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The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan
In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a "prehistory" to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kōzō, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethinking the national question in Marxist theory. Walker's analysis of Uno and the Japanese debate strips Marxist historiography of its Eurocentric focus, showing how Marxist thought was globalized from the start. In analyzing the little-heralded tradition of Japanese Marxist theory alongside Marx himself, Walker not only offers new insights into the transition to capitalism, the rise of globalization, and the relation between capital and the formation of the nation-state; he provides new ways to break Marxist theory's impasse with postcolonial studies and critical theory.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published March 25, 2016
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February 17, 2021
The Old Mole
Why read Marx today? More to the point, why devote a book to how Marx was read in Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular to the writings of a Marxist scholar named Uno Kōzō (1897-1977), Japan’s foremost Marxian economist and founder of what is usually referred to as the Uno School (Uno gakuha), Uno economics (Uno keizaigaku), or Uno-ist theory (Uno riron)? Books about this branch of Marxist theory now collect dust on the shelves of second-hand bookstores in the Kanda-Jinbōchō district in Tokyo. They remind us of Marxism’s surprising longevity in Japan’s academic circles: a Japanese publishing house, Kaizōsha, was the first editor in the world to publish the complete collected works of Marx and Engels (in thirty-two volumes), and Marxist theory was taught and studied with passion in the tumultuous years of campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The generation that imbibed Marx’s shihonron in its formative years is now past retirement, and the few remaining bastions of Marxism are only to be found in philosophy or literature departments, not in faculties of economics. But Gavin Walker considers that something important was at stake in these economic debates, something that can still speak to our present. In his opinion, we need to understand the “sublime perversion of capital” in order to situate and possibly overcome our contemporary theoretical impasses and debates: the surprising persistence of the nation, the postcolonial situation, the enclosure of the new “digital commons,” the endless cycles of crisis and debt. Indeed, Walker argues, “this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself.” For, like Marx wrote to his German readers in the 1867 preface of Das Kapital, “De te fabula narratur!”—it is of you that the story is told.
De te fabula narratur
First, we must clear the ground from what the book is not. It is not a political essay à la Fukuyama that would try to apply Marxian or Hegelian lenses to a rereading of the present—Walker has only contempt for such literature, which he calls “supreme political cretinism.” Nor is it a rephrasing of Lire le Capital, an attempt to expose Marx’s theory along logical lines: indeed, this is how historiography remembers the main contribution of Uno Kōzō, who reformulated Marx’s Capital in conformity with an adequate order of exposition, with a necessary beginning, development, and end. But what concerns Walker the most is to think about what is at stake in the Japanese debates on Marxist theory for theoretical inquiry today. As he explains, “What I am interested in is to enter into the theoretical work in Marxist theory, historiography, and philosophy of this moment as theory.” He doesn’t study Japanese Marxism historically or in isolation, but plugs it to the scholarship of “world Marxism” in which the concerns of Japanese intellectuals echo, sometimes decades in advance, theoretical issues that were also picked up in the United States or in Europe. Just like Lenin identified “three sources and three component parts of Marxism” (German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism), Walter draws from three traditions of critical thinking: Japanese Marxism or “Uno Theory” which forms the main focus of the book, but also as minor voices or counterpoints French political philosophy (Althusser, Balibar, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou), and the Italian autonomia school of social critique (Paolo Virno, Sandro Mezzadra, Silvia Federici). His familiarity with texts written not only in English and Japanese, but also in French, Italian, Russian, and German is what commends Walker to the serious reader. And his rereading of Japanese Marxism provides an introduction to an important current of political thought that has seldom spilled over the national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries of academic communities.
Uno Kōzō and Japanese Marxism are unfamiliar to most readers, and some elements of contextualization are in order. However, Walker warns us that “this book does not privilege or even accept the biographical mode of analysis,” and that “it is hostile to the concept of ‘context’.” He provides only one paragraph on the life and work of Uno Kōzō, mentioning his studies in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, his arrest in 1938 on suspicion of political activism, his work as a statistician outside of academia until the end of the war, and his reappointment after 1945 in Tokyo University’s Department of Economics, where he was to develop his famous theory of the three levels of analysis, or sandankairon, and his formulation of the “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri). Walker provides more perspective on the debate on Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō) and the opposition between the two factions of Japanese Marxism, the Rōnō-ha (Labor-farmer faction) and the Kōza-ha (Lectures faction). Based on positions or “theses on Japan” adopted by the Comintern, and raising the issue whether the Japanese Communist Party should ally with other progressive forces in a popular front, this debate, predominantly held from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, deeply influenced political developments, not only in Japan, but also in the then-colonized Korean Peninsula, in China, in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The Rōnō faction argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restauration had successfully effectuated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that Japan was now ripe for a socialist revolution. The Kōza-ha, representing the mainstream of the JCP and of the Comintern, held the view that Japanese capitalism was permanently crippled by emerging from a feudal basis and that “remnants of feudalism” (hōkensei no zansonbutsu), especially in the countryside, made inevitable the turn to “military-feudal imperialism” (gunjiteki hōkenteki teikokushugi).
Difficult words and torturous grammar
The political debates of the times were loaded with difficult words and expressions that the Japanese language, with its kanji characters and grammatical structure, makes even more abstract and unfamiliar. Especially hard to fathom was the work of Marxist scholar Yamada Moritarō, whose Analysis of Japanese Capitalism, published in 1934, was “one of the most simultaneously celebrated, reviled, frustrating, controversial, and influential book in the history of Japanese Marxist theory and historiography.” Yamada wrote in a particularly recondite and idiosyncratic prose, filled with “riddles” and “codes,” as his writing style was modeled after the German language used in the most abstract philosophy with its inversion of typically Japanese grammar, sentence structure, and diction. But Gavin Walker’s own immersion in this literature testifies that getting fluency in this highly theoretical language is no more difficult for the true believer than mastering Buddhist scriptures: mantra-like formula such as “military semi-serf system of petty subsistence cultivation” are treated as blocks of characters that are stringed one after the other and recited like a psalmodic shibboleth. They create their own world of meaning that bears little resemblance with ordinary life, and convey to the insider the impression that he or she belongs to the select few. Besides, Japanese scholars were also fond of colloquialisms and didn’t hesitate to call each other names in a prosaic manner: rivals from the Rōnō faction called Yamada’s text a “farce,” and reacted to one of Uno Kōzō’s key lectures by saying that “Uno’s gone nuts” (Unokun wa kawatta.) The most intricate discussions often centered on simple words, such as the “semi-” (han) in semi-feudalism or the concept of “muri” used by Uno in his “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” theorem (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri.)
Gavin Walker devotes a whole chapter to Uno’s notion of “muri,” which he alternatively translates as “logical (im)possibility,” “rational impasse,” or “the nihil of reason.” But, as any child or Japanese language beginner will tell you, muri can also mean, at a colloquial level, “don’t think about it,” “out of the question,” or “no.” Disentangling the colloquialism from the conceptual is no easy task. The most abstract discussions in Japanese philosophy often focus on everyday notions, such as mu (not, without), ma (empty space), ba (place), or iki (lively). These concepts have their roots in Japanese Buddhism and especially in the Zen tradition, and were often picked up by nationalist ideologues and twentieth century philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō to emphasize the distance between Japanese thought and the Western canon. To attempt to translate them in a foreign language, or to discuss their meaning for a Western audience, raises a difficult challenge. On the one hand, foreign commentators need to convey the radical otherness of these notions rooted in a culture that gives them meaning and depth, and they can only do so by making elaborate discussions on the intricate lifeworlds that these words summon. On the other hand, they risk to lose their simplicity and childlike quality that makes their meaning commonsensical and straightforward. This contradiction is apparent in Walker’s treatment of muri. In Uno’s logic, the commodification of labor is the foundational basis of capitalism, and yet this commodification is made impossible by the nature of labor power as defined by Marx. Another way to express it is that although the commodification of labor power should be impossible, in capitalist society “the impossibility is constantly passing through” (sono muri ga tōtte iru). Again, the expression “passing through,” that Walker submits to a long exegesis, cannot convey the simplicity of the Japanese verb tōru.
Childishly simple
Another way to complicate simple notions is to resort to vocabulary borrowed from the hard sciences or to mathematics. To convey the notion of the impossibility of labor power’s commodification, Walker alternatively refers to mathematical figures such as the Moebius’ strip, the Klein bottle, the Borromean knot, the torus, or topology notions of torsion, inversion, loop, and fold. These topological notions were all the rage in the theoretically loaded context of the sixties and seventies, when Marx was often discussed in conjunction with Freud and Lacan—the French psychoanalyst who became enamored with algebraic topology. Walker also suggests that Uno’s use of muri may be borrowed from the concept of “irrational number” (murisū), although the evidence he gives to back his claim is rather moot. The mathematical formulae he introduces in his text—variations on the M—C—M’ equation in Marx’s Capital—, are at the level of a elementary logic and only contribute to his prose’s dryness. On the other hand, Walker is also capable of flights into hyperbole and metaphoric statements. The title of his book illustrates his use of colorful rhetorics and literary excess. Why is capital perverse, and what is sublime about the perversion of capital? As I understand it, capital is perverse in the sense that it thrives on our most basic instincts in a capitalist society: commodity fetishism and the elision the social relations between people as relationships among things, the forgetting of labor’s true contribution to value and profit, alienation from one’s true self and other workers through the act of production. The sublime is the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations: this is the feeling that grips the true believer upon the revelation of absolute truth and true science that Marx’s doctrine was supposed to incarnate.
The Japanese management system
The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a debate that dominated scholarly discussions in Japan for decades. This debate, interesting in its own right for the logical arguments and rhetorical skills that it mobilized, has long passed its expiry date. It never affected Marxist theory—what the author labels “world Marxism”—in a significant way, and attempts to revive it in the twenty-first century are faced with the same conundrums that Derrida experienced when he confronted himself with the specters of Marx. Trying to rekindle the flame by rehashing the old theories of a Marxist scholar unknown beyond Japan’s borders seems to me like the epitome of a lost cause. Historically, the debate on Japanese capitalism was soon replaced by the discussion on Japanese management—some scholars, Japanese or Western, adapted to the changing times and made the transition between the two. I see some parallels between the two lines of enquiry. First, Japanese management scholars were also concerned with the nature of capitalism in Japan and the way it differed from the Western version. They insisted on labor relations and workplace arrangements: lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), the seniority-wage system (nenkō joretsu), and the enterprise union (kigyōbetsu kumiai) formed the “three sacred regalia” (sanshu no jingi) of the Japanese employment system—to be sure, the crown has now lost its jewels. Like the Marxist mantras of Yamada and Uno, strings of Japanese characters were attached in long formulations and found their ways in Western texts, or were lost in translation. Management specialists pondered endlessly about the everyday notions of genba (workplace), kanban (signboard) or kaizen (improvement) that sound commonsensical to anyone familiar with Japan. We even hear echoes of the disputes between the Rōnō and the Kōza factions in the opposition between proponents of Japan’s distinctiveness and those who favored neoliberal solutions—the latter won the day.
Why read Marx today? More to the point, why devote a book to how Marx was read in Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and in particular to the writings of a Marxist scholar named Uno Kōzō (1897-1977), Japan’s foremost Marxian economist and founder of what is usually referred to as the Uno School (Uno gakuha), Uno economics (Uno keizaigaku), or Uno-ist theory (Uno riron)? Books about this branch of Marxist theory now collect dust on the shelves of second-hand bookstores in the Kanda-Jinbōchō district in Tokyo. They remind us of Marxism’s surprising longevity in Japan’s academic circles: a Japanese publishing house, Kaizōsha, was the first editor in the world to publish the complete collected works of Marx and Engels (in thirty-two volumes), and Marxist theory was taught and studied with passion in the tumultuous years of campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The generation that imbibed Marx’s shihonron in its formative years is now past retirement, and the few remaining bastions of Marxism are only to be found in philosophy or literature departments, not in faculties of economics. But Gavin Walker considers that something important was at stake in these economic debates, something that can still speak to our present. In his opinion, we need to understand the “sublime perversion of capital” in order to situate and possibly overcome our contemporary theoretical impasses and debates: the surprising persistence of the nation, the postcolonial situation, the enclosure of the new “digital commons,” the endless cycles of crisis and debt. Indeed, Walker argues, “this moment of globalization calls for a fundamental (re)examination of the central questions of Marxist theory itself.” For, like Marx wrote to his German readers in the 1867 preface of Das Kapital, “De te fabula narratur!”—it is of you that the story is told.
De te fabula narratur
First, we must clear the ground from what the book is not. It is not a political essay à la Fukuyama that would try to apply Marxian or Hegelian lenses to a rereading of the present—Walker has only contempt for such literature, which he calls “supreme political cretinism.” Nor is it a rephrasing of Lire le Capital, an attempt to expose Marx’s theory along logical lines: indeed, this is how historiography remembers the main contribution of Uno Kōzō, who reformulated Marx’s Capital in conformity with an adequate order of exposition, with a necessary beginning, development, and end. But what concerns Walker the most is to think about what is at stake in the Japanese debates on Marxist theory for theoretical inquiry today. As he explains, “What I am interested in is to enter into the theoretical work in Marxist theory, historiography, and philosophy of this moment as theory.” He doesn’t study Japanese Marxism historically or in isolation, but plugs it to the scholarship of “world Marxism” in which the concerns of Japanese intellectuals echo, sometimes decades in advance, theoretical issues that were also picked up in the United States or in Europe. Just like Lenin identified “three sources and three component parts of Marxism” (German philosophy, English political economy, and French socialism), Walter draws from three traditions of critical thinking: Japanese Marxism or “Uno Theory” which forms the main focus of the book, but also as minor voices or counterpoints French political philosophy (Althusser, Balibar, Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Badiou), and the Italian autonomia school of social critique (Paolo Virno, Sandro Mezzadra, Silvia Federici). His familiarity with texts written not only in English and Japanese, but also in French, Italian, Russian, and German is what commends Walker to the serious reader. And his rereading of Japanese Marxism provides an introduction to an important current of political thought that has seldom spilled over the national, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries of academic communities.
Uno Kōzō and Japanese Marxism are unfamiliar to most readers, and some elements of contextualization are in order. However, Walker warns us that “this book does not privilege or even accept the biographical mode of analysis,” and that “it is hostile to the concept of ‘context’.” He provides only one paragraph on the life and work of Uno Kōzō, mentioning his studies in Berlin from 1922 to 1924, his arrest in 1938 on suspicion of political activism, his work as a statistician outside of academia until the end of the war, and his reappointment after 1945 in Tokyo University’s Department of Economics, where he was to develop his famous theory of the three levels of analysis, or sandankairon, and his formulation of the “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri). Walker provides more perspective on the debate on Japanese capitalism (Nihon shihonshugi ronsō) and the opposition between the two factions of Japanese Marxism, the Rōnō-ha (Labor-farmer faction) and the Kōza-ha (Lectures faction). Based on positions or “theses on Japan” adopted by the Comintern, and raising the issue whether the Japanese Communist Party should ally with other progressive forces in a popular front, this debate, predominantly held from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, deeply influenced political developments, not only in Japan, but also in the then-colonized Korean Peninsula, in China, in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. The Rōnō faction argued that the land reforms instituted in the 1868 Meiji Restauration had successfully effectuated the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and that Japan was now ripe for a socialist revolution. The Kōza-ha, representing the mainstream of the JCP and of the Comintern, held the view that Japanese capitalism was permanently crippled by emerging from a feudal basis and that “remnants of feudalism” (hōkensei no zansonbutsu), especially in the countryside, made inevitable the turn to “military-feudal imperialism” (gunjiteki hōkenteki teikokushugi).
Difficult words and torturous grammar
The political debates of the times were loaded with difficult words and expressions that the Japanese language, with its kanji characters and grammatical structure, makes even more abstract and unfamiliar. Especially hard to fathom was the work of Marxist scholar Yamada Moritarō, whose Analysis of Japanese Capitalism, published in 1934, was “one of the most simultaneously celebrated, reviled, frustrating, controversial, and influential book in the history of Japanese Marxist theory and historiography.” Yamada wrote in a particularly recondite and idiosyncratic prose, filled with “riddles” and “codes,” as his writing style was modeled after the German language used in the most abstract philosophy with its inversion of typically Japanese grammar, sentence structure, and diction. But Gavin Walker’s own immersion in this literature testifies that getting fluency in this highly theoretical language is no more difficult for the true believer than mastering Buddhist scriptures: mantra-like formula such as “military semi-serf system of petty subsistence cultivation” are treated as blocks of characters that are stringed one after the other and recited like a psalmodic shibboleth. They create their own world of meaning that bears little resemblance with ordinary life, and convey to the insider the impression that he or she belongs to the select few. Besides, Japanese scholars were also fond of colloquialisms and didn’t hesitate to call each other names in a prosaic manner: rivals from the Rōnō faction called Yamada’s text a “farce,” and reacted to one of Uno Kōzō’s key lectures by saying that “Uno’s gone nuts” (Unokun wa kawatta.) The most intricate discussions often centered on simple words, such as the “semi-” (han) in semi-feudalism or the concept of “muri” used by Uno in his “impossibility of the commodification of labor power” theorem (rōdōryoku shōhinka no muri.)
Gavin Walker devotes a whole chapter to Uno’s notion of “muri,” which he alternatively translates as “logical (im)possibility,” “rational impasse,” or “the nihil of reason.” But, as any child or Japanese language beginner will tell you, muri can also mean, at a colloquial level, “don’t think about it,” “out of the question,” or “no.” Disentangling the colloquialism from the conceptual is no easy task. The most abstract discussions in Japanese philosophy often focus on everyday notions, such as mu (not, without), ma (empty space), ba (place), or iki (lively). These concepts have their roots in Japanese Buddhism and especially in the Zen tradition, and were often picked up by nationalist ideologues and twentieth century philosophers such as Nishida Kitarō to emphasize the distance between Japanese thought and the Western canon. To attempt to translate them in a foreign language, or to discuss their meaning for a Western audience, raises a difficult challenge. On the one hand, foreign commentators need to convey the radical otherness of these notions rooted in a culture that gives them meaning and depth, and they can only do so by making elaborate discussions on the intricate lifeworlds that these words summon. On the other hand, they risk to lose their simplicity and childlike quality that makes their meaning commonsensical and straightforward. This contradiction is apparent in Walker’s treatment of muri. In Uno’s logic, the commodification of labor is the foundational basis of capitalism, and yet this commodification is made impossible by the nature of labor power as defined by Marx. Another way to express it is that although the commodification of labor power should be impossible, in capitalist society “the impossibility is constantly passing through” (sono muri ga tōtte iru). Again, the expression “passing through,” that Walker submits to a long exegesis, cannot convey the simplicity of the Japanese verb tōru.
Childishly simple
Another way to complicate simple notions is to resort to vocabulary borrowed from the hard sciences or to mathematics. To convey the notion of the impossibility of labor power’s commodification, Walker alternatively refers to mathematical figures such as the Moebius’ strip, the Klein bottle, the Borromean knot, the torus, or topology notions of torsion, inversion, loop, and fold. These topological notions were all the rage in the theoretically loaded context of the sixties and seventies, when Marx was often discussed in conjunction with Freud and Lacan—the French psychoanalyst who became enamored with algebraic topology. Walker also suggests that Uno’s use of muri may be borrowed from the concept of “irrational number” (murisū), although the evidence he gives to back his claim is rather moot. The mathematical formulae he introduces in his text—variations on the M—C—M’ equation in Marx’s Capital—, are at the level of a elementary logic and only contribute to his prose’s dryness. On the other hand, Walker is also capable of flights into hyperbole and metaphoric statements. The title of his book illustrates his use of colorful rhetorics and literary excess. Why is capital perverse, and what is sublime about the perversion of capital? As I understand it, capital is perverse in the sense that it thrives on our most basic instincts in a capitalist society: commodity fetishism and the elision the social relations between people as relationships among things, the forgetting of labor’s true contribution to value and profit, alienation from one’s true self and other workers through the act of production. The sublime is the notion of absolute greatness not inhibited with ideas of limitations: this is the feeling that grips the true believer upon the revelation of absolute truth and true science that Marx’s doctrine was supposed to incarnate.
The Japanese management system
The transition from feudalism to capitalism was a debate that dominated scholarly discussions in Japan for decades. This debate, interesting in its own right for the logical arguments and rhetorical skills that it mobilized, has long passed its expiry date. It never affected Marxist theory—what the author labels “world Marxism”—in a significant way, and attempts to revive it in the twenty-first century are faced with the same conundrums that Derrida experienced when he confronted himself with the specters of Marx. Trying to rekindle the flame by rehashing the old theories of a Marxist scholar unknown beyond Japan’s borders seems to me like the epitome of a lost cause. Historically, the debate on Japanese capitalism was soon replaced by the discussion on Japanese management—some scholars, Japanese or Western, adapted to the changing times and made the transition between the two. I see some parallels between the two lines of enquiry. First, Japanese management scholars were also concerned with the nature of capitalism in Japan and the way it differed from the Western version. They insisted on labor relations and workplace arrangements: lifetime employment (shūshin koyō), the seniority-wage system (nenkō joretsu), and the enterprise union (kigyōbetsu kumiai) formed the “three sacred regalia” (sanshu no jingi) of the Japanese employment system—to be sure, the crown has now lost its jewels. Like the Marxist mantras of Yamada and Uno, strings of Japanese characters were attached in long formulations and found their ways in Western texts, or were lost in translation. Management specialists pondered endlessly about the everyday notions of genba (workplace), kanban (signboard) or kaizen (improvement) that sound commonsensical to anyone familiar with Japan. We even hear echoes of the disputes between the Rōnō and the Kōza factions in the opposition between proponents of Japan’s distinctiveness and those who favored neoliberal solutions—the latter won the day.
January 12, 2025
The text pivots around the so-called "national question," which the author attempts to navigate through simultaneously attending to the specificity of the question of the uneven and combined development of capitalism from feudalism in Japan, while also generalizing these debates from Japan to Marxist theory as anywhere applicable. Nevertheless, the forays into general Marxist theorizing are less interesting than the tracing of the history of these debates - the treatment of the topology of capital has already been done elsewhere, especially in Lacanian theory, while the commentary on Kōzō Uno does not leave one with a clear idea on the specificity of his thought. Nevertheless, I appreciated the inclusion of Federici in the chapter on "primitive accumulation," especially on the notion of limit as it relates to both the process of enclosure and the medieval European witchhunts.
Want to read
April 11, 20212021 . 04 . 07 -- I'm not smart enough to read this and it makes me sad... Time to find some more accessible books on Marxism first and maybe try and slog my way through the Communist Manifesto again before I come back to this one.
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