Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre Do Their Ghost-Dance: Globalization and the Nation-State

The Liberal Democratic Party finally began talking of elevating the Defense Agency to the status of Ministry a few years ago, and now the governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, is showing no hesitation to provide the so-called genuine Japanese with a social “quarantine” camp for—against—the so-called illegally residing non-Japanese workers. This is inextricable from the ongoing and deepening Heisei recession. More alarming, however, is that the populist position of Ishihara is now being further put into action by the recently elected populist Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, his cabinet, and their “New Economic Policies.”

The Japan of the 1990s was the decade of recession and stands in sharp contrast to the hyperbubble period of the 1980s. However, it is incorrect to see the 1990s simply as an interruption or “recess” of the business cycle, whose capitalist dream is an eternal boom with “manageable,” blinklike interruptions. The Heisei recession, instead, brought with it an irreversible structural change in Japanese society, requiring not only people living in Japan but also Japanese policy makers to readjust the Keynesian connective between the economy and the state. This readjustment, however, has revolved not simply around the notion of globalization, but rather, more precisely, around that of the national. This is in no way meant to suggest that we can neglect the accelerating process of globalization, which Japanese capitalism is now desperately trying to cope with. On the contrary, we must start our argumentation from the national, since the Japanese negotiation with globalization results in a schizophrenic split such as the national contraction under/due to its desire of global expansion, where the excess of capital and the so-called redundant—for example, the contrast between the skyrocketing information technology stock market and the homeless in Shinjuku station—juxtapose, and which has appeared in the form of uncanny political ruses such as the legalization of the national flag (Hinomaru) and the national anthem (Kimigayo) and the proliferation of many neoliberal policies in the last phase of the 1990s. These were all proposed in the name of “a globally competitive Japan.” In order to analyze this schizophrenic situation, however, we have to consider theoretically both the unsublatable relationship between the allegedly international capitalism and the nation-state and the capitalist means to deal with this unsublatability, from which the politicosocial signification of the Heisei recession emerges.

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The ultimate conclusion, therefore, of this essay is that globalization, the most conspicuous feature of which is financialization, takes place mainly on the surface, where commodified money and capital—the “fictitious capital” in marxian terminology—circulate. I will try to reach this conclusion by means of theoretically connecting and integrating key concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and of Karl Marx and Kozo Uno, an independent Japanese marxian economist. ¹

As many have argued, I, too, argue that globalization, by and as its reaction, increasingly requires nation-states (and national economies) to renationalize themselves against one another, during the process of which almost all the nation-states transform themselves. But what should be emphasized here is that this renationalization under globalization is not simply conditional upon politicohistorical contingencies; quite the contrary, it must and can be theoretically explained with reference to a capitalist relationship between the surface (circulation/form) and its depth (the production-process/content).

The body of this text will be divided into two theoretically interconnected parts. Both parts will deal with the same theoretical agenda in essence, a specific double bind: that is, not only the theoretical relationship between the innate desire of capital to be international and its unavoidable national closure, but also the incessantly devised capitalist means to get out of this innate arrest inherent in capitalism. The first part, however, will deal mainly with Deleuze and Guattari, specifically their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenic. ² Carrying...