the profits gained from industrial capital, on the basis that they were earned through equal exchange. Yet industrial capital also makes profits from the differential generated through this very ‘equal exchange’ itself. In other words, it gains surplus value from the differential of purchasing labour power in the labour market and selling what the labourer is forced to produce on the open market. Both merchant capital and industrial capital are based on equal exchange. The difference lies in the following point: in the case of merchant capital, the differential comes from the spatial difference between synchronic systems, while in the case of industrial capital, it comes from the temporal differentiation between synchronic systems. It is the differentiation of value systems on the basis of technical innovation, and it is for this reason that industrial capital leads towards ceaseless technical development. Obviously, capital is indifferent to the diverse ways it can gain surplus value and thereby increase itself; this is precisely why capital itself is essentially merchant capital, and why Marx is able to define the accumulation of capital with the general M–C–M′ formula.
I came to the above understanding through the various hints I took from Saussurean linguistics. But what I later recognized is that there was a basis beyond mere analogy for the introduction of Saussure into the reading of Capital that I undertook in the present work. Saussure himself began to conceive of synchronic systems in language by means of the analogy with economics, and specifically with the general equilibrium theory of the Swiss economist Léon Walras. Walras rejected the classical labour theory of value, conceiving of value from the perspective of marginal utility, in other words, the theory of the neoclassical school. This appears, at first glance, to be in direct opposition to Capital, but it is not at all the case. As Volume 3 demonstrates, Marx conceived of prices of production separately from labour values, and in his theory of rent posited the importance of marginal costs, following Ricardo, in opposition to the theory of equilibrium of classical political economy. In terms of the theory of rent, Ricardo clearly belonged to classical political economy, but, in contrast to the classical school’s concept of ‘equilibrium’, he brought in the concept of the ‘marginal’. There is an important relation here as well to Marx’s work of the 1870s and after on questions of differential calculus (see the Mathematical Manuscripts).3 In this sense, at the same historical moment, Marx shared a certain problématique with Menger, Walras, and the ‘Marginal Revolution’.
To put it in terms of economics, Saussure’s thought not only overcame that of the classical school, but also that of the neoclassical. He did not just develop the notion of synchronic systems as a concept; he attempted to theorize the exchange (communication) between differing systems. In turn, Marx’s critique of political economy also implies not only a critique of classical political economy, but of the neoclassical school as well. In my view, this is precisely because Marx attempted to think the problems of a capitalist economy from the standpoint of exchange.
Since the original publication of Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility in 1973, I have attempted to fundamentally rethink the theoretical problem, in the broadest sense, of the exchange or communication with the other. This theoretical project passed from linguistics itself to the logical foundations of mathematics, and then to my philosophical Investigations.4 During this period, I did not really deal with or theoretically treat the work of Marx. When I started to work on Marx again, it was the beginning of the 1990s: the Soviet Union had imploded, and the US–Soviet Cold War period had come to an end. Around the world, there were loud proclamations about ‘the end of history’ and ‘the end of Marxism’. In the years to follow, historical materialism was not refuted, but it lost its authority. If we consider this, we might say that the moment when I began to write about Marx initially (1973) was precisely a moment of Marxism’s downfall, and the 1990s were much the same.
For historical materialism, the forces of production and the relations of production constitute the base, which determines the ideational-political superstructure. However, in this type of economic determinism, there is no genuine scope to elucidate the ‘superstructural’ role of the state, of religion, and so forth. The state or religion, however, possess a power or force that can be neither explained nor resolved by means of the economic base. Here, no matter how much the economic base is taken to be determinant for the ideational-political superstructure, it comes to be generally recognized as possessing a relative autonomy. Yet, as soon as we admit this, the economic base’s determining function is perhaps not negated, but certainly disappears as a point of emphasis. Thus, in some sense, the conception of the economic base has been in reality totally forgotten.
Right at the moment of the 1990s, I again took up the questions of historical materialism. I attempted to discover the ‘economic base’ of the historical social formation not in the sphere of production, but in exchange. In this sense, exchange is not something secondary to or derivative of production, but rather its prior condition of possibility. Already, in Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, I had theorized this expanded conception of exchange. However, even if the book touched on the realm of linguistics, I did not go beyond a thinking of the economic in its narrow sense. It was in the 1990s that I first came to locate the problem of exchange in matters that are not usually considered to be forms of exchange themselves.
Marcel Mauss saw in the exchange of gifts and reciprocity the basis of clan society. I referred to this as ‘mode of exchange A’, the introduction of the power that constructs community. Similarly, I theorized the formation of the state in terms of voluntary surrender and protection, or taxation and redistribution, what I called mode of exchange B. This is precisely where the state’s power – different from military force – comes from. And I referred to the sphere of ordinary commodity exchange as mode of exchange C, in a sense, the origin of the power of money.
To these three modes, we can add mode of exchange D, which attempts to sublate the others, like the power of God, which manifested in the form of universal religion in the age of the ancient empires. D is local, something that always remained within the later social formation; in the second half of the nineteenth century, it appeared in our world as communism. In his later years, Marx stressed the importance of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, arguing that communism was nothing other than ‘the return of modern society to a higher form of the most archaic type – collective production and appropriation’.5 To rephrase it, mode of exchange D is the return of mode of exchange A ‘in a higher form’.
Historically speaking, the social formation is the articulation of multiple modes of exchange. In primitive society, mode of exchange A is dominant. What we must be careful to point out is that, even at this stage, modes of exchange B and C already exist in nascent form. If B becomes dominant, the state is formed. In such a moment, however, A is not eliminated, but continues to exist in the form of the agrarian community subjugated by the force of the state and the landowner. On the other hand, C is expanded by means of the development of B. In other words, at the stage of the formation of multiple territorial states, the money economy emerged. In the ancient world empires, A and C are combined under the dominance of B.
Mode of exchange C rose to prominence in the social formation with the appearance of industrial capital, and this is precisely the process Marx sought to explicate in Capital. However, from the perspective of modes of exchange, we need to be careful to emphasize that, when industrial capital emerged, it also caused a transformation of the social formation as a whole, and as a combination of all of the modes of exchange. That is, A and B did not diminish, but were altered in form by the dominance of C. B took the form of the bourgeois state, while A formed the ‘imagined community’ of the nation. To put it simply in my terms, this constituted the triadic structure of capital-nation-state.
At the end of the 1990s, I proposed the above mode of analysis in my Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Once again, I did this by means of a specific way of reading the texts of Marx and Kant, which is to say I took a more or less literary-critical stance, and once again published it for the first time in a literary magazine in serial form. Subsequently I discarded this stance and began a process of systematically constructing my theoretical work as a whole. In fact, I
