rob lucas

SOCIALISM AS
A R E G U L AT I V E I D E A?

jin karatanis Structure of World History is a book

so strange and ambitious, and of such striking theoretical
imagination, that any approach to it risks misrepresenting
its object.1 It is a bid to refound Marxist theory and historiography in general, unearthing the fundamental structures of human
society and tracing their transformations over time, from the earliest
nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to the present, in a sort of universal history. In doing so, Karatani offers to remedy a deficiency that he traces
back to Marx: the lack of an adequate concept of the state or the nation
and a reductivearguably bourgeoisunderstanding of the economic.
It is also a philosophical work, exemplifying Karatanis mode of Kantian
Marxian transcendental critique in its re-examination of the essential
structures of society. Finally, it is an attempt to revise the strategic orientation of his Transcritique (2003), anticipating how a simultaneous world
revolution might yet be possible.
Transcritique was essentially a meshing of heterogeneous themes that
had first been developed in articles for a literary magazine. This new
book, written since Karatanis retirement from Japanese academia in
2006, is an attempt at grand synthesis. His signature intellectual procedure over the years has been the striking reinterpretation, in clear,
accessible prose, of some small detail from a work of philosophy,
political economy or anthropology, which then precipitates a broader,
unanticipated shift of perspective. While The Structure of World History
attempts something more systematic in the way of theoretical and
historical construction, it bears the imprint of its authors distinctive
politico-cultural history.
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Born in 1941 in Amagasaki, in 1960 Karatani entered Tokyo University

at the height of popular struggles over the Japanus Security Treaty.
There he joined the Kysand (Communist League, or Bund), a left
split from the Communist Party with roots in the post-war student
movement, that had been playing a central role in the anti-Treaty protests. After the defeat of the campaign a majority turned left again,
to form a new proletarian vanguard party. Rejecting this course, in
1961 Karatani wrote a manifesto calling for a reorganization of the
Shagakud (Socialist Students League) as an association of activists,
free of any centralized partyan orientation to spontaneity he would
later recognize as anarchist.

Literary criticism
In these years, Karatani studied the work of heterodox Marxist economist
Kz Uno, counter-intuitively a core element of the Tokyo University
curriculum at the time. Unos theorization had focused particularly on
the formal structures of exchange, effectively treating merchant capital
as the key form of capital per sean emphasis that would pass into
Karatanis thinking, and take on a new importance there. However, after
a first degree in economics, he opted for postgraduate studies in literature, and it was in this area that he launched his intellectual career,
making his name as a critic with an award-winning essay on the Meiji
novelist Natsume Sseki.2 In these years too, he developed a close association with the later-famous burakumin [outcaste] novelist and essayist,
Kenji Nakagami, that would last until the latters early death in 1992: an
instance of the criticnovelist pairing that Akira Asada has characterized
as a standard feature of Japanese intellectual life.3 Karatanis cultural
turn was not necessarily a step back from politics, though; by Asadas
estimate, up to the end of the 1970s literary criticism was the main
arena in which Japanese intellectual and political debate occurred, more
engaged than other areas with a broader reading public. A continuation
Kjin Karatani, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of
Exchange, trans. Michael Bourdaghs, Durham and London 2014.
2
Though Karatani apparently denies any intentional reference, the nom de plume by
which he is known is also the exact title of a Sseki novel [kjin], translated as
The Wayfarer. See Bungaku to und2000-nen to 1960-nen no made (Literature
and Movement: Between 2000 and 1960), interview in Bungaku-kai, January 2001.
3
See kojinkaratani.com and Akira Asada, A Left Within the Place of Nothingness,
nlr 5, SeptOct 2000.
1

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of the work on Sseki, Man in Awe, was published in 1972, followed

three years later by Meaning as Illness, an investigation of the literary construction of sickness.
At this point Karatani was invited to lecture on Japanese literature at Yale,
where he formed connections with Paul de Man and Fredric Jameson.
The book that emerged from these lectures, Origins of Modern Japanese
Literature (1980), was lightly poststructuralist in manner, displaying a
somewhat Foucauldian or Nietzschean genealogical orientation. It examined the points of genesis, through the years in which Japan underwent
its breakneck conversion to industrial capitalism, of a number of new
cultural constructslandscape, interiority, confession, the childnot so
much under the mere influence of Western culture as spontaneously
produced in response to the social logics of a capitalist epoch. Another
book of the same year, Architecture as Metaphor, which drew on a series
of essays from the 1970s, was an avowedly deconstructionist project,
attempting to grapple with a will to architecture that had supposedly
been at the core of Western thought since Plato, and probing the question of structure in town planning, mathematics, language, philosophy,
and Marxian political economy.4
But Karatanis postmodern moment, unlike that of so many of his peers
internationally, did not amount to a straightforward retreat from the radicalism of the 1960s, or a rejection of Marxian theory tout court. Indeed,
he was distinctly ambivalent about any wholesale embrace of the postmodern, viewing this in a Japanese context as a kind of facile escapism
from the ineluctable nature of modernity.5 Looking back from 1992,
he doubted the supposed radicality of Western-style poststructuralism
in a culture which was, he thought, already constitutionally predisposed
to a certain deconstructionism.6 Here, it was more radical to engage
in positive, architectonic construction. The cognitive dissonance of his
dual position on these issues appears to have precipitated some sort
of crisis and reorientation, eventually to be thematized in the parallax
view of Transcritique.7
Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money, Cambridge, ma
1995.
5
Karatani, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, Durham and London 1993, p. 188.
6
Architecture as Metaphor, pp. xlivxlv; also, Transcritique, Cambridge, ma 2003, p. x.
7
See Karatani, Transcritique, p. xiv.
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Around that time, Karatani and Asada launched the quarterly journal
Critical Space, which aimed to draw together Japanese and Western critical traditions, with articles on culture, politics and philosophy.8 Then
in 2000, with others, they initiated the New Associationist Movement
(nam), amid deepening economic stagnation, and cynicism about the
party-political system after the Socialists had squandered their one
chance in government. Drawing its name from the lexicon of the early
socialist movement, associationism was a utopian programme that
sought to transcend capital, nation and stateseen as three mutuallyreinforcing moments of a Borromean knot9through the creation of
federated worker and consumer cooperatives, boycotts, and local currency schemes, which were supposed to sow the seeds of a post-capitalist
mode of production in the midst of capitalist society. Justification for
this orientation had come from Karatanis reading of Marxian political
economy, which viewed the moment of consumption as one of greater
leverage for workers than that of production, since capital has no direct
power to enforce the purchase of its products.
Transcritique can be read as the main theoretical statement of associationism, constructing a cosmopolitan, ethical Marxism strongly
coloured by Proudhonism. Its signal contribution was a novel philosophical constructthe parallax. This was a sort of intersection, critical
and antinomic, of which the central example was the relation into which
Karatani brought Kant and Marx. Kantian transcendental critique was
here refigured as transcritiquea mode of open-ended interrogation
within and across these conjunctions. In Kants first critique the objects
of such interrogationor retrospection as Karatani sometimes calls
itwere the transcendental conditions of possibility of experience; in
Capital they were the structures of bourgeois political economy. Here
the two were brought into alignment, in a series of analogical relations:
Ricardo and Bailey are to Marx as Leibniz and Hume are to Kant; money
tallies with transcendental apperception, and so on. Though often
grounded in striking scholarly insights, there was perhaps something
of the postmodernist, collaging approach to theory-production here, as
well as a lingering aroma of deconstructionism: was it not arbitrary to
See Asada, A Left Within the Place of Nothingness, p. 24 and the Critical Space
archive at kojinkaratani.com/criticalspace.
9
See Harry Harootunian, Out of Japan: The New Associationist Movement, Radical
Philosophy 108, JulyAugust 2001 for a summary of the nam book, Principles
Genri, Tokyo 2000.
8

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align a philosophical interrogation of the transcendental subject with

the critique of political economy? If Marx was ethicized, Karatani drove
Kant in a more emphatically social direction, to the extent that even core
concepts such as synthetic judgement and the thing-in-itself were reinterpreted in social terms. The general effect was to preserve a deliberate
dissonance even while pulling these distinct theoretical structures into
alignment, but if there was any overall methodological outcome, it was a
rather mysterious notion of transcendental critique as now social.

A systematic undertaking
It is such a critique that Karatani claims to be performing upon human
history in The Structure of World History, which first appeared in slightly
different form in Japan in 2006. His motive, he disarmingly explains
in the preface, is in large part political, spurred by the NorthSouth fissures he saw opening up with 9/11 and with Japans part in the us-led
occupation of Iraq, which he strongly opposed. Although he had always
disliked systematic undertakings and was never particularly good at
them, he found himself compelled to construct a theoretical system as
the only way to explicate the problem he was wrestling with: how to
go beyond themutually reinforcingtriplex of capitalnationstate.
This insistent hope, qualified but never extinguished by real-world conditions, drives the whole book. As against the sort of world history that
is ordinarily taken up by historians, this would be a transcendental critique of the relationships between the various basic modes of exchange,
involving a structural explication of three great shifts that have occurred
in world history.10
Karatanis major departure, from Transcritique to The Structure of World
History, is the attempt to think the objects of historical materialism
under the heading not of modes of production, but of modes of exchange.
In doing so, Karatani sees himself not as abandoning Marxafter all,
Capital begins with commodity exchange, and the labour process takes
hundreds of pages to enter the analysisbut, rather, extending his
procedure to explain the state and the nation, as well as the commodity,
as grounded in specific structures of exchange. His starting point is a
perceived weakness in the Marxian theory of the state: on his reading of
the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx
10

Karatani, Structure of World History, p. 28.

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takes the state to be a mere ideological phenomenon, on a par with art

or philosophy. Moreover, he argues, the division of economic base from
political superstructure arose from Marxs study of modern capitalist
society, and cannot be applied to pre-capitalist formations.11
The Structure of World History thus supplements Marx, as the emblematic
thinker of the structures of commodity exchange (here labelled mode of
exchange C), with a Hobbesian concept of the state as providing order
and security in exchange for obedience, or public works in exchange
for tax and tribute (mode B), plus a notion of reciprocal relations (mode
A), based on Marcel Mausss idea of the giftfor Karatani, the social
solidarities forged and obligations imposed through gift exchange characterize communal bonds, from clan societies to the contemporary
nation. Perhaps to fend off the obvious criticism that, logically, there can
be no exchange without some prior form of production, Karatanis first
chapter stretches the meaning of exchange, firstly to include the more
general term of intercourse, or Verkehr, as used by Marx and Engels in
The German Ideology and Moses Hess in Essence of Money (1845), and
then to take in metabolismHesss Stoffwechsel, or material exchange
thus incorporating an exchange relation with nature.
Actual social formations, Karatani argues, consist of complex combinations of these modes of exchange, differing in terms of which mode
takes the dominant role. In regular, repeated systems of social interaction, people give and take reciprocally (A), form consensual structures of
domination and exploitation (B), and exchange goods for money (C). It
seems that for Karatani, these mutually irreducible modes are the objective, elementary forms of sociality as such. In themselves too abstract to
directly characterize history itself, their variant combinations over time
can be used to describe and explain more concrete social structures. In
the case of the present, for example, mode C (commodity exchange),
has come to dominate B (the state), and, in combination, these two have
destroyed the traditional agrarian community (A)leading, Karatani
suggests, to its imaginary reconstitution as the nation.
The Structure of World History puts this schema to work, in combination
with modified world-systems theory frameworks, throughout the run of
In mental dialogue with Proudhon, Marx directly addressed the issue of a
historically-specific vs a transhistorical notion of the economy in the Grundrisse,
London 1973, pp. 4889.
11

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human history. Part One examines the tribal mini-systems glued together
through gift exchange (A) when humans first took up fixed settlements
after the last Ice Age; Part Two looks at the formation of world empires12
with the first emergence of the state (B); Part Three surveys the modern
world system, characterized by generalized commodity exchange (C). With
regard to the periodization of history, Karatani, like many others, is a trinitarian. But in speculating on what lies beyond he breaks the Aristotelian
rule and adds a fourth part to his narrative, a future in which capital and
state are overcome, and mode of exchange Awhich has been repressed
in capitalist societiesreturns in a higher dimension, released from
the oppressive obligations of traditional community. Karatani identifies
this speculative return of reciprocal exchange as mode D, apparently to
differentiate it from reactionary hankerings after pre-capitalist forms of
community (A), and to emphasize that it would not negate the liberty that
commodity exchange has brought. The closest precedent for this utopian
combination of liberty and reciprocityKaratanis ur-idealis actually
the nomadism of hunter-gatherer bands, before fixed settlement first
introduced ordered social systems of exchange; before even a principle of
reciprocal giving (mode A) came into place. Though Karatani insists his
approach is non-linear and non-teleological, this grand schema clearly
represents a return to a once-discredited genre: the philosophy of history.
We can anticipate that this will be a focus of controversy. But we would do
well to avoid hasty dismissals on such bases: could a speculative orientation to world revolution do without any philosophy of history?

The passing of nomadism

What of the universal history that Karatani constructs on this basis? The
first of the major shifts to be explained is that which establishes human
society as such. He opposes the notion of an agriculture-driven Neolithic
Revolution, which, in his view, involves a confusion of cause and effect.
Endorsing Masaki Nishidas sedentary revolution, he speculates that
the real shift here was the renunciation of nomadic existence. It cannot
simply be assumed that human beings are essentially sedentary dwellers; on the contrary, it seems clear that they disliked fixed settlement,
not least because it leads to personal conflict and discord within and
As in Wallerstein, world in such formulationsworld religion and world
economy are two other instancesdenotes a historically formed set of interrelationships functioning as a provisional totality, whatever its demographic and
territorial extent.
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without the band. In nomadic life, if things get bad, people simply move
onbut once a band takes up sedentary settlement, it has to come up
with ways of dealing with the conflicts and discord that increase in frequency as the population grows.13
Why then did hunter-gatherers adopt fixed settlement? This, Karatani
argues, was precipitated by post-Ice Age climatic shifts. Rising temperatures favoured the spread of forests, which squeezed large-game
populations; increasing seasonal variation disrupted foraging practices;
gradually, the indicated alternative became fishing, which, however, was
at odds with nomadic lifestyles, because of its reliance on equipment and
focus on particular sites such as river mouths. Such pressures, rather
than the agricultural possibilities of alluvial soil, explain the first riverside
encampments. Agriculture was then a consequence, rather than a cause,
of these settlements, as ecologies were transformed by the very presence
of human dwellings. With fixed settlement came the first possibilities for
accumulation, such as the smoking and storing of fish. At this stage, the
basic pooling of resources by nomadic bandsnot itself a full-fledged
mode of exchangestarted to give way to the reciprocities of clan society,
producing stratified structures, from family nuclei to inter-tribal relations. This is the beginning of Karatanis mode A, the original fall from
small-scale pooling. Indeed, the reciprocity of mode A can be rigorous.
Gift-giving itself, Karatani maintains, following Mauss, is the imposition
of an obligation: The gift exchanges of potlatch sometimes continue
until both communities completely exhaust their resources, and it is
the same with vendetta. Vendetta is abolished only when a higher-order
structure capable of sitting in judgement of crime arises.14 For Karatani,
it was through gift-giving that relations between clan societies were regulated, enabling trade, and ultimately the establishment of higher-order
communitiesalthough the endless warfare that is the concomitant of
this sort of reciprocity held off the emergence of the state.

The coming of the state

The second great historical shift in Karatanis scheme is the emergence of the state. Pitting himself against what he calls the dogma of
V. Gordon Childes Neolithic Revolution, he argues that the proto-city
and state actually preceded the wholesale turn to agriculture, emerging
with the extension of trade relationsthemselves held to be entirely
13

Structure of World History, pp. 423.

14

Structure of World History, p. 41.

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transhistoricalbetween riverside fishing settlements in tandem with

gift-giving. With systematic commodity trade, he concludes, there came
directly the tendency for one commodity to start playing the role of universal equivalent, or world money; and thus we have arrived already at
the abstract structures of commodity exchange that Marx analysed in
volume 1 of Capitaland even at credit, since monetary exchange always
harbours a speculative aspect in the salto mortale that the commodity
must make to realize itself in sale. Moreover, it was in its antediluvian
forms that the characteristics of mode C were most explicitly revealed,
so that it is in these that the essence of capital can best be grasped.15
Karatani agrees with Marx that trade was initially between communities
with internal commodity exchange a matter of taboorather than an
outcome of some essential Smithian propensity to truck and barter.
With the resultant meeting of peoples for trade, new gods and religious
forms arose as distinct peoples made Weberian federations by oath,
and proto-cities thus became a new kind of sacred centre. With the new
religious legitimation came king-priests capable of organizing people
into command-and-control structures for both military and labour tasks,
as well as enforcing contracts; and from this, Karatani believes, there
emerged the Hobbesian sovereign, born of a covenant extorted by fear.
But it would be a mistake to read this as an endogenous process. Rather,
the sovereign arrives as a conqueror, or at least as a response to the
threat of conquest, and the state emerges when reciprocity between communities is prohibited and a principle of no punishment without law
is established. For Karatanipicking up threads from Karl Wittfogels
refiguration of the Asiatic mode of productionit is in the large-scale
irrigation projects resulting from these transformations that we find the
first signs of the state proper, and thus finally a systematic turn to agriculture. Counter-intuitively, it was not the development of the community
that led to the rise of the state; to the contrary, it was only after the establishment of a centralized state that a new community would emerge.16
The first world empires were then constructed as other city-states or
communities were subordinated through conquest. In the process,
state religions became world religions; state languages became world
languages; moneyworld money; lawa supra-communal rule.
This led to new geopolitical patternings, for which Karatani adapts
a schema from Wittfogel: core, submargin, margin, and the out of
15

Structure of World History, p. 84.

16

Structure of World History, p. 73.

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sphere. Since world empires were dominated by the state (mode B),
other configurations of exchange relations tended to be generated only
in their submarginszones too distant from the core to be dominated or absorbed, yet not so far away as to be untouched by its regnant
civilizationwhere the social logics of world empire were more negotiable. Thus it was in Ancient Egypts submargins that Mediterranean trade
first began to flourish.
A chapter on belief systems describes the divine order of world religions
as paralleling that of the imperial state in relation to other powers
the solar cult of the pharaoh Akhenaten, for example, was produced
through his struggle with local priesthoods. In contrast, universal religions emerged in antagonism with the existing order, in places where
mode of exchange C had become the general rule. The key figure here
is the prophet or philosopher who criticizes the existing world religion
and attacks the priestly caste. For Karatani, such a figure is in structural
opposition to state and capital (modes B and C), due to the threat they
pose to communal reciprocities (mode A), and thus posits their speculative overcoming (mode D):
Mode of exchange D is born in reaction to the ambiguous effects of mode
of exchange C. The money economy severs people from the bonds of community and at the same time situates them in new class relations . . . In
other words, the money economy simultaneously brings about freedom
and inequality.17

Karatani identifies a historical alignment between early communist and

anarchist movements and the more radical poles of universal religions.
But as with Buddhism in the Tokugawa shogunate or Christianity in the
Roman Empire, radical-upstart universal religions, once co-opted by the
state, revert to the condition of humdrum world religions, with their
own priestly castes and legitimations of state violence.

Capital and state

The third major historical shift is the emergence of the modern world
system. For Karatani, it was the very lack of any centralized state in
feudal Europe, situated in the submargin of the Islamic world, that
enabled commodity exchange (mode C) to flourish in free cities. With
its spread, Englands feudal aristocracy became landlords; monarchs
17

Structure of World History, p. 148.

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intensified their efforts to promote trade with a view to swelling tax

revenues; state-funded bureaucracies and standing armies developed.
In Transcritique it was claimed that the essential form of the capitalist
state was revealed in mercantilism, and the same conviction is in evidence here: the modern state was wedded to commerce from its very
beginnings, Karatani maintains, sometimes speaking of capitalstate
to emphasize this conjunction. Nonetheless, he goes on, modern sovereigntywhich he seems to view as fundamentally Westphalianis to
be grasped according to a political logic essentially external in character:
Sovereign states were formed through a process of mutual recognition.
No higher entity, such as an empire, was recognized. In turn, this concept could legitimate conquest since it implied that countries lacking
a recognized sovereign state could therefore be ruled over by others.
Western powers would thus come to denounce imperial forms of rule,
offering sovereignty to subject peoples of existing world empires
Ottoman, Qing, Mughal.18 For Karatani, drawing on Carl Schmitt, it is
the exceptionparticularly warthat discloses the essence of the state,
as an entity distinct from government and people and defined primarily
in relation to other states. Gramscian and Foucauldian approaches are
on this view overly focused on internal systems of coercion and consent.
The relational foundation of the state has important implications for the
notion of popular sovereignty, and for any prospect of a revolution aiming to consign mode B to the past:
When the absolute monarchy is toppled, it appears as if the national people
become sovereign. But the idea of sovereignty is not something that can be
understood solely from within the interior of a nation. Sovereignty exists
first of all in relation to the outside. As a result, even if an absolute monarchy is overthrown, there is no change in the nature of sovereignty as it
exists in relation to other states.19

Karatani views nationality as a product of capitalstate. While agreeing

with Ernest Gellners grounding of nationalism in industrial society and
the formation of a standardized workforce, he insists that the nation,
understood as Benedict Andersons imagined community, is also a form
of resistance. He suggests that the break-up of the agrarian community,
under pressure from capitalstate, led to its reconstitution in imaginary
form as the nation. Rather than a sublation of traditional religious sentiment, this process actually freed religion to take on a more universal
18

Structure of World History, p. 168.

19

Structure of World History, p. 170.

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form. The nation, then, is not a stand-in for religion, but for the agrarian
community in which the latter was previously grounded. And just as
the political logic of sovereignty tended to proliferate after first emerging in Europe, so too with the nation-state: here the mechanism was
imperialism. Whereas the old world empires ruled over distinct subject
communities without much need to intervene in their internal life, the
imperialism of the modern capitalnationstate, committed as it was to
the expansion of the world market, could not help but do so. The resulting disruption of the colonized agrarian community produced impulses
towards national consciousness as a force of resistance.
Although his metahistorical schema effectively locates merchant capital
at the origins of agrarian society, to account for specifically industrial
capitalism it is necessary for Karatani to deal with the question of transition. He views the debate over this as conventionally polarized between
production-centred and exchange-centred claims: either producers
converted themselves into merchants, or merchants took hold of production. The Structure of World History aims to remain faithful to Marx
in presenting a way of thinking both aspects together. In this view, the
specificity of industrial capitalism lies not in the production process per
se, nor at the level of exchange, but rather in the double freedom of
labour-power: workers are free of means of production and free to sell
their labour. On this basis, industrial capital enabled a virtuous circle by
which workers in aggregate came to buy back the products of their own
labour; and given that the prices of necessary articles of consumption
ultimately determine wage levels, the operation of this circle meant that
greater aggregate surpluses could be won through increases in productivity. From this follow both the dynamism of industrial capitalism and
its inherently expansionist tendencies.
But how was this virtuous circle established in the first place? Here
Karatani ventures a sort of late developer argument: states emerging
once capitalism was already established at the level of the world market
had to force domestic industrial capital into being through active intervention. Thus, he argues, the British state, lagging behind Holland in
world trade, was compelled to step in with mercantilist policies favouring domestic industries. The manufactures from below that were
thereby stimulated happened to consist mainly of inexpensive everyday
goods that workers themselves would consume, rather than the luxuries
with which merchant capital was primarily concerned. At the same time

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the state intervened as a representative of collective capital, actively promoting the formation of a working class.

The knot tightens

Karatanis book concludes with a survey of oppositional traditions and a
programme for a new global politics. While resuming themes familiar
from Transcritique, he now accepts the implausibility of simply building
socialism from the level of the cooperative enterprise. Yet he also maintains both that the state cannot furnish an exit from capitalism (being
itself one-third of the Borromean knot), and that it cannot be abolished
from within (being fundamentally constituted by external, inter-state
relations). Karatanis vision of revolutionary aspirations foundering in
the ever-tightening capitalnationstate knot is reminiscent of the posthistorical excursions of the last century.20 Indeed, he partly endorses
Francis Fukuyamas appropriation of Kojve:
In my view, the situation that Fukuyama called the end of history means
that once this capitalnationstate form is realized, any subsequent fundamental revolution is impossible. The capitalnationstate circuit is
perfectly stable. Because people are not even aware that they are trapped
within its circuit, they mistakenly believe that they are making historical
progress when in fact they are simply spinning around in circles within it.21

The one thing that could dissolve these binds is a simultaneous world
revolution that would remove the external forces constituting the state.
If 1848 presented a model for this, Karatani argues that the possibility
of a new iteration dwindled in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
as the Borromean knot tightened and the interests of worker-consumers
became systemically entangled with those of capital, nation and state.
The October Revolution is dismissed as a mere coup dtat, a betrayal
of the revolution, given that Germany was unlikely to follow suithere
Karatani rolls out a Menshevik argument against attempts to leap over
historical stages. While socialists did deserve credit for taking on the
tasks of ethnic independence and social reform, he concludes, in such
contexts they could not help but play out social logics of capitalnation
state formation that had begun in Europe under absolutism. If Marxists,
Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, London and New
York 1992.
21
Karatani, Structure of World History, pp. xiiixiv.
20

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in this way, fell into a trap laid by the state, a comparable folly was the
lure of the nation: Georges Sorel and Japanese thinker Seikyo Gondo are
examples here.
From this sombre picture Karatani nonetheless summons up some
speculative optimism. It will still be necessary to pursue the programme
of associationism, he maintains, sowing seeds of a post-capitalist
economy in the present through cooperatives and boycotts. But without simultaneous world revolution these will ultimately fail, and given
real global divides it is implausible that any simple union of countermovements could be built. How, then, might the programme work?
If Kants kingdom of ends supplies the ethical model for Karatanis
mode D, his world republic gives a political onea world federation of
nations established with a view to bringing about an end to all hostilities. Improbably, Karatani places his hopes for world revolution in the
United Nations. The realization of a world system grounded in the principle of reciprocityof a world republicwill not be easy, he concludes:
Modes of exchange A, B, and C will remain stubborn presences. In other
words, the nation, state, and capital will all persist . . . Yet so long as they
exist, so too will mode of exchange D. No matter how it is denied or
repressed, it will always return. That is the very nature of what Kant called
a regulative Idea.22

Structure and strategy

Karatani has produced a book of remarkable imaginative scope, ranging
from hunter-gatherers to nineteenth-century mutualists, proto-cities to
world empires. In anthropology, he ably draws upon Mauss, Sahlins,
Testart, Lvi-Strauss, Polanyi, Clastres and Freud; in philosophy, upon
Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzsche, Aristotle and Schmitt, as well as the ubiquitous Kant; Marx, of course, is a consistent reference point. He has been
well served by his translator, Michael Bourdaghs, who renders Karatanis
argument in crisp and lucid prose. How then should The Structure of
World History be assessed?
We might start by remarking how little the book has to say about contemporary prospects for capitalbarely a paragraphcompared to the
22

Structure of World History, p. 307.

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extended treatment of the pre-capitalist world. The same could be said

of present global political conditions. Though it has retained overwhelming military superiority, we are informed that us power is in definitive
decline, and that we have therefore entered a new multi-power age of
imperialism, as in Lenins day, centred on Mode B, presaging an era of
crises and wars; but how and why this has happened remains unclear.
Social movements, too, go largely unexamined. Karatani suggests that
they remain imprisoned within capitalist nation-states and have little
prospect of global unification. The logic of such thinking seems to lead
towards a pessimism indifferent to the actual stakes of concrete struggles, insofar as these all play out on terrain already lost. Such despair
may be understandable, not least in the desert that Japan has become
since the turbulent 1960s. But it is another thing to make a virtue of
necessity, such that one further disables capacities for concrete action.
And a non-indifferent, sober assessment of the strategic terrain would
be a fair place to start.
But there are reasons to doubt whether this can be expected of a work
such as The Structure of World History. One of these is general, having
to do with the disposition of philosophy in the field of the political. The
other takes us to the heart of Karatanis intellectual purpose: his claim to
have identified the fundamental structures of human history and their
basic forms of articulationwhich are, after all, the necessary ground
of all rational strategic thought. There is perhaps a certain elective affinity between the inherently universalizing standpoint of philosophy and
a kind of anti-political orientationlessness with regard to determinate
conditions. Philosophers rarely, if at all, think philosophically and strategically at the same timeexcept, of course, when strategy itself is treated
in terms of abstracted generalities. Elsewhere, Karatani has been at pains
to show how the singularities identified by proper names are obfuscated
by logical generality, and can only ultimately be grasped in relation to a
fully social notion of the universal.23 There would be an irony here, then,
if what he might term the thisness of singular strategic conditions were
eclipsed by the generic structures of his philosophical history, such that
it simply could not be thought. A related diagnosis might be made of
the position of the historical itself in this book, which contains a great
deal more structure than history. Like politics, history is a domain of singularities and proper names. While these might justifiably be bracketed
23

Transcritique, pp. 10812, 1712.

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to draw out a transcendental structure underlying the flux of events, if

this structure is then re-employed to explain phenomena that are of irreducible singularity, the outcome may be a damaging reductionism, and
something of which Hegelian-style philosophical history has long stood
accused: logicizing reality.
Karatanis theorization of the nation as the symbolic displacement of
a lost agrarian community is a case in point. It is notable that in his
engagements with Gellner and Anderson, his emphasis falls on the most
abstract aspects of their thinking, while the comparative, complex and
multi-causal explanations that constitute the major part of their writings
about nations and nationalism fade from view. That national sentiment
involves a sense of fraternal reciprocity between people who lack a concrete relationship is true virtually by definition. But can the nationalisms
of Andersons creole pioneers, or of Gellners post-colonial Africa, for
example, really be explained as so many cases of the return of a repressed
reciprocity from the agrarian community in particular? In the most
abstract sense, a certain reciprocal mode of relation may well still apply
at the level of description, but it is not clear that this actually explains
anything, even at its own structural level. This points to a certain indeterminacy in Karatanis notion of structure. Following Hegel, he thinks that
underlying structure can be revealed through historical repetition.24 For
example, the recurrence of demagogic leadership in times of political
crisis, in figures such as Louis-Napolon, reveals essential truths about
the nature of the political. A structural mode of causation may then legitimately be attributed to the forms that are uncovered in this way, such
that one can posit the existence and operation of structures behind and
through the ebb and flow of events. But there is a risk that structures
grasped in this way are actually illusoryperceptual figments that have
no objective existence. In such cases, positing their operation in events
will amount to a sort of supernaturalism.

Questions of causation
Karatanis peculiarly social reading of Kant in Transcritique has been noted;
the concept of transcendental structure as he deploys it here involves
an operation of another kind. The notion of a universal and ineluctable
condition is now transposed from reason to history, but, in that move
24

Karatani, History and Repetition, New York 2011, p. 20.

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which is precisely not parallelcomes to confront a new problem: what

is the causal status of these transcendental structures in the totality of
the historical process? Here is a critical lacuna in Karatanis account.
Modes of exchange, if they really are Karatanis kind of transcendental
structure, are essentially historyless, and their application as explanatory
resources to historically specific forms appears fraught with difficulty.
Capital and state as modes of exchange become passe-partouts for the
whole of history, while the specificities of social formations risk being
either identified with an elusive notion of structure or simply occulted.
It is telling, moreover, that Karatanis causal factors are all exogenous:
environmental changes drive the establishment of the first settlements;
external conquerors (from where?) lead to the formation of the first
states; external trade brings about early capitalism; the British need for
protection against Dutch mercantile capitalism (why Dutch?) creates
industrial capitalism. If the basic structures tend towards historylessness, then the motive forces of history must come from elsewhere. The
absence of endogenous modes of causation may help to forestall wellworn accusations of teleologism and so on, but the cost of this move
seems to be a way of thinking about history in which the specifically
historical itself cannot properly be cognized.
One obvious test of the theory would be to ask: how convincing are
Karatanis accounts of the great shifts in human history to date? On the
evidence of his presentation, it is, to say the least, an open question.
That his theses are dependent on the original work of others is unexceptionable in itself; what gives pause is that his engagement with these
bodies of scholarship can be remote and sometimes damagingly selective.25 Karatani miniaturizes his key claims in bold aphoristic form: We
cannot conclude that the state form arose out of agriculture. If anything,
In marked contrast to Karatanis evident philosophical and anthropological erudition, historianssave for cursory homages to Bloch and Braudelare strikingly
absent. There is no dialogue with a major project of comparable scope in historical
sociology, Michael Manns Sources of Social Power. There is no engagement with
William McNeil or Jared Diamond. The Asiatic mode of production is effectively
taken on without reference to the chequered history of this concept. Karatani
appears to be unaware of the Brenner debate or of the development of capitalist
agriculture in Britain prior to the Industrial Revolution. The historiographical
debates about the latter are ignored, as are those around Pomeranzs work on the
Great Divergence.
25

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the reverse is true: agriculture began from the state.26 The probable
reality is less dramatic than Childes Neolithic Revolution, and surely
less so than this proffered reversal. However enlivening the manner,
there is room to doubt whether such punctual antitheses, seeming to
court incredulity, best capture the dynamic of historical processes that
unfolded irregularly across vast spaces over many hundreds of years.
Inevitably, in the absence of relevant records, some of the historical
theses he advances or adopts as his own are thought experiments
a recurring phrase that conveys something of the quality of the book
as a whole.
As Karatani makes clear in his opening sentence, The Structure of World
History is a book with a political mission, and it is in this light that
his historical construction should be read. The emergence, in epochal
succession, of the societal forms defined by the gift, the state and the
commodity gives history its shape. But historys motive power is something older and apparently inextinguishable. This is the will to freedom
and to the equitable relations that true liberty promotesa staple of
nomadic life that would persist, in one guise or another, throughout the
history to come. It was this ancestral endowment, preserved amidst the
changed conditions of settled existence, that supported the principle
of reciprocity in clan society; and it was in turn this drive that operatedwith the force of a Freudian return of the repressed, Karatani
would sayto inhibit and delay the emergence of emperors and their
bureaucracies. The power of the gift validated commodity exchange, as
in the practice of kula; and capitalism, the final freeing of the commodity, took off in Europe, where dreams of a world-empire state had come
to nothing. Today, the will to freedom sustains the idea of mode D. So,
Karatanis history seems to have an endogenous mover after all, and
that in an unexpectedly strong and paradoxical sense: it is an unvarying
psychic drive.
The occultation of endogenous structural factors in Karatanis thinking
is perhaps related to that of the moment of production itself, which of
course must temporally precede that of exchange, and always exists in
some determinate form which is not lacking in structural consequences.
A reasonable defence for the focus on modes of exchange might be that
it is at this level that specifically social forms can really be grasped in
26

Structure of World History, p. 59.

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their determinacy, and that such forms retroactively shape the moment
of production itself. Capital would be nothing without commodity
exchange; in terms of social ontologyrather than material-technical
factors or temporal orderthe forms of exchange relations may be
deemed to have a certain priority, at least in social formations dominated
by the capitalist mode of production.27 But what, then, of formations
centred on non-alienable property, which would seem by definition to
be unthinkable under the sign of exchange? Can the diversity of feudal
production relations be adequately characterized in terms of the submission for protection of Karatanis mode B? Marxs own abstract schemas
of forms which precede capitalist production in the Grundrisse seem
capable of grasping subtle modulations in the social structures of landholding which remain obscure if viewed under the heading of exchange.
Overall, it appears, a polemical positioning on these issues has led to
overcompensation in the opposite direction, such that the moment of
production is rarely even mentioned, let alone analysed, beyond a qualified concession to Testarts belief that smoked fish may have been the
first form of accumulated wealth.

Mode D?
It is notable that the mode D of generalized reciprocity, with which
Karatanis philosophy of history is brought to term, is a regulative Idea
that, while necessary, can never fully be realized. Thus, the prospect of
simultaneous world revolution dwindles into a familiar bifocal scheme:
in the far distance, a compelling historical image; closer to the present,
a nave vision of world peace-making held within the narrow horizon of
the existing global order. The explanation for Karatanis appeal to the un
to make the world revolutionthe un whose founding acts included
handing over the better part of Palestine to Zionism in 1947, in flagrant
disregard for population ratios of Jews and Arabs on the ground, and
backing the 1950 us war on Korea, the turning point in Japans conservative restoration; the un which provided cover for Japans role in the
occupation of Iraq, opposition to which was this books starting point
can only lie in his highly personal form of Kantian cosmopolitanism.
Elsewhere, Karatani has tried to differentiate this from Habermass
usage of the oracle of Koenigsberg to support the bombardment of
For an exceptionally lucid exploration of thinking along these lines, see Chris
Arthurs work, especially The New Dialectic and Marxs Capital, Leiden 2004.
27

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Yugoslavia.28 But Habermas is closer to the truth of Perpetual Peace

and Idea for a Universal History, in which Kant explained that Man is
an animal who needs a master (Herder famously retorted: The man
who needs a master is an animal) and that rebellion against tyranny is
in the highest degree wrong.29 There are certainly tensions in Kants
thinkingindecision, mere inconsistency, or the contortions of a dance
with the censorsthat can enable the drawing of contradictory political
conclusions. Scholarly acknowledgement of these is a prerequisite for
any serious political engagement with his thought. But Karatani tends
towards a simpler edulcoration in his eagerness to claim Kant as the
prophet of a post-capitalist utopia.
Where does all this leave Karatanis postulated mode D? A reasonable
conclusion here might well be that we could better do without such
regulative Ideas. Yet Karatani thinks we cannot, for the compulsion
to project some such redemptive meaning onto historyand specifically to postulate a higher return to a state of reciprocity, beyond capital
and stateis an inescapable transcendental illusion without which we
would slip into schizophrenia. What could this mean? Schizophrenia,
in one influential account of the condition, is produced by a double
bind of conflicting logical demands, which compels the formation of
a delusional system in which these can be resolved. The simultaneous
world revolution may be said to perform a similar function in Karatanis
philosophy. However, since it is a pure speculation rather than a claim
about reality, it cannot be dismissed as mere delusion. If, for Karatani,
the complete denial of meaning in history would amount to a lapse
into schizophrenia, this may be because without such structural displacements into speculation the present would have to be interpreted
delusionally. The opposed demands that would here compel either delusion or its displacement into speculation are the conflicting logics of
elementary forms of sociality, or modes of exchange. And since modes
B and C, state and capital, always come together in some relatively noncontradictory combination, the real conflict is always between them and
mode A, or the reciprocity of the gift, to which human society in some
sense always wants to return. Thus it is essentially the experience of a
double bind between an elementary reciprocity and capitalstate social
logics that produces the stark choice between a deluded, schizophrenic
28
29

Karatani, Transcritique, p. 317 fn. 42.

Immanuel Kant, Political Writings, Cambridge 1970, p. 126.

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reading of the worldin which this key contradiction of sociality is

deniedand one that acknowledges it fully, but in order to do so must
project its speculative dissolution.
But an idea of revolution that has become the backstop of thinking that
would otherwise be delusional is a long way from the sort that can be the
object of a politics more serious than Karatanis suggestions about the
un. What seems to have happened here is a sort of ethicization of socialist politics: it is Kants moral lawnot within me, but within human
sociality as such. It may well be that Karatanis simultaneous world revolution simply cannot constitute a real object of political action, at least
in present conditions. But if the ethical subject is to be more than a
rather pious individual, it will have to engage in another kind of speculation: that belonging to the salto mortale of political action. Such action is
always speculative, since its outcomes cannot be known in advance. But
it is ultimately as ineluctable as any of Karatanis transcendental structures, and the weighing of its possibilities is the work of strategy.