Failed Abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form

Lange, Elena Louisa

doi:10.1163/1569206x-12341336

Cited by 6 publications

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References 8 publications

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“…52 'Kurashiki-shi' literally means 'City of Storehouses ' . 53 For an overview of the earliest reception of Marx's works in Japan, see Lange 2014. press' .54 Uno had read Marx's works in the German original;55 complete Japanese translations have not been published before 1924.56 While in Germany, Uno is reported to have been 'listening and observing, attending party rallies, sharing life and information and acquaintances with other Japanese in residence' ,57 sucking in the spirit of the times. In the wake of the Russian Revolution in the early 1920s, the world suddenly became a place where the shifting of parameters seemed possible.…”

Section: 11mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Value without Fetish

Lange¹

2021

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s and Ōtani Teinosuke's support, advice and good spirits are painfully missed.Thanks to the discussants of the Value-Form Group for being 'ruthless critics of all that exists' .Many thanks to Jan Steiner for his invaluable, and spontaneous, help.Special thanks to my patient parents, Horst and Donka. Extra special thanks to the love of my life, F.A part of the research conducted for this book has been financially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (snsf).

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Section: 11mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The monograph Studies in Capital (Shihonron no kenkyū) that had been published with Iwanami in 1949. 6 See Lange 2014. 7 Elster 1986.…”

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Value without Fetish

Lange¹

2021

Self Cite

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“…Books on Marxism were published one after another, 3 influencing workers’ and peasants’ movements. However, the oppression of Marxists by the authorities intensified in the 1910s, and Marxism entered an age of suspension, that is, the so-called “winter of years” (Lange, 2014: 10). But soon after that, the Russian Revolution taking place in 1917 shocked and inspired socialists and Marxists.…”

Section: The Nature Of Japanese Capitalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 14 For example, in her critique of Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, Elena L. Lange provided a methodological objection, asking, “what is the nexus of the theory that all three ‘levels’ of the theory share, and how does it account for or justify the various forms of abstraction undertaken on each level?” (Lange, 2014: 11). Even if so, Three-Stage Theory has provided many fruitful contributions to the debate over methodology in Japanese social science and generated a lot of discussion, as well as criticism.…”

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Marxism and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism in Prewar Japan

Aoki¹

2020

Critical Sociology

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After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan rapidly industrialized, greatly raising its level of economic productivity. However, the peasants were kept in a state of hunger under a semifeudal agricultural system. How should this semi-feudality be understood? About this question arose a debate among Japanese Marxists in prewar Japan: the Debate on Japanese Capitalism. This article examines the methodologies of three analysists of Japanese capitalism focusing on the level of abstraction of the analysis of capitalism, whose ideas were derived from Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s methodology of downward analysis and upward development: Moritarō Yamada of Kōzaha, Itsurō Sakisaka of Rōnōha, and Kōzō Uno, who distanced himself from both sides. Uno criticized Yamada and Sakisaka for directly analyzing a particular Japanese capitalism with a highly general theory such as Capital, and proposed the Three-Stage Theory: the Pure Theory, which is based on the assumption of a pure capitalism, such as Marx’s Capital; the Stage Theory, which clarifies the historical developmental stage of capitalism, such as Lenin’s Imperialism (1917); and the Empirical Analysis, which analyzes capitalism in each country at a given time. However, Uno’s main concern was to analyze Japanese capitalism in the Stage Theory, doing little to further advance it in the Empirical Analysis. Therefore, this article divided the Empirical Analysis into two levels of abstraction: the domain of theoretical construction of Japanese Capitalism, such as Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), and of data analysis of specific conditions of Japanese capitalism, such as Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), and thus proposed the Four-Stage Theory. It is a hypothesis for complementing Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, which should be further developed by data. Finally, such methodological consideration for analyzing capitalism is applicable to non-Japanese capitalist societies.

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“…I support Uno’s view of the value-form, but have presented a different and detailed explanation of the simple value-form there. Elena L. Lange (2014) criticizes Uno’s value-form analysis without reference to labour substance as ‘Failed abstraction’, following Marx’s text. However, if Marx is wrong on the spot of debate, her argument will not be valid.…”

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The reality of the law of value

Nagatani

2021

Capital & Class

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In the wake of Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism that Marx’s law of value runs contrary to empirical facts, Marxian economics has developed mainly in two different directions: one based on the simple commodity production and the other on the mathematical identity of value with prices of production (the transformation problem). The author agrees with neither, arguing that Marx intended to base the law of value on the production process of capital, as in Capital Volume 1, independently of Capital Volume 3. However, the notion of this process and the law of value have not been sufficiently explained in Volume 1. Marx presents the value of a commodity as socially necessary labour objectified in Chapter 1 on the commodity, and later applies this rule to capitalist commodity products in Chapter 7. Pointing out the defects of this method, this article relocates the presentation of the dual nature of labour to the Labour Process (Chapter 7, Section 1), and the proof of the substance of value or the law of value to the Valorization Process (Chapter 7, Section 2). The Labour Process plays a key role in Volume 1, but it contains a fatal flaw. Consequently, Section 2 ends up with insufficient explanation. By reconstructing the Labour Process and the Process of Creating Value and Surplus value, the author confirms the meaning and reality of the law of value in Chapter 7, Section 2.

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Failed Abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form

Cited by 6 publications

References 8 publications

Value without Fetish

Value without Fetish

Marxism and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism in Prewar Japan

The reality of the law of value

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