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

Abstract

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.

Capitalismos del “Sur Global” (c. siglos X-XIX) – Viejos y nuevos aportes y debates

“…For authors such as Anibal Quijano or Raewyn Connell, the term makes visible historical and global processes and forms of knowledge in motion, originating in non-Western geographical and historical contexts. 7 The concept of the "Global South" has also become a political slogan in academia and international activism that "draws attention to global struggles and solidarities" among different peoples sharing experiences of inequality in contemporary global capitalism. 8 In this vein, Anne Garland Mahler argues that the "Global South" refers mainly to a political consciousness fundamental to theorizing contemporary hegemony and resistance.…”

Revisiting the Semi-Feudal Question in the Philippines: A Brief Literature Review

“…Again, citing Uno, who asserts that both Yamada's and Saisaki's analyses are culled from highly theoretical categories on the laws of capitalist development and reproduction akin to those in Das Kapital, Aoki (2020) says Uno calls to focus the study on the development stages in Japan to understand the phenomenon at hand. He affirms that analyzing a certain mode of production should grasp all the necessary historical, class, and political-state antecedents in a particular country.…”

“…With the country's limited industries including those dealing with the processing raw materials, the mainstream left asserts that the country remains semi-feudal and semi-colonial by the marriage of the global monopoly capital with feudal agriculture (Guerrero 1970;Sison 1987;2020). To them, domestic feudalism serves as the social base of imperialism, as the PSR would put it.…”

“…The above-cited conceptions of the Philippine mode of production, of course, if one has to take them seriously, are arguably more sophisticated than the official thesis adopted by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP, 1968). The party has been asserting up to now, more than fifty years since the publication of the Philippine Society and Revolution (PSR) and the founding of the CPP itself (Guerrero,1970;Sison 1987;2020) that the Philippines remain a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country as a result of the intermarriage of global finance capital with that of domestic feudalism. The resultant offspring, therefore, between the union of the West and the East (Lagman, 1994) is a concomitant semi-feudal economy whose growth is restricted by the local domestic production economy and the weight of global monopoly capital in consumer industries.…”