Commodity Form Theory of Law
Discussion
Commodity Form vs Social Form Theories
Jeremy Santora:
"The commodity form theory of law (von Arx 1997; Dimick 2021; Miéville 2006, 2008; Pashukanis 1980, [1924] 2001), for instance, has immense synergy with Wallerstein’s account of uneven state formation. It argues that imperialism is imbedded in the “juridical equality of sovereignty” itself, allowing (geo)political power to act as a coercive force in legal relations. (Miéville 2006:270). To demonstrate this model historically, Miéville examined international law doctrines and geopolitical competition over the last five centuries to illustrate the formation and universalization of the sovereign nation-state as capitalism’s unique juridical unit. However, by ignoring Wallerstein’s historical account in favor of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, Miéville overemphasizes doctrinal changes while ignoring class relations, the transnational division of labor, and capitalism’s socioecological dynamics. The result is a circulationist and formalist argument—that the full maturation of the commodity form must precede the development of the capitalist legal form—which abstracts from the geopolitical class projects central to the capitalist world-ecologies formation.
Furthermore, Pal (2020), a social property form theorist, has also taken a crack at the legal basis of the transition, but has similarly failed to engage with Wallerstein’s account. Pal’s focus is the distinct social property relations of the Dutch, English, French, and Spanish empires, including their colonial territories. To avoid treating capitalism as immanent to feudalism—that is, waiting to be released once the proper fetters are removed—she conceives of mercantilism as a transitionary period of contingent class conflicts that culminated in the development of capitalist social property relations in some states and not others. Central to these class conflicts was jurisdictional accumulation, defined as “the accumulation of rights, functions, and titles” (Pal 2020:19).
While Pal’s account provides an upshot over the commodity form approach by approaching mercantilism as a “geographical strategy” of political accumulation as opposed to a “qualitative change in the logic of world order” (Teschke 2003:204; 210); Pal’s approach runs into issues from its formalism and methodological scope. By refusing to engage with Wallerstein, Pal retraces Brenner’s mistaken unit of analysis. Furthermore, her formalist approach to capitalist social property relations lead to a one-sided view of the proletarian relation as a wage-laborer, excluding slaves and coerced- cash crop laborers from her analysis (see Wallerstein 1974b). Engagement with Wallerstein’s account of capital’s transnational division of labor and uneven state formation is thus necessary to draw out the relations between European empires.
The omission of Wallerstein from both camps has also led to an undeveloped account of capitalism’s crisis tendencies and turning points. For Miéville this is because of a lack of engagement with political-economic dynamics. For Pal this is a result of the national methodological unit which prevents the failure of Spanish imperialism from being connected to the rise of the Dutch, English, and French as core states. Arrighi ([1994] 2010:28–75) offers a set of helpful insights to bridge this gap. Building upon Wallerstein, he argues that successive hegemonic states have restructured the world system to restore interstate competition when faced with crisis."