Clinging to the Relics for Support: Capitalism and the Nation—Review of The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan by Gavin Walker

Michael Keaney

doi:10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.3.0415

Abstract

Observing the apparently anomalous retention of pre-capitalist forms amid rapid economic transformation, Marxists in early 20th-century Japan grappled with the theoretical challenges posed by a set of practices that did not adhere to the presumed teleology of capitalist development. In response, they proposed a sophisticated treatment of nationalism as an essential (but inherently temporary) stabilizing feature of capitalism, requiring constant reinvention as part of capitalism's fundamentally unstable and contradictory growth process. The validity of this treatment can be witnessed today with respect to populist backlashes in Europe and North America, and strident nationalist and even genocidal state policies in South Asia, amid a general stalling of the neoliberal globalization project that has increasingly been seen to fail in the unfolding aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009.

Highlights

As the Communist Manifesto famously declared, all that is solid melts into air and all that is sacred profaned, why do older, even pre-capitalist, social forms and practices persist, and even to the extent that they would become firmly incorporated into the set of arrangements that comprise the existing capitalism of a particular place and time? Is this a failure of states to “modernize”? Or is it revealing of Marxism’s erroneous universalizing teleology that reduces history to a foregone conclusion?
The failure of nationalist and socialist development models amid the persistence of neocolonialism had already led to the imposition of structural adjustment by the newly invigorated agencies of global capitalism, assisted by the visible stultification and decline of a Soviet model that was increasingly and very visibly failing its own peoples
The “discovery” of nonEuropean literature and other art forms that drove the rise of postcolonialism metamorphosed into a more general critique of Eurocentrism

Summary

Introduction

As the Communist Manifesto famously declared, all that is solid melts into air and all that is sacred profaned, why do older, even pre-capitalist, social forms and practices persist, and even to the extent that they would become firmly incorporated into the set of arrangements that comprise the existing capitalism of a particular place and time? Is this a failure of states to “modernize”? Or is it revealing of Marxism’s erroneous universalizing teleology that reduces history to a foregone conclusion?. The very notions of a thing called “Japan” and a Japanese nation called into question the nature of the state form, which had clearly existed for centuries.

Results

Conclusion