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

Gavin Walker’s The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan is a truly interdisciplinary work that understands Japanese Marxism as part of a larger global moment in which people confront the logic of capital. The book is divided into six chapters entitled “The Sublime Perversion of Capital,” “The Feudal Remnant and the Historical Outside,” “Primitive Accumulation, or the Logic of Origin,” “Labor Power: Capital’s Threshold,” “The Continent of History and the Theoretical Inside,” and “The Ready-Made World of Capital.” The first chapter serves as an introduction and outlines the basic theme of the book, namely, that although capital posits itself as pure, it is always already perverted because it cannot produce labor power on its own.

Chapter 2 analyzes the debates about the Meiji Restoration and feudal remnants between the Lecture Faction (Kōza-ha) and the Labor-Farmer Faction (Rōnō-ha), showing how Japanese Marxists dealt with the problems of transition to capitalism and of capital’s outsides. Marxists of the Lecture Faction presupposed a pristine conception of capitalism, leading them to understand Japan as plagued with the problem of the remnant. However, some Japanese Marxists associated with the Labor-Farmer Faction, Uno Kōzō in particular, went beyond theorizing the remnant to focus on how capital produced its outsides.

Uno emerges as the hero of the book, and the next four chapters highlight his insights. Chapter 3 treats the problem of the so-called primitive accumulation of capital. In Walker’s reading of Uno and others, primitive accumulation does not happen just once at the origins of capitalism, but must constantly occur if capitalism is to continue. Capital repeatedly commodifies labor power, which in principle cannot be turned into a commodity. This chapter also posits the nation-state as a supplement to capital that encloses spaces to create the conditions for the commodification of labor power. Chapters 4 and 5 continue the discussion of the impossibility of commodifying labor power and the need for capitalism to constantly pass through this impossibility. Chapter 4 focuses on the biopolitics of capital, or how capital uses various apparatuses to control bodies and turn them into commodities. Chapter 5 touches on the importance of the agrarian question for Uno while further theorizing the relationship between capital’s dream of its purity and the reality of its constant reliance on external coercion in order to commodify labor. In this context, Walker also discusses the relationship of history and capital. Chapter 6 examines how capital produces a world through a schema that mediates the earth.

Readers of this book should not expect to find a detailed intellectual history of Marxism in pre-, inter-, and postwar Japan; rather, they should prepare to engage with a creative and insightful reading of Japanese Marxism in light of contemporary theoretical concerns. Walker’s approach contrasts with other treatments of Japanese Marxism and of Uno Kōzō in particular. For example, a recent study by Elena Lange carefully reads Uno on the value-form to show that he fails to grasp Marx’s original point.¹ Similarly, in a well-known discussion in The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxist and Modernist Traditions placing Uno within the postwar Japanese intellectual context, Andrew Barshay suggests that he constructed an abstract discourse that made him politically irrelevant even as his students further retreated to hermetically sealed textual exegesis.² Uno is known in North America through translation, and for the most part readings of him have focused on his idea of levels of analysis, which stresses a pure level of the theory of capital as distinguished from historical capital. Walker instead emphasizes Uno’s idea that labor power cannot be commodified, taking it as the key to offering a new reading of this thinker, who was a major figure in postwar Japanese Marxism at...