Kojin Karatani on Why We Should Move from Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange

Discussion

Kojin Karatani:

"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), but this became subjected to the criticism that it did not sufficiently capture the “political and ideological superstructure”. For example, Weber, Durkheim, and Freud criticized historical materialism in this way. 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? 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.

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, 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.

I thought that what they called “Verkehr (intercourse)”, or “exchange”, was the key to solving the mystery. In fact, Marx himself later tried to elucidate the “fetish” as the superstructure brought about by exchange in Capital. The exchange that Marx discovered in Capital is exchange of commodities that begins between communities. However, intercourse exchange is not confined to this. For example, gift-giving/ gift-repayment and domination/subjugation are also forms of exchanges. Therefore, we could say that both the community and the state began with intercourse-exchange. 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.

The modes of exchange can be divided into A (gift and return), B (obedience and protection), C (commodity exchange), and D, which goes beyond these. I realized that the “power” that defines the political and ideological superstructure does not come from somewhere different from the economic base, but from the “intercourse (exchange)” that forms the foundation of the economic base. 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. There are four modes of exchange A, B, C, and D that underlie the social formations; the social structure changes depending on which mode is dominant and how different modes are combined. From the above perspective, I worked to reconsider the history of social formations in The Structure of World History. After writing this book, I have come to think about in particular about the “power” which these exchanges bring about. It was Marx, who first clarified about this power; in Capital, he elucidated the power that arises from mode of exchange C. He saw the emergence of a fetish spirit in the emergence of money out of the exchange of things between communities. It is the power that enables, or rather compels, the exchange of things. Likewise, Marx discovered “capital as spirit”."

(http://www.crisiscritique.org/volume_8-issue_2/CC_8.2_Kojin%20Karatani.pdf)