Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
To cite this article: Gavin Walker (2011) POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION IN MARXIST
HISTORIOGRAPHY, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 13:1, 120-137, DOI:
10.1080/1369801X.2011.545583
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content)
contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our
licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or
suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication
are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &
Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently
verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or
arising out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial
or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use
can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
P O S T C O L O N I A L I T Y A N D T H E N AT I O N A L
QUESTION IN MARXIST
HISTORIOGRAPHY
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
Gavin Walker
Cornell University, USA
................
capitalist In examining the relation between Marxist historiography and the theoretical
development trajectories of postcolonial studies, the problem posed in Marxist theory under
the name of the national question remains decisive. This question is always
Japanese emerging around the tensions generated between the logic of capital, the purified
Marxism
circuit-process of capitals self-unfolding, and the local conditions of its
Marxist deployment, typically the modern form of the nation-state. I argue that the
historiography history of the prewar debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism, which was
itself the fundamental locus for the development of Marxist historiography and
nation-state theory in Japan, can be a suggestive source of clues for the explication of this
relation. In examining the theoretical problems that inhere in this historical
postcolonial
studies
moment, I attempt to argue that the national question in Marxist theory can be
forcefully renewed through a parallax movement with the question of the
postcolonial, that is, the irreversibility of the history of colonialism inscribed in
the form of the nation-state. In other words, the national question is not only a
question of the levels and stages of capitalist development in given, apparently
stable areas; it is also the question of how the logic of capital relates to the
historico-epistemological production of the national itself.
................
......................................................................................
interventions Vol. 13(1) 120137 (ISSN 1369-801X print/1469-929X online)
Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2011.545583
........................
PO STCOLON IALITY AND THE NATIONAL QU ESTION IN M ARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Gavin Walker
121
went hand-in-hand with the emergence of colonies, the slave trade, and the
enclosure of newly discovered territories, examining in particular the
politicaleconomic consequences of policies such as E. G. Wakefields theory
of systematic colonization. Through Marxs reading strategy, therefore, we
can see that the primitive or original accumulation which forms the basic
presupposition on which capitals own self-movement can unfold is also an
expression of the formation of the modern international system of nation-
states in gestation. As we know today, it is furthermore in the form of the
colony that we find the laboratory in which the techniques of violence,
domination and subjugation characteristic of the management of the modern
nation-state were developed and perfected. Numerous and divergent studies
have shown that the centrality of the police-function, the role of systematic
hygiene, and techniques of government to manage, classify and analyse the
population all characteristic of most contemporary nation-states today
were previously key elements of colonial rule. Therefore, Marxs analysis of
capitals emergence is simultaneously closely bound up with the general form
of colonial relations of power, and for us today, the continuum between these
two polarities remains in the form of the continuance of the nation-state, in
whose very existence is inscribed the postcolonial as a condition, that is, the
fact of the irreversibility of the history of colonialism, which is irredeemably
located within the form of the nation-state itself. Now, as Gayatri Spivak has
emphasized, capitalism is something like the pharmakon of Marxism (Spivak
1999: 83), because Marxist analysis effects its own self-development in a
complex parallax with the unfolding of capitals own power of abstraction.
We could also reformulate this by beginning from the assertion that, in a
similar form of relation, the colony is the pharmakon of the nation-state.
Let me illustrate this doubled relation further. As Robert Young has
argued, postcolonial theory is not exactly a theory in the strong sense, but
rather a set of conceptual resources (2001: 64) that allow us to conceive
not only of the historical question posed by the colony, but also those forms
of resistance to its domination. Thus, I would like to pose a specific form of
connection between this set of conceptual resources and the history of
Marxist theory itself, as a question not of complementarity, but of mutual
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 13 :1 122
.........................
imbrication. In other words, in my view, the object of postcolonial studies,
which analyses the contemporary and modern relations of power in terms of
the irreversible historical fact of imperialism, is a theoretical framework
which shares with Marxist theory the analysis of the historical presupposi-
tions for the becoming of the network of organized social forces which
supports the contemporary order. Just as labours expropriation, the
violence of its capture, is erased by plugging up the ontological gap in
capitals smooth circuit-process through the semblance of labour power, so
too, the nation-states postcolonial condition always attempts to erase the
traces and continuities of colonial violence by means of its own refined
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
Marxist theory itself historically accounted for the formation of the local,
how has theory itself been operationalized in relation to this translation of
translatability itself?
Although I acknowledge that these two aspects movement and theory
cannot necessarily be so easily dissociated, there is, in my view, an important
reason for provisionally doing so. That is, from certain perspectives, the
question of the postcolonial is frequently treated as a supplement or
collateral question to that of capitalism as a whole. But I would rather
attempt to read the postcolonial in direct relation to, as an inseparable
element of, capitals own drive to ceaselessly expand its supposedly smooth
circuit-process of accumulation everywhere. That is, the postcolonial as the
name for the condition which indicates the irreversibility of the history of
imperialism and the inscription of this condition into the nation-state
should not be considered merely as a moment of friction subsumed under
the massive one of capitals accumulation process. Rather, (post)coloniality
and capitals own drive are phenomenal expressions of the same broad
operation of power. Therefore, it is not only in the empirical history of
resistances to colonial rule that we can locate the question of Marxism itself,
but also in relation to how capital itself tends to organize its maturation
process, its life-cycle, through such forms as empire, colony, nation and
state. That is, what would it mean to think the relation of the postcolonial
and Marxist theory from the question of this pharmakon that we have
rephrased from Spivaks usage?
Marxism as a theoretical framework focuses in general not on the moral
or ideological development of a certain formation (although it does not
ignore these factors either), but rather focuses generally on the real
movement of history, and specifically on the analysis of the economically
given social period to clarify its balance of forces. Therefore, Marxism as a
form of thought and as a method of enquiry is always pegged to the
development of capitalism itself, to the shifts and changes in its modality of
reproduction and expansion. Consequently, it is a fact that the decisive
question in every national situation whether colonial, semi-colonial,
imperial and so forth for Marxists has always been the theoretical
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 13 :1 124
.........................
clarification of the particular stage or process of capitalism that is occurring.
Without such a clarification, a party formation could never hope to
effectively orient its practical measures and organizational tactics with the
aim of overthrowing the organized social forces that sustain the given
situation. But capitalism itself does not develop in a vacuum. It does not
develop on a higher order of being where concrete historical practices play
no part. Rather, capitalism develops its internal logic while heterogeneous
practices, operations and functions emerge and submerge throughout its
form. Thus, the theoretical clarification of the question of what stage of
capitalist development is occurring at a given moment is one that is closely
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
fully realized modern state, but still overwhelmed with feudal remnants in
the form of parasitic landlordism and so forth, thus initiating the beginnings
of the split which would come to a head with the 32 Thesis. As the major
developed country relative to its neighbouring states and primary im-
perialist power in East Asia, the Comintern considered Japan an important
and pivotal target for the revolutionary project, but in the wake of the 27
Thesis, which emphasized the democractic revolution as an essential
precursor to the socialist transition, the question thus emerged: was Japanese
capitalism ready for socialist revolution in the conditions on the ground,
was it possible to discover the revolutionary subject of this process?
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
faction. For him, the only way to truly and effectively articulate the political
consequence of theory, the proletarian strategy, was to focus on the
particularity (tokushusei) of Japanese capitalist development. The reason
for this, Noro claimed, was that, without understanding the dominated
(hishihaiteki) mode of production (i.e. the agrarian semi-feudal structure of
the countryside), one could not understand the particular way in which the
development of the productive forces had necessitated a turn to imperialism.
This basic logic could be understood as the backbone of the position staked
out throughout the volumes of the Lectures.
However, the theoretical centrepiece was probably Yamada Moritaros
Nihon shihonshugi bunseki (Analysis of Japanese Capitalism), which was
later published as a stand-alone volume in 1934. Yamada essentially refined
and developed this argument made by Noro for him, and by extension for
most of the Koza faction and indeed, largely for the JCP as a whole, the
Japanese social formation was characterized by a fixed and determined
form or model (kata), that is, semi-feudal, semi-serfdom (han-hokenteki
han-nodosei) derived from the basic economic form, semi-serf petty sub-
sistence cultivation (han-reino reisai kosaku) in the rural village (Yamada
1984). Consequently, the primary contradiction in the conjuncture was
understood to be the issue of land, land ownership and the semi-feudal class
role of the landlord stratum. This stratum consisted of a pyramid, at the top
of which was the emperor-system, itself a kind of macro-reflection of the
landlord system and its feudal ideology as a whole. This critique of the
emperor-system was an essential aspect of the Koza factions theoretical and
political line: attacking the emperor-system was an absolutely necessary
mass democratic task precisely because the backwardness of the country-
side and in particular the rural village structure, with its feudal ideology,
total impoverishment, overpopulation and low political consciousness was
for him the vital supporting network for absolutism, militarism and feudal
remnants in political life.
Yamadas argument essentially follows this basic structure: the process of
establishment of industrial capital in Japan (1890s1900s) was not something
characterized by the development of free labour and the free competition of
........................
PO STCOLON IALITY AND THE NATIONAL QU ESTION IN M ARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Gavin Walker
127
of Japanese capitalism in its internal emergence. For Hattori, the basis of the
form of Japanese capitalism could be seen in the period of the 1840s1890s,
and the development of a type of manufacture that is, a period of early
development of labour markets through an expanded division of labour in
tasks (often handicrafts), but without a dramatic change in the technical
basis of production. Hattori saw in this a double ambivalence on the one
hand, such an organization contains the spectre of change (i.e. market-
ization, penetration of the space of work by a primitive form of capital,
gradual transition towards the wage relation, and so on), while on the other
hand it remains wedded to the various embodiments of feudal and absolutist
social characteristics.
Although there are numerous necessary reading strategies of these texts
that I cannot adequately cover here, I want simply to enquire into this
remnant structure of Japanese capitalism put forward in the various forms
deployed by thinkers articulating the historiographical positions of the Koza
faction. Where does this discourse stem from? Certainly, this historical logic
is by no means unique to the Japanese situation. Before these thinkers
developed this question of the feudal remnant (hokenteki zanshi; hokensei
no zansonbutsu), this question of the remnants or survivals of feudalism was
a critical point of debate and contention within the international communist
movement. It was an essential problem that Marx considered in his late work
of the 1870s, and a problem that characterized the discussions of Lenin and
others on the development of capitalism in Russia (see Shanin 1983). Slightly
later, in the mid-to-late 1920s, before Yamada and others theorized this
specific structure of backwardness, the question of feudal survivals was the
distinguishing feature of Stalins discussions of the prospects of the revo-
lutionary movement in China, as well as the central point around which his
line was distinguished from that of Radek, in a number of texts such as his
1927 Talks with Students of the Sun Yat-Sen University. The first question
posed by the students to Stalin was precisely this one: was the Chinese social
formation experiencing the transition to capitalism, the imperialist entry and
capitalization of the existing social relation, or was something completely
different occurring? Was Radek correct to emphasize the role of global
........................
PO STCOLON IALITY AND THE NATIONAL QU ESTION IN M ARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Gavin Walker
131
conceal and erase this fact. One of the dramatic failings of the historical
analysis of the Marxist revolutionary project has been precisely this
inaccurate schematism according to which capitalthe universal, while
local conditionsparticular.
Marxs own project does not endorse this logic in the least, but rather
emphasizes that capital grafts itself divergently onto various singularities and
re-computes them. Therefore, the specific conditions which obtain in a
given space should be understood as peculiar in the sense of singular and
not as deviant from something supposedly central or normal: capital
names a relation in which it posits its own deviances. That is, capitalism is
2 O uchi Tsutomu, always mobilizing the particular, not in opposition to the universal, but as
extending the work part of the same movement: capitalism is always something like a continuity
of Uno Kozo,
incisively points out in discontinuity. Therefore, the world of particularities envisaged in a
that paradoxically, global schema of various national forms of development and their temporal
the most apparently position can never be a tool for radical politics: this schematic is capitals
feudal processes in
rural exploitation own blueprint for its expansion as a continuity in discontinuity.2
were not holdovers In general, what is behind this series of problems? The question of the
of feudal power or feudal remnant is not simply a way of talking about the rather obvious
restraints on
capitals overlapping features of unevenness, asymmetricallity or contingency in the
development, but development of modernity it goes without saying that such feudal
rather structural remnants are always present in capitalist transition. Certain Marxist
elements of Japanese
capitalism itself theoreticians, in particular Rosa Luxemburg, argued that primitive accumu-
(O uchi 1961: 284). lation was not a period, as Marx described it, but rather an ongoing and
That is, he shows endless process of violence against and expropriation of the exterior. But in
clearly that
backwardness is not the prewar Marxist discourse in the Japanese context (and in many other
something local or situations), the feudal remnant is understood first and foremost as a
eternal; rather, it is constraint, a material hindrance on full participation in the world as a
precisely that capital
demands the schema. It is essentially a stand-in term for a remnant ethnos, belonging or
formation of an kinship relations in short, the traces of Gemeinschaft overlapping the
overall schema of emergence of Gesellschaft and functions primarily to outline an image of
particularity in order
to effect its own the national community, thereby explaining its position in the international
development. order.
PO STCOLON IALITY AND THE NATIONAL QU ESTION IN M ARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Gavin Walker
........................
133
But as an analytic device and heuristic lever, the entire structure of the
discourse of the feudal remnant is thus reliant on the givenness and
naturality of the form of the nation-state. That is, the national form is
presumed to be something whose characteristics were concretized and fixed
in antiquity, forms that continue to overdetermine the historicity of capitals
entry into the situation. But we must always confront the fact that, roughly
speaking, the national community as a form is broadly co-emergent with
capitals world deployment. In other words, the world as a systematic
generality composed of a network of specificities (nation-states) is a schema
which capitalist development has historically utilized in order to deploy itself
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
(we should always understand this role of the ongoing and repeating
formation and maintenance process of the nation-state in relation to Marxs
discussion of primitive accumulation, the role of enclosure). Therefore,
these thinkers like Yamada, Hani, Hattori and the global Marxist theoretical
culture of the time that they represent, are incapable of understanding the
historical role played by the formation of the nation-state, the process by
which capital then localizes itself in a certain gradient and uses its enclosure
3 In this sense, both
of that gradient to legitimate its own existence.3 In other words, their
of the main trends of analyses are dependent on understanding the form of national specificity as a
the debate on unity that pre-exists the modern advent of a particular, in this case Japanese,
Japanese capitalism
capitalism, the state juridical form, and so forth. But this logic hampers their
fall into the trap of
imagining analyses dramatically; it prevents them entirely from developing a more
community as an theoretically coherent understanding of the phenomenon of backwardness
accomplished fact in that is, they see backwardness as a fixed, given form and not as an ongoing
its full plenitude, in
precisely the manner production. This problem has largely overdetermined the historical devel-
so comprehensively opment of the Marxian understanding of the national form and its relation
criticized by Jean- to the form of the colony.
Luc Nancy (see
Nancy 1991, p. 11).
Capitalist development, the way in which capital gathers its elements and
deploys itself on a global scale, is always intimately related to its political
and juridical antecedents in the form of structures of commodification and
classification. These structures not only spurred on and necessitated both the
development of the international state system and colonial expansion, but
also and at the same time the development of capitalism, which always
works on a global scale (while nevertheless relying on the national border
and colonial difference to effect its work). Therefore, it seems to me that a
critical site of analysis, one that demonstrates the importance and cruciality
of postcolonial studies, is precisely the analysis of the historical formation of
backwardness, of the epistemological consequences of capitals complex
development as a heterogeneity in homogeneity. In fact, a great many of the
prejudices, the forms of exclusion and inclusion that have historically
structured the modern world, have been formed on the basis of this
judgement of backwardness. Consequently, it seems to me that we must
continually ask this question: why did the internal emergence of the capitalist
i n t e r v e n t i o n s 13 :1 134
.........................
system require not only the transformation of immediate conditions to be
suitable for the emergence of capital, but also require an expansion
elsewhere and marking of territoriality with the inscription of difference?
Therefore, it is my view that through the analysis of sites such as the
astonishing depth and force of the theoretical legacy of Marxist theory in the
Japanese case, wherein the national question was exposed to an unprece-
dented intensity of analysis, we can expand the potentiality of postcolonial
studies as a critical force in the analysis of contemporary conditions of life.
The project of postcolonial studies has often put these judgements of
backwardness into question for their universalizing assumptions, their
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
of all social reason in capitalist society. That is, capital is a social relation
which is always positing its own retrospective legitimation. Similarly, it is
now, in the postcolonial present, that we truly see the end products of the
form of the colony, of the techniques of ordering that were developed in
colonialism. Capitals own process of becoming is constantly showing us this
effect in its own internal operation; in turn, it is Marxs work and project
that attempted most rigorously to expose and conceptually isolate the most
elemental form of this imbrication or complicity. That is, capitalism itself
operates by enclosing and capturing its outside, but it folds this outside back
into itself as if it were an endogenous production. This describes, of course,
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
Acknowledgements
All translations from languages other than English are my own unless
otherwise indicated. I would especially like to thank the anonymous
reviewer(s) for Interventions, whose incisive comments and careful reading
helped me to rethink and reformulate the ideas in this essay.
PO STCOLON IALITY AND THE NATIONAL QU ESTION IN M ARXIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
Gavin Walker
........................
137
R e f e ren c e s
Comintern (1962) Kominterun: Nihon ni kan suru teze Sakai, N. (2007) Nihon/eizo/Beikoku: Kyokan no
shu [Collected Comintern Theses on Japan], Tokyo: kyodotai to teikokuteki kokuminshugi [Japan/
Aoki Shoten. Image/America: The Community of Sympathy and
Fukumoto, K. (1965) [1925] Hoko tenkan wa Imperial Nationalism], Tokyo: Seidosha.
ikanaru sho-katei o toru ka, wareware wa ima sono Sakisaka I. (1947) Nihon shihonshugi bunseki ni
ikanaru katei o katei shitsutsu aru ka: Musansha okeru hohoron [Methodology in the Analysis of
ketsugo ni kan suru Marukusuteki genri [What Japanese Capitalism], in Nihon shihonshugi no
processes constitute the turning point and which shomondai: Shihonshugi to noson no kaikyuteki
of these processes are we currently experiencing? bunka [Problems of Japanese Capitalism: Capital-
On the Marxian principles of proletarian unity], in ism and the Class Differentiation of the Rural
Downloaded by [Cornell University Library] at 19:07 11 November 2014
Takeuchi Yoshitomo (ed.) Gendai Nihon shiso Village], Tokyo: Odosha, pp. 336.
taikei [Collection of Contemporary Japanese Shanin, T. (ed.) (1983) Late Marx and the Russian
Thought], vol. 21, Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, pp. Road: Marx and The Peripheries of Capitalism,
6187. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Hani, G. (1956) [1932] Toyo ni okeru shihonshugi no Spivak, G. C. (1999) A Critique of Postcolonial
keisei [The development of capitalism in the East] Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
in Meiji ishinshi kenkyu [Studies on the Meiji Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Restoration], Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, pp. 1114. Stalin, J. V. (1948) Sochineniia, 13 vols, Moscow:
Hani, G. (n.d.) Hani Goro rekishiron chosakushu Gosudarstvenoe izdatelstvo politicheskoi
[Collected Historical Writings of Hani Goro], literatury.
4 vols. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Stalin, J. V. (1953) Works, 13 vols, Moscow: Foreign
Hattori, S. (1973a) Meiji ishin no kakumei oyobi Languages Publishing House.
han-kakumei [The Meiji Restoration: revolution or Uno, K. (1973) Rodoryoku no kachi to kakaku [The
counter-revolution] in Hattori Shiso zenshu value and price of labour power], in Uno Kozo
[Complete Works of Hattori Shiso], vol. 3, Tokyo: chosakushu [Collected Works of Uno Kozo], vol. 4,
Fukumura Shuppan, pp. 179256. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Hattori, S. (1973b) Ishinshi hohojo no shomondai Walker, G. (2010a) Shihon no kigenteki iki: Hida
[Problems of method in the history of the Restora- toshite no rodoryoku [Capitals Originary
tion] in Hattori Shiso zenshu [Complete Works of Threshold: Labor Power as Fold] in Jokyo, Tokyo:
Hattori Shiso], vol. 4, Tokyo: Fukumura Shuppan, Jokyo Shuppan, June 2010, pp. 120134.
pp. 13116. Walker, G. (2010b) Kenryoku toshite no shihon:
Hoston, G. (1986) Marxism and the Crisis of Seijiteki kake to kyo no kishosei [Capital as
Development in Prewar Japan, Princeton: Princeton Power: The Political Wager and the Rarity of the
University Press. Commons] in Jokyo, Tokyo: Jokyo Shuppan,
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1975) Collected Works, October 2010, pp. 185203.
50 vols., London, Moscow, and New York: Walker, G. (2011) Primitive Accumulation and the
Lawrence and Wishart, Progress Publishers, and Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt in
International Publishers. Rethinking Marxism, London: Taylor & Francis
Nancy, J-L. (1991) The Inoperative Community, ed. (forthcoming).
Peter Connor. Minneapolis & London: University Yamada, M. (1984) [1934] Nihon shihonshugi
of Minnesota Press. bunseki [Analysis of Japanese Capitalism] in
Nagahara, Y. (1998) A sketch on the hauntology of Yamada Moritaro chosakushu [Collected Works of
capital, Keizai shirin 66(2): 14362. Yamada Moritaro], vol. 2, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.
Nagaoka, S. (1985) Nihon shihonshugi ronso no Young, R. J. C. (2001) Postcolonialism: An Historical
gunzo [A Group Portrait of the Debate on Japanese Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell.
Capitalism], Tokyo: Aoki Shoten.
O uchi, T. (1961) Nihon shihonshugi no nogyo mondai
[The Agrarian Question in Japanese Capitalism],
revd edn, Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai.