The legend of Unoism in Japan

Abstract

Marx taught that economics, as a social science, must seek to know the noumenon (thing-in-itself) of capitalism, not just this or that of its phenomena, despite Kant’s well-known thesis that suggests the impossibility of such an enterprise. Uno was the only Marxist who understood this message from his study of Capital, and so developed his elaborate tripartite methodology, quite different from the usual “positivist” approach adopted by the natural sciences and bourgeois economics. His genriron (or pure theory of capitalist society) marked the first step towards the dialectic of capital that lurks behind Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy, and initiated a truly scientific enquiry into the dialectical (i.e., synthetically-logical) structure of the capitalist mode of production. Economics based on this knowledge is scientifically dependable in comprehending not only the developmental phases in the past of our capitalist history, but also its process of disintegration that began after WWI and is continuing at present. Without this lucidly Uno-Marxian perspective, scientific approach to economics is fundamentally impossible.

Notes

1 This view, which is based on the state of natural science as it was already many decades ago, when Uno was still alive, and when unbeknownst to him K. R. Popper et al. were in chorus, writing aggressively in their bitter attacks on “historicism” in the social sciences (Popper 1962, 1968, 1972), may by now be changed, and thus has become partially obsolete in more recent times, especially after the writings of Hawking (1988, 2018), since he never seemed to believe in Kant’s thesis on the unkowability of the universe as thing-in-itself. He may have been opposed to it. In that case, I may need to revise and modify part of my argument above in some ways, although I have not as yet heard of any radical change in the scientific method of the natural sciences. But, what happened to A. J. Ayer (1959, 1969), Karl Popper, Thomas S. Kuhn and the whole lot of erstwhile philosophers of science, in a more pedagogical vein, such as Stephen Toulmin (1960), Carl G. Hempel (1966), etc.?

2 For myself, I have rather devoted my career in polishing and updating Uno’s genriron (or the theory of a purely capitalist society) in the form of my Dialectic of Capital, with a view to exhorting, and refreshing the memory and the significance of Marx’s Critique of Classical Political Economy, the gist of which Uno single-handedly preserved and developed, without which economics can in no way claim to be based on any objective and scientific knowledge. See Reference.

3 See note 2.

4 This is basically the way I understand it. But, the expression “not directly assisted by either genriron or dankairon” may be misunderstood. From my Unoist point of view, economics studies “capitalism” at three levels, i.e., (1) pure theory (genriron), (2) types of its development (dankaïron) and (3) history (genjô-bunseki). This is consistent with the idea that the whole of capitalism must be understood in the light of its purely logical structure, its typical stages of development and in its concrete-historical context. Now when the subject matter of our study extends to an economy beyond the age of capitalism, or prior to it., we cannot directly apply our knowledge of capitalism to it. Yet, real economic life is always there in all human societies as a metabolic relation between humankind and its surrounding nature. The right way to study it then is to do so in the light of (i.e., in comparative reference to) the commodity-economic or mercantile way in which it is done automaticallly under capitalism. For the latter works always to achieve an optimal state of the ecoomy, exclusive of all non-economic considerations. Thus, if, in a non-capitalist society, labour-power is not reproduced as a commodity, or productive labour is not automatically allocated to each of the different branches of industry so as to equalize the general rate of profit in them, there should be a good reason for that society to otherwise aim at achieving the same or similar (i.e.,optimal) results, as efficiently as possible. For, if that economy will not be functioning in an non-optimal or inefficient fashion, the cost of economic non-optimality and inefficiency must be borne in one way or another. In other words, even in a non-capitalist society, its real economic life must always be compared with what it would have been like under an ideal capitalist society as a standard or “norm”. For only when the deviation from the capitalist pattern is preferable or worth paying the cost should society opt for a non-capitalist way of managing its economic life. For instance, the law of value does not operate automaticaly today as under capitalism through the self-regulation of the commodity market, but the same or similar (optimal) result must be obtained, in one way or another, to satisfy the “general norms of economic life” as Uno calls them in all human societies. How similarly if differently it is done in a non-capitalist society is that which must be studied and understood. This is what I mean by “not directly assisted” by the pure theory and stages-theory of capitalism. In other words, neither genriron nor danakïron can be directly used or applied, but they must instead be utilized indirectly as something like “counter-examples”. That is to explain how the same or saimilar (and hopefully even a better) real-economic result is achieved in different (i.e., non-commodity- economic or non-mercantile) ways.

5 I first published an article in Japanese, entitled “On the Trend Towards an Ex-Capitalist Transition in the Present-day World Economy” (Gendai-Keizai ni-okeru Datsu-Sihonshugi-ka Keikou) in a Japanese journal called Keizai Seminar (February, 1974), which then presumably sounded like a distant (and so harmless) wolf-cry to be sensibly ignored in Japan, where I was not living then. There is no English translation of it. But subsequently I wrote a joint essay with John R. Bell entitled “The Disintegration of Capitalism: A Phase of Ex-Capitalist Transition” in a collection of essays under the title of Phases of Capitalist Developent, Booms, Crises and Globalization (Palgrave), pp.37–55, edited by R. Albritton, M. Itoh, R. Westra and A. Zuege, in 2001. Also, more recently, I appended another essay, entitled “An Essay on the Transition away from Capitalism: How Might Unoists Account for the Evolution of the post-1914 World Economy? “in Appendix II to my translation of Uno’s book, The Types of Economic Policies under Capitalism, Brill, 2016 (See Reference).

6 See note 6.

7 Here as elsewhere I follow Uno, in using the term “capitalism” for short in the sense of Marx’s “capitalist mode of production”. But in journalism and daily conversations the same word is used in a much broader sense and in more general ways, especially after WWII, since the world was then divided into the two camps, under Cold War, into the “communist” East led by the Soviet Union and the “capitalist” West led by the United States. In this sense, “capitalism” is almost synonymous to the economy of the western democracies which preserves the “privately-run sector” side by side with the “government sector”. But as the latter grew rapidly in size, the former steadily dwindled. One thus begins to talk about the end of capitalism more recently, though not quite certain of what will come to replace it.