This essay began as an attempt to make sense of a recurring argument within left political economy: how capitalism should be explained once its global expansion no longer resembles the European experience that originally gave rise to its theories. The immediate trigger was a recent controversy around an interview with Vivek Chibber in Jacobin. But this piece is not about that exchange, nor is it written for participants in online ideological disputes. The argument Chibber re-entered is far older and far broader. It runs through a century of debates in Marxist political economy about colonialism, labour, the state, and uneven development—debates that emerged not from abstract theory, but from attempts to explain societies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America where capitalism took durable forms that standard European models could not easily account for.