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The uneven and combined development of the Meiji Restoration: A passive

revolutionary road to capitalist modernity
Jamie C. Allinson and Alexander Anievas
Capital & Class 2010 34: 469
DOI: 10.1177/0309816810378723

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 Capital & Class

The uneven and

34(3) 469­–490
© The Author(s) 2010
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combined co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0309816810378723
development of the c&c.sagepub.com

Meiji Restoration:
A passive
revolutionary road to
capitalist modernity

Jamie C. Allinson
University of Edinburgh

Alexander Anievas
University of Cambridge

Abstract
In this article, we examine the utility of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive
revolution and its relation to Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined
development in analysing the transformational effects of world economy and
international relations on ‘late-developing’ societies’ transition to capitalism.
Although Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and
combined development, we argue that Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit
assumptions present in the Prison Notebooks, but never fully thematised. In turn,
we demonstrate that incorporating passive revolution into Trotsky’s theory further
illuminates the ontology of class agencies that is often lacking in structuralist
approaches to bourgeois revolutions. In illustrating these arguments, we examine
the case of Japan’s modern state-formation process, demonstrating how the Meiji
Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging
within the context of the uneven and combined process of social development
activated and generalised through the rise of the capitalist world economy.

Keywords
passive revolution, uneven and combined development, Japanese development,
Meiji Restoration

Corresponding author:
Jamie C Allinson, University of Edinburgh
Email: j.c.allinson@sms.ed.ac.uk

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470 Capital & Class 34(3)

Introduction
The arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ on the shores of Yokosuka in 1853
sparked a general crisis of Japanese society from which it would not soon recover. With
hardly concealed threats of trade or war, these ‘foreign barbarians’ shook the foundations
of the Tokugawa regime (bakufu) to its core. Less than fifteen years later, sections of the
Japanese warrior aristocracy would overthrow that regime, inaugurating the Meiji
Restoration. Amidst the debate that soon erupted among the new ruling class over the
scale and depth of the reforms, Itō Hirobumi wrote to fellow Meiji leader Kido Kōin, ‘if
we cannot rule at home, we will be unable to set matters to right abroad’ (quoted in
Beasley, 1972: 330). And, one might add, without setting matters right abroad, the new
Meiji regime would be unable to rule at home.
Itō’s sentiments well articulated the Janus-faced logic underlying Japan’s revolution
from above, pressurised from without—a revolution resulting in the paradigmatic case of
a ‘successful’ catch-up programme of state-driven industrialisation. Japan’s experience
also represents an example of Antonio Gramsci’s ‘passive revolution’, a process immanent
to the uneven and combined character of capitalist development. While many recent
studies have explored Gramsci’s passive revolution and Leon Trotsky’s theory of uneven
and combined development1 separately, very few have illuminated their internal relations
(but see Morton, 2007a; 2007b; 2010). In applying these concepts to Japanese develop-
ment, we also offer a contribution to recent debates regarding the theoretical standing of
inter-societal relations within historical materialism—a subject, until very recently,
largely unexplored within Marxism (see Anievas, 2009). As Kees Van der Pijl (2007: viii)
notes, the ‘Marxist legacy as it exists has largely failed to develop its own method in the
area of foreign relations’. In Capital, Marx explicitly abstracted from the inter-societal
context in order to ‘examine the object of our investigation in its integrity, free from all
disturbing subsidiary circumstances’ (Marx, 1990: 727 n2). But when should such ‘sub-
sidiary circumstances’ be raised from historical contingency to be instead conceived as
theoretical presupposition? That is: how can the ‘internal’ (sociological) and ‘external’
(geopolitical) factors in social development be united into a single, coherent explanatory
apparatus (Rosenberg, 2006)?
In response to these issues, we take up the Japanese case as follows. First, we examine
the concepts of passive revolution and uneven and combined development in Gramsci
and Trotsky’s work respectively, illustrating their theoretically complementary relation-
ship. Then, focusing on Japanese development in the longue durée, we demonstrate how
the Meiji Restoration of 1868 can be conceptualised as a passive revolution emerging
under the world-historical conditions of uneven and combined development generalised
through the rise of capitalist world economy.

Passive revolution from the perspective of uneven and combined

development
Despite the many socio-historical and political differences between the local milieus in
which Gramsci and Trotsky wrote, both encountered one very significant issue—or more
precisely, set of issues—prominent in the debates of the Second and Third Internationals. These
concerned what the Austro-Marxist turned bourgeois economist Alexander Gerschenkron
(1966) called the question of ‘historical backwardness’ confronting late-developing states such

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Allinson and Anievas 471

as Italy and Russia. The crucial question facing revolutionary socialist praxis in such countries
was whether they were ‘ready’ for a strategy of independent proletarian revolutionary
action: had the country passed through the ‘necessary’ stage of bourgeois-democratic revo-
lution and capitalist development sufficient to provide the material and political bases
for socialist revolution?2 The classical position in this debate, taken up by the Mensheviks
in Tsarist Russia, was that late-developing states remained unripe for socialist revolution.
Thus, the task of the proletariat was to ally itself with the bourgeoisie in its struggle
against pre-capitalist forms of rule. The minority position, articulated most forcefully by
Lenin, argued for an independent proletarian strategy of leadership to achieve bourgeois-
democratic aims.
The underlying basis of these perspectives is summarised in Marx’s famous dictum,
directed at then ‘backward’ Germany: ‘De te fabula narratur!’ (‘This story is told of you!’).
The problem was that in such states as Russia and Italy—and more generally any ‘country
of the second, third or tenth cultural class’ (Trotsky, 1959: 4)—the characters of this story
were not playing their assigned roles. For it was clear by the early 20th century that the
development of the more advanced societies was not destined to show the less developed
society ‘the image of its own future’ (Marx, 1976: 91). In this sense, the course of history
had proven Marx mistaken. ‘England in her day revealed the future of France, consider-
ably less of Germany, but not in the least of Russia and not of India’ (Trotsky, 1959: 378).
In their different ways, Trotsky and Gramsci’s theoretical contributions were the ‘nec-
essary critical corollar[ies]’ (as Gramsci, 1971: 114, Q15§62, put it) to Marx’s 1859
Preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which had stated:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have
been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the
material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
(Marx, 1970: 21)

In its cruder forms, the ‘two-stage’ strategy of revolution of the Second International
took Marx’s dictum to its reductio ad absurdum, mechanistically interpreting it through
an internalist social evolutionary schema, with each society conceived as developing in
abstraction from the wider international capitalist context. In contrast to this ‘method-
ological nationalism’, Trotsky’s permanent revolution began from the recognition of the
international character of the world capitalist system. It proposed that Russia’s minority work-
ing-class movement could successfully telescope the supposedly indispensable stages of bour-
geois democracy and capitalist development into a single ‘uninterrupted’ or ‘permanent’ stage
from which it would necessarily promote socialist revolution internationally.

Two theories: One uniting theme

Underlying Trotsky’s strategy of permanent revolution was his theory of uneven and
combined development. From this perspective, Trotsky conceived the Bolshevik revolu-
tion as a result of the international development of capitalism of which its fate was also
bound. Broadly speaking, the theoretical content of uneven and combined development
can be summarised as follows. The unevenness of the entire socio-historical process—for
Trotsky, its ‘most general law’—is expressed not only by the varying levels and tempos of
development within societies, but also between them. At all points of the historical

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472 Capital & Class 34(3)

process, and across its developmental spectrum, we find the interaction of differentially
developing social temporalities.
It is from within this variegated socio-historical topography that capitalism emerged.
Arising late on in the peripheries of ‘backward’ Europe, capital as a revolutionary social
force inserted itself into this uneven developmental process, gradually gaining mastery
over it, ‘breaking and altering it, employing therein its own means and methods’ (Trotsky,
1936: 19). Unifying all development into a single, organic, yet internally differentiated
world totality, capitalism ‘in a certain sense realizes the universality and permanence of
man’s development’ (Trotsky, 1997: 3). It does so in particular by bringing social entities
together into a dynamic of ‘coercive comparison’ (Barker, 2006: 78) through which cap-
ital enforces its distinctive disciplining logic of competitive accumulation. A contradic-
tory unity of universalising and differentiating tendencies, capitalism simultaneously
exerts equalising and fragmentary pressures on social development. A ‘whip of external
necessity’ is thereby inflicted upon ‘backward’ societies to develop in response to the
military-geopolitical and economic pressures emanating from more advanced capitalist
powers. Crucially, this mechanism of capitalist development presupposes the seemingly
mundane fact of a multiplicity of interacting and differentially developing societies.
From this first inter-societal determination (the ‘whip of external necessity’) follows a
second, compounding and rearticulating the effects of the first. This Trotsky termed the
‘privileges of historic backwardness’. This was exemplified by the ruling classes of Czarist
Russia’s being compelled by the exigencies of geopolitical-military competition to adopt
the ready-made developmental achievements (technological, sociopolitical, intellectual
etc.) of the more advanced Western European powers. By turning foe into tutor, Russia
was thereby permitted the ‘skipping’ of ‘a whole series of intermediate historical stages’
(Trotsky, 1959: 3). Russia’s development thus necessarily diverged from the unilinear
model posited by the orthodox Marxisms of the Second International, which took its
‘cue from capitalist society conceived as a single type’ (Trotsky, 1959: 378). Yet this pos-
sibility of skipping stages, Trotsky claimed, was ‘by no means absolute’. Rather, it
depended upon the existing levels of cultural and socioeconomic ‘capacities’ within the
borrower societies and, above all, we argue, the historical timing of these societies’ politi-
cal and economic incorporation into the capitalist world economy (Trotsky, 1959: 3).
Dependent upon such capacities and timing—as well as the critical factor of social
agency—this ‘skipping’ process certainly did not automatically take place.
Instead, as often occurred, the assimilation of technological, cultural and economic
innovations by borrower societies resulted in their ‘debasement’ through ‘the process of
adapting them to’ less developed social structures. The introduction of ‘certain elements
of Western technique and training, above all military and industrial’ into absolutist
Russia by Peter the Great, for example, ‘led to a strengthening of serfdom as the funda-
mental form of labour organization’ (Trotsky, 1959: 3). Hence, the infusion of European
armaments and finance was a contradictory process, simultaneously strengthening
Czarism whilst undermining its socioeconomic and political foundations. By the late
19th century, this process resulted in a structure distinguished by its ‘peculiar combina-
tion of different stages in the historic process’; an ‘amalgam of archaic with more con-
temporary forms’ (Trotsky, 1959: 3, 4).
This ‘combined’ Russian social formation was characterised by the most advanced
capitalist relations and productive techniques interacting with feudal relations in potentially

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Allinson and Anievas 473

socially and geopolitically explosive ways: mass concentrations of technologically advanced

capital (particularly within the state-run military industries) imported from Western
Europe, and a rapidly growing proletariat existing alongside an unreformed absolutist
monarchy and a dominant landowning aristocracy. The result: the rise of a class-conscious
proletariat, joining together with a majority peasant class, capable of overthrowing
Czarist power and leading the world’s first socialist revolution. Russia’s combined devel-
opment—the fusion of dissimilar social structures (or modes of production) within a
single formation—was the composite effect of geopolitical–military pressures opening
the way for an accelerated development resulting in its own unique ‘class of effects’,
‘ramifying’ the Russian social structure (Rosenberg, 2010). These ‘contradictions of soci-
ological amalgamation’, as we term it, represent a third determination; again derivative
of capitalism’s differential development as a multiplicity of interactive societies.
Trotsky’s theory provides a particularly rich understanding of the complexities of Marx’s
much derided ‘basis/superstructure’ (Basis/Überbau) metaphor (see Allinson and Anievas,
2010)—one complemented by Gramsci’s writings, specifically in his formulation of passive
revolution. Notwithstanding Gramsci’s often misunderstood criticisms of the permanentist
strategy,3 he shared much of Trotsky’s methodological perspective (cf. Morton, 2007a;
2007b). For both, the methodological starting point was not the nation-state unit, but
capitalism in its internationally conditioned world-historical development. Like Trotsky,
Gramsci viewed capitalism as having united the world into a single causally integrated, but
internally differentiated, ontological whole. ‘Capitalism is a world historical phenomenon’,
Gramsci (1977: 69) wrote, ‘and its uneven development means that individual nations can-
not be at the same level of economic development at the same time’. Exerting pressures,
setting limits, and effecting transformational processes, the international dimension of capi-
talist development was crucial for Gramsci. ‘International relations intertwine with’ the
‘internal relations of nation-states, creating new, unique and historically concrete combina-
tions’ as illustrated by the dissemination of ideologies from advanced to ‘less developed
countries, impinging on the local interplay of combinations’ (Gramsci, 1971: 182, Q13§17).
These international dimensions of capitalist development are particularly significant
for Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution. Avoiding any mechanistic application of the
concept, Gramsci stressed that passive revolution must be continually related back to this
‘politico-military equilibrium’ moment (Gramsci, 1971: 106–7, Q15§17). Here and
elsewhere, Gramsci uses passive revolution as a political corrective to the economistic
tendencies of Marx’s 1859 basis/superstructure metaphor, offering an ‘interpretive crite-
rion’ to understand the forces blocking the transition from capitalism to socialism. This
involved a ‘molecular’ process of transformation, ‘progressively modify[ing] the pre-exist-
ing composition of forces’ in the ruling classes’ ‘gradual but continuous absorption’ of its
‘“antithesis”’ (the proletariat) (Gramsci, 1971: 58, Q19§24; 109, Q15§11). Passive revo-
lution was, in turn, formulated as a concept in order to understand the specific forms of
bourgeois revolution in late-developing capitalist societies—particularly those occurring
in Europe after and in reaction to the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. It thus
offers further theoretical content to what had been described by earlier Marxists as ‘revo-
lutions from above’4; whilst directing attention to the molecular processes through which
class demands from below are absorbed from above in periods of ‘organic crisis’.
The causes of the change in the form of bourgeois revolutions, distinguishing them
from an earlier cycle between the 16th and 18th centuries, were two-fold. First, the rise

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474 Capital & Class 34(3)

of a proletariat as a potentially revolutionary social force opened an unbridgeable chasm

between labour and capital, impelling the latter to accommodate and form alliances with
the old, aristocratic-absolutist ruling classes. Hence, as Gramsci saw, the Jacobin model
of bourgeois-subaltern class alliance was no longer a viable option. Second, under eco-
nomic, ideological and particularly geopolitical-military pressures from those countries
that had already undergone bourgeois revolutions, fractions within the existing ruling
classes were compelled to effect their own capitalist transformations given the inability of
the bourgeois to do so themselves (Davidson, 2003: 11–2). Modern European states
were born through ‘successive waves’ of class struggle combining ‘social struggles, inter-
ventions from above of the enlightened monarchy type, and national wars—with the
later two phenomena predominating’ (Gramsci, 1971: 115, Q10II§61). The temporal
and spatial sequencing of capitalist transitions were, therefore, central to the form subse-
quent revolutions took. They were, as Perry Anderson notes, ‘historically interrelated …
the sequence of their connexions entered into the definition of their differences. Their
order was constitutive of their structure’ (Anderson, 1992: 116).
Gramsci never explicitly linked passive revolution to uneven and combined develop-
ment. Nevertheless, Trotsky’s theory helps make explicit certain presuppositions never
fully thematised in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks—assumptions present ‘in a practical
state’, but not a conceptual form.5 Incorporating passive revolution into Trotsky’s theory
of uneven and combined development, in turn, illuminates the ontology of class agencies
often lacking in more structuralist accounts of capitalist revolutions.6 The ‘series of pas-
sive revolutions’ in post-Napoleonic Europe can be thus conceived as emerging internally
from the staggered nature of capitalist industrialisation, developing within the interac-
tive context of a European multi-state system, boiling over in a cauldron of revolutionary
class conflict (Morton, 2007b).

The ‘peculiarities’ of Japanese development: Taking the passive

revolutionary hyper-route to capitalist modernity
The interwar debate
As the only Asian country to escape subaltern status while making the transition to
capitalism in the 19th century, the question of Japan’s development has generated an
enormous body of literature. Among the first and most vital of these debates were the
inter-war Symposium on the Development of Japanese Capitalism and responses to it.7 In
this period, Marxists such as Fukumoto Kazuo, Yamakawa Hitoshi, Noro Eitaro, Yamada
Moritaro and Hani Goro all sought to understand a social formation founded upon a
similar legacy to that of Italy and Russia (Nakumara, 1992: 4). One finds striking paral-
lels between the Nihon shihonshugi ronso (‘Japanese capitalism debate’) and the central
question addressed by Trotsky and Gramsci—that of revolutionary strategy in a society
simultaneously ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’. Indeed, the Japanese Communist Party (JCP)
split around the question of whether to pursue an independent proletarian revolution.
The Rōnō-ha (‘worker-peasant faction’) developed an analysis that, at first sight,
appears similar to Trotsky and Gramsci. They argued that a bourgeois revolution was not
necessary in Japan, as the Meiji Restoration was in essence a bourgeois revolution that
had established in the Taisho and Showa periods a democracy on the basis of capitalist
social relations. In response, leading Kōza-ha (‘symposium faction’) theorist Noro Hani

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Allinson and Anievas 475

argued that the Meiji Restoration was no bourgeois revolution, but rather the installation
of an absolutist regime which ‘merely accomplished the removal of pure feudal landhold-
ing relations … and in its place put unified landownership under the sovereignty of the
absolute monarch’ (Hani, quoted in Hoston, 1986: 212). The Kōza-ha maintained that
the 1875 replacement of (feudal) dues with a land tax did not abolish such relationships:
rather, they persisted in ‘semi-servile’ forms of tenure such as labour service, sharecrop-
ping and the overall extremely high level of rents in the Japanese countryside. These
conditions provided Japanese capital with its ‘peculiar half-feudal and militaristic charac-
ter’ (Hirano, 1948: 4, 67). The task of the JCP was therefore to abolish the absolutist
elements of the Japanese state and encourage agrarian reform, only then moving on to
the business of worker’s revolution (Hoston, 1991: 567).
The weaknesses of the arguments in this debate reveal almost as much as the enor-
mously productive research it generated. Both the Rōnō-ha and the Kōza-ha acknowl-
edged the decisive impact of international pressures on the course of the Meiji Restoration
and subsequent transformation of Japanese social relations and its divergence from any
model of bourgeois revolution (Takahashi, 1930: 7; Hirano, 1948: 153–155). Yet nei-
ther group integrated these insights into its theories, as Gramsci and particularly Trotsky
had. Both were in fact committed to a stagist view of history—the difference being that
the Rōnō-ha thought that Meiji Restoration constituted the bourgeois stage, and the
Kōza-ha that it constituted the absolutist or semi-feudal one. We suggest that a reading
of the Meiji Restoration as a passive revolution within the context of capitalism’s uneven
and combined development helps us move beyond some of these limitations.
In analyses of the Meiji Restoration, we can broadly delineate three key intertwined
themes of these debates: (1) the extent to which the Japanese developmental case refutes or
reinforces classical social theories of development; (2) the relative weighting of ‘internal’
and ‘external’ factors, and the relationship between these spheres, in explaining the origins
and trajectory of the transition to capitalism and (3) the precise nature of this transition—
that is, whether the Meiji Restoration can be defined as a ‘bourgeois revolution’. The unify-
ing question here is the extent to which the causes and pattern of Japanese development
followed or deviated from the classic transition from feudalism to capitalism pioneered in
Western Europe. It was precisely to this classical developmental model that both the
Rōnō-ha and Kōza-ha sought to ‘fit’ the Japanese case—an attempt followed by subsequent
generations of scholars in explaining the Japanese economic ‘miracle’. Tokugawa Japan is
conceived as a form of European feudalism, thus explaining the Meiji reformers’ ability to
promote such a rapid, ‘successful’ transition to capitalist modernity (e.g. Norman, 1940;
Landes, 1965; Moore, 1966; Anderson, 1974; Halliday, 1975; Howell, 1995; Brenner in
Harman and Brenner, 2006). Yet here we see the limits of endogenous models of social
development, since the contrasts between Tokugawa Japan and Europe were more signifi-
cant than their similarities. In order to adequately understand these differences, we need to
first trace the more general uneven and combined process of Japan’s development.

Japanese development in the longue durée

Japan’s pre-modern history illustrates well both the presence of elements of uneven and
combined development and the difference between those elements and the later geopo-
litical pressures of the capitalist era that led to the Meiji passive revolution. The geo-
graphical position of the Japanese archipelago placed it at the edge of the ‘China-centered

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476 Capital & Class 34(3)

tributary trade system’, as Giovanni Arrighi (2007: 314) calls it, somewhat insulated
from intensive incorporation into that system (Hall, 1970: 7). As an ‘imperial frontier
society’ of sorts (Van der Pijl, 2007: 76–7; on Japan as frontier, see 102–3), the Japanese
were able to selectively borrow and improve upon the innovations of Chinese civiliza-
tion, which had subsequent consequential effects on Japanese development (cf. Totman,
2004: 31–44). In these ways, Japan fits Justin Rosenberg’s (2006) expanded conceptu-
alisation of uneven and combined development, capturing the multilinear and interactive
dimension of social development.8 Yet this combined inter-societal development greatly
differed from the endemic warfare and military expansionism of the European multi-
state system.
This contrast is all the more instructive because of the initial apparent similarity of the
starting points of Europe and Japan. Japanese social structure of the Kamakura and
Muromachi periods (1185–1573 CE), can be viewed as a form of feudalism. By the end
of the 12th century, state–society relations were characterised by the emergence of an
increasingly powerful provincial military aristocracy (the bushi or samurai), the creation
of a military establishment with broad civil powers (the shogunate), and an increased
dependence upon lord–vassal relations in the exercise of power (see Hall, 1970: 75–6;
Mason and Caiger, 1997: 74–80). The dynamics of Japanese development thus wit-
nessed a process similar to the ‘political accumulation’ of feudal Europe (Brenner, 1986).
In the absence of capitalist production relations, the evolving samurai class had little
incentive to systematically develop labour-saving technologies. In order to increase their
incomes, the samurai, as an exploiting class like the European lords, ‘had little choice but
to do so by redistributing the wealth and income away from their peasants or from other
members of the exploiting classes’ (Brenner, 1986: 31). Consequently, Japanese politics
alternated between more and less severe periods of civil war, as samurai sought to extend
their domains and seize the decaying remnants of imperial tax lands (see Totman, 1993:
15–21). This period eventually issued in the rule of a supreme military commander9 at
the apex of a shifting pattern of competitive ‘political accumulation’.
However, the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate was no mere analogue of the European
experience. The ‘near-absence of intra-systemic military competition and extra-systemic
geographical expansion’ on the Chinese periphery for over five hundred years (1400–
1900) (Arrighi, 2007: 314, 316) contributed to this trajectory. If Arrighi is incorrect in
his reasoning for China’s peaceful relations with its East Asian neighbors (cf. Van der Pijl,
2007: 89–109), he nevertheless elucidates a key factor in explaining the divergent devel-
opmental patterns between Europe and Japan—specifically the absence of centralised
state formation. ‘Japan was Europe in microcosm’, James Fulcher notes (1988: 232), ‘the
imperatives of internal inter-state competition produced local absolute states but the
international isolation of Japan made a national absolute state unnecessary’. While illu-
minating, Fulcher’s argument must be qualified.
By the end of the Muromachi era, Japanese society was in the midst of the highly
destructive period of ‘warring states’ (sengokujidai), which eventuated in the consolida-
tion of power in the hands of the Tokugawa house by 1600. The ‘closed country’
(sakokou) policy of the Tokugawas was a response to the early mercantilist overtures of
the Portuguese and the Dutch. The success (never total) of that policy depended in part
on Japan’s geographical isolation from these European powers, but also required a mea-
sure of coercive centralisation. Hence, under the transformed bakufu-han system, the

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Allinson and Anievas 477

Tokugawa shoguns came to exert a central authority over regional lords (daimyō), court
aristocracy and its strategically placed allies (Havens, 1998: 234). There emerged a ‘hier-
archy of sovereignty’, from shogunate to ‘intermediary’ domains whose acknowledgment
of Tokugawa legitimacy ensured that different interests would be resolved within broad
strictures stipulated by the shogunate. ‘Consequently, Japan could safely maintain a
multiplicity of “states” within the state’ (Howell, 1998: 120, 119, emphasis added).
Thus, the Japanese experience diverged significantly from that of feudal and absolut-
ist Europe. Tokugawa rule never developed into the ‘redeployed and recharged apparatus of
feudal domination’ of the absolutist state characterized by the ‘displacement of politico-
legal coercion upwards towards a centralized, militarized summit’ (Brenner, 1982: 81;
Anderson, 1974b: 18, 19). Rather, the Tokugawa system is best understood as constitut-
ing a distinct ‘tributary mode of production’ (Trimberger, 1977), combining certain
characteristics attributed to both feudalism and the absolutist state, but not reducible to
either. The Tokugawas ruled through ‘an economical system of indirect control through
the daimyō’ (Fulcher, 1988: 231). Each han represented an economic unit, in which the
samurai were transformed from feudal retainers to bureaucratic stipendiaries, but tribu-
tary control was institutionalised in practices such as the restriction of daimyō’s military
forces and the sankin kōtai, whereby the daimyō had to leave their wives and children per-
manently in Edo whilst bi-annually attending the shogun’s court there (Halliday 1975: 4).
This clarification is necessary in order to delineate the trajectory behind the Meiji pas-
sive revolution. The ultimate foundation of the Tokugawa system remained the exercise of
samurai control over the land. Organised under the go-nin-kumi system, groups of five
peasant households were responsible for the payment of a rice tribute collected by the
samurai. This tribute was then transferred upward to the daimyō who, in turn, gave a por-
tion of rice to the shogun. The samurai and daimyō were not, however, equivalent to feudal
lords exercising direct personal control over cultivators working and living on the lord’s
lands. Rather, they most approximated a ‘state class’ utilising centralised political apparatus
to extract surpluses—as tax or labour services—from a peasantry it did not personally
control (Trimberger, 1977: 87–8). These two different methods of surplus-extraction
entail distinct dynamics of social (re-)production as characterised by Chris Wickham
(1985) in terms of the contrasts between a feudal ‘coercive rent-taking’ system and a tribu-
tary ‘state tax-raising’ one. A key difference between the ruling classes of these two systems
was their proximity to the production process—‘the relative separation of the former and
the near-total separation of the latter from the production process’. Since the tributary state
did ‘not need to control the economic and social lives of its subjects’—instead simply
requiring ‘the funding that enables it to pursue its chosen objectives’—the exploiting
classes more often lived in the urban centres from where they impersonally ruled the peas-
antry (Wickham, 1985: 186–7, 185–6). This was exemplified in the Japanese case by the
daimyō and their samurai retainers, who resided in the highly urbanised castle towns (Hall,
1955). After 250 years of Tokugawa rule—premised upon a particular inter-societal con-
text in the early mercantile period of capitalism—the dynamics of this system produced a
crisis which, in an altered inter-societal context, led to the Meiji Restoration.
Tokugawa Japan was anything but economically and technologically stagnant.10
Instead, the institutionalisation of tributary relations opened ‘space for new economic
forces to develop’ (Barker, 1982: 13). The Tokugawa system witnessed a gradual increase
in wage labour, the yielding of subsistence to commercial agriculture, new agricultural

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478 Capital & Class 34(3)

techniques (though few mechanical), expansion of rural industry, the growth of com-
mercial networks independent of the state, and the growth of existing markets and the
emergence of new ones (Crawcour, 1974; Smith, 1959). Yet, notwithstanding these eco-
nomic transformations and the relatively high growth rates of the Tokugawa era, only
isolated regions developed distinctly capitalist relations (see Howell, 1995). In Japan,
there was no ‘functional equivalent’ to the English enclosures, which forced the peasants
off the land thereby creating the ‘reserve army of labour’ needed to establish the free labour
market necessary for the development of capitalist social relations. Instead, the late
Tokugawa period actually witnessed a shortage of labour (Trimberger, 1977: 92, 91).
Nonetheless, the commercialisation of tributary social relations led to increased social
stratification—within and between classes—thereby intensifying class conflict, as exem-
plified in the recurrent waves of peasant uprisings and protests from the 1840s onwards
(see Bix, 1986; White, 1995). Commercialisation was in part stimulated by the luxuri-
ous urban lifestyle maintained by the daimyō and samurai, in turn, partly causing indebt-
edness to the merchant classes (chōnin) and internal differentiation within the aristocracy
that undermined the samurai’s economic position. As the sankin kōtai (alternate resi-
dence) system required the daimyō to spend time in the capital of Edo, they had to
maintain permanent residences both at home and in Edo. In these ways and others, the
shogunate purposely encouraged—for reasons of political control—various forms of lux-
urious displays of wealth by the aristocratic classes. Though these effects were spread
throughout the entire aristocrat class, the samurai were hardest hit (see Hall, 1970: 199–
213; Norman, 1975: 165–168).
These creeping molecular transformations to inter-ruling class relations within the
Tokugawa tributary mode—coupled with the subsequent ‘external’ pressures from the
West (see below)—account for the apparently ‘odd class behavior’ (Smith, 1960: 371) of
the samurai during the Meiji Restoration. In order to maintain internal stability, the
Tokugawa rulers had deliberately separated the samurai from the means of production
(land ownership), eliminating their fiscal and military autonomy (Landes, 1965: 170; see
Ikegami, 1995: 150–157, 184). Consequently, samurai–daimyō relations became steadily
more impersonalised, breaking down the strong bonds of loyalty that had existed in
earlier eras (Howland, 2001: 361). These changes also cut the final thread linking the
samurai’s aristocrat warrior privileges to the traditional requirement of property owner-
ship. Hence, to restrict or even abolish these rights ‘did not arouse fears for the safety of
property’ since the power of the samurai class had become ‘almost exclusively based on
office-holding, and this monopoly was not immediately in danger because no other class
had yet the experience, education, and, confidence to displace warriors in administra-
tion’ (Smith, 1960: 378–9).
The interests of the samurai became intertwined with that of the state bureaucracy
which they sought to preserve through political and ultimately revolutionary means. The
samurai’s transformation into a bureaucratic state class was thus fundamental to its ability
to function as relatively autonomous agents in the transition from one mode of produc-
tion to another. Detached from the means of production, these bureaucrats could oper-
ate as an independent social force—the leading agents of what Ellen Trimberger termed
a ‘dynamically autonomous state apparatus’ emerging in periods of economic transition
characterised by a constitutive absence of consolidated class control—using their control
over state resources to promote a new mode of production (Trimberger, 1977: 86–7).

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Allinson and Anievas 479

The motive for such revolutionary transformation was supplied by the increasingly
diminished economic position of the samurai. As ‘an urban consumer class’ whose mem-
bers were already living beyond its means, large swathes of samurai fell into poverty,
producing a ‘lumpen aristocracy’ worse off than most commoners (Hall, 1970: 200;
Moore, 1966: 236; Howland, 2001: 362). This was a class, then, lacking any political or
socioeconomic stake in the prevailing tributary mode of production, or the emerging
relations of petty-commodity production.
Thus most of the Meiji Restoration leaders were mostly lower-class samurai from the
Satsuma and Chōshū regions, financially backed by sections of the merchant classes of
Osaka and Kyoto (notably Mitsui) who—still lacking the agrarian masses—played little
active role in overthrowing the bakufu. Hence Meiji ‘was a radical upheaval, but within
a very limited circle of Japanese society’ (Akamatsu, 1972: 295, 287, 295). In power, the
restorationist samurai not only abandoned their historic aristocratic class privileges, but
actively abolished them through the liquidation of the ‘class-like status system’ of the
shimin in promoting the construction of a new social structure (i.e. capitalism). ‘By
degrees’, the Meiji officials ‘decided to overthrow the Bakufu and supplant the daimyō
class. In that sense, their action really did have a revolutionary character’ even while it
represented a certain ‘continuity of class rule from feudal to modern times’ (Akamatsu,
1972: 304; Norman, 1975: 358). While peasant conflict and protest both revealed and
further accelerated the disintegration of the Tokugawa regime (Bix, 1986), during the
events of the revolutionary period proper, the peasants’ role was very minor. The central
agents of the Restoration were clearly the samurai. The Meiji Restoration thus repre-
sented a passive revolution in which the state replaced ‘the local social groups in leading
a struggle for renewal’, becoming a ‘policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elas-
tic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals’
(Gramsci, 1971: 115, Q10II§61).
While the Tokugawa regime was beset by internal contradictions and crises, it is nev-
ertheless curious that the samurai ended up orchestrating the development of capitalist
social relations. If anything, the dynamics of the late Tokugawa society era reveal a ten-
dency towards a re-feudalisation of society, were it not for the encroachments of the
advanced capitalist states (see Moore, 1966: 236; Anderson, 1974: 415–6; Moulder,
1977: 48, 88–89; Trimberger, 1977: 86; Barker, 1982: 29). For no clearly capitalist social
forces to push the samurai in such direction had developed. As the problematic11 inter-
war intellectual Takahashi Kamekichi put it (1930: 4), the Tokugawa ‘feudal’ system was
‘dragged from the hothouse of its development’ by the pressure of Euro-American capital-
isms. In order to understand the specifically capitalist nature of the Meiji Restoration, we
must then go beyond internalist accounts and examine the inter-societal determinations
of Japan’s transition.

The Meiji Restoration as passive revolution under conditions of

uneven and combined development
With the theory of uneven and combined development, Trotsky articulated three causal
factors derivative of the international constitution of the capitalist world system: (1) the
‘whip of external necessity’; (2) the ‘privileges of backwardness’; and (3) what we call the

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480 Capital & Class 34(3)

‘contradictions of sociological amalgamation’. All three can be used in explaining the

Japanese developmental process. As Germaine Hoston writes, ‘Much as Russian Tsar
Alexander did in response to the Crimean War of 1854–56, the oligarchs ruling in the
name of the Meiji emperor launched the Meiji reforms in the 1870s to strengthen Japan
militarily enough to oppose external pressures from more advanced Western capitalist
societies’. Consequently, ‘both Russia and Japan shared a pattern of backwardness and
accelerated economic development from above yielding a combination of aspects of dif-
ferent modes of production in both cases’ (Hoston, 1986: 5, 63). How could such differ-
ent countries as Russia and Japan have undergone such a similar developmental process?
The necessary starting point to answer this question lies in the shared timing of Russia
and Japan’s industrialisation drives and modern state-formation processes in relation to
the interactive development of world capitalism. This recalls Phillip McMichael’s (1990)
methodology of ‘incorporated comparison’, whereby specific instances of state formation
processes are dialectically related as constitutive moments in a single world-historical
process. The ‘whole’ thereby crystallises via comparative analysis of its ‘parts’ as moments
of a differentially developing, interactive ‘self-forming whole’ (McMichael, 1990, 386;
cf. Morton, 2009). Hence, ‘variations in the actual process whereby the same historical
development manifests itself in different countries have to be related not only to the dif-
fering combinations of internal relations with the different countries, but also to the
differing international relations’ (Gramsci, 1971, 84, Q19§24).
For two-and-a-half centuries, Japan remained on the margins of the developing world
capitalist order, thereby maintaining its independence from Western colonisation. Yet,
by the mid-19th century, the ‘external’ environment from which the ruling class had
sought to isolate itself was being radically transformed. ‘By the mid-19th century’, Perry
Anderson (1974: 392) remarks, ‘the advent of the industrial revolution in Western
Europe had created a capitalist world market of a type that had never existed in the 16th
and 17th centuries, with a pulling power that could transform backward agrarian regions
within a few decades’. This ‘pulling power’ of the world economy and the historically
unprecedented developmental gulf that opened between capitalist and non-capitalist
regions radically transformed the intensity of the geopolitical-military forces now facing
the Tokugawa bakufu.
The original European challenge to Japan was posed by Portuguese and Spanish trad-
ing networks linking distant nodes in non-capitalist societies to provide goods that were
not locally available. The source of their profit was in buying low and selling high, rather
than in the exploitation of labour at the point of production (Rosenberg, 1994: 107).
These were not yet capitalist empires, and their economic and military capacities were
relatively meagre. ‘The Portuguese and Spanish who ventured to the Orient in the six-
teenth century were stretching their capacities to the limit... their staying power rested as
much on the weakness of the people they conquered as on their special military superior-
ity’ (Hall, 1970: 135). The determined resistance of the Tokugawa shogunate was thus
enough to deter such adventurers, as the Japanese social structure represented a level of
development more or less similar to those of the Portuguese and Spanish mercantilist
empires. When the Dutch and English later entered Asian waters in the 17th century,
they too still lacked the will and material backing to exert any major effort to open up
the Chinese and Japanese markets. After a century-and-a-half, then, both China and
Japan were able to ‘control’ the Westerners (Hall, 1970: 136). Again, the reason was the

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Allinson and Anievas 481

comparative developmental closeness between these early agrarian capitalisms and the
tributary structures of Japan and China. The ‘great divergence’, as Kenneth Pomeranz
(2000) terms it, between the two would only come in the early 19th century and after
with the emergence of an industrialising world capitalist economy, somewhat overcom-
ing the barrier of sheer geographical distance.
Emerging from societies in which competition on the basis of exploited wage labour
had become predominant, the Europeans and Americans competing to ‘open’ Japan in
the 19th century were of a different sort. As industrial capitalist societies, they had both
the technology—in the form of the steam ships and arms produced by industrialisa-
tion—and the imperative to conquer Japan. Whichever group of nationally based capi-
talists could conquer Japan would, it was hoped, reap the windfall profits that accrue to
industrialised commodities sold in pre-industrial markets. Britain’s crushing success in
reducing India and China to de-industrialised colonies provided an example to be emu-
lated and feared. Indeed, the fate of China in the Opium Wars of 1838–42 ‘made a last-
ing impression on the best minds in Japan whose writings despite censorship and
suppression sounded a clarion call for national defense and even the adoption of Western
industry and military science’ (Norman, 1940: 38; See Jansen, 2002: 270–2). This ‘dem-
onstration effect’ of the Chinese defeat was further compounded by the arrival of
Commodore Perry in 1853, and soon followed by European intruders. The question
with which Japan’s traditional ruling class was soon confronted was no longer that of
‘whether Japan should enter the world system’, but ‘how, on what terms and under whose
power’ (Barker, 1982: 38).
In a 1858 memorandum, bakufu official Hotta Masayoshi summarised and dismissed
‘as worse than useless’ two of the most widely recommended policies of the time: ‘a
policy of resistance by force and a policy of grudging accommodation’ (Totman, 1980:
10). Instead, noting the vast changes in ‘world conditions in general’ of ‘recent times’,
including the concluding of treaties and ‘open trade’, Japan should act accordingly as
‘military power always springs from national wealth, and means of enriching a country
are principally to be found in trade and commerce’. Thus, Hotta concluded, the correct
policy

should be to stake everything on the present opportunity, to conclude friendly alliances, to

send ships to foreign countries everywhere and conduct trade, to copy the foreigners where
they are at their best and so repair our own shortcomings, to foster our national strength and
complete our armaments, and so gradually subject the foreigners to our influences until in the
end all the countries of the world know the blessing of perfect tranquility and our hegemony is
acknowledged throughout the globe. (quoted in Totman, 1980: 11)

What were the likely results of the two courses Hotta dismissed? The bakufu seemed
at first incapable of anything but grudging accommodation. After Perry’s arrival, the
Tokugawa house publicly admitted its weakness by consulting the daimyō on how to
respond. This was a major blow to the shogunate, whose ‘legitimacy was founded on
military supremacy’ (Hoston, 1991: 558). The impression of incoherence was com-
pounded when the shogun sought the backing of the (hitherto symbolic) emperor,
thereby opening the discursive ground later used by the Meiji Restorationists. Furthermore,
the Tokugawa house was itself divided and the eventual seizure of power by its ruthless

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482 Capital & Class 34(3)

scion, Ii Naosuke led only to the further imposition of ‘unequal treaties’ at the hands of
Western powers. This path seemed to lead unambiguously to colonial subjugation, and
hence the loss of the samurai’s material basis in the prebendal state apparatus.
Most of the daimyō offered a different response to the shogun’s consultation: outright
defiance. The ‘lumpen aristocracy’ of the samurai were particularly inclined to this
course. They violently opposed the Western presence, using their martial skills to cut
down the hapless foreign interlopers. Their slogan was sonnou-joui: ‘revere the Emperor,
expel the barbarians’. As ‘revere the Emperor’ implied, this course would lead to armed
confrontation with the bakufu itself. Even were such a confrontation to be successful (as,
in a sense the Meiji Restoration was), the victors would be without the resources to expel
the barbarians as they wished. The eventual outcome was a third course, somewhat sim-
ilar to Hotta’s proposal and favoured by a propitious international conjuncture. The
middle-ranking samurai of the tōzama (distant) han of Choushū and Satsuma moved
from a position of defiant opposition to the foreign presence to emulation of its tech-
niques, in order to overthrow the internally fractured bakufu. Incapable of militarily
beating the barbarians, Choushū leaders such as Saigo Takamori sought earnestly to join
them. The imperial succession following the death of the Kōmei emperor in January
1867 provided the opportunity for these restorationists to strike. In November of that
year, the last Tokugawa shogun, Yoshinobu, ‘placed his prerogatives at the disposal of the
Emperor’— representing a transfer of power to the Choushū-Satsuma coalition. The
victory of the Choushū-Satsuma coalition in the ensuing Boshin war—won by a con-
scripted army with British aid—sealed its position as the ‘Piedmont’ of Japan.
Even before the Restoration, then, it had become evident that maintaining Japanese
sovereignty required the development of military capabilities equivalent to those of the
advanced Western powers. This meant borrowing Western military technologies and
organisational forms. Given the institutional underpinnings of what William McNeill
(1984) termed ‘the industrialization of war’, the Meiji leaders were compelled—often
beyond their original intentions—to institute reforms promoting capitalist social rela-
tions and national identity (cf. Westney, 1987). These included the creation of a literate
and patriotic citizenry shaped by a common educational system; a strong industrial base;
improved communications and transport networks; and state structures that could
extract the necessary resources to build all these. These organisational forms were all
innovatively borrowed from Western Europe and the USA. ‘By the end of the Meiji
period’, Eleanor Westney (1987: 5) writes, ‘there were few organizations in the major
Western industrial societies that did not have their counterparts in Japan’.
Lacking other suitable agencies and under military threat from the West, the primary
task of reconstituting state and society along capitalist lines fell to the Meiji bureaucratic
state class. ‘The involvement of the Japanese State in industrialization is the clearest and
most graphic illustration of international political competition motivating strenuous
efforts to industrialize’ (Sen, 1984: 125). The Meiji state came effectively to function as
capital (see Barker, 1978). Taking on the role of capital accumulator, state agencies
sought to embed the value relation throughout Japanese society. To this end, the Meiji
oligarchs launched a series of land and tax reforms in the 1870s, including the abolition
of han jurisdictions and caste distinctions; the permitting of the commutation of dues
and right to buy, sell and leave land; and the introduction of universal conscription. Such
was Japan’s ‘mimetic’ process of ‘state-led combined development as the primary channel

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Allinson and Anievas 483

of primitive accumulation’ engendered under the conditions of capitalism’s uneven and

interactive development (Morton, 2007a: 47).
The particularly rapid pace of Japan’s transition to capitalism was indeed a conscious
decision taken by Meiji leaders. ‘The new Meiji regime undertook massive industrializa-
tion under the slogan fukoku kyōhei (“enrich the country, strengthen the military”), its
goal to match in a few decades the achievements that England and France had required
more than a century to produce’ (Hoston, 1986: 5). Like other late industrialisers devel-
oping under the impetus of geopolitical–military forces, Japan’s ability to do so was
engendered first by the ‘privileges of backwardness’, as well as the precise timing of its
industrialisation in relation to the historical development of the capitalist world econ-
omy and states system.
This timing of the international conjuncture of the Meiji restoration, on the cusp
of free trade and ‘imperialism’ in the development of capitalism, was recognised as
crucial by the inter-war historians (see e.g. Hirano, 1948: 3) and subsequent scholars.
As Francis Moulder argues (1977: 92), during the ‘free trade era of imperialism’
(approx 1800s–1880s), Japan was shielded from full incorporation into an expanding
world capitalist economy by those Asian regions in closer geographic proximity to
Western Europe. During this period, the advanced capitalist countries were busy
exploiting the large, resource-rich areas of India, Indonesia and especially China.
These regions formed ‘buffer’ zones shielding Japan from Western imperialism.
Crucial here was the absorption of the British Empire in China and India, and a
simultaneous drastic rise in imperial defence costs—another result of the industrialisa-
tion of war. Consequently, the admiralty sought to reduce naval expenditures through
cutting the size of naval stations overseas, thereby diminishing their presence in the
Far East. British policymakers were thus less inclined to extensively intervene in
Japanese affairs of the time (Sugiyama, 1988: 28–9). Further, since it was viewed as
being relatively resource poor, and lacking in articles of interest for trade, European
statesmen saw ‘opening’ Japan as more trouble than it was worth (Moulder, 1977:
92–93, 128–29). Although the US and European powers began signing trade treaties
and establishing diplomatic ties with the Tokugawa regime during the 1850s, their
central economic and strategic interests lay elsewhere—particularly in China, which
would bear the brunt of imperial assault.
During the crucial ‘transition’ years from the era of free trade imperialism to the ‘new
imperialism’ (1848–1875) ‘industrial capitalism became a genuine world economy’
(Hobsbawn, 1975: 47). This was accompanied by a number of extra-European colonial
wars and rivalries, along with the ‘successive waves’ of ‘interventions from above of the
enlightened monarchy type, and national wars’ that Gramsci noted (1971: 115,
Q10II§61) within Europe and the USA. These included the Piedmont-Austrian War
(1848–9), the German-Danish War (1848–50), the Anglo-Persian War (1856–7), the
Second ‘Opium War’ (1856–60), the Crimean War (1853–6), the Russian war in
Circassia (1859–64), the Italian Civil War (1861–9), the American Civil War (1861–5),
the Franco-Mexican War (1862–3), the Italian-Austrian War (1866), and the Franco-
Prussian War (1870–1). It was this ‘fortuitous balance of international forces’, as E. H.
Norman termed it (1940: 46), that provided the ‘vital necessary breathing-space’ for
Japan ‘to shake off the restricting fetters of feudalism’ relatively free from Western
encroachment.

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484 Capital & Class 34(3)

Yet this ‘fortuitous’ conjuncture of international forces seems less contingent when
viewed from the perspective of capitalism’s uneven and combined development. From
this approach, the conjuncture of wars for national unification and revolutions from
above within Europe emerge from the ‘chain of interconnected industrial revolutions,
staggered in space and time, stretched across northern Europe’s long nineteenth century’
(ibid.). This ‘East-West plane of unevenness’, as Justin Rosenberg (2010: 25) argues,
elicited ‘rapid alterations in the Continental balance of power, themselves attendant
upon the dynamic historical unevenness of industrialisation across Europe, undermin[ing]
established geopolitical configurations’. This was witnessed in the period of the ‘New
Imperialism’ (1880s onwards), which saw the emergence of new industrialising capitalist
powers in the West—particularly the newly unified German and American states, along
with Russia—challenging British hegemony. The result was a sharpening of the com-
petitive struggle among the Western capitalist powers for energy resources and new mar-
kets, leading to a vast expansion of colonial acquisitions and informal modes of
imperialism. ‘Had the Western nations reached Japan at this time’, Moulder (1977: 93)
writes, ‘rather than in the 1850s, Japan, though smaller and poorer than China or India,
might today be burdened by a colonial heritage’.
By the 1880s, however, Japan had built a new army and navy, having already begun
its state-led transformation into an industrial capitalist power. Unlikely to withstand
a serious European military engagement, the Japanese state was nevertheless strong
enough to make any such effort relatively costly. For very different reasons, European
statesmen now again turned their attention to the easier and more traditional targets
of imperialist plundering such as India and China, as well as annexing new swathes of
land in Africa and the Middle East. And, having demonstrated its newly acquired
military power in its surprise victory against China (1894–5), Japan proved a ‘likely
candidate as ally or “junior partner”’ for British policymakers whom, in the face of
multiple geopolitical challengers, were desperately looking for strategic partners.
Thus, instead of being conquered or relegated to subaltern status, Japanese sover-
eignty and power was enhanced through the formation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance
in 1902 (Moulder, 1977: 93).
The upshot of these specifically inter-societal determinations on Japan’s transition to
capitalism was a near-classic case of ‘combined development’: an amalgamated social
structure fusing different ‘stages’ of development—in this case, an intertwining of tribu-
tary and capitalist social relations. Given the ‘exigencies of the historical situation’, E. H.
Norman wrote,

Japan skipped from feudalism into capitalism omitting the laissez-faire stage and its political
counterpart. Thus speed was a determining element in the form which modern Japanese gov-
ernment and society assumed. The speed with which Japan had simultaneously to establish a
modern state, to build an up-to-date defense force in order to ward off the dangers of invasion
(which the favorable balance of world force and the barrier of China could not forever post-
pone), to create an industry on which to base this armed force, to fashion an educational system
suitable to an industrial modernized nation, dictated that these important changes be accom-
plished by a group of autocratic bureaucrats rather than by the mass of the people working
through democratic organs of representation. (Norman, 1940: 47)

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Allinson and Anievas 485

This combined formation is not, however, to be grasped in a mechanical way but rather
as emerging in the crises and responses of the actors in Japanese society. The Meiji
reforms abolished the legal and economic basis of the samurai class and prebendal power
over the direct producers. However, the abolition of the dues of the samurai class was
achieved at the expense of the peasants, rendered notionally free but in fact still subject
to ‘semi-servile’ agrarian relations (Hirano, 1948: 4). By this time, ‘Japan’s uneven devel-
opment had produced a highly concentrated urban capitalist sector, contrasting sharply
with conditions in the countryside that many Marxists came to see as vestiges of feudal-
ism’ (Hoston, 1986: 9). The origins of Japan’s agrarian class crisis, which intertwined
with industrial class struggle in the 1920s and to which ‘imperial fascism’ was a response,
lay in this ramified social structure.
A consequence of this combined development, as seen elsewhere in interwar Europe,
was an increasingly radicalised anti-capitalist movement on both the right and left—the
former finding its class origins in a perpetually crisis-ridden agrarian sector, along with
an economically squeezed petty-bourgeois (see Moore, 1966; Halliday, 1975). The mass
right-wing movement of agrarian nationalism (Nōhonshugi) was nevertheless, according
to Havens, ‘sufficiently compatible with the prevailing statist outlook to provide at least
tacit support for Japan’s military rulers’, in its racial and national myths, its idolizsation
of the rural Gemeinschaft, and its predisposition to conflict with the Western sources of
cultural degeneracy (Havens, 1974: 319). The inherent instabilities resulting from
Japan’s combined development would act as a geopolitical feedback loop through
Japanese imperialism of the early 20th century and inter-war years, which was (in part)
an externalisation of domestic crises. In the context of the fragmented world economy of
the 1930s, Japanese policymakers embarked upon an aggressively expansionist foreign
policy in search of much needed raw materials and secure markets for Japanese surplus
capital (see Holston, 1986: 247–250; Matin 1995: Part II; LaFeber, 1997).

Conclusion
Ernest Gellner (1991: 20) once wrote of the industrial (and Neolithic) revolution,

the new social order, due to be ushered in by history, was so radically discontinuous and different
from its predecessor that it simply could not be anticipated or planned or willed … This point
in no way applies … to the subsequent diffusion of a new social order, once established and suc-
cessful in one location. On the contrary: once a new and visibly more powerful order is in exis-
tence, it can be, and commonly is, consciously and deliberately emulated. Those who emulate
may also end up with more than they intended and bargained for, but that is another story.

We have attempted to tell the story of the Meiji Restoration as the pre-eminent case
of such emulation. We argued that in order to understand Japan’s hyper-route to moder-
nity, Trotsky and Gramsci’s concepts of uneven and combined development and passive
revolution are indispensible. Throughout its history, the Japanese archipelago was the
site of a diffusion of productive, cultural and governmental techniques from the Sino-
centric system of greater North-East Asia. From these inter-societal dynamics and the
related ‘whip of internal necessity’ within the Japanese archipelago itself emerged the

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486 Capital & Class 34(3)

peculiar tributary system of the Tokugawa shogunate, and its enormous, well armed, well
trained and under-employed aristocratic class. Tendencies towards the dissolution of that
system were already evident in the two centuries after the founding of the Tokugawa bakufu.
Yet we cannot understand the impact of those tendencies and the resolutions of the
crises they caused without looking at the inter-societal determinations involved—and
these must be taken at the level of the internal relations between uneven and combined
development and passive revolution. At the beginning of its rule, the Tokugawa house
shrewdly and effectively closed the country to foreign influence. By the mid-19th cen-
tury, however, the epochal social changes wrought by industrialisation had produced a
different international context, one that both compelled and allowed the introduction of
industrialisation and capitalist social relations in Japan. It was by no means inevitable that
Japanese society would take this course. The decay of the tributary system and the exam-
ple of China provided the motivated and trained men who were able to respond to the
challenge of the West, but only by restructuring the state to undermine the privileges of
the very class from which they came. In doing so, they exemplified the process of passive
revolution under conditions of uneven and combined development, or, as Trotsky put it,
the curious historical twist by which ‘the tasks of one class are carried out by another’.

Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Colin Barker, Katsuhiko Endo, Harry Harootunian, Ken
Kawashima, Kamran Matin, Adam Morton, Justin Rosenberg, Peter Thomas, Owen
Miller and two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments on earlier drafts
of this paper. Of course, all omissions and errors are our own. Alex Anievas would also
like to thank the Cambridge Political Economy Trust Fund for their generous financial
support.

Endnotes
  1 See e.g. Rosenberg (2006, 2007); Matin (2007); Allinson and Anievas (2009, 2010); Davidson
(2009); Ashman (2009); Shilliam (2009).
  2 For an anthology of these early debates sketching the origins of Trotsky’s strategy of permanent
revolution, see Day and Gaido (2009).
  3 Gramsci rejected Trotsky’s specific reformulation of permanent revolution. Yet Christine
Buci-Glucksmann’s (1979: 211) and Frank Rosengarten’s (1984–5: 92) explanations of this
in terms of a contrast between Gramsci’s ‘national’ approach and Trotsky’s internationalism
are off the mark, as Thomas (2009) lucidly demonstrates.
  4 The two terms are not, however, synonymous: passive revolution refers to a much wider
dimension of processes, as other contributions to this volume demonstrate (cf. Morton,
2007a).
  5 We would like to thank Peter Thomas for helping us clarify this important point.
  6 In the specific Meiji case, class agency primarily took the form of an intra-ruling class conflict
played out in the context of a more generalised societal crisis entailing elements of intensified
inter-class struggle throughout 19th-century Tokugawa society (pp. 9–10 below). We would
like thank one anonymous review for pushing us to clarify this.
  7 Here, we build on Germaine Hoston’s (1986) excellent study of the interwar debate, which
also points to the recurrent problem of uni-linearity facing Japanese Marxists.
  8 But see our criticisms of potential concept over-extension in Allinson and Anievas (2009).
See also the related arguments in intellectual history by Andrew E. Barshay (2004).

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Allinson and Anievas 487
  9 Hence shogun—generalissimo.
10 Recent scholarship confirms this picture of a dynamic Tokugawa economy—a far cry from
the perpetually stagnant ‘Asiatic mode of production’ (e.g. Howell, 1995; Francks, 2002).
11 Takahashi went onto drift into proto-fascism, a position we clearly do not endorse.

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Author biography
Jamie C. Allinson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Edinburgh. His dissertation is provisionally entitled ‘Uneven

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490 Capital & Class 34(3)

and combined development and Arab nationalism: The social origins of Jordanian
foreign policy from the Baghdad Pact to the Iraqi Revolution’. He is a corresponding
editor of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory.

Alexander Anievas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics and International

Studies, University of Cambridge. His dissertation is entitled ‘Capitals, states, and con-
flicts: International Political Economy and Crisis, 1914–1945’. He is on the editorial
boards of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory and the Cambridge
Review of International Affairs, and has recently edited a book collection, Marxism and
World Politics: Contesting Global Capitalism.

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