Law and Transitions to Capitalism

Embedded in early debates about the transition to capitalism is the idea that law and legal relations play a pre-determined yet artificial role. While this reflects Marx's general claims about law and capitalism, the more that the legal sphere is held as the realm of fiction, the more that the economic sphere's association to the natural realm grows in concert. This undermines Marx's broader objective to interrogate the apparent naturalization of economic rationales in Capital I. In this essay, I dissect the notion of law as artifice not simply to displace the conceptual association between law and derivation, externality, or fakery, but to rethink the definitive transformation of labour compulsion as it is portrayed in the transition debates. Aided by Elleni Centime Zeleke's Ethiopia in Theory, I ascertain the Eurocentric limits of the early debates, and I recuperate a constructive notion of artifice in a way that does not treat law as a derivative phenomenon prone to stagist interpretations. This perspective informs my call for an approach to law and ‘transitions to capitalism’ that is less enthralled by law's mystifying force and more attentive to the material conditions of labour compulsion.