As Frederic Jameson once exclaimed, ‘Always historicize!’ is ‘the one absolute and we can even say “transhistorical” imperative of all dialectical thought’.89
Does Jameson’s injunction necessarily translate into a denial of the use of ‘tran-shistoricals’ in Marx’s own methodology? We believe not, as a number of studies have well demonstrated that transhistorical abstractions did in fact play quite an important role in Marx’s work.90 As Robert Wess notes in a discussion of Marx’s method outlined in the Grundrisse, Marx ‘insists, at the very outset, that to avoid the bourgeois misconception of capitalism as “natural”, one must para-doxically begin on the transhistorical level, with production in general…[as] the transhistorical renders visible the concrete historicity of capitalism’.91 Explaining his method of abstraction, which begins with the ‘general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of societies’, Marx wrote that:
although the simpler category may have existed historically before the more concrete, it can achieve its full (intensive and extensive) development precisely in a combined form of society, while the more concrete category was more fully developed in a less developed form of society.92
In keeping with this method of abstraction, Marx worked with a number of trans- historical categories: ‘use-value’, ‘concrete labour’ and ‘production in general’.
Marx’s use of these transhistorical categories was, however, strikingly different from their employment within much contemporary mainstream political economy and IR. In realist theories of IR, for example, a theoretical abstrac-tion such as ‘anarchy’ takes the form of the primary explanans of the argument, from which all other relevant concepts (such as the ‘balance of power’, ‘national interest’ and ‘security dilemma’) are deduced. From this perspective, the abstraction forms the theory itself.
In contrast, for Marx, a general abstraction functions as an inbuilt assump-tion: the existence of a concrete general condition whose historically specific form has to be accounted for by still further explanans. General abstractions are, in other words, question-begging. They serve the purpose of isolating particular objects of study, which in turn raise analytical questions that can only be answered through their connection to other abstracted moments and concretised through their historical contextualisation and analysis.
Marx’s explanations took place not by the reduction of social reality into a simplified and elegant abstraction, but by the expansion and complexification of the object under study. Hence, again in contrast to the ‘bourgeois’ method which seeks to identify a unitary essence in the object(s) of study (the abstraction), for Marx an abstraction cannot be judged heuristically useful by what elements of concrete reality it successfully excludes, but by what elements of concrete reality are opened up for further exploration. In short, rather than positing abstrac-tions (such as anarchy) as the explanans of theory, general abstracabstrac-tions need to be conceived as explananda: things that require further explanation. Used in this way, general abstractions are best understood as ‘a guiding thread, an
orientation for empirical and historical research, not a theoretical substitute for it’.93
As such, Marx’s abstractions do not provide, on their own, the concepts required for theory.94 Nor do they act as axioms from which secondary and tertiary concepts are derived, where concretisation takes place in a unilinear fashion from the abstract to concrete. Instead, they provide the basic ontological presuppositions needed for more determinant, historically specific categories to be brought to light.
In Capital Volume I, for example, the commodity is understood as a bearer of both the general, transhistorical need to produce ‘use-values’ and the histori-cally specific conditions under which such production occurs – the production of
‘exchange-values’. Similarly, ‘labour’ is at once conceptualised as ‘concrete labour’
(the general feature of all human labour) and ‘abstract labour’ (the historically specific condition under which concrete labour takes place in capitalism). Marx thus claims that the general abstraction of ‘concrete labour’ ‘expresses an immea-surably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, [which] nevertheless achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most modern society’.95 Here again we see how Marx employs ‘transhistorical’ abstractions to bring out the very historicity of their more concrete and specific forms in different epochs. Marx was not seeking to build a transhistorical theory of labour or use-value, for example, but instead sought to introduce these concepts as ques-tion-begging presuppositions in his construction of a historically specific theory of the capitalist mode of production. As such, the contents of categories are not rigidly fixed, but ‘developed in their historical or logical process of formation’.96 The method required to do this involves viewing the object of study through different historically specific contextual prisms, different analytical vantage points or ‘windows’. The view from any singular vantage point will tend to be ‘flat and lack perspective’. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the concrete from a multi-plicity of different abstractions; that is, to deploy multiple vantage points in order to disclose the complexity of social relations and determinations in any given historical context. By moving across different vantage points in this way, those elements formerly hidden by any one-sided abstraction will come into view, thus reconstituting the object of study by adding ‘greater depth and perspective’.97 In short, Marx ‘explained’ by carving open analytical and theoretical spaces that would necessitate the introduction of – and relation to – additional explan-atory determinations, derived from alternative vantage points. Hence, across Capital as a whole, Marx repeatedly changed register and (re)analysed social relations through different conceptual prisms, moving from the singular capi-talist enterprise,98 to circulation,99 to many capitals.100 In Capital, each analytical shift of this kind served to ‘destroy the simplicity’ of anterior vantage points and ‘complicate their phenomenology’ by bringing them into interrelation with other abstracted moments.101
Through the disclosure of the relations between these expanding sets of abstracted moments, the multiplicity of concrete conditions and determinations pertaining to the capitalist mode was unearthed and reconstituted in thought. In like fashion, we argue that uneven and combined development can be utilised in a similar (though not identical) way in filling out a distinctively historical materialist theory of ‘the international’. Used in this way, uneven and combined development is not a theory in itself. It is, rather, a methodological fix – or more precisely, a ‘progressive problem-shift’ – within the broader research programme of historical materi-alism.102 The why, how and in what forms development is uneven and combined in different historical periods can only be explicated by more concrete categories and determinations accompanying a mode of production-centred analysis.
As our exposition demonstrates, the ontology of uneven and combined development postulates that historical processes are always the outcome of a multiplicity of spatially diverse nonlinear causal chains that combine in any given conjuncture. What this compels historians and sociologists to do methodologi-cally is to analyse history from a multiplicity of different spatiotemporal vantage points – or overlapping spatiotemporal ‘vectors’ of uneven and combined devel-opment103 – in order to uncover these causal chains. In this schema, an emphasis on the origins of capitalism in Europe, or the English countryside à la Brenner, would constitute one of many spatiotemporal vectors of uneven and combined development – one that must be complemented and combined with other deter-minations analysed from alternative vantage points.104 It would be one that is, in turn, related to a number of extra-European determinations bound up in the histories of colonialism, slavery and the Asian merchant trades, to name but a few of the processes examined in the following pages. In short, uneven and combined development stresses, indeed necessitates, a genuinely ‘internation-alist historiography’105 of the origins of capitalism. We now explicate how these ontological and methodological pointers would be generative of a theory – or more precisely theories – of uneven and combined development.