the football World Cup took place in South Africa, while this year’s Winter Olympics were held in Putin’s Russia (in Sochi) and the football World Cup will be staged in Brazil.
In 2016, the Olympics will take place in Rio, and the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in Russia and Qatar respectively. Despite the obviously different political régimes in each of these countries, all of them have to bear the brunt of an ‘Olympicisation’ (as Baron de Coubertin put it) of the world, within the wider framework of a generalised ‘sportification’, which always means a sharp loss of democracy.
The judge went on to say that any injury experienced by the plaintifs was not a result of the spying itself, but rather from the leaking of the information about the spying by the Associated Press.
The motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but to find Muslim terrorists hiding among the ordinary law-abiding Muslims.