The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan 2015040908, 9780822361411, 9780822361602, 9780822374206

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translations
Three Orientations
One. The Sublime Perversion of Capital
Two. The Feudal Remnant and the Historical Outside
Three. Primitive Accumulation, or the Logic of Origin
Four. Labor Power: Capital’s Threshold
Five. The Continent of History and the Theoretical Inside
Six. “The Ready-Made World of Capital”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE SUBLIME PERVERSION OF

C A P I TA L

ASIA - PA CIFIC Culture, Politics, and Society

Editors: Rey Chow, Michael Dutton, H. D. Harootunian, and Rosalind C. Morris Duke University Press

Durham and London

2016

GAVIN WALKER

THE SUBLIME PERVERSION OF

CAPITAL Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan

© 2016 duke university press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞ Text designed by Courtney Leigh Baker Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Walker, Gavin, [date] Title: The sublime perversion of capital : Marxist theory and the politics of history in modern Japan / Gavin Walker. Other titles: Asia-Pacific. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. Series: Asia-pacific: culture, politics, and society | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2015040908| isbn 9780822361411 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9780822361602 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 9780822374206 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Marxian economics—Japan—History—20th century. | Capitalism— Japan. Classification: llc hb97.5 .w355 2016 | ddc 330.952—dc23 lc record available at http: // lccn.loc.gov / 2015040908 Cover art: Woodblock print by Yanase Masamu. Courtesy of the Oharu Institute for Social Research, Hosei University, Japan.

FOR RACHEL

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Note on Translations xiii Three Orientations xv One. The Sublime Perversion of Capital 1 Two. The Feudal Remnant and the Historical Outside 28 Three. Primitive Accumulation, or the Logic of Origin 75 Four. Labor Power: Capital’s Threshold 108 Five. The Continent of History and the Theoretical Inside 152 Six. “The Ready- Made World of Capital” 182 Notes 195 Bibliography 225 Index 243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began life as a dissertation at Cornell University, and in this sense, I owe first and foremost a great intellectual debt to Naoki Sakai, not only for his work and its influence on me but also for his continuing friendship and personal support. Thanks to J. Victor Koschmann and Brett de Bary for many discussions over the years that shaped the background to this project, for their close readings of my work, and for all their help and support. I’m grateful to Bruno Bosteels for his support, friendship, discussions, encouragement, and many decisive suggestions on my writing. I would like to deeply thank Yutaka Nagahara for his friendship, his solidarity, his encouragement and assistance, and for his support for me and for my work. It is not excessive to say that Yutaka’s own work, as well as our projects together, have been one of the deepest influences on me, and his support has given me a sense of energy to write. Harry Harootunian’s support and advice on this project have helped to shape it into what it is now, and his theoretical and political example is an inspiration. Carol Gluck provided much- needed assistance, help, and suggestions on a number of crucial aspects of this book. Ken Kawashima’s friendship and solidarity are behind a lot of this work, and all our times spent debating in living rooms, bars, clubs, and other inadvisable locations have helped shape every aspect of this book. Our current joint projects together have opened a new direction of analysis, a kind of improvisation and collaboration in theory that has also changed my other work, this text included. Katsuya Hirano has been a close collaborator and friend for the duration of this research, and many of my analyses have been deeply impacted by our shared projects and shared intellectual goals. I would like to thank him for his friendship and support. Discussions and drinks with William Clare Roberts over the last three years have helped me think about all the themes of this book, and I’m grateful for his friendship.

Many thanks to Ken Wissoker, Jade Brooks, the two anonymous reviewers, and everyone at Duke University Press for turning this book into a reality. I owe a lot to my friends and colleagues at McGill and in Montreal more broadly for discussions and support, especially Sandeep Banerjee, Subho Basu, Nathan Brown, Luca Caminati, Michelle Cho, Kay Dickinson, Elizabeth Elbourne, Yuriko Furuhata, Thomas Lamarre, Lorenz Lüthi, Jason Opal, Jarrett Rudy, Masha Salazkina, Daviken Studnicki- Gizbert, Hasana Sharp, and Yves Winter. Let me also thank for their friendship, support, discussions and exchanges over the recent years: Adachi Mariko, Christopher Ahn, Jamie Allinson, Étienne Balibar, Tani Barlow, Susan Buck- Morss, Sebastian Budgen, Richard Calichman, Nina Cornyetz, Jodi Dean, Mark Driscoll, Je=rey DuBois, Katsuhiko Endo, Pedro Erber, Mat Fournier, Federico Fridman, Kanishka Goonewardena, Asad Haider, Agon Hamza, Yukiko Hanawa, Stephen Hastings- King, Christopher Huw Jones, Ayako Kano, Rebecca Karl, Ko¯jin Karatani, Hirotaka Kasai, Iyotani Toshio, John Namjun Kim, Takeshi Kimoto, Alex Lenoble, William Marotti, Wendy Matsumura, Sandro Mezzadra, Osamu Nakano, Benjamin Noys, Oki Ko¯suke, Jason Read, Setsu Shigematsu, Jason E. Smith, Jon Solomon, Robert Stolz, Suga Hidemi, Dexter Thomas, Peter Thomas, Tomiyama Ichiro, Alberto Toscano, J. Keith Vincent, Max Ward, Mark Winchester, Travis Workman, Joshua Young, and many more people that I have not listed here, but who I would simply like to thank for being there. I’m grateful for invitations to present some of this material at Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Toronto, the University of California, Los Angeles, Hitotsubashi University, Kyoto University, Princeton University, Duke University, and elsewhere. Earlier versions of parts of chapter 2 were previously published in “Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Di=erence: On Marx and Schmitt,” in Rethinking Marxism and “Primitive Accumulation and the State- Form: National Debt as an Apparatus of Capture,” in Viewpoint; earlier versions of parts of chapter 3 were previously published in “The Absent Body of Labour Power: Uno Ko¯zo¯’s Logic of Capital,” in Historical Materialism; earlier versions of parts of chapter 4 were previously published in “The World of Principle, or Pure Capitalism: Exteriority and Suspension” in Uno Ko¯zo¯,” Journal of International Economic Studies. I appreciate the support of personal friends and family, especially Ruth Sandwell and Colin A. M. Duncan. My parents, Elin McCoy and John Frederick Walker, have always supported me in life, work, and everything else, and their example continues to be an enormous influence on me. Since I cannot x

acknowledgments

thank them enough, I put this here simply as a placeholder of that immeasurable love and gratitude. Last but most important: Rachel Sandwell, whose love accompanies the whole of this book. This book is dedicated to her—for her support, her solidarity, her thought, her care, her being, her love, everything. Our daughter, Anne Joséphine Walker, came into the world while this book was in its final stages: I hope that by the time she’s old enough to read it, she’ll begin to inherit her own world of thought, commitment, internationalism, dignity, politics, fidelity, love, and struggle, the best parts of the world we already inhabit.

acknowledgments

xi

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

Throughout this book, all translations from materials written in languages other than English are mine, unless otherwise indicated. For the transliteration of Japanese language, I use the Modified Hepburn system, with the macron indicating a long vowel, for example, kaikyu¯ to¯so¯. Terms in Japanese, in particular proper nouns or place names that have an established usage in English, for example, Tokyo, are not modified with diacritics.

THREE ORIENTATIONS

Our task today is nothing less than the task of creating a form or symbolization of the world. . . . This task is a struggle. In a sense, it is a struggle of the West against itself, of capital against itself. It is a struggle between two infinites, or between extortion and exposition. It is the struggle of thought, very precisely concrete and demanding, in which we are engaged by the disappearing of our representations of the abolishing or over­ coming of capital. It demands that we open or discern in capital another type or another kind of a flaw than what we understood to be insurmountable contradictions, and that capital was able to overcome, thus overcoming also our representations. . . . The moment has come to expose capital to the absence of reason, for which capital provides the fullest development: and this moment comes from capital itself, but it is no longer a moment of a “crisis” that can be solved in the course of the process. It is a di=erent kind of moment to which we must give thought.—jean- luc nancy Although a purely capitalist society can never be concretely realized, the fact that at a certain stage of development it begins to develop in this pure direction by means of its own forces, and the fact that its underside or verso expresses a historical process in which this development is reversed, forcing capitalism to anticipate its own termination, simultaneously forces the theoretical systematization of this process toward its own com­ pletion or perfection. From the outset, a commodity economy is something in which the relation between one society and another penetrates back into the interior of each soci­ ety itself and secures this moment as its ground—a commodity economy must contain a fundamental (im)possibility, an absence or “nihil” of reason [muri], inasmuch as it expresses and treats relations among human beings as relations among things, and yet it is paradoxically the precise fact that this (im)possibility [muri] itself has paradoxically developed as a form capable of ordering the totality of society that renders possible our own theoretical systematization of its motion.—uno ko¯ zo¯ Empirical concepts bear on the determinations of the singularity of concrete objects— that is, on the fact that such a social formation presents such and such a configuration, traits, particular arrangements, which characterize it as existing. . . . But this term must not lead us into error. Empirical concepts are not pure givens, not the pure and simple tracing, not the pure and simple immediate reading, of reality. They are themselves the result of a whole process of knowledge, containing several levels or degrees of elabora­

tion. . . . By “empirical concepts” then, we do not mean the initial material but the result of successive elaborations; we mean the result of a process of knowledge, itself complex, wherein the initial material, and then the raw material obtained, are transformed into empirical concepts by the e=ect of the intervention of theoretical concepts, present either explicitly, or at work within this transformative process in the form of experimental set­ tings, rules of method, of criticism and interpretation.—louis althusser

xvi

three orientations

ONE

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.1 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.”2 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 di=erent 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.”3 Marx’s point is not that every situation develops in the same way, but that there is a certain contemporaneity—not “sameness”—that su=uses 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 2

chapter 1

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).4 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.5 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 nonWestern languages were often beset by numerous problems: the political strife sublime perversion of capital

3

internal to world Marxism (for example, the global e=ects of the Sino- Soviet split), the split between “Western Marxism” and “o