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Karatani’s Marx

Gavin Walker

Often, one translates a book because it is topical for our moment in an untimely fashion; what appeared at the forefront of the historical process in one part of the world may later come to dominate at another moment elsewhere. Other times, one translates a book because of its intellectual-historical value; texts frequently concretize and concentrate in their appearance a whole continent of thought surrounding their moment of emergence. At yet other points, one might translate a book whose mode of expression is unique, distinctive, or rare in our world. In all cases, the ‘value’ of the translation is linked to some aspect of the historicity of the text, be it of immediate, historical, or logical importance. Kōjin Karatani’s Marx is all of these things at once: an exceptionally important work in intellectual-historical terms, a distinctive reading of Marx whose insights remain powerful, and an early key to the later developments of his thought, already amply represented in the English language.

Today, Karatani himself needs little introduction as a thinker. Since the 1970s, he has been at the forefront of Japanese intellectual life, producing numerous influential works of social theory, literary criticism, political thought, and intellectual history, among them the 1974 Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin (Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility). This early book, which pioneered a new theoretical role for Marx in the Japanese situation, both drawing on and moving away from the heavily methodological analyses of the postwar Japanese tradition of Marxist theory (represented by thinkers such as Uno Kōzō and Hiromatsu Wataru), paved the way for a new opening of critical theory, in the broad sense, in Japanese intellectual life. Karatani’s influence on multiple generations of thinkers cannot be overstated, both for his own original ‘reading protocols’ and conceptual innovations, as well as his organizational and editorial role, founding and animating the widely influential journal Hihyō kūkan (Critical Space) throughout the 1990s. Edited in collaboration with the influential critic Akira Asada, Hihyō kūkan or Critical Space played an exceptional – and rare – role for the intellectual space of contemporary Japanese thought. Published for roughly fifteen years, from its founding in 1991 to its final issue in the mid 2000s, Critical Space distinguished itself above all for the remarkable curation of texts that Karatani and Asada undertook, its influential transcripts of group discussions and round-tables, in some cases field-defining, and the unique mixture of theoretical work that was possible in the journal, ranging from Marxian political economy to philosophy, social theory, literature, music, architecture, art and more. In a sense, since its dissolution, other journals which overlapped in content – such as Gendai shisō: Revue de la pensée d’aujourd’hui (published since the early 70s by Seidosha, and itself an important site for the development of critical theory in Japan) – have been in a process of retreat, and, I would say, especially in a process of de-internationalization. Karatani and Asada’s unique mixture of great influence domestically along with their international links provided a complex and powerful space of critique that has yet to be replicated.

As Karatani has frequently pointed out – and as he does again in the new 2019 preface to this edition – his own texts on Marx have tended to appear at moments in which Marx was least on the theoretical agenda. In some sense, the publication of this work in 2020 is untimely in a classically doubled sense. On the one hand, it is a voice out of time, a voice from the 1970s, immersed in a theoretical situation that could not be further from that of the Anglophone world today. In another sense, it is untimely, because it is today, in the Anglophone world and more broadly in the advanced capitalist countries, that Marx is suddenly on the agenda again, almost ‘trendy’: the source of numerous positions in public discourse, no longer a ‘bad word’ associated with the ideological demonization of the USSR, and, in a sense, the main figure of theoretical resistance to the dominance of neoliberalism, a figure once again associated with the cutting edge of contemporary political thought. In such a situation, a number of key points about Karatani himself and about this work must be kept in mind.

It is probably scarcely believable to the majority of Marxists in North America and Western Europe that in the twentieth century, it could easily be argued that the most Marxist country on earth was postwar Japan. Not ‘most socialist country’ or ‘most communist country’ in the sense of forms of governance, but ‘most Marxist country’ in the sense of an intellectual culture, and certainly the most Marxist system of higher education. When Karatani entered the economics department of the University of Tokyo in the 1950s, where he studied with major figures of Marxian economics like Suzuki Kōichirō in the tradition of Uno Kōzō (about whom more shortly), the undergraduate course – ‘Foundations of Economics’ or ‘Principles of Economics’ (Keizai genron) – consisted of four years of intense reading, as if they were textbooks, of all three volumes of Marx’s Capital, the Theories of Surplus Value, and associated works. Such a comprehensive, detailed and rigorous education in Marx’s own work likely existed nowhere else at the time, and certainly not in the Soviet bloc, where the Stalin-period ‘Economic Textbooks’ tended to replace the works of Marx himself. It still does not exist in China, where today you are more likely to read various classics of liberalism and perhaps some ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ than you are to be trained up in a strict and attentive reading of Marx. In fact, throughout the twentieth century, an intensive reading of Marx tended to eventually become suspect in many of the ‘actually-existing’ socialist countries (although certainly not all), perhaps testifying to the dangerous power of this body of thought: if you read it too carefully, you might turn it back on us.

In many strange ways, the history of Marxism in Japan is something of which we do not yet have a clear social and political understanding, in any language, including Japanese. There is no similar precedent to this period, spanning roughly 1947 through the late 1980s, in any of the other advanced capitalist countries. The peculiarity goes further. Of course, we are speaking about the University of Tokyo, which, together with Kyoto University, form the two most prestigious sites of higher education in Japan, ever since their prewar status as two of the main ‘Imperial’ universities. But, in the case of the University of Tokyo economics department, we are also speaking about the essential site of training for generations of state economic planners who staffed the bureaus of the Ministry of Trade and Information (MITI), and who were, more or less, responsible for managing Japanese capitalism and its relation to the state in pursuit of the eventual and fully-achieved goal: to turn Japan into the second largest capitalist economy on earth throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. In this sense, we can even perhaps only half-jokingly assert that an education founded on the clearest and most rigorous description of a capitalist commodity economy, that of Marx, provided the essential ground for the Japanese state’s runaway success as an economic force in the postwar period.

I do not mention this peculiar set of facts solely for their novelty (although it is certainly a topic that would itself benefit from extensive analysis), but to furnish an essential background to Karatani’s work, his emergence as a thinker, and the theoretical landscape in which he was writing. It would be difficult to think of another country with as large a population of readers well-versed in Marx, a massive and still-successful publishing industry, and a critical space of discourse overlapping with the university, but in which it was possible to make a living by writing theoretically oriented works of literary and social criticism for a mass public audience. It is in the midst of this situation – buttressed by two other historical factors, the crisis of the New Left and the advent of a new theoretical culture in the university – that Karatani’s Marx was first published.

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Originally serialized in seven articles in the review Gunzō in 1973–74, Kōjin Karatani’s most enduring and pioneering work in critical theory was his Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin (Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility). As Karatani himself points out here in the new preface to this English edition, the first point concerning this text that must be kept in mind is its inherently interdisciplinary or even parallax character, to use a term that Karatani would later develop into a central concept of his thought. Gunzō was and is a mainstream literary periodical, not in any way a journal of the Left, nor a philosophically or theoretically specialized space of intellectual engagement. In this sense, it is all the more remarkable that a text such as the present could be published in such a venue, and bears witness to the extraordinary public nature of intellectual life in postwar Japan. Thus, the texts that make up Karatani’s Marx were read first by a general audience, transversal to the university, and located squarely within the broad field of literary criticism.

Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had come to a halt under the weight of the breakdown of armed struggle, as well as the political exhaustion of competing sectarian visions of Marxism, Karatani’s Marx laid the groundwork for major changes in Japanese intellectual life. A short text of approximately 150 pages in Japanese, it produced a new reading of Marx’s work, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time. Since the 1920s, Marxist theory had been one of the dominant currents in Japan, so much so that one could scarcely discover a single field of the humanities and social sciences in the mid-twentieth century that had not been deeply marked by Marxism as a mode of inquiry. In this sense, Karatani’s emphasis on Marx merely continued a trend that his predecessors had already inaugurated: the great postwar intellectuals, such as Uno Kōzō, Maruyama Masao, Ōtsuka Hisao, Hiromatsu Wataru and others, had all been significantly influenced by Marxism (and, in the cases of Uno and Hiromatsu, were well-known and important Marxist theorists in their own right).

However, debates within Marxism in Japan had, from the prewar period onwards, become exceedingly methodological and obscure in their fixation on textual or theoretical minutiae. The positions linked to the prewar debate on the origins of Japanese capitalism reverberated through postwar Marxism as well, constantly attempting to understand the nature of the Japanese social formation. Karatani’s Marx, then, marked a very different moment: soon to depart for Yale at the high point of deconstruction, and in dialogue with Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and more, Karatani returned to the importance of Marx in Japanese intellectual life, but with a new set of theoretical tools. Semiotics, deconstruction, the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, and the emphasis on Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs, produced a massive impact on Japanese intellectual life. Above all, the book represents a break – or rather is itself situated within a break, one might say – with the prevailing reading of Marx, dominant in 1968: that of the early Marx, a Lukácsian reading of the figure of the self-alienated labouring human. Karatani’s Marx is a firm rebuttal to the simplistic ‘theory of alienation’ so beloved of the 60s generation of Marxists in Japan.

Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin began a sequence of writings of Karatani (to be followed by dozens of further works, including among others Investigations I and II, Introspection and Retrospection) that were crucial in the development of critical theory in Japan. Karatani, along with his compatriot Akira Asada, would go on to essentially produce a parallel development in Japan to what had been institutionalized in the United States as ‘French theory’, and often referred to as ‘new academism’ in Japan. But Karatani’s Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in modern Japanese intellectual history after the moment of 1968, but also because the reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text will go on to form the basis of his ‘transcritical’ work that would culminate decades later in texts such as Architecture as Metaphor, Transcritique and The Structure of World History. All of these texts have now made an increasing impact in the English-speaking world, seen as an important and singular intervention in critical theory and Marxist thought.

The translation of Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin in this sense fills a void: both to make clear the origins of Karatani’s own work on Marx, but also to show its groundwork, as it were. It is in this text that Karatani’s peculiar blend of influences (Marx, mathematics, formal and Saussurean linguistics, anthropology, literary analysis, geometry, and more) is concatenated together for the first time, and thus constitutes a crucial text in our understanding of Karatani’s thought: it is also his most singular and sustained engagement directly with Marx in his body of work.

In the initial lines of the present work, Karatani writes:

To deal with a thinker is to deal with his or her work. This may seem an obvious point, but in fact it is not. For example, in order to consider Marx, one should intensively read Capital. But people instead pass through certain external ideologies such as historical materialism or dialectical materialism, and merely read Capital in order to confirm these ideological presuppositions. This is not reading. What I mean by reading a work is rather: to read neither with the presupposition of philosophical concerns external to the work itself nor authorial intention.

For Karatani, the act of reading, the politics of reading, consist in reading towards the centre of possibility expressed in the given text, and it is precisely this centre of possibility that we should affirm as the analytical core of our own reading of his project, a project devoted above all to the paradoxical explication of capital’s structures and the heretical creation of concepts for its overcoming, rather than to the canonical enforcement of academic genealogies and filiations. In contrast to Hiromatsu Wataru’s imposing Shihonron no tetsugaku (The Philosophy of Capital),¹ published the same year (1974) as Karatani’s Marx began serialization, Karatani writes in a style that is deceptively simple and remarkably clear. A consistent feature of his work for decades, this speaks not only to the clarity of his thought but to his consciousness as a public intellectual.

In a sense, Karatani’s text – written as a public intervention – contains little that would help the reader situate its position genealogically, with one exception. Karatani affords a crucial place to the thought of one figure in Marxist theoretical analysis from whom he absorbed a crucial and general conceptual problem. The thinker is Uno Kōzō (1897–1977), and the problem, in the broadest possible terms, is the relationship of capital to its outside, as it were. Uno, who would go on to become one of the most dominant figures in Marxist theoretical research in Japan, and indeed one of the most famous thinkers of Marx’s value theory worldwide,² was educated at Tokyo University.³ He left Japan to study abroad in Berlin from 1922–24, where he was accompanied by his long-time friend Sakisaka Itsurō, later the editor of the Kaizōsha edition of the Marx–Engels Collected Works – the first in the world in any language – and leader of the Japan Socialist Party following the war. (Incidentally, the so-called ‘Weimar hyperinflation’ of this period meant that with the favourable exchange rate, the Japanese Ministry of Education stipends for overseas researchers and students in Germany were worth a small fortune, and, in an interesting historical irony, it was this government money that allowed Sakisaka and other Marxist students to collect the materials that would compose the Collected Works and other original Marxian sources). Uno returned to Japan in 1924 (incidentally, on the same boat as the early Japan Communist Party leader Fukumoto Kazuo),⁴ where he began to teach, first at Tohoku University until 1938, when he was arrested on suspicion of his political stance. From this moment until the end of the war, Uno was forced to remain outside academic life, working in the statistics bureau of the Japanese External Trade Organization, followed by the Economic Research Institute of the Mitsubishi corporation. After the war, in 1946, he was reappointed as full professor in the department of economics at Tokyo University, and immediately released almost a decade of theoretical work that had been impossible to publish under the fascist system – Theory of Value (Kachiron, 1947), Prolegomena to the Agrarian Question (Nōgyō mondai joron, 1947), Introduction to ‘Capital’ (Shihonron nyūmon, 1948), and the first series of articles that would later form his two-volume Principles of Political Economy (Keizai genron, 1950).

Uno is best known for his reschematization and reformulation of Marx’s economic thought, exemplified by Capital, into a highly formalized, purified system designed to create a ‘scientific’ political economy on par with the other social sciences coming to the fore in the immediate postwar period, and it is this work that should be seen as a clear background to Karatani’s text. The most basic distinguishing methodological feature of Uno’s system, the theory of three levels of analysis or sandankairon, is a tripartite division of the practice of theory, and represents an effort to construct a general economic meta-epistemology capable of dealing with the primary contradictions of not only the conjuncture of Japanese capitalism (and the constant debate within Japanese Marxism on its origins and development), but also the theoretical concerns internal to Marxian economics. Structurally, Uno proposes three levels of analysis: 1) the level of pure theory or ‘principles’ (genriron), the logic of capital made rigorously theorizable by allowing its tendency to finally commodify itself, forming a pure interiority expressed as a thought-experiment; 2) the level of the theory of stages (dankairon), wherein the logic of a pure capitalism encounters its own necessity to develop historically and in the world, through specific regimes of accumulation – liberalist, mercantilist, imperialist; and 3) the level of analysis of the contemporary situation or conjuncture (genjō bunseki).

What this division accomplishes in its separation of a level of ‘pure theory’ or ‘principles’ is an attempt to draw closer to the possibility of a Marxist logic – Uno often emphasized the importance of understanding Lenin’s famous argument in the Philosophical Notebooks that ‘If Marx did not leave behind him a “Logic” [with a capital letter], he did leave the logic of Capital.’⁵ By attempting to develop to the furthest extent possible the Logic inherent in Capital, Uno also exposed or ran up against the limits of this logic, the historical contamination that is always paradoxically included in the thought-experiment of a ‘purely capitalist society’. Although most work on Uno over the last fifty years has focused on his methodology in terms of this tripartite division of theoretical practice, we might rather say that the essence or truly critical moment in Uno’s work lies elsewhere, in a short phrase that he considered the ‘nucleus’ or theoretical centre of his work, one that is constantly returning in his writing to undermine the smooth or ‘pure’ logic of Capital, or rather, one that expresses the logical problem for the dynamics of capitalism around the labour power commodity.

On a worldwide level, analysis of Uno’s work has almost always agreed on its supposedly ‘pure’ character – that is, he is widely considered the most esoteric, purely theoretical, excessively formalistic and scholastic figure in the Marxian analysis of value; but I argue that this is not at all the case. In itself, Uno’s assertion that Marx’s work must be reconstructed as a theory of principle – a theory of a relatively pure capitalism or one that has developed in the direction of the principles of the capital-relation itself – is not particularly controversial. After all, Marx himself declared that the capitalism under analysis in Capital was not exactly synonymous with English capitalist development as such but rather constituted an ‘ideal average’ of the capitalist mode of production:

In our description of how production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the world market, its conjunctures, movements of market prices, periods of credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were [nur die innere Organisation der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, sozusagen in ihrem idealen Durchschnitt].⁶

In attempting to treat as much as possible the inner dynamics of this ideal ‘average’ or ‘cross-section’ (Durchschnitt) of capital’s logical drive, Uno makes a wager on the possibility of a certain excessive formalism as the only means available to us to ‘express’ the abstraction of the circuit-process of capital. But, in the most theoretically innovative aspect of his work, he always undercuts or contaminates the purity of this circuit by drawing our attention to one decisive phrase that concentrates within it the density of politics. This is what Uno referred to with his famous and enigmatic phrase ‘the impasse or (im)possibility of the commodification of labour power’ (rōdōryoku shōhinka no ‘muri’).⁷ What he means by this simply – although it is not at all a ‘simple’ point – is that the starting-point of the systematic logic of political economy must always ‘suppose’ (setzen) something entirely irrational as the ground of the rationality of the historical process, which will then be ‘retrojected’ back onto the moment of origin in order to once again ‘presuppose’ (voraussetzen) it as if it were rational. Uno once wrote:

A commodity economy inherently possesses an impossibility or impasse (muri) insofar as it treats relations among human beings as relations among things, but it is paradoxically the fact that this impossibility (muri) has developed as a form capable of ordering the totality of society that in turn renders possible our own theoretical systematisation of its motion.⁸

In turn, in the present text, Karatani writes:

In capitalist society, labour power becomes a commodity. Strictly speaking, it is not labour power that becomes a commodity, but the concept of labour power itself – distinct from labour – is something that already comes from the analysis of the commodity form. That labour power could be a commodity is nothing more than a tautology; what is crucial is that the owner of labour power appeared historically.

Often accused of prioritizing exchange over the sphere of production, Karatani is simply extending and developing in part an insight that stems from Marx himself and that intervenes in a sense well before such a division could be enacted. ‘Commodities’, Marx reminds us, ‘cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians (Hütern), who are the possessors of commodities (Warenbesitzern)’⁹ This point is crucial for us to consider when we attempt to take up one of the essential points of Karatani’s work: his emphasis on the set of questions contained not strictly within the sphere of production, but those contained as it were, in the parallax between circulation and production. In order to understand the position of the seller and buyer of labour power in the market, we require, in certain senses, a reversal of the typical schema through which we read Marx. We often presuppose or allow ourselves to imagine a hierarchy of spheres, in which the circulation-surface is subtended by the ‘hidden abode of production’. But this too can be a merely mystifying point unless we consider the problem of what is given or what must be presupposed in the production process: precisely the availability of labour power, that archi-commodity at the origin of the entire social landscape, without which we remain in a process of infinite referral between instances to seal the basic gap that it represents. It is precisely for this reason that we must remember Marx’s point: ‘It is … impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.’¹⁰

Karatani’s intervention is not only an intervention into the logic of capital, it is an intervention in history, and in politics, one that in some sense also gave way to the rebirth of Marxist theoretical analysis in the Japanese situation, now linked to a whole anti-humanist tradition that was being developed globally through the 70s. In the first afterword, written in 1978, to the republished Japanese edition of Marx sono kanōsei no chūshin, Karatani speaks extensively of the background to this work: ‘Insofar as every author writes within a language and a logic, every author possesses a unique system. But the richness of a work exists insofar as there is a system that the author cannot control within the systematic structure that the author is consciously in control of.’¹¹ The same can be said for Karatani’s text itself, and as a thinker of genuinely rigorous consistency – remarkable over a period of nearly fifty years of public writing and theoretical work – he would surely agree. In the present text, he writes:

What I refuse is the historicist fiction of Marx’s conceptual development, from the dissertation to Capital. If Capital didn’t exist, who would even bother reading back to Marx’s dissertation? The early Marx is not the origin of Capital, but its result. Even the originality of this dissertation first becomes clear, not in relation to its meaning within the temporal context of its writing, but rather within the reading of Capital.

We, too, might refuse the ‘historicist fiction’ that would see the present text as a secret ‘origin’ for Karatani’s work. In some sense, it is rather the reverse: Karatani’s later work has now given us a new vantage point from which to read and re-read the present work.

In returning to a textually centred reading of Marx, Karatani burrows into the inner contradictions and the inner structure of Capital as a text, but also of capital as a concept. Here, in the aftermath of the fantasies of the full plenitude of the subjective political intervention that characterized the end of ’68, Karatani places the emphasis squarely on the side of capital, following Marx in his point that ‘the very necessity of general political action affords the proof that in its merely economic action capital is the stronger side.’¹² In recent years, Karatani has come to address principally what he calls the Borromean knot of ‘capital-nation-state’, and particularly the supplementary relationship that capital requires to sustain its pretence of operating as a purely self-contained cycle, reminding us of the essential madness of capital and its corresponding system of thought. It is precisely in this sense of capital’s demented undercurrent, covered over or erased by its two impossibilities in the so-called primitive accumulation and the commodification of labour power, that the two polarities are in a constant inversion or reversal into each, whereby the logical topology of the irrational commodification of labour power in the circulation process (annulled by being covered over in the form of money) reappears in the production process as the absurdity, madness, violence, and exteriority of the historical cartography of the process of primitive accumulation. This entire cycle furnishes us with the basic problem of the supplement, in the form of the origin that erases itself as an origin, a problem that is not overcome, but merely passed through or traversed through the gift, whereby what cannot ever be said to be purely given must be there at the commencement for the entire cycle to operate. In turn, it is Karatani’s emphasis on the question of modes of exchange – his recent development, but one that can surely be connected with the present text – within the logico-historical dynamics of capital that might lead us directly to a new direction of analysis capable of understanding how the dynamics of commodification of that which cannot strictly be commodified – labour power and land – can pass through our social life as if they could be smoothly assumed, so that this impossible or excessive ‘gift’ of capital is refigured in the final form of reification, a reification in which capital in the end reifies itself.

Karatani’s triangular structure of capital-nation-state is also an emphasis on how each of these instances of the trinity serve temporarily as forces of mediation for each other: the nation mediating capital’s schema of buyer and seller of labour power, presupposed in the sphere of circulation, the state mediating the nation’s drive for communal integration through citizenship systems and policy initiatives in the gap between prosperity and recession. By focusing on the centrality of capital’s supplementarity – its originary supplemental role – Karatani also opens up for us another possible thinking of the subject in capitalist society, the political subject, after and in the wake of 1968. In precisely the place where the hole or wound of commodity-economic rationality lies, the structure of sentiment, but also the openness of practice remains. This is the domain of the political, of class struggle as such, a point where the Borromean knot of these three figures Capital-Nation-State are knotted together. Rather than reveal our stasis, our enclosure into permanent capture, Karatani’s emphasis on the sphere of circulation instead shows us the place of the primacy of politics, the possibilities of a genuinely political response to the subsumptive force of capitalist society. Karatani’s Marx is itself a text whose lessons, arranged after the end of the last great global revolutionary surge of the late 60s, remain full of possibilities, possibilities that lead us into the centre of our political condition today.