Continuing the theme of the transition debates. Here is another critique of the Brenner-Wood-Chibber approach - specifically, their methodological nationalism - but this time from a perspective close to value-form analysis. In his article “A Commodity-Form Theory of Transition”, historian Andrew B. Liu revisits the classic Marxist debates on the origins of capitalism, arguing that the transition to capitalism cannot be reduced to the emergence of free wage labor or industrial production. Instead, he proposes understanding capitalism through the universalization of the commodity form and the global dynamics of value accumulation:

In short, past Marxist scholars who fixated on the site of production envisioned a global economy composed of a patchwork of capitalist and non-capitalist producers, of local “transitions” and “non-transitions” to capitalism. In the nineteenth century, hypothetically, the British waged economy may have been capitalist but the suppliers of their sugar, tea, raw cotton, and other consumer goods and materials remained non-capitalist. The logical and historical problems that arise from this conception should be plainly visible. Instead, it is more useful to read Marx as positing one fundamental epochal transformation, which he called at various moments “the capitalist mode of production” or “capitalist era” or “capitalist epoch.” He described this transition conceptually. In terms of real history, he speculated that it began several centuries ago and has since become global in scale. It has also been characterized by unevenness, or the impersonal dynamics of many capitals in contention with one another.

For those of us studying the last two centuries, my guess is that many of the “transitions” we are attempting to theorize are transitions not to capitalism but from within capitalism’s history — namely, from absolute to relative surplus-value, or, from inherited processes (slavery and family farms) to novel ones overhauled and restructured in capital’s image (industrial plantations and Fordist factories).
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Liu is Associate Professor of History at Villanova University and the author of Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (Yale University Press, 2020). His research brings together the history of modern Asia, global capitalism, and Marxist political economy.