This World, Sixty Days Long

Aspects of Formal Subsumption in Fernand Braudel's "The Mediterranean" #1

This post is the first of an intended series of notes that aim to take Fernand Braudel’s masterful two-volume work The Mediterranean, and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II as a basis for exploring questions related to the historical emergence of capitalist social relations and the prominence of the capitalist mode of production. There is currently no plan set forth for these fragmentary essays, and they will be followed as much as my time and interest can maintain them, in the course of pursuing other work on this site. This first set will be dedicated to an analysis of aspects of Marx’s concept of the “formal subsumption of labor under capital”¹ that are apparent in the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, an epoch of profound social transformation on the world scale of an emergent modernity, upon a reading of Braudel’s text. 

My own exposure to Braudel is fairly recent, as I began reading him sometime late last year, when my friends Benjamin Crais and James Crane sent me a copy of the first volume of this work as a gift during my stay at the Robert A. Deyton Detention Facility in Lovejoy, Georgia, USA. It was warmly received, and I continued to read it and finished the second volume upon my release. Braudel himself wrote the initial drafts of what would become The Mediterranean from behind the barriers of POW camps in Mainz and Lübeck, where he was held by Nazi troops for five years, after being captured in 1940 during his service as a lieutenant in the French army.² The unrelenting breadth of this work alone is a testament to a perseverance of intellect and will, the ability of the author to produce a work of intense originality and passion for its subject despite, or perhaps even driven by, the confines of his detention. 

The subtle complexity of the book and its sweeping structure of presentation make necessary an introduction to the method that Braudel deploys throughout, an approach that he names in the work’s conclusion as “a new kind of history, total history, written in three different registers, on three different levels, perhaps best described as three different conceptions of time”.³ The threefold structure of the book comprises distinct temporalities of a historical survey, these registers all necessarily bleeding into one another as the crossing and reciprocally supportive stitchings that give an immense tapestry its shape as well as its color. A broad outline of these sections can be given in brief. There is the opening geographic history of the region, a survey of the temporality of the sea and its surrounding lands from the vantage point of the earth itself and the social world that has stamped it with the name “the Mediterranean”, revealing an implicit understanding of the social relationship that is the ecological world as we experience it in accordance with our definite relations to it and each other. As the construction of the Mediterranean world is “the unceasing work of human hands”, it is a work that has had to “build with unpromising material, a natural environment far from fertile and often cruel, one that has imposed its own longlasting limitations and obstacles.”⁴ From this follows the social history of the peoples of the region, their definite formations and modes of practice, “collective destinies”⁵ and the general trends of movement and development that result forthwith. The dialectic of historians that Braudel calls forth in the preface to the second edition, that “contradiction in terms of structure and conjuncture, the former denoting long-term, the latter, short-term realities” characterizes the dynamic of the conflicting and multidimensional temporalities that appear throughout the book, yet most actively in this middle section. In complement with the geographical history of the region, the tour of its immense diversity of ecologies, topographies, and the social formations inhabiting or rejecting them (and from which these socialities may themselves have been rejected in turn) is made more immediate, less abstract, as we move closer to the movements that characterize the immense activity of this world at this historical juncture. Finally, the book takes us through the fine-point details and chronologies of the “events, politics and people”⁶ of the epoch, a foray into the conflicts, maneuvers, and machinations of the powerful of the time, the “essentially ephemeral yet moving occurrences, the ‘headlines’ of the past.”⁷ 

These registers of time and its study grant the text a semblance of systematicity, yet it is a methodology carefully resistant to a formulaic deployment. Even as Braudel himself assumes the totality of this world as the object of this study and a subject in its own right, the Mediterranean as a unit itself, he qualifies the coherence that could be imparted onto the dynamics of social development of this epoch. “This world, sixty days long, was, indeed, broadly speaking a Weltwirtschaft, a world-economy, a self-contained universe. No strict and authoritarian order was established, but the outlines of a coherent pattern can be discerned.”⁸ The character of this coherence and its rhythms make for a compelling addition of Braudel’s work in not only a general historical understanding of the origins of capitalism as a social system, but also one very useful for a Marxist conception of these origins as well. It is not necessary to attempt to claim Braudel as a Marxist historian, let alone establish what criteria make one so, to see in his materialist social history a model of the kind of intensive study that would benefit any historical materialist to take seriously, and to further their own efforts. 

As for the dimension of Braudel’s work here that directly deals with the origins of the capitalist social metabolic order and the established reproduction of its social relations, it is necessary to do so with a foundation in Marx’s own conception of capital, and to read with a mind to make a practical synthesis out of such historiographic work. For this it is essential that we look towards some of the more historically-situated claims we find in Marx, especially those pertaining to the initial dynamics of the transformation of the labor process into the extraction of surplus labor positing the production of surplus value. In the initially unpublished appendix to Capital Volume 1, “Results of the Immediate Production Process'', Marx develops an exposition of two concepts that appear briefly in Chapter 16 of Capital, on “The Production of Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value”, that of the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. 

For Marx, the production of absolute and relative surplus-value are dimensions by which surplus labor can be exploited from the seller of labor-power, the worker, primarily acting by way of the mode of coercing surplus labor time from the worker in the production process, forming the basis for the production of surplus value. At the outset, we must ground our terms and their present implementation, for the sake of clarity. They will be subject to more investigation as these notes proceed. Where value is the abstract form of social wealth in capitalist society, surplus value is its life in motion. Capitalist production is not simply the production of commodities, but the production of surplus value, of the worker’s production of capital.⁹ Where value necessarily appears in the independent existence given it by the money form, this money’s apparent self-expansion as capital is a feature of surplus value. As a mediation of social relations of exploitation, where the collective worker’s mediation of subsistence by the wage relation embeds and eclipses the relation between necessary and surplus labor time in the production process, the form of value acts as a logical presupposition to its movement as the law of value, in which capitalists find themselves engaged in competition to maximize their appropriation of surplus value, and thus too constantly maximizing the share of the working the period of the collective laborer that is surplus labor. This regulatory aspect of value’s mediation of social production presents us with a social form of labor in its appearance as human labor in the abstract, or abstract labor, and its appropriation as the commodity labor-power, a mediating structure which maintains a structural class antagonism through a social metabolism of reproduction which fragments and decomposes their objective conditions of existence as a motive power of its self-expanding dynamic. This expansive dynamic of surplus value is given in the internal relations and logical structure of capital’s categories and the class relation characteristic of and internal to the capitalist mode of production. Production and labor is social, but its ends, given by the form in which it occurs, are necessarily partisan.

The temporal axis of exploitation is essential for Marx in order to understand the means by which surplus value is generated through this dynamic complex of capitalist social relations. The denotations of “absolute” and “relative” surplus value refer to means of manipulating the time of workers and their self-activity as it appears in the form of labor-power. Absolute surplus value appears initially in the lengthening of the time worked by the laborer, most apparent in the lengthening of the working day, an absolute increase in time as a means of extracting surplus labor. Relative surplus value appears within definite limits of absolute time that can be worked within a definite period, and sees the increase of surplus labor time relative to necessary labor time through the increased productivity of labor through its exploitation as labor-power, usually experienced as technologies applied for increased profitability, the characteristic examples given by Marx being the power of greater amounts of labor brought together in co-operation, the division of labor in manufacture, and the implementation of machinery and large-scale industry. The flexibility of time as a function of the exploitation of human self-activity as labor-power is the generative basis of surplus value, and thus the capitalist mode of production. 

Yet, while Marx uses concrete examples of the instantiation of these dynamics of surplus value production in Capital in order to demonstrate the structural antagonism of capital’s social metabolism, the historical foundation of these dynamics remains open to investigation. This category of “subsumption”, then, proves to be a means by which we may observe their relative development in concrete circumstances. In Capital, formal and real subsumption are treated fairly briefly, appearing only in such terms:

“It therefore requires a specifically capitalist mode of production, a mode of production which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops spontaneously on the basis of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. This formal subsumption is then replaced by a real subsumption. It will be sufficient if we merely refer to certain hybrid forms, in which although surplus labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to capital. In these forms, capital has not yet acquired a direct control over the labour process. Alongside the independent producers, who carry on their handicrafts or their agriculture in the inherited, traditional way, there steps the usurer or merchant with his usurer's capital or merchant's capital, which feeds on them like a parasite. The predominance of this form of exploitation in a society excludes the capitalist mode of production, although it may form the transition to capitalism, as in the later Middle Ages. Finally, as in the case of modern 'domestic industry', certain hybrid forms are reproduced here and there against the background of large-scale industry, though their physiognomy is totally changed. A merely formal subsumption of labour under capital suffices for the production of absolute surplus-value. It is enough, for example, that handicraftsmen who previously worked on their own account, or as apprentices of a master, should become wage-labourers under the direct control of a capitalist. But we have seen how methods of producing relative surplus-value are, at the same time, methods of producing absolute surplus-value. Indeed, the unrestricted prolongation of the working day turned out to be a very characteristic product of large-scale industry. The specifically capitalist mode of production ceases in general to be a mere means of producing relative surplus-value as soon as it has conquered an entire branch of production; this tendency is still more powerful when it has conquered all the important branches of production. It then becomes the universal, socially predominant form of the production process. It only continues to act as a special method of producing relative surplus-value in two respects: first, in so far as it seizes upon industries previously only formally subordinate to capital, that is, in so far as it continues to proselytize, and second, in so far as the industries already taken over continue to be revolutionized by changes in the methods of production.”¹⁰

This formal subsumption of labor under capital appears initially within the constraints of the labor process in pre-capitalist conditions and relations, in which the form of production and the labor processes which constitute it become subordinate to capital in their relation to the totality of social production. This is where the “parasitic” relationship of usurer’s and merchant’s capital acts as a mediation initiating the capital relation, and thus the possibility of a capitalist transformation of the process itself. Marx, in the Appendix, draws a more direct analogy between formal and real subsumption and absolute and relative surplus value, saying that “if the production of absolute surplus-value was the material expression of the formal subsumption of labour under capital, then the production of relative surplus-value may be viewed as its real subsumption.”¹¹ Yet this is demonstrated by the passage above to be merely a simpler shorthand for their most direct expression, the essence of each dimension of what is, in actuality and in concrete historical determinacy, a dynamic process of hybrid appearances and variable intensities, the class struggle that is the practical dialectic of capitalism’s historical development giving lie to any clean and linearly straightforward explanations for its emergence.

It is here where Braudel’s work can prove an engaging and generative encounter for the methodological foundation which Marx establishes, to an extent, in the category of the formal subsumption of labor under capital. While there is no direct outline by which an initial “moment” of the capitalist mode of production’s concrete historical emergence can be discerned from this, a means by which we can observe the initial dynamics and realization of formal subsumption can be illuminated by way of applying Marx’s method to Braudel’s multidimensional temporalities, and the accounts he provides of social life in the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century, in which an early form of commercial capitalism, dominated by merchants and financiers, saw a period of remarkable expansion and fundamental transformation that would lay the socio-economic, as well as political, foundations for the type of industrial capitalism that Marx analyzed in his day. 

What lies at hand to observe more closely, as regards the formal subsumption of labor to capital, is the change in the form of the activities of the social reproduction of material life into the production of capital. For as Marx says of formal subsumption, “this change does not in itself imply a fundamental modification in the real nature of the labour process, the actual process of production. On the contrary, the fact is that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production. And since that is the case it is evident that capital took over an available, established labour process [...] The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the actual labor process, the actual mode of working.”¹² If we are to understand this formal subsumption as a change in the form of production absent the transformation of the internal qualities of the labor process itself, the qualitative transformation of form must be a determination on the scale of the relations in which the base of production in question is brought in contact with through the mediation of a new class of agents. In this case, this epoch of commercial modes of capital accumulation, it is a mediating structure driven by merchants and financiers capable of articulating themselves as a definite class formation through the organization of production as a generator of monetary wealth as value. Marx says of the development of this activity that “the process of production has become the process of capital itself. It is a process involving the factors of the labour process into which the capitalist’s money has been converted and which proceeds under his direction with the sole purpose of using money to make more money.”¹³

Formal subsumption thus denotes a process by which money is, so to speak, officially “put to work”, and becomes the lubricant of not merely exchange, but a production for its own sake which drives the metabolism of exchange, given the formal constraints of the social relations and their objective conditions as this emergent form of social wealth and its mediations encounters them. Real subsumption, in turn, takes this formal subsumption as its basis and presupposition, for a fusion of the labor and production processes with the valorization process in the direct image of capital, though this does not occur all at once. As we begin with formal subsumption, we must understand it as a process which must be made by definite agents that occupy a definite position and bear the interest in doing so, and thus merchants and the particular form of merchant’s capital comes to be a specific manifestation of this relation, but one where the internal dynamic of surplus value’s self-expansion is underdeveloped, not yet guiding the reproduction of capital unconsciously through the metabolic activity of the agents of both labor and capital. For it is the case that “the distinctive character of the formal subsumption of labour under capital appears at its sharpest if we compare it to situations in which capital is to be found in certain specific, subordinate functions, but where it has not emerged as the direct purchaser of labour and as the immediate owner of the process of production, and where in consequence it has not yet succeeded in becoming the dominant force, capable of determining the form of society as a whole.”¹⁴ 

This disjunction between an abstracted model of capitalism’s ideal functions and the terrain of concrete historical formation that is the social constitution of its formal categories is a bridge that the pointillistic details of Braudel’s triptych allows us to cross. In the broad analogy that can be made between absolute and relative surplus value to the dynamics of formal and real subsumption, there is also the historical realities of combined and uneven development, of the ability to observe the dynamic interrelations between disparate regions of economic capacity. As Braudel tells us, the relative wealth of the towns and commercial centers of the Mediterranean, the innovations of this time, were not uniformly spread. The intensely localized character of many economies, the early types of peasant and communal relations that pertained therein, produced an odd dynamic of separation with the trade that also characterized this era of a world-economy in the making:

“The Mediterranean region was sprinkled with half-enclosed local economies, both large and small, with their own internal organization, their innumerable local measures, costumes, and dialects. Their number is impressive. The islands of Sardinia and Corsica, for example, were virtually outside the main flow of Mediterranean trade. The Sardinian peasant was never offered any incentive to increase his production, to experiment with new crops or change his methods; he was used to burning off the stubble (narboni) and did not leave fields fallow. Some parts of the island, even in 1860, Orosei and Posada on the east coast and Gallura to the north, had no wheeled vehicles and all trade ‘is conducted on horseback’. In this island which was more pastoral than agricultural in the sixteenth century, money was often unknown. The Jesuit fathers who had been settled at Cagliari since 1557 were overwhelmed with gifts in kind: poultry, bread, kids, perhaps a capron or a sucking pig, good wines, and calves. ‘But’, says one of their letters, ‘the alms we receive in money never amount to 10 crowns.’”¹⁵

The absence of a dominant coercion of laboring activity here is indicative of an absence of formal subsumption, though clearly exchange constituted a practice of trade between groups, though consciously as deemed necessary, and not by the imperative of realizing a value apart from the object exchanged. This lack of penetration of the monetary economy is a feature of the epoch, as Braudel demonstrates with particular clarity in the observations on these more isolated social formations. Though these do not necessarily constitute exceptions of the epoch, for as Braudel tells us “the existence of large numbers of these regions, great and small, entering very little into the monetary economy was by no means confined to the Mediterranean. In Germany, on the shores of the Baltic, at Reval, in Estonia, in Finland, it was a similar and sometimes even more striking feature [...] There were similar regions in England. Even in the time of Cromwell, once the traveller left the main road he found himself in the ancient England of forest and heath, the haunt of vagabonds [...] This is evidence of the backwardness not of the Mediterranean but of the sixteenth century with its inadequate monetary economy and the powerlessness of men to order all things. It brings us face to face with an economic ancien regime that neither begins nor ends with the sixteenth century.”¹⁶ What becomes apparent here, and what translates into an insight into our own age, is the relative spatial concentration of capitalist social relations in their full development, despite the expansion, both territorial and relational, characteristic of the mode of production’s historical development. This is a theme echoed even in the political life of Marxist thought, as early works on the historical actuality of the capitalist mode of production tended towards an investigation of the agrarian question, in the face of concentrated centers of industrial activity where many peasant relations in Europe and the world over still pertained. 

This quality of the making of the capitalist mode of production as mediating structures of social life, developed through definite modes of social practice, comes through quite clearly through Braudel’s accounts of the exchange fairs, in the form of “temporary commercial centres”, where paper titles as proprietary claims emerged as a new temporality proving itself able to manipulate space for definite ends:

“Commercial centres were the indispensable motors of economic life. They countered the obstacle of physical space and launched streams of traffic that triumphed as best they could over distance, travelling as fast as the century allowed. They were seconded in their task by other activities, chief among them the fairs, which we can consider almost as towns, temporary commercial centres, differing as towns do, very much among themselves, some of minor, others of moderate, a few of exceptional importance, the latter developing in time from trade fairs to exchange fairs. But nothing could be taken for granted here. The fairs of Champagne died out in the fourteenth century, to be resurrected at Chalon-sur-Saone, Geneva, and later at Lyons. In northern Italy and the Netherlands, countries where there was intense urban activity, fairs although still glittering occasions in the sixteenth century, began to decline. When they survived, as at Venice, it was largely as a facade. At Ascensiontide the spectacular fair held in St. Mark’s Square and known as La Sensa (from the religious festival), was the scene of much festivity and the celebrated marriage of the doge to the sea. But this was no longer the heart of Venice, which now beat on the piazza and the bridge of the Rialto.”¹⁷

The work of value as an autonomous form of social wealth finds its lifeblood through the organization of such activity historically, the real work of human hands creating a definite metabolism in the accumulation of social wealth in a definite form of its activation and realization. These did not stand apart from the more permanent situation of towns, but formed an active movement in their own dynamics of expansion beyond spatial barriers. “In this constant dialogue between the towns (or commercial centres) and the fairs, the former since they operated without interruption (at Florence the exchange rates were quoted every week on Saturdays) were bound in the long run to count for more than the fairs, which were exceptional gatherings [...] The establishment in 1579 of the exchange fairs (known as the Besancon fairs) at Piacenza in northern Italy was the event of the century from the point of view of the history of capitalism. For many years the relentless ‘heart’ of the Mediterranean and entire western economy beat here at Piacenza.”¹⁸

Yet these were not yet as pervasive as the import to its actors would lead one to assume. The lack of penetration of monetary mediation necessitates a more dynamic view of this era of capital’s metabolic processes existing contemporaneously with populations not yet subsumed into a labor market, and thus subjugated to the exploitation of capitalist modernity. This reality was still largely the province of slave labor, the intensive extraction and brutalizations occurring in the “discovery” of the New World, and the formation of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, though its economic coinciding with the Mediterranean world axis at this time was still disjunctive as well, the violent fits and starts that would yet become essential determinants of a vast world of alien wealth as its own power. For the underdeveloped regions of the Mediterranean and Europe of this time, money still operated in an incoherent way, producing strange distortions in the variable means by which it took hold. Its effect amongst isolated cloisters where it would surface interacted in such a way that “the more inward-looking these archaic economies were, the more likely it was that gold and silver, on their rare appearances there, would be overestimated [...] Mediterranean countries, like other European countries, were checkered with low-cost regions, which in every case were separate worlds by-passed by the general economy.”¹⁹ This cost-determination of life’s mediation with subsistence draws forth a general metabolism between development and underdevelopment in a pre-capitalist form, as Braudel tells us:

“[...] above all there was the inevitable dialogue between advanced countries and underdeveloped regions. Then as now economic life was conditioned by differences in level or voltage. The Genoese merchant in the town or Corsica obeyed an economic law by which he was the first to be bound and which indeed in a way excuses him, just as it does the Venetian merchant at Aleppo or Hormuz, the Ragusan at Uskub, Sofia, Temesvar, or Novi Pazar, the Nuremberg merchant in Bohemia or Saxony, all benefiting from the cheap labour and cost of living there. For the towns could not do without these poor regions on their doorsteps (and which they maintained, whether deliberately or not, in their poverty). Every city however brilliant [...] had to draw its essential food supplies from an area contained within a radius of about 30 kilometres.”²⁰

This dynamic of interdependence and metabolic exchange, where cheap labor begins to emerge as an important structural underpinning of the subsistence of concentrated regions in which the capital relation was being forged as a consistent feature of social life’s material reproduction, necessitates a foray into the industrial development of the epoch, wherein capital as a class relation would be actualized by the coherent activity of merchants and their organization of production. For to discuss the origins of capitalism as a mode of production, and this mode of production itself as the basis for a social life which takes on its image in the commodity, stamped with the imprint of value across the mediation of all social relations, the analysis of the epoch of commercial capitalism must be one that does not merely observe exchange itself on the surface as constitutive of capital, but the synthesis of the antinomies of production and circulation as a contradictory unity of valorization’s self-movement, where merchants first brought these movements together in a manner adequate to the concept of capital and, crucially, a labor market adequate to its relations of exploitation. We will next take a look at this fusion of commerce, industry, and the structuration of a labor market in the putting-out or ‘Verlag’ system and the rise of urban industry, as well as through further materials on the penetration of money economies in the Mediterranean of the sixteenth century.

1. For these entries, I will be primarily drawing upon material from the Appendix to the Penguin Edition of Capital Volume I (1976) and the Grundrisse (1973) on formal and real subsumption and pre-capitalist economic formations and social relations, respectively.

2. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fernand-Braudel

3. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean (1995) p. 1238

4. Ibid, p. 1239

5. Ibid, p. 354

6. Ibid, p. 901

7. Ibid, p. 1243

8. Ibid, p. 387

9. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1976) p. 644 “Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value. The worker produces not for himself, but for capital. It is no longer sufficient, therefore, for him simply to produce. He must produce surplus-value.”

10. Ibid, pp. 645-6

11. Ibid, p. 1025

12. Ibid, p. 1021

13. Ibid, p. 1020

14. Ibid, pp. 1022-3

15. Braudel (1995) p. 382

16. Ibid, p. 385

17. Ibid, p. 379

18. Ibid, p. 379

19. Ibid, p. 384

20. Ibid, p. 386