It’s four fifths of the title of Dale Tomich’s book, the other fifth of which is “through” (ugh that’s a terrible opening, my apologies [but while I’m parentheticaling, let me add that a bit of googling for the link above to Tomich’s book turns up stuff that suggests he was a Radical America editor along with Paul Buhle… neat]).
Tomich’s book is a collection of previously published essays, divided into thirds which get progressively more narrow in scope. The first section is almost exclusively theoretical or conceptual, dealing with issues like the ways others have handled the distinctions between slave labor and free labor, and takes in the entire capitalist world system. The second section focuses on the Caribbean, still set against the world system as backdrop and with a mainly methodological emphasis. In the final section Tomich hones in on Martinique and deals in more depth with slave laborers’ work and resistance.
The book is quite theoretically sophisticated. In the early essays Tomich takes Wallerstein and Brenner to task by finding common aspects to their opposed positions. In doing so he draws upon Lukacs, Kosik, Dunayevskaya, and Rosdolski to name just a few.
Given his use of those writers, Tomich’s approach can be construed as part of the Hegelian Marxist tradition, but Tomich doesn’t spend much time on larger theoretical or meta-theoretical questions beyond how to conceptualize the history (or histories) of slavery within the world system. Put simply, Tomich has an axe to grind about slavery, not dialectics.
[I need to head out now. A great many quotes to follow. I’ll put them in this post so they’re all in one place. It’ll probably take me more than one session to type them all out.]