Abstract
At the end of the twentieth century, Alain Badiou once wrote that “Marxism no longer has a historical homeland,” but had instead at last been “expatriated” from the burden of its apparent “origins.” There exists a long polemical history, often within the framework of postcolonial studies, which posits the Marxist tradition as something fundamentally “Western,” something that never fit “the world,” but only its supposed “homeland.” But what truly is the “homeland” of Marxism, if we can even put it this way at all? My principle thesis here is the following: If Marxism’s homeland in the nineteenth century was Western Europe, then its homeland in the twentieth century was above all the Tricontinental—Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This thesis is a polemic, intended to radically alter our view of the intellectual history of Marxism, which methodologically remains deeply fixed to a narrative about itself that is structured according to a model of diffusion. But what if we chose concretely to theorize it another way, to emphasize that the seed of this transfer between centuries lay already in Marx’s work in the years following Capital, and that the global impetus to understand the function of Capital as a guide to the “critical analysis of capitalist production” came principally from the situation of the “non-West”? This itself would lead us, in a circular fashion, back to the beginning, to formulate a new historical trajectory of development for Capital, as the pivotal text of a new global centrality of the categories of “race” and “nation” to the enclosure of the world by capital itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Reading the first-hand reports of the famous American socialist Daniel de Leon, the Chairman of the delegation of the Socialist Labor Party of America, written for the Daily People from August–December 1904, we encounter de Leon’s memory of the Katayama-Plekhanov handshake: “Apart from rousing the Congress from the languor it was drooping into, and driving it to frenzied applause, the handshake of Plechanoff [sic] and Katayama at that place was a pathetic rebuke to Capitalism, whose code of practical morality was at the very hour being exemplified in the heaped-up corpses of Russians and Japanese on the battlefields of Manchuria. It contrasted the gospel of practical humanity that Socialism is ushering into life, with the gospel of practical rapine that Capitalism apotheosizes.” See the articles reprinted in Daniel De Leon, Flashlights of the Amsterdam International Socialist Congress 1904 (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1924), 20.
- 2.
This section draws from my longer discussion of the debate on Japanese capitalism in Walker (2016), especially chapters 1 and 2.
- 3.
See Kominterun: Nihon ni kan suru teze-shū (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1961).
- 4.
Noro Eitarō, ed. Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi kōza, 8 vols. (Iwanami Shoten, 1932–33).
- 5.
On this point, see Norō Eitarō’s earlier Nihon shihonshugi hattatsu-shi, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1930).
- 6.
Otto Kuusinen, “Nihon teikokushugi to Nihon kakumei no seishitsu: 1932 nen sangatsu futsuka no Kominterun shikkō i’inkai, jōnin i’inkai kaigi ni okeru dōshi Kūshinen no hōkoku” [Japanese imperialism and the characteristics of the Japanese revolution: Comrade Kuusinen’s presentation to the Exectutive Committee of the Comintern, Meeting of the Standing Committee on March 2, 1932] in Kominterun: Nihon ni kan suru teze-shū (Aoki Shoten, 1962), 102–119. For a general overview of this period of the Comintern’s international policy, see The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents, vol. 3: 1929–1943, ed. Jane Degras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).
- 7.
Kuusinen, “Nihon teikokushugi to Nihon kakumei no seishitsu,” 104.
- 8.
“Nihon ni okeru jōsei to Nihon kyōsantō no ninmu ni kan suru teze” in Kominterun: Nihon ni kan suru teze-shū (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1962), 76–101.
- 9.
Kuusinen, “Nihon teikokushugi to Nihon kakumei no seishitsu,” 104.
- 10.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 567; Marx, Das Kapital, Bd 1 in MEW, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 592.
- 11.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 589; Marx, Das Kapital, Bd 1 in MEW, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 620.
- 12.
See Haupt, Löwy, and Weill 1997.
- 13.
The following two sections draw from Gavin Walker, “Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar,” in Postmodern Culture 22, no. 3 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012).
- 14.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1 in MECW, vol. 35 (New York: International Publishers, 1996), 182; Marx, Das Kapital, Bd 1 in MEW, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1962), 186.
- 15.
This is the point on which Uno Kozo’s work has developed a set of important and original theses related to the originary and unavoidable absence or impasseof rationality characterizing the position of the labor power commodity. See on this point Walker (2016).
- 16.
We should note that the concept of “actual life” in Marx and Engels cannot be encompassed in the vitalist understanding of life: Rather it is here specifically social life that is at stake, the entire life of a social formation, not an abstract and quasi-mystical conception of life. I owe thanks to Benjamin Noys for discussions on this point.
- 17.
For reasons of length and topicality, I cannot extensively enter into a re-examination of the “articulation” debate here, but it is necessary to read and re-read this debate in our current moment. For an overview of the questions at stake, see Foster-Carter 1978.
- 18.
- 19.
See Walker (2011b).
- 20.
Translation modified. The term “comprises” in the second to last sentence (“…umschließt eine Weltgeschichte”) also indicates an “enveloping,” “enclosing,” or “encompassing.” This “topological” sense should be kept in mind.
- 21.
On this crucial concept of the “regime of translation,” see the many works of Naoki Sakai.
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Walker, G. (2019). The Homeland(s) of Marxism: Labor Power, Race, and Nation After Capital . In: Chakraborty, A., Chakrabarti, A., Dasgupta, B., Sen, S. (eds) ‘Capital’ in the East. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9468-4_4
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