Abstract
The concept of “the world-economy” has been a central conceptual constituent of the world-system/world-historical studies. Methodological debates within the world-historical studies have engaged in conceptually specifying and historically locating the world-economy by understanding and tracing the relationship between “the parts of the capitalist world-system” that are conceived as the objects of analysis at the national-local levels and “the whole” that is conceived as the world-historical unit of analysis. Dale Tomich’s contribution to these debates has produced a distinct methodological plane that questions and re-comprehends the relationship between theory and history. Tomich brings light a new conception of world-economy based in Marx’s theory of capital that both demonstrates the limits of Marx’s “historical theory” and enables the differentiated complexity of locally specific “theoretical histories” unfolding within the world-historical context of the formation and development of the world-economy as a historical process. Tomich’s perspective questions a conceptually and empirically singular history of capitalist development as a history prefigured by theory. Instead, it calls for exploring socially and materially multiple and diverse histories of commodities, (re)production and exchange as unified histories interlinked through the world-historical relation of capital, i.e. the world-economy., in ways that informs and reconstructs “the theory” as historical theory.
Introduction
The concept of the capitalist world-economy has become an integral element of the “world-system” or “world-historical” studies since its systematic formulations by Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins in 1970s. The main proposition of the world-system perspective was the development of the historical system of capitalism through the formation of a single capitalist world-economy from the 16th century onwards based in a single division of labor, but multiple polities/states and cultures (Hopkins, 2016; Wallerstein, 1974, 1979). From this perspective, it specified the (capitalist/modern) world-economy as a “temporally bounded” (having beginnings and end points) and “temporally patterned” (having distinct cycles of expansion and stagnation) historical social system integrated through a social division of labor. It conceived the history of capitalist development as a process of broadening and deepening of the world-economy, i.e. “the historical expansion of its geographical space” to the whole globe through processes of incorporation or elimination of the “external” spaces and “the historical extension of its social space” through reconstitution of “external” social relations, respectively (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 2016: 171-173, 179).
The world-system/world-historical perspective can be considered as a distinctive methodological and epistemological approach to the understanding of modern social change and capitalist development that conceptually and methodologically draws on yet is differentiated from both Marx and Weber’s theoretical treatment of capitalism and method of analysis (Tomich, 2016: 27-28; Hopkins, 2016). The major novelty brought by the world-historical perspective has been the treatment of the world-economy not only as an object of analysis, but also as a unit of analysis. It has thereby created a pathbreaking shift from the conception of national-society as a politico-cultural unit of social change to the conception of the world economy as a site and source of social change at once (McMichael, 1990: 390-391). While this shift was a first step of “breaking out of the “modernization problematic””, it paved the way for the next critical methodological problem of “grasping world-historical contingency” (McMichael, 1990: 396) that is the historically dynamic, geographically differentiated character of the world-historical totality as a complex contradictory unity of diverse. In this commentary, I would like to address Dale Tomich’s methodological and theoretical contribution to this problem. Specifically, I will point out how Tomich has developed a novel conceptual and methodological perspective to the understanding of the world-economy and the historical study of capitalist development that integrates the world-historical method with Marx’s theoretical account of capital in a distinctive way.
The world-historical method and the world-economy
In its early formulation, the world-system perspective constructed a holistic conception of the capitalist world-economy as a singular, structured, and unified historical totality composed of uneven parts, i.e. local-national societies constituting the core and periphery zones that are unified through division of labor. The purpose of this conception was to underpin the interconnectedness of uneven processes unfolding in different parts forming the whole (Tomich, 2016: 27-28). Yet, an important methodological limitation has been the initial tendency of the world-system approach to “prefigure history” as an outcome of the identification of “the concept of the world-system with its empirical scope”, i.e. of theory and history. It therefore constructed a conception of the world-system/world-economy as “a preconceived concrete totality in which parts are subordinated to the whole” (McMichael, 1990: 391) and the concept directly accounts for its historical development. Wallerstein’s empirically conceived framework of the capitalist world-economy as a historically evolved structure recognizes the multiplicity and diversity of forms of surplus value producing labor integrated through the world market. Yet, it homogenizes all this diversity as a quantitative relation of ““unequal exchange” of surplus value through the world market”. It thereby misses the qualitative distinctions of surplus value production in each mode of labor control such as slavery and “fragments the inner connection” between slavery as a “historical particular” forming the world economy and the world-economy that is formative of slavery. A critical methodological question of this perspective has been thereby how to conceive and reconstruct “the part-whole relations historically forming the capitalist world-economy” (Tomich, 2004: 13-17; 2016: 32-34).
In the face of this problem, Philip McMichael (1990) has proposed as an alternative the “incorporating comparison” that conceived the capitalist world-economy as an “emergent totality” as a methodological tool instead of “an empirical or conceptual premise” prioritizing an already-given and all-encompassing whole. This methodological approach reconceives the part-whole relation in which the parts are relational categories revealing and realizing the changing totality. It prioritizes heterogeneity and contingency of processes and relations as mutually conditioning moments of a historically integrated process. The capitalist world economy is understood “as a complex unity of social relationships anchored in wage labor and linked by exchange relations, in which wage labor and other forms of nonwage, value-producing labor coexist in time and space.” Recognizing the unity of diverse forms without their reification, it aims to transcend both “abstract individuality”, i.e. isolated and decontextualized contingency, and “abstract generality”, i.e. undifferentiated, static and all-encompassing view of totality (McMichael, 1990: 391-392, 395). This approach presents a specific formulation of the world-historical method that enables historically situated, geographically diverse, and relational analysis of “a dynamic self-forming whole” (1990: 396). Yet, as it transforms the problem of the part-whole relation into a methodological problem, it leaves open a conceptual understanding of “the whole” as a substantive category that can rebuild itself as a complex and dynamic concrete totality of the world-economy as a world-historical relation “that is at once structured and structuring” (Tomich, 2018: 486).
Dale Tomich expounds on the world-historical method and the internal theory-history relation proposed by the incorporating comparison with a distinct perspective that is grounded in a dialectical relation between what he distinguishes as “historical theory” and “theoretical history” of capitalist development. Historical theory is a perspective of reading and understanding Marx’s Capital in relation to its method of abstraction or inquiry as a historically specific conceptual analysis of the social relation of capital in its fully developed form. To put more specifically, all the conceptual categories belonging to Capital are constructed in relation to each other to build a logical exposition of capital as a theoretical appropriation of the capital-wage labor relation, as the fullest expression of the capital relation. It does not integrate into the theoretical analysis other diverse historical forms, such as non-wage forms of labor, which have been historically constitutive of capitalist accumulation and development. Rather, it treats non-wage relations of production and forms of labor, such as slavery, in the historical formation of the capital relation as “external contingency” of the theory and, thereby, excludes from the logical exposition (Tomich, 2004: 17-24). Therefore, Tomich proposes to use Marx’s theoretical exposition as a historically situated conceptual premise, i.e. historical theory, to move towards “constructing a theoretical history of the capitalist world-economy” (Tomich, 2016: 34-35). Only this way, he argues, can we reconstruct the history of capitalist development by reincorporating into the analysis “historical contingencies and disturbing accidents” and moving “beyond the limitations of the wage-centered totality of Capital” in the world-historical expansion of commodity production, creation of the world market, and the development of the capital-wage labor form (Tomich, 2004: 23-29).
From this perspective, he identifies the methodological problem of the preconceived totality of the world-system approach as a problem of the dissolution of the distinction between the abstract formulation of the world-economic whole (world-system) and its concrete conception. The former is about conceiving the world-economy as the unit of analysis, as the conceptual point of departure for historical investigation. The latter implies theoretical appropriation and specification of concrete historical structure of the world-economy as a unified spatio-temporal whole as a product of analysis and point of arrival (Tomich, 2018: 489). Having established this distinction, he suggests for historical investigation a movement from the abstract to the concrete, from “the concept of world-economy as analytical framework” as the conceptual premise of the analysis to “historical world-economy as object of analysis (that is, the concrete outcome of theoretical-historical reconstruction).” Like McMichael’s suggestion, the purpose of the latter is “not to construct the whole, but rather to specify and concretize the relations and processes comprising it”. Historical analysis and specification of a particular unit of observation and object of inquiry, which may or may not be the world-economy itself but a local formation, relation, or process as well, simultaneously specifies the concrete historical-empirical scope of the world-economy. Yet, Tomich differentiates from McMichael’s suggestion by keeping the concept of the world-economy as a conceptual premise and framework of historical investigation, as a reference point of theoretical appropriation of the history, i.e. theoretical history. Here, the part-whole relation is about simultaneously conceiving and “theoretically reconstructing the particular unit of observation within the world-economic whole” as an abstract unit of analysis and to establish “the whole” as a concrete-historical outcome of “the complex interrelation and interaction of the elements”. In other words, “the part” and “the whole” dialectically (re)produce and (re)structure each other. In the process of investigation and analysis, the cognitive departure point is the world-economy or the world-system as a unified totality that informs and organizes the identified relations and processes. The point of arrival is the world-economy as “the outcome of research and analysis, an empirically rich reconstruction of the world-system as a concrete, structured totality of historically specific relations” (Tomich, 2016: 30-32; 2018: 489-491).
This methodological perspective enables Tomich to theoretically appropriate and historically reconstruct the complex and dialectical “relation of the various parts of the world-economy to one another and to the world-economic whole” (Tomich, 2016: 28-29). The world-economy is both a unifying framework for specifying diversity and difference in a relational way and a developed “rich complex of historically formed relations” “as a contradictory unity, not an integrated duality” (Tomich, 2016: 28-32). A good example of this perspective is his study of the slave-sugar complex in Martinique during the first half of the nineteenth century. He expresses the character of this work as “rethinking the historical formation of the capitalist world-economy from the perspective of Martinique” and the slavery-based sugar frontier in Martinique rather than “fitting Martinique into an already-provided theory of the modern world-system” (Tomich, 2016: 23). At the historical level, Tomich’s purpose is comprehending the spatially and temporally differentiated and continuously re-forming and elaborated character of the world-economy as the unity of relational diversity. As he writes, “the historical formation of the world-economy is at once unified and unifying and differentiated and differentiating” (Tomich, 2016: 49). At the theoretical level, “the reconstruction of capitalism as a historical world-economy as the concrete outcome” (2016: 37) requires the abstraction of the world-economy as a world-historical relation. In the next section, I will focus on how Tomich builds his concept of world-economy as capital or capital as world-economy based on Marx’s conceptual exposition of capital. It is this conceptual perspective, I argue, that renders possible the premise of the concept of the world-economy as the unit of analysis in the world-historical method as a dynamic form and content relation.
Capital as world-economy
Tomich develops in his article titled The Limits of Theory an “expanded conception of capital” in Marx’s theoretical analysis “as a complex structured totality… as a temporally (and spatially) complex historical relation” (2015: 330). In the following analysis, I present how Tomich’s analytical positioning of Marx’s theory of capital as such offers the theoretical framework or premise for the understanding of historical capitalism as the historical formation of the capitalist world-economy in the world-historical studies. I specifically underscore his emphasis on the transformation of the contradiction between use-value and exchange value peculiar to the commodity form into a more complex form through the relation between the commodity circuit and the money circuit in the development of the world division of labor and world market.
In Capital, Marx’s logical exposition of capital as a historically specific relation organizing the social relations of (re)production is a conceptual movement or progression from simpler and more abstract forms to more complex and concrete forms. Specifically, he moves from the commodity form, as the “economic-cell form” of the capital relation, to the value form to the money form and to capital. The contradictory nature of the commodity form, as a contradictory unity of use-value and exchange value, is key to the understanding of capital (Tomich 2004, 2015). As “the material bearer of exchange-value” (Marx, 1976: 12), use-value signifies the material, qualitative or distinctive aspect of commodities. In contrast, exchange value signifies or expresses the common, social, or quantitative element of all commodities emerging only through the social relation of the commodities with other commodities. This common element is called value that is the embodied human labor in the abstract as the same kind of labor irrespective of the useful character of the concrete labor (Marx, 1976: 128). As a social category, emerging through the relation between commodities, value expresses the socially necessary labor time. The purpose of Marx’s theoretical-logical exposition is to demonstrate the historical specificity of capital as a social relation through the value form. In the logical-conceptual movement from the commodity form to the fullest expression of capital, the contradictory unity of use-value and exchange value evolves into more complex concrete forms establishing the contradictory relationality between production and exchange, material processes and social relations leading eventually to “their mutual formation as world-economic processes” (Tomich, 2016: 37).
In demonstrating this, Tomich follows the analytical path in Capital moving from the exposition of the commodity circuit (C-M-C) to the exposition of the money circuit (M-C-M′). In the commodity circuit or circulation, whose purpose is to obtain use values, the products of labor transform into commodities through the exchange relation (Marx, 1973: 533). The commodity exchange articulates the relation between use-value and exchange value, between commodities and money. The commodity circuit (C-M-C) as the material circuit of social metabolism indicates the constant movement from commodities to money and from money to commodities. This two-fold movement as the basic form of market exchange is an exchange of equivalent values, i.e. the expression of objectified human labor or socially necessary labor-time. In Marx’s terms, the equivalent exchange between the commodities is the means by which the commodity “acquires social expression of its value… The objectivity of commodities as values is the purely “social existence” of these things” (1976: 159). As the complexity, volume, specialization of the commodity exchange increases through the development of the social division of labor, a particular commodity emerges as a universal equivalent expressing the values of all other commodities: money. The money form is an independent expression of the relation between commodities representing the value of the commodities in an objective form. The crystallization of value into money means the exchangeability of all commodities and the measurement of their values through money, as both a medium of exchange and measure of value. Therefore, the development of the money form, as a form of objective and equivalent expression of the value form, requires the historical development of a complex network (multiple interacting circuits) of commodity circulation and exchange. In this developed stage of the market, not the individual needs, but the division of labor and commodity circulation becomes the main impetus of commodity production. As Tomich (2015: 346) states, “it is no longer a question of the direct exchange of use-values… Rather, it is a question of producing for exchange on the presumption that the use-values that are needed will be available through the market.” Yet, this does not mean that money (and its circulation) is the source/driver of commodity circulation, whose purpose is still to obtain use values. Money, in the form of “world money” in the world market, only expresses or realizes the value of “the world of commodities” as the social form of realization of objectified/abstract human labor (Tomich, 2015: 344-347; Marx, 1976: 180-182, 202-208).
The mediation of commodity circulation through money leads to the emergence of a new circuit, the circuit of money (M-C-M′), which is the inversion of the commodity circuit. The formation of the money circuit does not automatically emerge out of the commodity circuit, although the latter is a condition for it. While the commodity form is the “logical starting point” of capital, within the context of Marx’s method of presentation in Capital, original accumulation is “the historical beginnings of capital” (Tomich, 2004: 23) or of the formation of capital-wage labor relation. What Marx (1976) underscores at the end of the first volume as primitive or original accumulation is the historical condition, or “the extra-economic origin” (Marx, 1973: 489), of the formation of this circuit. Original accumulation involves the processes of dispossession from the means of production, the emergence of property owners, and the creation of free wage labor available for exchange in the market. In the money circuit, the quality or use-value transforms into means for increasing the quantity or exchange value as an end itself. In other words, the purpose of this circuit is to create surplus value, i.e. the greater value of the product of labor (the activity of labor after it is sold) then the value of labor itself. The production of value organizes material production in which surplus product takes the form of surplus value. Capital-wage labor relation reproduces and expands itself based on the accumulation of surplus value, becoming “the law of value” as the driver of capital accumulation, as opposed to the original accumulation wherein there is no “law of value” yet. This relation requires the commodification of labor power that is the purchase of wage labor at its value on the market as a form of equivalent exchange (Tomich, 2015, 347-348, 355-356). “The exchange of equivalent values between capital and wage labor” becomes as Tomich writes “the form of the production of surplus value and value relations organizing the entire circuit of capitalist production and exchange” (Tomich, 2015: 350).
Tomich’s analysis illuminates the interdependence and contradictory unity between the two circuits in Marx’s conceptual exposition. The money circuit is a process of accumulation of capital and presents the general formula of capital, i.e. M-C-M′. Its logical premise is the relation among the “whole world of commodities” (Marx, 1976: 159) established through the commodity circuit, which gives rise to the money form based on the premise of equivalent exchange. The transformation of CMC cycle into MCM’ cycle indicates the formation of capital as a historically specific relation. The unity of the two circuits establishes the capital-wage labor relation as the historical specificity of capital at the level of capital in general, i.e. “capital as a social system” (not at the level of individual capital) (Tomich, 2015: 349). Capital in general does not begin in production but begins in circulation, as Marx expresses: “The circulation of commodities is the starting point of capital. The production of commodities and their circulation in its developed form, namely trade, form the historic presuppositions under which capital arises. World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold” (Marx, 1976: 247). Marx argues that “exchange value posited as the unity of commodity and money is capital” and this dual movement “appears as the circulation of capital (which is, however, a spiral, and expanding curve, not a simple circle)” (Marx 1973: 266). Tomich elaborates and completes this analysis by arguing that the continuous unity of the commodity circuit and the money circuit through the world trade, the world division of labor and the formation of the world market gives rise to the formation of the capitalist world economy (Tomich, 2015: 350-351, 358).
The formation of the world market is premised on both the world trade, i.e. circulation of commodities and money, and a world division of labor that is “a stable relation between specialized commodity-producing units formed through commodity circulation.” The main source of the historical development of this division of labor is “the interdependent and contradictory relation between use-value and exchange-value, the commodity circulation and the money circulation” (Tomich, 2015: 352). The continuous interaction between the division of labor, the world market and world trade create an enduring totality of capitalist social relations. Tomich conceives this totality as the source of “the long-term temporality, the longue durée, of the capitalist world-economy” (2015: 352). For him, this long-term temporality of the capitalist world-economy indicates a socio-historical unit that informs the methodology and substance of historical analysis, i.e. the world-historical unit of analysis. It serves as the conceptual and historical context for comprehending other levels of temporalities and “various trends and cycles of lesser scope and duration produced by the historical processes of capital accumulation” (2015: 353).
Tomich argues based on his own historical research that the historical development of the world division of labor constituting the world market entails not only commodity production or frontiers based on wage labor, but also “diverse forms of commodity producing labor… as the historical presupposition and condition for specifically capitalist production, the capitalist division of labor, and the capitalist world market” (2015: 354). “The subordination of production to the world market,” he writes, “creates the historical conditions for the emergence of wage labor as the dominant form of social labor. The world market as the longue durée structure of capital integrates and unites a multiplicity of forms of social labor whose outcome is wage labor capital relation as the organizing pole of the world economy” (Tomich, 2015: 355). The subordination of “a multiplicity of other forms of labor to wage labor as the dominant form of social labor within the division of labor,” in turn, creates the cycle of capitalist accumulation on a world-scale. In this cycle, “the law of value” restructures the world market and the division of labor. Yet, at the same time, the world-market and the division of labor continues to be the condition of the capital-wage labor relation. In other words, the production of surplus value through the capital-wage labor relation develops fully on the condition of the world market. This indicates an expanded conception of capital in which surplus value is produced by a totality of multiple yet interconnected commodity producing labor, i.e. the capitalist division of all forms of social labor, organized through the world market. It is the development of the world-market that transforms abstract (or value producing) labor into social labor, i.e. socially equivalent labor related to each other through the relation between commodities. While the surplus value organizes capitalist production, commodity circulation equates the value of all commodities and integrates all (wage and non-wage) forms of commodity producing labor imposing “specifically capitalist form of surplus value production on them” as well. Thus, the world market and division of labor are reconfigured as products of this interdependent diversity of forms of social labor and commodity production that are integrated in the world circuit of productive (industrial) capital. Tomich, thus, demonstrates conceptually in Marx’s analysis and historically in his work that “surplus value is the product of the whole system, the production and reproduction of capital on a world scale” (Tomich, 2015: 358-362, emphasis added; Marx, 1978: 189-90; Tomich, 2016).
Tomich’s perspective thus produces a specific historical conception of capital, which is rather latent in Marx’s exposition: capital as world-economy. He argues that, rather than being a theory of the capital relation defined exclusively by the capital-wage labor relation, Marx’s theory of capital is “a theory of the capitalist world-economy” (2015: 363). By situating Marx’s logical-conceptual analysis of capital in relation to his method of inquiry and exposition and by differentiating between historical theory and theoretical history, he is able to show “Marx’s expanded concept of capital as a complex, structured, spatially and temporally plural totality,” i.e. the capitalist world-economy (2015: 365, emphasis added). I argue that this expanded concept of capital as world-economy transforms the problem of the part-whole relation in the study of the world-historical method into a form/appearance-content/essence problem (Geras, 1971). The capitalist world-economy as the unit of analysis becomes a world-historical social relation configuring the historically specific content or essence of the diversity of interacting social forms. As an essence the world-economy enables the inner connection between multiple forms of manifestation, i.e. “local faces” (Tomich, 2004: 53), of social relations and processes enabling their historical commensurability or internal relationality. Therefore, understanding the concrete category of world-economy informs our historical-empirical analysis of the relationship among different “parts” and between “the parts” and “the whole” as a relationship between the form and essence that are “in constant interchange and struggle” (Rosdolsky et al., 1974: 66-67) which thereby reproduce and reconfigure each other.
Conclusion
Demonstrating how Marx’s method demarcates the limits of the theory of capital, Dale Tomich opens the space for “theoretically informed empirical investigation” (2018: 490) and reconstruction of the history of capital and the historical formation of the capitalist-world economy “by going against the grain of Marx’s classical theoretical presentation in order to reincorporate into the field of analysis those historical contingencies and disturbing accidents” (Tomich, 2004: 28). The understanding of capital as world-economy, in turn, allows the reconstruction of this history “expressed through the histories of nations, states, and empires” (2015: 367) as differentiated yet interdependent and unified histories at the world-historical level. Therefore, Tomich’s perspective questions a conceptually and empirically singular history of capitalist development as a history prefigured by theory. Instead, it calls for exploring socially and materially multiple and diverse histories of commodities, (re)production, exchange, nation-states as unified histories interlinked through and constitutive of the world-historical relation of capital, i.e. the world-economy, in ways that informs and reconstructs “the theory” as historical theory.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.