of economics at Tokyo University, and immediately released almost a decade of theoretical work that had been impossible to publish under the fascist system – Theory of Value (Kachiron, 1947), Prolegomena to the Agrarian Question (Nōgyō mondai joron, 1947), Introduction to ‘Capital’ (Shihonron nyūmon, 1948), and the first series of articles that would later form his two-volume Principles of Political Economy (Keizai genron, 1950).
Uno is best known for his reschematization and reformulation of Marx’s economic thought, exemplified by Capital, into a highly formalized, purified system designed to create a ‘scientific’ political economy on par with the other social sciences coming to the fore in the immediate postwar period, and it is this work that should be seen as a clear background to Karatani’s text. The most basic distinguishing methodological feature of Uno’s system, the theory of three levels of analysis or sandankairon, is a tripartite division of the practice of theory, and represents an effort to construct a general economic meta-epistemology capable of dealing with the primary contradictions of not only the conjuncture of Japanese capitalism (and the constant debate within Japanese Marxism on its origins and development), but also the theoretical concerns internal to Marxian economics. Structurally, Uno proposes three levels of analysis: 1) the level of pure theory or ‘principles’ (genriron), the logic of capital made rigorously theorizable by allowing its tendency to finally commodify itself, forming a pure interiority expressed as a thought-experiment; 2) the level of the theory of stages (dankairon), wherein the logic of a pure capitalism encounters its own necessity to develop historically and in the world, through specific regimes of accumulation – liberalist, mercantilist, imperialist; and 3) the level of analysis of the contemporary situation or conjuncture (genjō bunseki).
What this division accomplishes in its separation of a level of ‘pure theory’ or ‘principles’ is an attempt to draw closer to the possibility of a Marxist logic – Uno often emphasized the importance of understanding Lenin’s famous argument in the Philosophical Notebooks that ‘If Marx did not leave behind him a “Logic” [with a capital letter], he did leave the logic of Capital.’5 By attempting to develop to the furthest extent possible the Logic inherent in Capital, Uno also exposed or ran up against the limits of this logic, the historical contamination that is always paradoxically included in the thought-experiment of a ‘purely capitalist society’. Although most work on Uno over the last fifty years has focused on his methodology in terms of this tripartite division of theoretical practice, we might rather say that the essence or truly critical moment in Uno’s work lies elsewhere, in a short phrase that he considered the ‘nucleus’ or theoretical centre of his work, one that is constantly returning in his writing to undermine the smooth or ‘pure’ logic of Capital, or rather, one that expresses the logical problem for the dynamics of capitalism around the labour power commodity.
On a worldwide level, analysis of Uno’s work has almost always agreed on its supposedly ‘pure’ character – that is, he is widely considered the most esoteric, purely theoretical, excessively formalistic and scholastic figure in the Marxian analysis of value; but I argue that this is not at all the case. In itself, Uno’s assertion that Marx’s work must be reconstructed as a theory of principle – a theory of a relatively pure capitalism or one that has developed in the direction of the principles of the capital-relation itself – is not particularly controversial. After all, Marx himself declared that the capitalism under analysis in Capital was not exactly synonymous with English capitalist development as such but rather constituted an ‘ideal average’ of the capitalist mode of production:
In our description of how production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, we leave aside the manner in which the interrelations, due to the world market, its conjunctures, movements of market prices, periods of credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. We leave this aside because the actual movement of competition belongs beyond our scope, and we need present only the inner organisation of the capitalist mode of production, in its ideal average, as it were [nur die innere Organisation der kapitalistischen Produktionsweise, sozusagen in ihrem idealen Durchschnitt].6
In attempting to treat as much as possible the inner dynamics of this ideal ‘average’ or ‘cross-section’ (Durchschnitt) of capital’s logical drive, Uno makes a wager on the possibility of a certain excessive formalism as the only means available to us to ‘express’ the abstraction of the circuit-process of capital. But, in the most theoretically innovative aspect of his work, he always undercuts or contaminates the purity of this circuit by drawing our attention to one decisive phrase that concentrates within it the density of politics. This is what Uno referred to with his famous and enigmatic phrase ‘the impasse or (im)possibility of the commodification of labour power’ (rōdōryoku shōhinka no ‘muri’).7 What he means by this simply – although it is not at all a ‘simple’ point – is that the starting-point of the systematic logic of political economy must always ‘suppose’ (setzen) something entirely irrational as the ground of the rationality of the historical process, which will then be ‘retrojected’ back onto the moment of origin in order to once again ‘presuppose’ (voraussetzen) it as if it were rational. Uno once wrote:
A commodity economy inherently possesses an impossibility or impasse (muri) insofar as it treats relations among human beings as relations among things, but it is paradoxically the fact that this impossibility (muri) has developed as a form capable of ordering the totality of society that in turn renders possible our own theoretical systematisation of its motion.8
In turn, in the present text, Karatani writes:
In capitalist society, labour power becomes a commodity. Strictly speaking, it is not labour power that becomes a commodity, but the concept of labour power itself – distinct from labour – is something that already comes from the analysis of the commodity form. That labour power could be a commodity is nothing more than a tautology; what is crucial is that the owner of labour power appeared historically.
Often accused of prioritizing exchange over the sphere of production, Karatani is simply extending and developing in part an insight that stems from Marx himself and that intervenes in a sense well before such a division could be enacted. ‘Commodities’, Marx reminds us, ‘cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians (Hütern), who are the possessors of commodities (Warenbesitzern)’9 This point is crucial for us to consider when we attempt to take up one of the essential points of Karatani’s work: his emphasis on the set of questions contained not strictly within the sphere of production, but those contained as it were, in the parallax between circulation and production. In order to understand the position of the seller and buyer of labour power in the market, we require, in certain senses, a reversal of the typical schema through which we read Marx. We often presuppose or allow ourselves to imagine a hierarchy of spheres, in which the circulation-surface is subtended by the ‘hidden abode of production’. But this too can be a merely mystifying point unless we consider the problem of what is given or what must be presupposed in the production process: precisely the availability of labour power, that archi-commodity at the origin of the entire social landscape, without which we remain in a process of infinite referral between instances to seal the basic gap that it represents. It is precisely for this reason that we must remember Marx’s point: ‘It is … impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation.’10
Karatani’s intervention is not only an intervention into the logic of capital, it is an intervention in history, and in politics, one that in some sense also gave way to the rebirth of Marxist theoretical analysis in the Japanese situation, now linked to a whole anti-humanist tradition that was being developed globally through the 70s. In the first afterword, written in 1978, to the republished Japanese edition