To put it in terms of economics, Saussure’s thought not only overcame that of the classical school, but also that of the neoclassical. He did not just develop the notion of synchronic systems as a concept; he attempted to theorize the exchange (communication) between differing systems. In turn, Marx’s critique of political economy also implies not only a critique of classical political economy, but of the neoclassical school as well. In my view, this is precisely because Marx attempted to think the problems of a capitalist economy from the standpoint of exchange.
Since the original publication of Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility in 1973, I have attempted to fundamentally rethink the theoretical problem, in the broadest sense, of the exchange or communication with the other. This theoretical project passed from linguistics itself to the logical foundations of mathematics, and then to my philosophical Investigations.4 During this period, I did not really deal with or theoretically treat the work of Marx. When I started to work on Marx again, it was the beginning of the 1990s: the Soviet Union had imploded, and the US–Soviet Cold War period had come to an end. Around the world, there were loud proclamations about ‘the end of history’ and ‘the end of Marxism’. In the years to follow, historical materialism was not refuted, but it lost its authority. If we consider this, we might say that the moment when I began to write about Marx initially (1973) was precisely a moment of Marxism’s downfall, and the 1990s were much the same.
For historical materialism, the forces of production and the relations of production constitute the base, which determines the ideational-political superstructure. However, in this type of economic determinism, there is no genuine scope to elucidate the ‘superstructural’ role of the state, of religion, and so forth. The state or religion, however, possess a power or force that can be neither explained nor resolved by means of the economic base. Here, no matter how much the economic base is taken to be determinant for the ideational-political superstructure, it comes to be generally recognized as possessing a relative autonomy. Yet, as soon as we admit this, the economic base’s determining function is perhaps not negated, but certainly disappears as a point of emphasis. Thus, in some sense, the conception of the economic base has been in reality totally forgotten.
Right at the moment of the 1990s, I again took up the questions of historical materialism. I attempted to discover the ‘economic base’ of the historical social formation not in the sphere of production, but in exchange. In this sense, exchange is not something secondary to or derivative of production, but rather its prior condition of possibility. Already, in Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, I had theorized this expanded conception of exchange. However, even if the book touched on the realm of linguistics, I did not go beyond a thinking of the economic in its narrow sense. It was in the 1990s that I first came to locate the problem of exchange in matters that are not usually considered to be forms of exchange themselves.
Marcel Mauss saw in the exchange of gifts and reciprocity the basis of clan society. I referred to this as ‘mode of exchange A’, the introduction of the power that constructs community. Similarly, I theorized the formation of the state in terms of voluntary surrender and protection, or taxation and redistribution, what I called mode of exchange B. This is precisely where the state’s power – different from military force – comes from. And I referred to the sphere of ordinary commodity exchange as mode of exchange C, in a sense, the origin of the power of money.
To these three modes, we can add mode of exchange D, which attempts to sublate the others, like the power of God, which manifested in the form of universal religion in the age of the ancient empires. D is local, something that always remained within the later social formation; in the second half of the nineteenth century, it appeared in our world as communism. In his later years, Marx stressed the importance of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, arguing that communism was nothing other than ‘the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation’.5 To rephrase it, mode of exchange D is the return of mode of exchange A ‘in a higher form’.
Historically speaking, the social formation is the articulation of multiple modes of exchange. In primitive society, mode of exchange A is dominant. What we must be careful to point out is that, even at this stage, modes of exchange B and C already exist in nascent form. If B becomes dominant, the state is formed. In such a moment, however, A is not eliminated, but continues to exist in the form of the agrarian community subjugated by the force of the state and the landowner. On the other hand, C is expanded by means of the development of B. In other words, at the stage of the formation of multiple territorial states, the money economy emerged. In the ancient world empires, A and C are combined under the dominance of B.
Mode of exchange C rose to prominence in the social formation with the appearance of industrial capital, and this is precisely the process Marx sought to explicate in Capital. However, from the perspective of modes of exchange, we need to be careful to emphasize that, when industrial capital emerged, it also caused a transformation of the social formation as a whole, and as a combination of all of the modes of exchange. That is, A and B did not diminish, but were altered in form by the dominance of C. B took the form of the bourgeois state, while A formed the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. To put it simply in my terms, this constituted the triadic structure of capital-nation-state.
At the end of the 1990s, I proposed the above mode of analysis in my Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Once again, I did this by means of a specific way of reading the texts of Marx and Kant, which is to say I took a more or less literary-critical stance, and once again published it for the first time in a literary magazine in serial form. Subsequently I discarded this stance and began a process of systematically constructing my theoretical work as a whole. In fact, I abandoned literary criticism completely. In a sense, you could say that what I have attempted to do since that moment is to reconstruct Capital as a ‘guiding thread’, this time with its economic base not in modes of production, but in modes of exchange. The process culminated in The Structure of World History.6 In the present work, I speak from an understanding that might be seen to differ from that of Marx. But I would rather think that in fact, what I discovered there was precisely ‘the centre of possibility’ in Marx.
Tokyo, April 2019
Mankind inevitably sets itself only such
tasks as it is able to solve.1
– Marx
Man cannot discover himself by increasing his perception,
but only through the tasks he defines for himself.2
– Malraux
Essential thinkers always say the Same.3
– Heidegger
1
To deal with a thinker is to deal with his or her work. This may seem an obvious point, but, in fact, it is not. For example, in order to consider Marx, one should intensively read Capital. But people instead pass through certain external ideologies such as historical materialism or dialectical materialism, and merely read Capital in order to confirm these ideological presuppositions. This is not reading. What I mean by reading a work is, rather, to read neither with the presupposition of philosophies external to the work itself nor authorial intention. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is already widely considered a ‘classic’ in the history of political economy. This indicates two things. On the one hand, it suggests that Capital itself, along with the conceptual world and knowledge that it examines, is antiquated and out of date; on the other hand, as with the experience of reading Epicurus or Spinoza, reading the ‘classics’ is precisely already an experience of ignoring all external appearances, and, instead, reading toward the centre of possibility contained in the text.
In his letter of 31 May 1858 to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx states the following: