1. In Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy, Robert
Albritton stages a series of encounters with contemporary and
classical thinkers. Hegel, Weber, Adorno, Althusser, Derrida, Postone
and Gibson-Graham are all evaluated vis-à-vis the Uno-Sekine method of
political economy that Albritton champions, and which is outlined in
the book's introductory chapters. Albritton asserts the superiority of
the Uno-Sekine method in each case, and this allows him both to
highlight the finer points of this approach to political economy, and
to speculate on its implications for social theory as a whole. In so
doing, Albritton seeks not only to advertise the advantages of the
Uno-Sekine method, but also to argue for a reformation of political
economy along these lines, which would address the epistemological
liabilities that have "driven poststructuralists to distraction" and
delimit "the latitude for disagreement" amongst practitioners
(Albritton 2001, 6, 9).
2. Drawing as he does on the Uno-Sekine method, a Japanese
variant of Marxian political economy, Albritton offers the reader an
intriguing glimpse of a relatively little-known and even exotic
theoretical alternative within Marxism, yet one that remains at the
same time deeply engaged with contemporary Marxian orthodoxy. In what
follows, I intend to examine Albritton's presentation of the
Uno-Sekine method, and to place it in the context of the present
controversy over historical and systematic dialectics. I will argue
that, despite its Japanese origins, in an Anglo-American context the
implications of the Uno-Sekine approach cannot be understood without
reference to poststructuralism and Western Marxism. Only then is it
possible to appreciate the extent to which it constitutes not simply
part of an orthodox countermovement to contemporary theoretical
tendencies, but a genuinely innovative alternative to the same.
A Japanese Approach to Political Economy
3. The Uno-Sekine method originates in the work of
twentieth-century Japanese political economist Kozo Uno (1897-1977).
By all accounts, the influence of Uno's heterodox Marxian political
economy in Japan has been widespread and varied, but it is primarily
through the work of Uno's student Thomas Sekine and a growing circle
of collaborators and colleagues, Albritton among them, that his work
has become known to an English-speaking audience.1 Sekine's work has
emphasized Uno's methodological innovations in the field of political
economy, in particular his levels of analysis approach and the theory
of a purely capitalist society, and it is typically to these
postulates that Albritton returns in the course of his argument.
4. The Uno-Sekine approach distinguishes three distinct "levels
of analysis" in Marx's theory of capitalism: the levels of pure logic,
stage theory, and historical analysis. It is the first of these, the
level of pure logic, that grounds the theory of pure capitalism. At
this level, capitalism's "inner logic" or "deep structure" is
presented in the abstract and "made rigorously theorisable by letting
its self-reifying tendency complete itself in theory" (43). This
affords an opportunity to "observe" capital's logic unobstructed and
therefore to determine its nature or essence. This inner logic of
capital corresponds to Marx's general formula and his theory of value;
it is "self-valorising value," or "self expansion through the
maximization of profit" (34-5). The second level of analysis, "stage
theory" or "mid-range theory," assumes a "structural and synchronic"
institutional configuration, typically one which approximates a given
historical period in the development of capital, such as mercantilism,
petty commodity production (which, in view of the defining role of
legal-institutional structures at this level, Albritton terms
"liberalism"), or monopoly capitalism ("imperialism"). In Albritton's
words, "the basic problem of mid-range theory can be formulated as
exploring and analyzing all the ways that the motion of value must
'compromise' with existing institutions in order to establish a
workable mode of capital accumulation" (8).2 Finally, at the level of
historical analysis all relevant determinate and contingent factors
are considered in the analysis of a particular historical conjuncture
or event.
5. This hierarchy of analytical levels rests on the assumption of
the distinctiveness and logical purity of capitalism as an object of
analysis. As Albritton elaborates in his second chapter, "The Unique
Ontology of Capital," this entails the claim that capital as a social
object is analytically separable from any given socio-historical
context in which it operates: In order to establish this, Albritton
turns, on one hand, to Althusser's account of the theoretical
constitution of objects of knowledge and, on the other, to Lukacs'
theory of reification, particularly as it is elaborated in the work of
Alfred Sohn-Rethel. In terms of the latter, Albritton introduces
Sohn-Rethel's concept of the "real abstraction" to establish the
objectivity and knowability of abstract forms on Marxian-materialist
grounds. To capital is attributed a unique power of abstraction that
progressively realizes itself in history, meaning that it both tends
to ever greater logical purity, and that its abstractions are
possessed of a thinglike objectivity.
6. Uno organized Marx's work in Capital into three
"doctrines"--Circulation, Production, and Distribution--and one of
Sekine's most notable innovations has been to assert a parallel
between these doctrines and the three doctrines of Being, Essence, and
Notion in Hegel's Logic. At the level of pure logic, this entails a
"dialectic of capital." In his third chapter, Albritton argues that
Hegel's dialectic begins with a kind of category mistake: The
dialectical form of exposition is not appropriate to Being in general,
but is rather specific to capitalism as an object of analysis. The
overarching contradiction that impels dialectical development is
therefore not between Being and Nothing, but between value and
use-value. At the level of pure logic, capital seeks to realize an
endless cycle of infinitely self-expanding value but, in historical
reality, is faced with a panoply of use-value "obstacles"--land and
labour constitute two principal and necessary inputs to production
that can never be perfectly commodified. Similarly, Hegel's failure to
distinguish logic from materiality and history accounts for the fact
that his dialectic does not include ontologically stratified levels of
analysis.
7. The correspondence with Hegel's doctrines imputes a high
degree of systematicity and coherence to the practice of political
economy at the level of theory. Capital as a phenomenon is plainly
self-consistent and rigorously knowable, and this permits the
political economist to arrive at many regularities and structural
tendencies that only vary in terms of their realization in history.
Accordingly, Albritton's approach as he addresses his chosen
interlocutors is, on one hand, to excoriate theoretical imprecision
and epistemological obscurantism; on the other, to implore closer
attention to the details of Marx's (and Uno's) own theoretical
presentation. A common theme is a lack of theoretical specificity.
Adorno, for example, "oppos[es] Hegel's general ontology and
epistemology with another general ontology and epistemology" (83).
Weber develops a conception of the economic that is not historically
specific and conflates a number of distinct tendencies in modern
society. Althusser generalizes the circumstances of the Russian
revolution. Derrida universalizes the ontology of deconstruction.
Postone's work constitutes an advance on Adorno's, but his position is
weakened by the fact that he "extract[s] only a few key points from
the dialectic" (91). Gibson-Graham fail to realize that "the best
antidote to Althusser's universalizing and totalizing structuralism in
not to adopt a poststructuralism that proposes opposite universalisms,
such as a universal privileging of anti-essentialism against
essentialism" "I believe," Albritton continues, "a more fruitful
approach for Marxian political economy is really to come to grips with
Marx's textsand particularly his, understanding of the unique ontology
of capital" (177).
Returns to Hegel?
8. In his introduction, Albritton notes the widespread
"anti-Hegelian animus" extant today, and approvingly cites Fredric
Jameson's observation (which dates from 1990) that "any number of
straws in the wind point to an impending Hegel revival, of a new kind,
likely to draw a revival of Capital-logic along with it" (Jameson
1990, 241; Albritton 2001, 10). In this sense, Albritton's book could
hardly be more timely, arriving as it does at the culmination of a
decade-long dialogue regarding "systematic" versus "historical"
dialectics in Marxian political economy. This new ascendancy of
systematic dialectics as a subject of concern in Marxian circles has
borne with it the practitioners of the Uno-Sekine method, Albritton
included, who have achieved a new place of prominence in the context
of this debate.3 This Hegel revival is perhaps less avant garde in
character than the one that Jameson described--not a new
"mathematical" Hegel for a digitized age, but rather a reaffirmation
of logical necessity of Marx's political-economic categories and a
reassertion of their priority over cultural and other factors.
9. It is all too easy to understand this new return to Hegel as
the final movement in a retrenchment of Marxian orthodoxy following an
extended period of struggle with postmodernism and the cultural turn
on the academic left, a conservative reaction in which the reemergence
of economic crisis and general recognition of a shift in regimes of
accumulation have reassuringly asserted the priority of political
economy over other domains of inquiry, and according to which it is
wishfully imagined that all that really needs to be debated is the
nature and extent of Marx's debt to Hegel. Apart from dialectics
itself, value and crisis theory have benefited most from this revival,
and the consequent shift to a schematic and concept-driven theory of
capital should indicate to what extent the influence of social and
cultural cofactors have been removed from consideration.4 Albritton
himself describes the contemporary scene as one "where knowledge is
reduced to shifting linesin the sand blown by the infinite winds of
overdetermination" (10).
10. The often polemical and uniformly partisan tone of Dialectics
and Deconstruction in Political Economy would seem, at first, to
support a reading of Albritton's project as a reaction to contemporary
theoretical shifts. Yet I want to suggest that neither Albritton's
work, nor the Uno-Sekine method, nor the broader discourse of
systematic dialectics, can be categorized so unambiguously. My own
interests are such that I hesitate to comment on the philological
correctness of the Uno-Sekine account of the relationship of Marx to
Hegel (Arthur [2002] does this), and Albritton's treatment of the
thinkers that he examines can be summary and dismissive. What is most
valuable and interesting in Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political
Economy is precisely the manner in which Albritton negotiates his
relationship to theoretical tendencies old and new. While the
Uno-Sekine method is presented as way to maintain orthodoxy in Marxian
political economy, Albritton in fact advances a number of suggestive
theoretical innovations in response to dominant tendencies in
contemporary theory.
A New Conceptualism
11. The Hegelianism espoused by Albritton and other proponents of
the Uno-Sekine method is hardly uncomplicated. Historical and
systematic dialectics aside, the Uno-Sekine reading of Hegel is
neither devoid of idiosyncrasy nor, indeed, unequivocally Hegelian.
The very epistemological claims on which the Uno-Sekine method rests,
and specifically those ways in which it assimilates Hegel to Marx,
transpose the Hegelian framework to a different context altogether.
Sekine has cited Karl Popper as an influence on his own
epistemological theory (2000), and both Uno's and Albritton's
arguments for the epistemological transparency of capitalism at times
sound as much Kantian as Hegelian (see for example Albritton 2001,
35). On one hand, proponents of the Uno-Sekine method would resituate
Hegel's dialectic in such a way as to negotiate its potential
performative contradictions. Sekine's present thesis that we are in a
late, advanced stage of capitalism grounds the claim that capitalism's
internal dynamic can be fully known to us at present. On the other
hand, by specifying Hegel's dialectic as a dialectic of Capital, the
Uno-Sekine method realizes a divorce of dialectical logic from the
Hegelian phenomenology of human self-consciousness, with philosophical
consequences that are perhaps never sufficiently explored.
12. One of things that is distinctive about the Uno-Sekine method
is the logical transparency that it purports to offer. Albritton's
arguments as well as those of other proponents suggest that the
theoretical attractions of the Uno-Sekine method inhere to a great
degree in the intuitive force and stark simplicity of its
epistemological claims. To draw clear a parallel between the three
doctrines of Hegel's logic and the three circuits of capital is to
deploy an analogy that is as persuasive as it is transparent to the
understanding. The task of theorizing capitalism becomes one of
progressive logical determination, which yields, at the most abstract
level, an algorithm which can then be applied to historical regimes at
two levels of specificity. To posit three clearly-defined levels of
analysis, each possessed largely of its own distinct logic, is to
offer a model of clarity and theoretical organization against the
loudly declaimed ambiguities of postcontemporary social theory. By
thus resting their theoretical framework on a Hegelian foundation, and
then systematizing that foundation even further, it would seem that
Unoists have arrogated to themselves the theoretical force and
sophistication of one of the most formidable thinkers in Western
history.
13. Yet systematic dialecticians are not alone today in their
desire to retain the power of dialectical thought for Marxian theory.
Most notably, there is Slavoj Zizek's prominent attempt to marry
Marxism with Lacanian social theory, the Hegelian roots of which are
much in evidence. Zizek too has turned to Sohn-Rethel and his account
of the real abstraction in an attempt to ground a theory of capitalism
which, like Albritton's, proceeds at least in part from Althusser's
anterior structuralism (cf. Zizek 1994). We may speculate that what
unites such efforts is not an unreconstructed Marxian fundamentalist
impulse, nor resentment in the face of a dominant (if disintegrating)
poststructuralism in the social sciences; but rather, as Albritton
professes (if sometimes too forcefully), the desire, following decades
of poststructuralist critique, to reassert the power and possibilities
inherent in the practice of theory.
14. In the wake of sustained efforts to reconstruct the practice
of social theory around quasi-literary modes of exposition (as with
Derrida and deconstruction) and anti-conceptual modes of inquiry (as
with Foucault and the various discursive genealogies derived from his
work), the return to Hegel evident in some quarters may be in fact be
representative of a more general and diffuse desire to reaffirm the
power of theory and conceptuality in themselves. As such, it is to the
extent that they propose conceptual solutions to problems in
contemporary social theory that the Uno-Sekine method and other
systematic-dialectical Marxian theories constitute a notable response
to poststructuralism today.
A New Ontology?
15. As Albritton suggests, the Uno-Sekine argument for the
specificity of capital as an object of theory arguably neutralizes
many aspects of the poststructuralist epistemological critique. The
posited specificity of capital entails strict limitations on what a
theory of political economy can achieve, and this can produce
unexpected theoretical results: While on one hand, the pure logic of
capital is theoretically transparent, at the level of history, the
purview of theory gives way to a much more complex and less axiomatic
kind of analysis. This entails not simply a limitation on the purview
of theory, but salutary recognition of the claim that different kinds
of theoretical objects are possessed of different properties, and will
require different methods of inquiry. In turn, this implies a
conception of the social totality as variegated and heterogeneous, and
untotalizable.
16. In this sense, the Uno-Sekine method is truly exceptional for
the extent to which it explicitly incorporates theoretical
multiplicity and ontological heterogeneity into its own framework.
Unlike the majority of poststructuralist approaches, the Uno-Sekine
method not only expounds the need to incorporate a variety of methods
in the theorization of social phenomena, but also explicitly attempts
to rigorously theorize an effective practical response to the need for
theoretical pluralism. Consequently, Albritton is most successful when
he counterposes the specificities of the Uno-Sekine method to the
parsimonious claims of his interlocutors: He gets much the better of
thinkers such as Hegel, Adorno, and Derrida when he exposes the
totalizing aspects of their own theories.5 But at the same time, the
Uno-Sekine method's rigidly hierarchized analytical levels and its
reductive theorization of capital's logic threaten to raise as many
objections as they might address. In particular, Albritton's
exposition of the Uno-Sekine method raises a number of substantive
questions regarding the nature of capital and the relationship of
political economy to other domains of social analysis.
17. The assumption of capital as a logically-coherent entity that
tendentially encroaches on the lifeworld effectively supplies
epistemological justification for abstraction at the level of theory.
The Uno-Sekine doctrine is explicit that the theory of the pure logic
of capital tells us little about how capitalism is actualized at the
level of history, yet important questions remain about the ontological
dynamics of its historical realization. These are properly questions
regarding the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Althusser
sought to respond to similar questions with his theory of
subject-formation in the essay "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses" (Althusser 1971)--insofar as Albritton invokes Lukacs'
account of social reification, there is some indication that his
theory of reproduction might also entail a theory of social-subjective
interpellation. Yet to the extent that this remains unspecified, and
given the asserted prominence of the theory of the pure logic of
capital, the question remains: How is capitalism, as a social
relation, produced and reproduced?
18. It seems inconsistent with the Uno-Sekine method that
capitalism would somehow be reproduced at the level of totality, as
this would resemble too closely the kind of Hegelian "expressive
causality" of which Albritton has approvingly cited Althusser's
criticism, and would undermine the Unoist claims to heterogeneity at
the level of history. But if capitalism is reproduced micrologically,
in the midst of existing social relations, this is fact begs further
questions about the ontology of capital itself. In this sense, the
Uno-Sekine argument regarding levels of analysis does too little to
clarify the nature of social structures at the level of history. What
kind of purity can capitalism in fact attain? One of the most valuable
byproducts of the poststructuralist turn for Marxian theory has been a
revision in recent years of the concept of social structure in
relation to the fundamental role of its "constitutive outside" (cf.
Gibson-Graham 1996). In the absence of an attempt to substantively
relate the ontology of capital to other social ontologies, we are left
with the implicit assumption of capital's primacy. While the
Uno-Sekine method would restrict this primacy to the field of
political economy, it remains a possibility that the nature of
capitalism simply cannot be understood without reference to other
social-theoretical problematics.
19. Albritton's elaboration of the Uno-Sekine method closely
parallels poststructuralism here, insofar as both regard the
construction of ontologies at the level of history as a theoretical
fallacy. Yet the Uno-Sekine method simultaneously suggests an
alternative proposition: That what is necessary for the practice of
social theory today is not a ban on ontological theorizing, but rather
the proliferation of ontological and other positive theories. In this
sense, it is possible that the Uno-Sekine endorsement of ontology,
although radical, is not radical enough in its repudiation of
poststructuralist common sense.
Conclusion: Twenty-First Century Marxism?
20. Dialectics and Deconstruction in Political Economy
constitutes a provocative challenge to many theoretical commonplaces
prevalent today. While Robert Albritton frames his argument as a more
or less orthodox Marxian polemic against poststructuralism and other
contemporary theoretical tendencies, this book is most valuable as an
illustration of the prospects for theoretical resourcefulness and
fresh thinking in the social sciences, and as a general affirmation of
the potential of theoretical invention against a pervasive and
undermining poststructuralist critique. Albritton's presentation of
the Uno-Sekine method emphasizes the persuasiveness and power of
rigorously-conceived theory, and offers a unique argument for
ontological and methodological pluralism in the social sciences. As I
have suggested, these affirmations of theory and ontology over and
against poststructuralist skepticism constitute much more than a kind
of Marxian theoretical conservatism, but rather resonate with more
general contemporary tendencies in the social sciences reassess the
power of and effectivity of speculative conceptuality in the practice
of social theory.
21. In another sense, all of this begs the question as to just
what a theory of capitalism might entail. The Uno-Sekine method
suggests several possibilities, with its levels of analysis approach
and its endorsement of dialectical rigor, yet the specific nature of
logic, abstraction, and other key terms remains in question.
Similarly, the less tangible qualities, as opposed to the logical
properties, of the unique ontology of capital remain largely
undeveloped. While intriguing suggestions are advanced on all counts,
there is a larger sense in which this reframing of the Marxian
tradition fails to leave the reader with a fully-conceived image of a
theory reconstructed. Such imaginative gaps are perhaps inevitable,
given that Albritton's book is intended less as a rigorous
presentation of the Uno-Sekine method than as a dialogue with other
theoretical approaches.
22. Albritton typically succeeds when he emphasizes the strengths
of the Uno-Sekine approach as against his chosen objects of critique.
His critique is especially effective when pitched against a
generalized notion poststructuralism, associated here primarily with
Althusser and Derrida--a poststructuralism ostensibly opposed to any
determinate form of theorization or positive knowledge. Yet Albritton
is not alone when neglects another, more recent movement within what
is understood as poststructuralist theory, one centered on a new
reading of Althusser, and on Deleuze and the "Spinozist tradition" in
Western philosophy, which offers a very different account of the
potentials of theory and the possibility of ontological theorizing.6
Here, perhaps, as much as in the Hegelian tradition, Albritton might
have found resources and support for the revised and revitalized
Marxian theoretical tradition that he envisions.
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Notes
1 Sekine introduces Uno's work, as well as his own interpretation, to
an English-speaking audience in "Uno-Riron: A Japanese Contribution to
Marxian Political Economy" (1976). For a more recent treatment, see
Sekine (1998); see Albritton (1986) and Albritton and Sekine (1995)
for further work in the Uno-Sekine tradition. Another Japanese Unoist
scholar who has published in English is Makoto Itoh (1988; 1995).
2 See also Albritton (1991).
3 In fact, this debate has developed less between proponents of
historical versus systematic dialectics than between advocates of
systematic dialectics themselves. See Arthur (1993); Smith (1990);
Reuten and Williams (1989); Ollman and Smith (1998).
4 The correlation between the emergence of systematic dialectics and
contemporary value-form theory is especially strong. See for example
Reuten and Williams (1989) and Smith (1998).
5 Albritton's criticism is less just, however, when he chides Adorno
for his emphasis on "barter" as opposed to commodity exchange in
Negative Dialectics-this has been exposed as an error of translation
(cf. Jameson 1990, x).
6 A suggestive starting-point is Deleuze's critical review of
continental structuralism (cf. Stolze 1998; Deleuze 1998). On
ontology, see Murphy (1998).
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