On the Past of Capitalism: A Marxist Response to Vivek Chibber

This brief commentary discusses several errors in the thesis of Vivek Chibber about the past of capitalism. Chibber wrongly insists that capitalism endogenously sprung up in eighteenth-century England and northern Europe, turning his back to the last half-century of robust empirical and analytical contributions that decisively challenged the Eurocentric bias of classical Marxism. To argue that Europe was the navel of the world economy before and after A.D. 1492, is to ignore ongoing debates on the patterns and rhythm of world commodity production and trade shaping European agrarian change. The idea that capitalism was a 'European fairy tale' has long been discredited by towering figures in the fields of economic and monetary history. Written in response to a popular podcast hosted by Chibber on the subject, the commentary calls the attention to the dangers that 'Marxism on demand' pose to the making of rigorous Marxist history and theory on the past and present of capitalism.