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The Sublime Perversion of Capital
Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
By Gavin Walker Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7420-6
CHAPTER 1
THE SUBLIME PERVERSION OF CAPITAL
Every individual interpretation must include an interpretation of its own existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary must be at the same time a metacommentary as well. Thus genuine interpretation directs the attention back to history itself, and to the historical situation of the commentator as well as of the work.
— FREDRIC JAMESON, The Ideologies of Theory
Capital's Historicity
Throughout the twentieth century on a global scale, Marxist theoretical research confronted again and again a certain resistance — an internal or immanent resistance — to its guiding principles, and to its capacity, as a mode of knowledge and method of inquiry, to be utilized in the concrete analysis of a wide variety of historical situations. This resistance came largely from the situation of the "non-West," understood as the diverse unity of circumstances other than those central to the historical development of western Europe. Needless to say, the division of "the West and the Rest" has long since been exposed for its direct links, at the level of knowledge, to the worldview of the nineteenth-century imperialisms as well as for its reductionist understanding of historical specificity. The very concept of "the West" has never ceased, however, to remain a remarkably resilient figure of discourse, one that continues to exert an influence on our world, its thought, and our concepts. Marxism, in this sense, has never been external to this problem.
Quite to the contrary, from the time of the First International onward, the status of Marxist theoretical and historical knowledge, when dislocated into situations far from its famous "three sources and three component parts" (as Lenin put it, "German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism"), has been widely contested. Was this mode of knowledge something delimited to its own local process of development, despite its pretension to universality, to a universal history? This broad question confronted Marxist theory long before its canonization and global development.
For example, in Marx's late work of the 1870s, after the completion of the writing of Capital, he was consistently confronted with the complexity of the nature of the Russian village commune (obshchina), its general milieu (mir), and the forms of craft labor cooperatives (artel') that still existed, social phenomena that had no precedent in western European settings. However, Marx, in a series of well-known documents (among others, the multiple drafts of the "Letter to Vera Zasulich," the "Letter to Otechestvenniye zapiski," and his "Preface to the Second Russian Edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party" with Engels), did not take the line of many early Russian Marxists (in particular Plekhanov), who essentially argued that these phenomena constituted blocks on the full development of capitalism and, therefore, blocks on the revolutionary process.
Prior to this moment, in the 1867 preface to Capital, volume 1, Marx famously remarked: "The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." This thesis, directed at the time against the facile dismissal of Capital as detailing merely "English" problems, concretizes to this day a major trend in Marxist historical analysis, one that is frequently accused of subtending a Eurocentric mode of inquiry. By confronting in the Russian case a divergent mode of development within the same world-historical situation, Marx came to argue, approximately ten years later in 1877, that this prior position did not fully encompass the aims of the project of the critique of political economy: "Events, strikingly analogous, but occurring in different historical milieux, led to quite disparate results. By studying each of these evolutions on its own, and then comparing them, one will easily discover the key to the phenomenon, but it will never be arrived at by employing the all-purpose formula of a general historico-philosophical theory whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical." Marx's point is not that every situation develops in the same way, but that there is a certain contemporaneity — not "sameness" — that suffuses the world of capital (what I will later describe as capital's "world of principle" or its own dream about itself). Thus, Marx did not insist on the native "specificity" of the Russian situation but demonstrated carefully that capital always localizes its development as if it were a natural outgrowth of the situation. In other words, he drew attention to the fact that "enclosure" does not simply mean the English "Enclosures Act," for example, but rather the general zone of abstraction in which capitalism emerges and is maintained. In fact, this later perspective, emphasizing the coexistence and contemporaneity of divergent modalities of development within the same overall world-trajectory, was already previewed in the lines before Marx's notorious statement in the 1867 preface, when he reminds the potential German reader that the story of English capitalism is not only a story about England, stating: "I must plainly tell him, 'De te fabula narratur!'" (It is of you that the story is told. — Horace). That is, Marx emphasized always a middle ground between two positions: on the one hand refusing the reduction of the critical analysis of capitalist production to a mere story about "the West" and on the other hand refusing to countenance the notion of a universalism wholly determined by a schematic of necessities and inevitabilities, based on a given and stable image of the world.
It is this Marx, the Marx who refuses to arrogate his theoretical system into a rigid doctrine of influence and origin on the basis of the nation, who informs this book. Today, we are essentially confronted with an ongoing set of debates — largely between a certain Marxist universalism and a certain focus on the exteriority of alternative modes of development, linked to the trends of postcolonial studies — that are neither new nor resolved. Rather, they concern the same crucial issues that Marxist theory has had to confront for the entirety of its existence as a mode of thought, and it is no accident that our contemporary moment returns these debates to the center of our attention.
The return to Marxism in contemporary thought has emerged exactly during the historical period since the early 1990s broadly understood as that of "globalization," the interpenetration and intermingling of national cultures, languages, and thought as a consequence of the increasing integration of the global economy. Indeed, this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself, as well as of its own historicity, because Marxism from the very outset constituted not only the backdrop to transnational political movements but also some of the first attempts in historiographical method and practice to go beyond simple "national history," by entering deeply into the metahistorical questions of the formation and maintenance of the national itself. In other words, paradoxically, Marxism's emphasis on the historical analysis of a single world constituted by global capital seems today to be not a moment of the past to simply record and sort out, but rather a living moment of the historical present.
Today, therefore, a renewed focus on and examination of the history of Marxism(s) around the world appears to have a new immediacy and urgency. Earlier attempts to open up and expose the history of Marxist thought in non-Western languages were often beset by numerous problems: the political strife internal to world Marxism (for example, the global effects of the Sino-Soviet split), the split between "Western Marxism" and "official" or Party-oriented Marxisms, as well as the language barriers and methodological Eurocentrism of "theory" itself. In particular, the last point has largely determined the reception of non-Western Marxist theory in European languages. While the Eurocentrism of the study of history can to some extent be displaced by the empirical analysis of heretofore understudied areas and languages, it cannot be overcome simply by means of such inclusions. Because the logic of Eurocentrism is not merely a hierarchy or ranking of already-established and self-contained unities but also a cognitive schema of the world itself as a total expression of social relations, divergent areas, languages, cultures, experiences and so forth can be incorporated into it without fundamentally disturbing the function of this schema. Thus, it is critically important to understand the epistemological consequences of this schema's operation. First and foremost, this Eurocentrism results in the location of theory in the "West" and the location of data in the "Rest." More than the inclusion of larger and larger amounts of localized data, we must attempt to rather target and critically dissect this "division of labor" that denies the possibility of "theory" outside the West. For such examinations today, the historical role and conceptual framework of Marxist theory is perhaps the most decisive example, insofar as it has been premised, since the late nineteenth century, on the simultaneous local immediacy and global breadth of "theory" itself.
In fact, in order to understand and revisit the relevance of Marxist theory to the historical present, this binary of "the West and the Rest," which has dominated historiographical work, must be overcome. "The West" has frequently served as something like a "model" of development for the entire world, but increasingly we are realizing that it is exactly this putative "superiority" and "unity" of the West that has prevented us from seriously understanding the historicity of capitalism itself. Despite our increasing understanding of the long historical role of certain global projects such as the Marxist theoretical paradigm, history writing often remains tied to single nation-states as units of analysis. By grasping instead the moments when theory itself was developed outside of "the West," we become able to historicize Eurocentrism by dislocating its assumed primacy in Marxist theory, thus questioning the assumption that the "Rest" constitutes the derivative field wherein theory is "applied" or "tested" for its validity and viability. Consequently we also become able to grasp the implications for historiography in general of the long prehistory of what we now call "globalization."
The situation through which I will attempt to develop these questions is the extraordinary prescience and sophistication of the Marxist theoretical analyses that were undertaken in Japan beginning in the 1920s. Encompassing a wide theoretical range of questions — the clarification of the transition to capitalism in Asia, the political role of the state in its divergence from the patterns of the former feudalisms of Europe, and the examination of the history of the Japanese social formation with a view to its socioeconomic foundations — these analyses eventually became a famous and fundamental debate in the history of the social sciences in East Asia, the so-called debate on Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi ronso). This debate, predominantly held from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, deeply influenced political activism and theoretical work, not only in Japan but also in the then-colonized Korean peninsula, in China, in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.
Precisely because the Japanese state experienced a dramatic and intense period of development from the foundation of the Meiji era in 1868, through the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, and the spread of Japan's empire throughout Asia from the early 1900s until defeat in World War II in 1945, the clarification of the socioeconomic causes of this intensified growth were heatedly debated. The continuity of the debate on Japanese capitalism served as a background against which the postwar themes of historiography in Japan — the clarification of the historical role of the emperor-system, the analysis of the postwar land reforms in relation to earlier reforms of property relations, the investigation of Japan's "internal colonization" of Hokkaido (and the Ainu people) and Okinawa, as well as other "peripheries" of the nation — were developed.
By contrast, in Europe and North America, the dominant debate in twentieth-century Marxist theoretical writing on the transition from feudalism to capitalism took place largely in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This debate, spurred on initially by the opposition between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb on the causes of the emergence of capitalism in the fifteenth century, has had a wide effect on Marxist writing in all European languages, and indeed in many non-European locales. Subsequently, in the 1970s, a succeeding debate around the work of Robert Brenner emerged in the pages of New Left Review in England and went on to encompass a great many thinkers in the orbit of so-called Western Marxism. This debate, now widely known as "the Brenner debate," centered around an opposition between Brenner and the then-highly influential "world systems theorists" or "dependency theorists" such as Andre Gunder Frank, Immanuel Wallerstein, Arghiri Emmanuel, Samir Amin, and others. But paradoxically, these later debates in Europe and North America remained completely unaware of the earlier debates in Japan, which had long ago sought clarification of the relationship between the so-called national question and the inner logic of the capitalist mode of production.
What concerns me in this work is to seek a divergent point of entry into this debate on Japanese capitalism, perhaps the first intensive debate at a high theoretical level of the relationship between capital and the form of the nation-state in Marxist theoretical and historical work worldwide. The work of such an analysis is necessarily one that begins not solely from the archival facts of this debate on Japanese capitalism, but more crucially for this discussion, from its theoretical position. Where can we locate this debate in the larger questions of the Marxian problematic as a whole? How does this debate intervene in the schematics of the transition, the logical role of the period of primitive accumulation, the reproduction of capitalist social relations in general? I approach these questions by locating the culmination of the debate on Japanese capitalism in the work of the great Marxist theorist and thinker Uno Kozo, whose systematic attempt to think the torsion between logic and history in the analysis of capital emerged from a critical sublation — not a synthesis, but a new kind of scission — of the debate as theory. It is this direction that I believe can also serve as a way to emphasize the globality of the Marxist theoretical project, a way to emphasize that the debate on Japanese capitalism is not simply a debate on developmental strategies or national specificity but a debate on the most central theoretical and historical questions of Marxist analysis itself.
Throughout all of his theoretical work, Uno Kozo essentially developed and deepened our grasp of two basic and axiomatic formulations: the "impossibility of the commodification of labor power" (rodoryoku shohinka no muri) and the theory of three levels of analysis (sandankairon) — a theory of principle or the inner logic of capital as a social relation (genriron), a theory of stages of capitalist development, encompassing the role of the state and dominant commodity-forms of specific historical epochs (dankairon), and finally, a theory of the analysis of the immediate conjuncture (genjo bunseki). In a broad theoretical sense, this book's project aims at the central question of how these two problems can be articulated to each other. Simply put, for capitalism's continual reproduction, labor cannot be fully commodified, and life cannot be fully captured but must instead be held in suspension. Yet we cannot encounter this raw flux at the center of the tension generated by capture, because this originary component or uncaptured facet only appears precisely when it is captured or employed — labor power thus had to be historically accumulated, controlled, and disciplined in specific and concrete circumstances.
(Continues...)
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