Kozo Uno: Principles of Political Economy: Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, Translated by Thomas T Sekine. Harvester, 1980, £25.
Makoto Itoh: Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan, Pluto Press, 1980, £2.95.
As early as the 1840s Marx observed that with the material links established through world trade there arises a 'world literature'. This is true above all of Marxist literature for the simple reason that it is (or should be!) free from the ideological particularisms of nation states.
This global character of Marxist theory was made evident to me when I found that in a recent paper I was debating works by a Belgian (Mandel), an American (Sweezy), a Russian (Rubin — a man liquidated by Stalin when Marxist work was crushed in the USSR), a Japanese (Itoh), an Italian (Colletti) and a Frenchman (Althusser).
Until recently British Marxism has suffered badly from its parochialism but more and more translations, such as the two Japanese books here reviewed, have become available, Naturally, notwithstanding Marxism's effort to achieve a global synthesis, every Marxist is shaped by his or her national experience, and this is true too of Japanese Marxism. Both Sekine and Itoh provide illuminating accounts of the way in which the specificity of late-developing, state-sponsored capitalism in Japan generated theoretical debates (including also the political perspectives, in which the Soviet orthodoxy was always strongly contested). These issued, in the work of Uno and his school, in a doctrine which sharply differentiates between three levels of analysis: a) the 'pure theory' of capitalism as a self-contained, self-reproducing system; b) a theory of the historical stages of world capitalist development; and c) conjunctural analyses.
Uno's Principles (first published in 1964) gives us a condensed version of the 'pure theory'. I strongly recommend anyone interested in political economy to read it. Uno is refreshingly undogmatic and freely criticises Marx's Capital where he finds it unclear or deficient, I was especially excited by his theory of value in which he makes a number of very acute points. Uno was one of the first to point out that Marx's great originality lay in the theory of the value forms as opposed to the labour theory of the value substance which he inherited from classical political economy. He insists on the necessity of fully developing — in a 'doctrine of circulation' — the forms of value, including money and capital, before discussing how these forms sink into, and take possession of, production itself.
Itoh is one of Uno's leading disciples and has for the past decade been engaged in a one-person crusade to bring Japanese Marxism to the notice of Westerners. These essays include an historical survey of Japanese Marxism and interventions in recent debates in England on value, on crisis, and on the nature of the current inflationary crisis. The second chapter, 'A Study of Marx's Theory of Value', makes explicit the Uno school's differences with Marx's presentation. As another reviewer (John Harrison) has remarked: 'value freaks should really get off on this one.' The two essays on crisis are particularly clear introductions to this knotty problem.
The Uno volume also contains a very substantial chapter by the translator, Thomas Sekine, on the philosophical underpinnings of Uno's work. Sekine tries to show that the peculiar character of the capitalist system not only makes it possible to grasp it with 'pure theory' but that [illegible] in this way analogous to the object of Hegel's Logic with its pure forms of thought. I am not entirely happy with everything Sekine says but there is no doubt that this is potentially a very fruitful point of departure.
Harvester and Pluto are to be congratulated for making available to us these high-quality contributions to Marxist theory.