Moreover, Uno’s reading of Capital itself was creative and original. In general, Capital was treated as a text in which the labour theory of value had been inherited from the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, but for Uno, Capital focused on exchange rather than production, and, in this sense, he emphasized precisely that capital itself was, in essence, merchant capital. I agreed with Uno’s thought, and soon entered the economics department of the University of Tokyo. Although Uno himself had already retired by this point, I encountered there numerous professors who belonged to the Uno School. But, before long, I lost interest in economics; after graduating, I turned towards literature and became a critic. Nevertheless, I certainly had not lost my interest in Marx’s Capital, rather, I was simply uninterested in treating it as an economist.
From my perspective, I saw the capitalist economy as disclosed in Capital not as something material but as an ideal superstructure founded on credit, something born not from the sphere of production but rather from the enigma of exchange. Marx famously stated that exchange began from the interval or intercourse between one community and another. But, in such circumstances, where does this ‘power’ that seems to secure and guarantee exchange with an unknown, uncanny other come from? Marx discovered it in the form of the fetish that adheres to things. In this sense, I understood Capital as a work depicting the process by which the fetish (commodity) develops into Mammon (capital) – but to read Capital in this way was impossible within the sphere of economics proper, and equally impossible within the field of philosophy.
Marx writes: ‘A commodity seems at first glance to be a self-evident, trivial thing. The analysis of it yields the insight that it is a very vexatious thing, full of metaphysical subtlety and theological perversities.’1 In other words, Capital itself is not a text that simply treats metaphysical or theological questions, but one that attempts to draw them out from within this ‘self-evident, trivial thing’ called the commodity. I believed that, in order to theorize this precise problem, it was only possible do so within literary criticism. However, I only began this project in 1973, after I had already published two earlier books as a literary critic. And there was another reason that I specifically wrote a text on Marx at that particular time: it was the very moment at which the New Left movements of the end of the 1960s had failed, and the voices that loudly proclaimed the ‘end of Marxism’ were becoming more and more hegemonic. This was not new to me, since similar voices had already been heard at the beginning of the 1960s, precisely the situation within which I began to read Capital voraciously.
Thus, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility was an attempt to read Capital from the perspective of literary criticism. What I called here ‘the centre of possibility’ indicates a form of meaning or signification that is there despite not being explicitly specified in the text. In other words, it exists more in the ‘margins’ than in the actual ‘centre’, a mode of seeing and reading that I learned from the critical writings of Paul Valéry. But we can also discover this mode in Marx’s own words. For example, in 1858, he writes the following to Ferdinand Lassalle, with regard to his own doctoral dissertation, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature:
I am all the more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work in that about 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far easier philosopher, Epicurus – namely the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, was – as with Heraclitus – only implicitly present in his work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him.2
I tried to conceive of Marx’s ‘system’ in precisely the same way. For example, Capital was written to an extent on the basis of Hegel’s logical system, but its ‘true inner structure’ is ‘quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented’. I attempted to see the economic problems detailed in Capital from an entirely different viewpoint by trying to theorize commodity exchange from the perspective of linguistic exchange, or communication. At the time, I discovered a form of thought that resembled that of Marx in the theoretical linguistics of Saussure.
In his theory of the value-form at the outset of Capital, Marx grasped the value of the commodity within a relational system of commodities. In the same way, Saussure took language (langue) to be a synchronic, differential system of signifiers: the meaning of one word is determined in relation to words outside it. Just by changing one element within a synchronic system, it becomes an entirely different system. Thus, what we see as the continual diachronic transformation of language is in fact a discontinuous process of transformation from one synchronic system to another. This is more or less the foundational insight of what came to be called ‘structuralism’. However, what struck me above all in the work of Saussure was that he theorized precisely the exchange or communication that takes place in the interval between multiple systems.
For example, Saussure argued that if a word in one system is translated into another system, while its ‘meaning’ might be the same, it will possess a different ‘value’ insofar as its relation to other words will itself differ. From this point I took a set of clues as to the theorization of surplus value. In other words, we might as well say that surplus value constitutes a differential that emerges from the exchange between different systems. Classical political economy described merchant capital as the process of buying cheap and selling dear. However, it is not the case that merchants practise unequal exchange. A thing may be cheap within one synchronic system, and expensive in another. Although each thing itself emerged from equal exchange within each system, a differential between them is born from exchange. We cannot say that the merchants who acquired this differential were unjust or unfair. Generally speaking, this differential was born in the trade between territories remote from each other.
Adam Smith criticized merchant capital but endorsed the profits gained from industrial capital, on the basis that they were earned through equal exchange. Yet industrial capital also makes profits from the differential generated through this very ‘equal exchange’ itself. In other words, it gains surplus value from the differential of purchasing labour power in the labour market and selling what the labourer is forced to produce on the open market. Both merchant capital and industrial capital are based on equal exchange. The difference lies in the following point: in the case of merchant capital, the differential comes from the spatial difference between synchronic systems, while in the case of industrial capital, it comes from the temporal differentiation between synchronic systems. It is the differentiation of value systems on the basis of technical innovation, and it is for this reason that industrial capital leads towards ceaseless technical development. Obviously, capital is indifferent to the diverse ways it can gain surplus value and thereby increase itself; this is precisely why capital itself is essentially merchant capital, and why Marx is able to define the accumulation of capital with the general M–C–M′ formula.
I came to the above understanding through the various hints I took from Saussurean linguistics. But what I later recognized is that there was a basis beyond mere analogy for the introduction of Saussure into the reading of Capital that I undertook in the present work. Saussure himself began to conceive of synchronic systems in language by means of the analogy with economics, and specifically with the general equilibrium theory of the Swiss economist Léon Walras. Walras rejected the classical labour theory of value, conceiving of value from the perspective of marginal utility, in other words, the theory of the neoclassical school. This appears, at first glance, to be in direct opposition to Capital, but it is not at all the case. As Volume 3 demonstrates, Marx conceived of prices of production separately from labour values, and in his theory of rent posited the importance of marginal costs, following Ricardo, in opposition to the theory of equilibrium of classical political economy. In terms of the theory of rent, Ricardo clearly belonged to classical political economy, but, in contrast to the classical school’s concept of ‘equilibrium’, he brought in the concept of the ‘marginal’. There is an important relation here