The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan by Gavin Walker

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan by Gavin Walker Curtis Anderson Gayle (bio) The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan. By Gavin Walker. Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2016. xvi, 245 pages. $89.95, cloth; $24.95, paper. In The Sublime Perversion of Capital, Gavin Walker takes up prewar and early postwar debates about Japanese capitalism and, in particular, the work of Japanese Marxist Uno Kōzō (1897–1977) with an eye toward how we might rethink the "national question" not only from the perspective of Japanese history but in global terms as well. In this sense, the book seeks to contribute to "the globality of the Marxist theoretical project" (p. 6) and to thereby go beyond area studies into the realm of globalization through a theoretical Marxist analysis. The Sublime Perversion of Capital seeks to reframe the national question in Marxism from "the vantage point of the formation and maintenance of the nation-state" and to show the "inherent instability of the nation-form" through the existence of the subject as a moment of both theory and history (p. 10). Basically, the prewar debate on capitalism in Japan took several positions on Japanese modernization. The Kōza position, supported by Moscow and the Japan Communist Party, argued that the Meiji Restoration was an incomplete revolution and that Japan needed a true bourgeois revolution in order to eradicate the feudal remnants of Japanese society. The Rōnō faction, on the other hand, argued that Japanese capitalism was "revolutionizing all social relations" and that a direct transition to socialism was necessary in Japan (p. 37). Uno was in the latter camp and thus at odds, for example, with postwar thinker Maruyama Masao (1917–96). Gavin Walker is interested in examining how the nation-state is both [End Page 523] created and undermined by the development of capitalism. The same forms of capitalism that have given rise to the nation and the public desire for nationalism have also provided, in this account, the means for the negation of the nation. The early twentieth-century national question, in the communist and capitalist worlds, originally took place within the historical milieu of decolonization, and thus the advent of capitalism brought with it, in one and the same moment, the undermining of national power as well as the reconsolidation of national power. Rejecting a purely material explanation, Walker argues that capital as a "social relation" brings with it the seeds of its own contradiction that lead to its perpetual expansion beyond the power of the nation-state. This perversion is sublime, according to Walker, in so far as it works in spite of its inherent defects. One way of looking at this problem is, for example, in terms of the contradiction between nationalism and imperialism, the logic of the nation-state and the drive toward empire. For Walker, the advantage of looking at Uno Kōzō is that the latter sought to make Marxism a social science in Japan and to therein express "the logical problem of the dynamics of capitalism around the labor-power commodity and the historical problem" centered on the national question (p. 39). The national question, for Walker, involves not only the traditional problem of national liberation but also that of essence/existence: in citing Etienne Balibar, he points out that we must look at the state and also at the "nation-form" which is the "aggregate of 'apparatuses' and 'practices' that institute the individual" within the nation (p. 69). So it is not only the formal and legal structures of the state that bind us, but the creation of subjectivity and agency under capitalism as well. As Ernest Gellner and others have pointed out, the formation of modernization is what creates the idea of the nation and, by extension, the problem of subjectivity, or agency, in the modern world or, at least, within capitalism. On another level, however, Walker is also interested in discerning and showing how the development of capitalism in Japan has involved the production of both the particular and the universal, national subjectivity and global capitalism, and how...