The narrow focus on the English countryside and the exclusion of interna-tional determinations derives in part from Political Marxism’s near Platonic
conception of capitalism as a theoretical abstraction to which empirical reality must conform or remain external. If the concept of capitalism used by Waller-stein and WST scholars is too broad, that of Political Marxists is too narrow.
For Political Marxists, capitalism can be said to have emerged only when the direct producers and appropriators have lost nonmarket access to their means of subsistence and production, and become entirely dependent on the market for their self-reproduction.121 Market dependency and the concomitant separation of the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ are thereby taken as the sine qua non of capi-talism. As Wood puts it, the ‘special character’ of the capitalist state rests on the fact that ‘the coercive power supporting capitalist exploitation is not wielded directly by the appropriator and is not based on the producer’s political or jurid-ical subordination to an appropriating master’; rather, the ‘the two moments of capitalist exploitation – appropriation and coercion – are allocated separately to a “private” appropriating class and a specialized “public” coercive institution, the state’.122
Political Marxists therefore draw a sharp distinction between (non- capitalist) extra-economic forms of surplus extraction and (capitalist) noncoer-cive forms of surplus extraction mediated by the market. Any mode of surplus extraction that does not conform to the latter market-dependent form, and any social formation characterised by extra-economic forms of surplus extraction, is therefore conceived as non-capitalist. This not only leads to the exclusion of geopolitical forms of accumulation and capital formation, but also justifies the narrow focus on England (and then Europe) as the historically privileged site in which this separation of the political and economic first took place.
Yet to reduce a mode of production to its immediate form of exploitation runs the risk of conceptualising capitalism as an ‘ideal-type’ abstraction, erasing ‘the many shades and connections between free and coerced labour that characterize actually existing capitalist social relations and labour regimes’.123 For example, Marx conceived of ‘extra-economic’ forms of exploitation in North American and Caribbean slavery as at least partially capitalist, because of their place in a wider set of international economic relations dominated by capitalism.124 The expan-sion of slavery in the colonies and free wage-labour in the imperial metropole were two sides of the same coin (see also Chapters 5 and 7). While wage-la-bour is certainly an integral feature of capitalism – in part defining it – to claim that capitalism can only exist where the majority of direct producers are ‘free’
is unnecessary, if not unhelpful. Rather, wage-labour should be conceived as a norm in capitalist societies, ‘beyond which there are many gradations of formal freedom’,125 and wherein ‘the “sale” of labour-power for wages is mediated and possibly disguised in more complex arrangements’.126 What the Political Marxist conception of capitalism thus erases are the various transitional or mediated forms of labour relations and regimes, involving different combinations of modes of production. Indeed, the idea of ‘combined development’ – as an amalgamation
of differentiated modes of production within a social formation – is absent from the Political Marxist discourse,127 which unduly abstracts from the messy and contradictory reality of ‘really existing’ capitalisms.
Politically, there is much at stake in this. The externalisation of ‘extra- economic’ forms of exploitation and oppression from capitalism ultimately leads Political Marxists to exclude the histories of colonialism and slavery from the inner workings of the capitalist production mode. They argue instead that such practices were rooted in the feudal logic of geopolitical accumulation.128 While we would not go as far as to claim that Political Marxists ignore colo-nialism and slavery per se,129 they do nonetheless absolve capitalism of any responsibility for these histories. However, as will be shown throughout this book, these phenomena were very much integral to the formation of capitalism as the globally dominant mode of production (see especially Chapters 5, 7 and 8). Equally, it is possible to point to the continuing prevalence of racial, gender and sexual hierarchies, often reproduced via nonmarket (as well as market) mechanisms, and ask how far these forms of oppression can be included in the Political Marxist critique of capitalism. The answer, it would seem, is that they cannot. In a critique of ‘diversity, “difference”, and pluralism’, Wood argues, for example, ‘that gender and racial equality are not in principle incompatible with capitalism … although class exploitation is constitutive of capitalism … gender or race inequality are not’.130
These are difficult claims to sustain empirically. A variety of authors from traditions as diverse as Marxism,131 feminism132 and Subaltern Studies133 have convincingly demonstrated that the origins of capitalism were heavily circum-scribed – and in fact often constituted – by such coercive, nonmarket forms of exploitation and oppression. Others have shown how inequalities based on gender134 and ‘race’135 continue to be inscribed in the very ‘logic’ of capital accu-mulation. But constrained as they are by disavowing the ‘extra-economic’ side of capitalism’s history, it is somewhat inevitable that Political Marxists might consider their historical status secondary. Such claims strike an especially discor-dant note when considered in light of recent debates on the Left about getting gender politics ‘right’ as well as the general disdain about postcolonial studies found in some quarters.136 Narrow conceptions of capitalism typical of Polit-ical Marxism risk descending into a politics of myopia, in which the manifold, complex and ‘intersectional’ forms of oppression (re)produced by capitalism are obscured, disavowed and externalised, rather than exposed, criticised and dismantled.
These points all derive from the central problem with Political Marxism:
that conceptual abstractions and empirical realities do not correspond to each other, or are misrecognised. As Teschke put it (in a critique levelled at the theory of uneven and combined development, but actually much more appro-priate to Political Marxism), ‘significant degrees of violence have to be done to
the richness of history to orchestrate a “fit” between theory and history. Ulti-mately, however, theory and history drift apart, inhabiting two different forms of reality’.137 History is, of course, a messy, complex affair, full of accidents, contingencies and the untheorisable. A grand theory of everything is unlikely.
Problems emerge, however, when the central objects of our theories (the origins of capitalism, the modern states system, intersocietal relations and so on) are considered pure contingencies in relation to the abstractions we seek to explain them with. Wood once criticised the Althusserians as viewing the relationship between the state and modes of production in actually existing social forma-tions as having ‘little to do’ with capitalism’s structural logic, thereby appearing
‘almost accidental’.138 Might not the same be said of Political Marxists’ concep-tualisation of the relationship between ‘the international’ and capitalism? Or, for that matter, their theorisations of the origins of capitalism itself?
Ultimately, despite its rigour and its many insights into the origins of capi-talism, Political Marxism must be judged as sorely lacking. Its pristinely abstract and consequently Eurocentric theorisation of capitalism and its origins is, we argue, historically untenable as it excises such huge swathes of capitalism’s history (including colonialism, slavery and war) that it becomes historically (and theoretically) unrecognisable. This abstraction from violence – from these geopolitical conditions in the making of capitalism – results in a violence of abstraction. Consequently, non-European agents who were most affected and made abject by these processes are written out of the making of capitalism. It is this theoretical and historical exclusion of non-Europeans that postcolonial theorists have so resolutely sought to correct. We now turn to consider their position.