The study of Marxian political economy in the West seems to have gained momentum in recent years, as if to presage the impending collapse of bourgeois social science. This tendency is, of course, both reassuring and gratifying. Yet many theoretical studies in this direction still concentrate on such specific issues as Marx’s value-and-price theory, crisis theory, reproduction theory, and so on, without paying sufficient attention to the manner in which they might all be integrated in a total system. These studies often imply that the nature of Marxian economic doctrine as a whole could be surmised simply from the conventional understandings of Marxism. Radically different from such apporaches is that of Kôzô Uno. The latter advances the idea that the Marxian economic doctrine as a whole constitutes a self-contained system, no part of which can be adequately comprehended in isolation from the rest, and that the logical synthesis of this system (which I call the ‘dialectic of capital’) should precede not only Marxism, but the very concept of capitalism that it intends to criticise. In the introduction to this book, I shall elaborate on the methodology of Uno’s political economy. In view of its radical departure from conventional Marxism, Uno’s contribution reveals a new direction in which future scholarly works in the Marxian tradition may be developed more fruitfully.
The 1980 publication in English of Uno’s Principles of Political Economy should, therefore, lend significant impetus to Western studies in Marxism. Yet the extraordinary conciseness of its style makes it difficult for anyone to immediately grasp the meaning of Uno’s thought. While using the text of the Principles in seminar discussions at York University over several years, I was frequently obliged to produce explanatory notes of my own to supplement it. The present volume has developed from the pile of such notes, originally intended to merely elaborate on and amplify Uno’s text. Yet as The Dialectic of Capital grew into an independent book, it was inevitable that my exposition would diverge somewhat from Uno’s. Just as Uno himself, while intending to be faithful to Marx’s thought, did not hesitate to depart from Marx’s text, I too felt free to reproduce Uno’s thought in my own language, without being unduly constrained by the text of his writings. For this, Uno would not blame me, since it was he who taught me that what is to be learned is the thought itself, and not the text that (more or less imperfectly) expresses it.
However, I am convinced that this book contains nothing fundamentally opposed to or incompatible with Uno’s thought. I have tried to be ‘innovative’ only in two respects, both of which are matters of expository technique. First, I have explicitly brought out the correspondence between the dialectic
From what has been said above, it should be clear that there is nothing ambiguous about the purpose of this book. It intends to expose the core of Uno’s paradigm, which is not yet well known in the West. This book does not intend to make incremental contributions to current debates on various aspects of Marxian economic theory. It is true that it makes its own contributions to the transformation problem, the falling rate of profit, the reproduction-schemes, and other popular topics. However, I would ask the reader to appraise them in the context of the dialectic of capital, rather than to immediately try to relate them to current debates. Indeed, similar conclusions of the dialectic and Western Marxism, respectively, may have been reached from altogether different perspectives. For this reason, I have intentionally kept references to the current literature to an unavoidable minimum. But this must not be taken to mean that the dialectic refuses to learn from ongoing theoretical debates or shirks productive controversies with other approaches. The dialectic of capital welcomes criticisms, provided that they are offered with an awareness of the whole of its scope.
The idea of this book has developed from my teaching and research at York University over many years, during which I benefited from the active support and sympathetic understanding of my colleagues and students. I am especially grateful to Professor Robert R. Albritton, whose friendship and encouragement have been invaluable in the preparation of this book, and with whom I have shared a number of first-rate graduate students. The three most promising of them, Messrs. John R. Bell, Colin Duncan, and Brian MacLean, have gone out of their way in assisting me to edit the text of this book. No word can suffice to express my gratitude for their kindness and devotion. On technical matters, I have been the fortunate recipient of much willingly proffered advice. I am particularly indebted to Professor Wahidul Haque of the University of Toronto,
In view of the difficulty in publishing a book of this size on a commercial basis, this word-processed edition has been prepared as research material at York University in a limited number of copies, pending formal publication. Much of the work in this connection has been carried out during my absence from York University by the Secretarial Services of its Faculty of Arts, under the guidance of Professor Albritton. My thanks are due to Professor Albritton and Mrs. Doris Rippington, the director of Secretarial Services. I would also like to thank a number of people who cheerfully and competently typed and retyped parts of this voluminous manuscript in the past several years.
Thomas T. Sekine, June 1983
Mitaka, Tokyo