Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference

The pre­fix pre in “pre­ca­pi­tal,” it could be said simi­lar­ly, is not a refe­rence to what is sim­ply chro­no­lo­gi­cal­ly prior on an ordi­nal, homo­ge­neous scale of time. “Precapitalist” speaks of a par­ti­cu­lar rela­tion­ship to capi­tal mar­ked by the ten­sion of dif­fe­rence in the hori­zons of time. The “pre­ca­pi­ta­list,” on the basis of this argu­ment, can only be ima­gi­ned as some­thing that exists within the tem­po­ral hori­zon of capi­tal and that at the same time dis­rupts the conti­nui­ty of this time by sug­ges­ting ano­ther time that is not on the same, secu­lar, homo­ge­neous calen­dar (which is why what is pre­ca­pi­tal is not chro­no­lo­gi­cal­ly prior to capi­tal, that is to say, one can­not assi­gn it to a point on the same conti­nuous time line). This is ano­ther time that, theo­re­ti­cal­ly, could be enti­re­ly immea­su­rable in terms of the units of the godless, spi­rit­less time of what we call “his­to­ry,” an idea alrea­dy assu­med in the secu­lar concepts of “capi­tal” and “abs­tract labor.”