Submission for Protection as a Mode of Exhange

Discussion

Kojin Karatani:

"What was the situation with state society that emerged after clan society? It may appear to be grounded primarily in violent exploitation, but in fact it is also based on a kind of ‘exchange.’ While not ordinarily regarded as a kind of exchange, what we find here is an exchange of submission for protection.9 The state has its beginnings in conquest and violent domination, but it can only become a sustained form of rule when the ruled willingly submit to it. This becomes possible when they receive protection in return for their submission—in other words, when the relation of ruler/ruled becomes a kind of exchange. This gives rise to a form of ‘power’ other than violence. This power binds not only the ruled, but also the rulers, because if the rulers are unable to protect the ruled, they will lose their position as rulers. In this sense, this relationship is bilateral (reciprocal), so that in a sense it is related to mode of exchange A. I call this form of exchange mode B. Just as with mode of exchange A, a kind of nonmaterial ‘power’ is at work in mode B. But this is something born out of ‘exchange’ itself, not something that somehow bubbled up from within the ideational superstructure. If we consider mode of exchange to constitute the economic base of a social formation, the state is not something that originates in the superstructure, outside the realm of the economic, but rather is directly rooted in a specific form of exchange—that is to say, in the economic base, broadly conceived. Gramsci’s “hegemony,” Althusser’s “ideational apparatuses,” and Foucault’s “knowledge-power” all come not from a superstructure that is autonomous from the economic base, but rather from the economic base itself. Moreover, those entities that Freud regarded as “psychological factors” in order to distinguish them from the economic realm also in fact originate from modes of exchange and hence are, in the broad sense, of the economic base.

Note: In Leviathan, Hobbes argued that the condition of peace was produced via a social contract from out of the ‘natural condition’ of struggle of all against all. This social contract was, he says, a covenant “extorted by fear.” This means it was a kind of exchange, because those who submitted were granted their lives in exchange for submitting. Moreover, the rulers were placed under an obligation to carry out their end as well. In this sense, we can say that Hobbes understood the state in terms of mode of exchange B. But theorists from Locke on have thought of the ‘social contract’ only in terms of mode of exchange C."

(http://www.kojinkaratani.com/en/pdf/An_Introduction_to_Modes_of_Exchange.pdf)