A comment on Dale Tomich’s exceptional world-historical research methodology

The first thing that comes to mind regarding Dale Tomich’s extraordinary intellectual contributions is how focused on historical method (let alone slavery) he is and has been since the early 1970s. This is when I first met him in the sociology department at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He was a historian already, but this maverick department, under the joint guidance of sociology Profs Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, was a unique oasis of research on world capitalist history. Dale served on my PhD committee, and since then we have maintained a continuing dialogue, exchanging drafts and processing the implications of our joint experiences in Binghamton, where we spent much of our time reading and re-reading Grundrisse and Capital, together. These were formative years in developing an appreciation for the world-historical method that lies behind Marx’s structured theory of capitalism in Capital. As Dale wrote:

By determining the necessary logical structure of categories Marx is able to theoretically comprehend the historical formation of capital as a specific relation. His analysis of the commodity form establishes commodity circulation, not production, as the starting point of capital. Thus, he argues that world trade and the world market of the sixteenth century form the historic presuppositions of the capital-wage labor relation… Although Marx identifies the world market as the historical premise and condition of capital, he presents a theoretical account of the movement from the market to the capital-wage labor relation and the categories of capitalist production, not a historical one (Tomich, 2004: 25).

A succession of emails, since our mutual Binghamton sojourn, leaves a trail of engagement with Marx and historical method. I particularly remember an email exchange we had back in January 2004, the year Dale’s brilliant book of essays, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy, was published. We had been discussing his chapter on the importance of Historical Theory versus Theoretical History, and its salience. Dale was wondering at the time whether this essay’s distinctive approach would work as the opening chapter – given its seemingly ‘unorthodox’ (pioneering) reworking of Marxist historical analysis, going against the grain of ‘orthodox’ interpretations of Capital, especially emphasizing the relations of circulation of commodities. My email response (for what it’s worth), was as follows:

…it certainly makes sense to me. To distinguish the theoretical from the historical hierarchy of labor is pretty radical, and (a) helps to get us beyond imposing the theory on capitalist history - so that slavery’s forms and roles come into their own; and (b) helps to clarify not only why Marx’s method distinguishes theoretical logic from history, but also how he does it. This also suggests that capitalism today isn’t disappearing just because wage labor is degrading. I think there is some brilliant insight here – it’s been achieved through your writing these individual chapters: as a set of essays that have emerged through time (January 2, 2004).

These discussions with Dale led me to acknowledge such shortcomings of orthodox class-analytic approach by Marxists to the ‘agrarian question’:

The consequence of the relations of production approach is to dehistoricize agrarian conditions (cf., Tomich, 2004). The agrarian question reduces history to (class) theory, substituting a capital logic for its political history. A political history includes the food sovereignty counter-movement – not an anomaly within a narrative but a mobilization challenging the capitalist episteme. The distinctiveness of the food sovereignty movement is that its struggle is located within capital’s relations of subjection, but not within the terms of those relations (Beverley, 2004: 266). …This perspective is not an essentialist perspective of a besieged peasantry, rather it is a perspective shaped by the uneven and contradictory historical conditions in which they find themselves (McMichael, 2013: 77-78).

And such relations have, across time and space, ‘differentiated’ small producers from traditional peasantries into diverse farming/labor households, involved in off-farm/migrant labor, seed sharing, local/domestic food marketing, agri-tourismo, among other activities, not the least of which is their mobilization across the world for their rights as producers (Patel, 2009). In Tomichian terms, the theory that traditional peasantries have been eliminated by capitalism is ahistorical in the sense that while traditional peasantries may be few and far between, the historical process “has resulted not in the disappearance of the peasantry, but in its redefinition” (Johnson, 2004: 55). Arguably, ‘redefinition’ includes not just crafting new livelihood strategies, but also mobilization for producer rights, as landscape stewards and ‘agrarian citizens’ (Wittman, 2009).

Here, the term ‘peasantry’ is deployed as a socio-political, rather than an analytical, category (Edelman, 2009), with ‘peasant’ mobilizations as movements both within, and against, the movement of capital. Accordingly, they do not conform to an orthodox (and linear) Marxist conception as ‘petty commodity producers,’ or, as maintained by the Private Sector Mechanism in the UN Committee on World Food Security, as “small-holding entrepreneurs/businesses in waiting” (McMichael and Műller, 2014). They are, essentially, products of contemporary world-economic conditions of marginalization (via trade and investment policies), even as they mobilize to protect and stabilize their productive cultures, as critical to maintaining territorial integrity.

Such historicization is critical to Dale’s research on slavery, where, for example, capital’s development of the world market transformed earlier plantation slavery to the ‘second,’ industrial slavery on the western frontier of the American South, Brazil, and in Cuba, as key exemplars. Hence Dale’s insights in his magnificent (award-winning) Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar. As he wrote, regarding how historical theory positions slavery:

Thus, neither the world market nor the relations of production can be treated as isolated phenomena. Rather, these relations of production and processes of commodity exchange should be simultaneous and mutually formative. They are not only interconnected, but their interrelation with one another forms a unified, structured, contradictorily evolving whole…Although the market and wage labor may be regarded as essential in their different ways to determining the capitalist character of the world economy, when viewed in isolation from historical process both categories remain abstract, static, and unchanging (Tomich, 1990: 4).

For Marx, not only was slavery a pedestal of wage labor, but that relationship evolved into industrial slavery by the nineteenth century as world capitalism matured (McMichael, 1991; Tomich, 1991). And here Dale underscored the world-historical process, with his notable deployment of ‘incorporated comparison’ (McMichael, 1990) regarding the trajectories of Martinique and Cuba -- where Cuba represented the rise of the competitive industrial sugar plantation system, while Martinique’s traditional plantation system languished (competitively) in a transforming world capitalist market. In this nineteenth-century moment, such a transition to what Dale calls ‘the second slavery’ (Tomich, 2018), and was a conjunctural world-historical process of interaction between sites of sugar production – where conventional comparison would miss the relational dimensions of an industrializing world-economy. As he wrote:

Cheap Cuban sugar was a major force in the development of a protected market for sugar in France and the intensive exploitation of Martinique…. On the other hand, the French system of protection pressured Cuba to increase its productive efficiency and the size of its output while the use of French sugar technology made such a response possible for Cuba. Thus, in a sense, Martinique is Martinique because Cuba is Cuba, and vice versa (Tomich, 1994: 342).

This phenomenon precipitated emancipation in Martinique, accompanied by slave revolt in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As Dale put it, the establishment of the Second Republic in France, in 1848, combined a “revolution from above” with a “revolution from below” (Tomich, 2004: 173).

At this point Dale addressed the “originality and diversity of Caribbean peasantries” – referring to “the diverse ways in which subsistence and market production combined with plantation labor in the peasant households.” He continued, underlining the rise of self-provisioning food plots among the emancipated:

…the experience of emancipation in Martinique calls attention to another dimension of the interrelation of proto-peasant practices and the formation of a plantation labor force. Rather than deserting the plantation, the freed population of Martinique sought to redefine the character of plantation labor while remaining resident on the estate. House and yard, provision ground, and the activities associated with them emerged as strategic terrains of contention in the attempts to fashion the post-emancipation labor regime. (Tomich, 2004: 174).

Such categorical recomposition of labor performance within processes of historical capitalism underscores Dale’s point that analytical categories cannot be essentialized (or indeed fetishized) -- rather they must be understood as relational-historical concepts with distinct meanings and import across time and space. There is no singular linear historical process. Dale insists that “Marx’s method posits a close and necessary relation between theory and history” (Tomich, 2004: 26). That is, Capital’s theoretical structure does not conform to the actual history of capitalist development. This insight follows from his argument that Capital involves a logical structuring of categories (commodity, value, price, labor, machine production, surplus value, reserve army of labor, primitive accumulation, ground rent, etc.) that offers a complex theory of capital, premised on how earlier forms of capital prefigure mature capitalism, and where capital’s dominance comes to reframe their relational meaning. Thus Marx’s ‘method of political economy’ enjoins us to invert the historical succession of landed property to capital, to establish capital’s determinate role:

Hence, within the system of bourgeois society, capital follows immediately after money. In history, other systems come before, and they form the material basis of a less complete development of value. Just as exchange value here plays only an accompanying role to use value, it is not capital but the relation of landed property which appears as its real basis. Modern landed property, on the other hand, cannot be understood at all, because it cannot exist, without capital as its presupposition, and it indeed appears historically as a transformation of the preceding historic shape of landed property by capital so as to correspond to capital. It is, therefore, precisely in the development of landed property that the gradual victory and formation of capital can be studied (Marx, 1973: 101, emphasis added).

For Dale, the “key to understanding Marx’s concept of capital… is given… by the structure and movement of the whole,” and “the theoretical structure of Capital cannot be treated as if it were identical with the history of capitalist development” (Tomich, 2004: 25-26). While Marx wrote: “the modern history of capital dates from the creation in the 16^th century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market” (Marx, 1965: 146), Dale has commented that although Marx “identifies the world market as the historical premise and condition of capital, he presents a theoretical account of the movement from the market to the capital-wage labor relation and the categories of capitalist production, not a historical one” (Tomich, 2004: 25). This pioneering opening chapter, then, stands as a landmark exegesis on, and for, an historical method enabling analysis of the contentious and contradictory unfolding of capitalism across space/time, including the political history of capital.