ABSTRACT
Does capital remain a central category in the debate of social science after the crisis of the legitimacy of western understanding of the world and its unilateral inability to come to terms with (contemporary global and) colonial pasts? The question is pertinently raised from an epistemological point of view by the Italian scholar Gennaro Ascione in recent times while arguing on the colonial formation of capital. He argues that the huge resource appropriation, land grabbing, plantation economy, industrial and exchange relations along with slavery (and indentured labour) systems vastly endured the functioning of colonial capitalism (Ascione, 2017). Such colonisation seeks to reveal the dominance of certain representations that shaped indelibly the ways in which reality was imagined and acted upon to produce differences and subjectivities (Escobar, 1995). Capital through investment and formation was indisputably the aggressive and linear logic of colonial capitalism and was entrenched through a scientific knowledge system and the well-framed political economy of production and trade relations. The post-colonial capital formation however was made through state instrument of planning model on domestic economic modernisation and heavy industrialisation programmes. State capitalism proliferated within the notion of nationalism, and was based on extractive forces within a territorial boundary to produce ‘internal colonialism’ (Misra, 1980). In the neoliberal economy, the logic and purpose of capital further has unleashed through a transnational economic order with the dominance of corporate capitalism, financialisation, contractual labour systems, multilateralism, open trade and logistical network that negotiate through geopolitical and technological apparatus. Thus, the world of capital is manifested as force multiplier and self-perpetuating, and its logic overrides social science understanding and debates from the colonial to the post-colonial and contemporary times through its rapacious persistence, power, space and functionality.
