The Japanese have a saying- 'idiot and genius- one sheet of paper'. (バカと天才は紙一重 (baka to tensai wa kami hitoe)) Sadly, in the case of Kojin Karatani, it was a sheet of heavily soiled toilet paper.
This is from 'The Science of Spirit'
The following words from the beginning of The Communist Manifesto are well known: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism”.
Marx meant that Communism was a bogeyman for Kings and Princes. If they were so frightened of it, maybe it was a good idea to become a Communist. After all, there must be some good reason the ruling class recognised the thing to be an existential threat. Marx didn't mean that Communism was a ghost or a demon or a vampire or a werewolf or some other such imaginary creature.
Of course, this is supposed to be a joke,
No. Marx was saying that powerful people were afraid of Communism because it represented a genuine path forward which had the potential to put an end to monarchy and aristocracy and oligarchy. Thus if you were against the existing European order, you should seriously think of becoming a Communist.
but that is not necessarily the case. Rather, it means the following: communism is a
“spirit”.
Marx didn't believe in 'spirits'. Indeed, he didn't even believe in Hegelian 'Geist'. He was a materialist.
In The Structure of World History, I proposed a view of the history of social formations from the perspective of the mode of exchange in addition to the mode of production. The modes of exchange can be divided into A (gift and return),
He calls this 'Reciprocity'. He doesn't get that you don't always have to reciprocate when given a gift or invited to a potlatch. Moreover, some goods and services are 'non-excludable'- i.e. you can't prevent your enemy from getting it, even if you only mean to supply your friends with it. There are also 'non-rival' goods where no other person receives less if an additional person gets access to it. In this case there are 'free-riders'. Consider a King who offers all within his territory defence from invaders and the protection of the law. In theory, the subject of the King has a reciprocal duty of obedience. Sadly, people like Marx & Engels might be 'free riders'. They get the advantages of the King's protection, yet plot against him.
B (obedience and protection),
Sadly, the 'free rider' problem, means that there is no 'exchange'. People may be stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds them or overthrow the regime that protects them.
C (commodity exchange),
This depends on some enforcement mechanism for contracts- i.e. the rule of law. Without it, there will be market-failure and thus no 'commodity exchange' and very little capital accumulation because property is not secure.
and D, which goes beyond these.
D is pure gift or 'associationism'. This is where everybody wants to work very hard to anticipate and cater to everybody else's every wish.
That is, it exists as an ideational “power” that transcends capital nation-state,
A nation state provides public goods. Sadly, it may get no obedience in return even if it provides plenty of protection. On the other hand, there may be non-State actors who provide 'club' and 'public' goods.
that is, as mode D that transcends modes A, B, and C of exchange.
mode E transcends D. This is what you get when you don't just anticipate and fulfil everybody else's every whim, you also show a tender care for the environment by wiping clean every shitty bum with your supple tongue.
Speaking of spirits, Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1995) is suggestive. In this book, he cites examples such as “the specter of communism” and writes that Marx was accompanied by many “ghosts” in his life.
If so, he was a superstitious old fool who believed in ghosts and vampires. The truth is he was merey speaking metaphorically. What Derrida & Karatani are engaging in is meta-metaphoricity. They treat a figure of speech as a concrete fact and then construct some other metaphor, itself to be taken as fact, on the basis of what is merely a verbal conceit. This way lies madness.
The ghosts he refers to range from communism to God, or to money-capital. Certainly, each of these is spiritual in its own way.
God may be so but only if God actually exists, not if God is imaginary or a conventional or 'noble' lie.
However, Derrida did not try to clarify the difference and relationship between them. As a result, I feel that the discussion ended up being a kind of play on words.
There is a story about a child who becomes very depressed and withdrawn. He is sent to a psychoanalyst to whom he reveals that he is upset because his parent's sexual relations haven't sent him any Christmas presents. This is the sort of childish mistake these stupid cunts are making.
Derrida wrote this at a time when “the end of history” (Francis Fukuyama) was pronounced after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, that is, at a time when it was said that Marxism was dead.
It is dead. Nobody wants class warfare or the overthrow and abolition of markets- including capital markets.
At one time, it may have seemed possible that the Communist countries would prevail over the Capitalist countries. Japan would move from the American to the Soviet/Chinese camp. The State would take ownership of all enterprises. Morisihima or Karatani or some other such shithead might get a seat on the Politburo. They would get an extra ration of rotten turnips and thus be the object of envy or emulation for other non-STEM academics.
what might be called the “science of spirits”.
I suppose 'Spiritism' (ouija boards, seances, ectoplasm etc.) appeared in the late nineteenth century at precisely the time when faith in God was shaken by Darwin & Co. Similarly the collapse of Marxism, caused some of the stupider of its adherents to start babbling about ghosts and spirits.
My consideration of “spirit” has some of its origins in Hegel’s spirits
Hegel was an Idealist. There is only one Spirit- Geist- which represents the self-actualization of freedom and rationality within human institutions, evolving from individual consciousness (Subjective Spirit) through shared social life (Objective Spirit) to absolute self-knowledge (Absolute Spirit). These are not different from each other. Rather there is 'sublation' of the subjective by the objective and the objective by the absolute
(especially in his Philosophy of Right, which deals with the problem of the capital-nation-state) and Marx’s fetish (Capital).
Fetishism is materialistic, albeit magical and a feature of primitive thought. Marx, being as stupid as fuck, did think that the social relationships between people 'had become obscured and appeaed as mystical, inherent qualities of the commodities themselves, as if objects have a life and power of their own, divorced from the labor that created them.' What this means is that the guy making the thing is called a 'worker' and the guy who owns the factory is called the 'capitalist' even though the same guy may be both. The fact is, a lot of 'capitalists' in Marx's day, had started off as workers but then set up their own operations and turned into industrialists. Nowadays, of course, the worker is also the Capitalist because his Pension fund is invested in equities. Still, economists distinguish between Labour's and Capital's share of National Income. This isn't fetishism. It is merely a convenient way to look at things.
In this essay, I will give a very brief introduction to this “science of spirits”. Firstly, I would like to quickly review how I came to conceive “modes of exchange”. According to the standard thinking, historical materialism is based on the mode of production (productive forces and relations of production),
sadly these are unknowable even if we know everything that is the case both ex ante and ex poste. It is a different matter that you can have a 'good enough' structural causal model for the predictive or managerial purposes but 'the map is not the territory'- i.e. the model is not reality. The former is conceivable. The latter isn't. If it were, the person who has the right conception would have magical powers. They would soon become enormously rich and thus able to change market outcomes. They would buy their way to absolute power.
but this became subjected to the criticism that it did not sufficiently capture the “political and ideological superstructure”.
Which is irrelevant. Your country or your company or your campus goes bankrupt if its economic 'substructure' is shit. It doesn't matter what ideology or political position you adopt.
For example, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud criticized historical materialism in this way.
Weber & Durkheim felt Marx was basing himself too much on England's experience. France and Germany had different trajectories. This would later become the 'Sonderweg' theory but it is perfectly compatible with privileging the 'sub-structure'. Lenin's 'Taylorism' Stalin's focus on heavy industry are examples. Indeed, in the late Fifties and Sixties- the 'convergence hypothesis' seemed plausible. Administered pricing and bureaucratic management would make the two systems indistinguishable.
In their view, there is something in the “political-ideological” dimension, i.e., the state and religion, that cannot be simply determined by the “economic base” (mode of production). But then how is it determined?
War and forcible conversion/ethnic cleansing. Inquisitions, Catholic or Marxist or Islamic can be very successful. But extreme poverty can have the same effect. You convert to the religion or ideology which offers you a bit of food.
In response to that, I thought like this: the political-ideological dimension is also determined by the “economic base”, however, the economic base in this case is not the mode of production but the mode of exchange.
Or charity. If the State is foolish enough to subsidize 'students' studying worthless shite, the 'politico-ideological dimension' gets variegated.
In fact, when Marx and Engels proposed the “materialist view of history (historical materialism)” in 1846, they wrote; This conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real process of production, starting out from the material production of life itself,
in other words, before you can do history you need a biological theory of evolution. Sadly, it turned out that 'bourgeois strategies' are 'eusocial'. John Maynard Smith, who discovered this, started off as as card carrying Communist.
and to comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this mode of production (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history.
Marx & Engels were Bouvard & Pecuchet avant la lettre. They had intellectual curiosity but lacked brain.
I thought that what they called “Verkehr
traffic. Some Marxist economists saw Econ as just a Monge-Kantorovich Transportation problem.
(intercourse)”, or “exchange”, was the key to solving the mystery.
It wasn't. Human beings have to compete for resources with animals and others like themselves. Exchange economies arise where there is comparative advantage, but if territory is scarce, then those with higher absolute advantage exterminate or drive extinct those with lower productivity.
In fact, Marx himself later tried to elucidate the “fetish” as the superstructure brought about by exchange in Capital.
I have very nice magical fetish. You should obey me because otherwise my fetish magic will fuck you up. Sadly, instead of obeying me, you kill me and add my fetish to your collection- unless you simply throw it away. Fetishes really don't matter.
The exchange that Marx discovered in Capital is exchange of commodities that begins between communities.
Communities can kill and eat other communities and grab all their cool shiny stuff.
However, intercourse exchange is not confined to this. For example, gift-giving/ gift repayment and domination/subjugation are also forms of exchanges.
No. They are unilateral 'transfers', not exchanges.
Therefore, we could say that both the community and the state began with intercourse-exchange.
Families begin with sexual intercourse. But Baby does not pay Mummy for breast milk. The Community and the State arise by reason of kin selective altruism and the need to solve collective action problems. Some 'mechanisms' used with respect to the latter may involve exchanges of a contractual type. But a lot of exchanges can be eliminated by 'Coasian' enterprises thus raising efficiency.
Of course, exchange here is different from commodity exchange. In The Structure of World History, I proposed a view of the history of social formations from the perspective of the mode of exchange in addition to the mode of production.
In other words, you did something very fucking stupid. Social formations can be explained by collective action problems and the fitness landscape. The point where exchanges occur is indeterminate. The same 'mode of production' can have different methods of organizing exchange.
The modes of exchange can be divided into
contracts of adhesion and incomplete contracts or relationships.
A (gift and return),
which is a transfer giving occasion to another transfer.
B (obedience and protection),
which is an 'invisible' service conditionally provided- i.e. an incomplete contract
C (commodity exchange),
bargaining problem or contract of adhesion.
and D, which goes beyond these.
But something already 'goes beyond' transactions of type A, B and C. You don't give gifts to the enemy. You don't show him obedience or protection. You don't traffic with the enemy. If you do, there is likely some penalty applicable to you by a force which go beyond the purely economic.
I realized that the “power” that defines the political and ideological superstructure does not come from somewhere different from the economic base,
which is biological
but from the “intercourse (exchange)” that forms the foundation of the economic base.
That is plastic or 'multiply realisable'. What matters is raising productivity. That's what leads to 'take off' and transition from one stage of civilization to another. By the early nineteenth century, this was becoming obvious. If you can extract energy more efficiently your civilization rises regardless of its internal arrangements.
That is to say, the ideational powers that are seen as religion or unconsciousness come from there, creating differences depending on the mode of exchange on which they are based.
The mode of exchange may change under exigent circumstances without any change in the base. Europe had seen big changes in religion with relatively little economic change. I suppose there may have been some dewy eyed idealists who thought that an Earthly Paradise would be achieved after the Bolsheviks came to power. But Karatani did not belong to that generation. He was just stupid.
After writing (Structure of World History), I have come to think about in particular about the “power” which these exchanges bring about.
Exchanges don't bring about 'power'. The mobilization and accumulation of resources does. In Economic terms this is 'investment' not exchange.
It was Marx, who first clarified about this power; in Capital, he elucidated the power that arises from mode of exchange C.
But 'Capital' does not arise from from commodity exchange. It arises by stockpiling commodities, not exchanging them. I have two goats and so I exchange one for a sack of grain. I don't have Capital. I get into goat breeding and have a thousand goats. I'm a capitalist. I can do deals with vendors of goat meat and leather merchants and so forth. Moreover, I can borrow on the security of my vast goat herd, and engage in arbitrage. True, I am taking a risk. But profit is the reward for risk. It isn't the reward for making your workers stay late and working them to the bone.
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