The Sublime Perversion Of Capital: Marxism And The National Question In Modern Japanese Thought

Abstract

Beginning from the dramatic changes which took place in the early 1930s in the dominant historical logic of Marxism at the time, that is, when the Kōza, or "Lectures" faction published their major historical statement, the 8-volume Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi kōza (Lectures on the History of Development of Japanese Capitalism) corresponding to the Comintern's 1932 Thesis on Japan, I theoretically trace the problem of the "national question," in other words, the theories of the distinguishing or specific characteristics of the Japanese situation through the interwar period and into the early postwar. The "national question" remained the decisive center around which Marxists considered the strategies and tactics of politics, as well as the means and methods of writing history. I examine certain Kōza faction theorists, in particular Yamada Moritarō, in order to theoretically consider their discussion of the national question in terms of the history of the development of Japanese capitalism. What they considered the uneven temporal sequences of development (supposedly "proven" by Japan's supposedly "semi-feudal" social basis in the countryside) can also be read as a debate on the temporalities and epistemic ordering mechanisms implied in the formation and constitution of specific difference itself, a debate on the question of how capital localizes itself, how capital acts as if it is a "natural" outgrowth of a putatively "given" situation. In the pursuit of this broad conceptual point - both the rethinking of the theoretical implications of the national question today and the rethinking of the specifically theoretical implications of the aftermath of the debate on Japanese capitalism - I revisit Uno Kōzō's powerful intervention into the basic questions of this debate through extensive reinvestigations of Marx's work, and take up certain corollary developments in the works of Tanigawa Gan and Tosaka Jun.