Marx, Uno and the Critique of Economics: Towards an Ex-Capitalist Transition

213 Pages·2023·2.238 MB·English

by  Thomas T. Sekine

PALGRAVE INSIGHTS INTO APOCALYPSE ECONOMICS
SERIES EDITOR: RICHARD WESTRA
Marx, Uno and
the Critique of Economics
Towards an Ex-Capitalist Transition
Thomas T. Sekine
Palgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economics
Series Editor
Richard Westra, Poland and Center for Macau Studies, University of
Macau, Macau, China;
Institute of Political Science, University of Opole, Opole, Poland
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Thomas T. Sekine
Marx, Uno
and the Critique
of Economics
Towards an Ex-Capitalist Transition
Thomas T. Sekine
Suginami-ku, Tokyo, Japan
ISSN 2523-8108 ISSN 2523-8116 (electronic)
Palgrave Insights into Apocalypse Economics
ISBN 978-3-031-22629-8 ISBN 978-3-031-22630-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22630-4
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Preface
Several years ago a young American gentleman came to spend a summer
in Tokyo, and during his stay there contacted me hoping to arrange an
interview with me; to be centred on my Unoist approach to Marxian
economics. While willing to cooperate with him in that project, I was not
confident from the beginning that I would be able to produce a satisfac-
tory result for him. For I am not the type of person who has ready-made
answers to questions that are typically thrown at him/her on the spur
of the moment. Nevertheless, we thoroughly enjoyed meeting with each
other and got along very well in our personal exchange of views on the
subject matter. When he was about to leave Tokyo, I asked him to write
down on paper a series of questions that he would have liked to ask me,
which would give me the chance to elaborate upon.
I thus obtained a series of wonderfully worded and exquisitely phrased
questions that would have given me only delight and pleasure to answer. I
have revisited these questions over the years and have had time to consider
them against the progress my life-long research on Uno’s approach to
economics has made since then. I now have a fully extended, more mature
version of what makes economics an “objective” knowledge. In both parts,
but especially in the first, I made use of the delightful phrasing that my
American friend originally employed in posing his apt questions to me.
I am grateful for his allowing me to reproduce once again some of his
superb style of language in this book.
v
vi PREFACE
As before, I wish to explain how the Uno-Sekine approach to
economics responds to the challenge of economics as objective knowl-
edge, uncontaminated by subjective, ethical and ideological biases. Also,
as before, this book consists of two parts. In the first, I concentrate on
Uno’s methodology, as I understand it now. That is to say, I wish to show
how Uno learned from Karl Marx’s method in “critiquing” bourgeois
(classical) political economy, and subsequently elaborated and refined it
further to its limit. That, however, is an exercise that generations of Marx-
ists, being always more involved in revolutionary practice of one sort or
another, have entirely failed so far to face up to. Thus, whereas they were
successful in making Marxism more subjective and dogmatic and hence
less scientific and objective, Uno made it exactly the reverse; that is, he
made it more objective and scientific, by blotting out its subjectively ideo-
logical and non-scientific claims. Concentrating on the methodology of
economics peculiar to Uno, which I wholeheartedly support, though, in
a sense boldly to the extent of wishing to restate it as my own “dialectic-
of-capital approach”, I contend in Part I basically the following two
points. (1) Marx’s critique of classical political economy was, without any
doubt, inspired and undertaken by applying the Hegelian method of logical
(dialectical) investigation, far more so than Marx himself was aware of
or was willing to acknowledge. (2) Uno’s contribution essentially lies in
bringing that fact into the open, by “translating” in effect Hegel’s meta-
physical Logic into an economic theory of a purely capitalist society, in
which all use-values are deliberately nominalized so as to drop all of their
sensuous connotations. Those who overlook and gloss over (or who inten-
tionally ignore) this fundamental connection will never comprehend the
real import of Marx’s and Uno’s works in economics. I know that this
singular contention of mine will not be readily accepted by the currently
learned public, because the latter has never before even heard of such
a strange (or odd, bizarre and fantastic?) story. My job, however, is to
make that crucial fact less strange and unfamiliar. For without resorting
to the distinctly Hegelian method, neither Marx nor Uno would have
accomplished what they did in economics.
Part II deals with the process of disintegration (rather than develop-
ment) of capitalism in the present-day world, which, since as far back
as 1974, I have called the process of ex-capitalist transition. This is how
I interpret Uno’s claim that, after WWI, capitalism has never entered a
fourth stage of its development, which broadly agrees with Karl Polanyi’s
PREFACE vii
idea that the world economy then entered the process of a “Great Trans-
formation” out of the capitalist era, which, to him, belonged essentially
to the nineteenth century. There are many other writers who adopt a
similar view. Yet why was it precisely at that juncture that the capi-
talist market suddenly ceased to be self-regulatory? While empty verbiage
continues to abound in the form of uncertain observations and subjective
impressions, one thing is certain to me. That is that economists have so far
failed to convincingly explain what it was that then crippled capitalism’s
erstwhile power of self-regulation. The national economy thence-forward
introduced by necessity a large and ever-growing “government sector”
side by side with the “private sector”, so that all of today’s economies
are now “dual” and so-called “mixed” ones. While economists fail to
explain this, a large number of politicians, commentators, publicists, jour-
nalists and opinion-makers become understandably impatient, and begin
to speculate on all sides as to what to make of the recent evolution
of “capitalism”. Yet, what they do amounts merely to inventing plau-
sible adjectives such as “current, contemporary, present-day, today’s”
or “modified, revised, revived, reorganized” or “global, financialized,
digital, super-modern” and the like ad infinitum, to re-qualify capitalism,
the identity (or thing-in-itself ) of which is conveniently kept hidden as
“unknowable”!
The Uno-Marxian approach to economics, unlike bourgeois and
conventionally Marxist ones, shuns that kind of methodological hocus-
pocus. For, by just re-labelling capitalism with a new perfunctorily chosen
modifier, we solve no real economic problem. We must understand what
it means for capitalism to lose its self-regulatory power. We must under-
stand why, when capitalism enters the process of its disintegration , a
Great Depression or Recession is liable to occur, which does not self-
heal. Therefore, we need deliberately to pump active, not idle, money
into the system, as if to spread (legal-tendered) banknotes from a “heli-
copter” in the sky over the people down below, who desperately need to
gain access to more active (not idle) money as the means of purchasing
commodities, so as to accelerate their circulation, and thereby to galvanize
the economy’s activity level to its full supply potential. Idle money which is
inconvertible into capital and which must in the meantime be hoarded, i.e.,
held in readily marketable securities earning negligible interest, until a new
opportunity for promising gambles arrives, is not up to such an ambitious
task. This lesson, though already known and available in the latter half of
the 1930s, was never seriously learned, nor applied even to make a slight
viii PREFACE
dent in the scourges of the Great Depression in the 1930s, which only
belatedly receded with the onset of WWII. That was because even FDR
was so desperately committed to the false virtue of a “balanced-budget”,
the keyword for the defence of the now obsolete and moribund bourgeois
state.
In a mixed economy, however, the government sector cannot balance
its budget, unless it is permitted to tax and levy all of the hoarded money
that amasses in the private sector of the economy (when it fails to invest
that which it saves). For otherwise, the gross domestic expenditure GDE
must fall short of potential GDP, and that will depress the national
economy. That is what Keynes cogently described as the euthanasia of
the rentier. But is that realistic? For civil society does not normally stage
a revolution whereby to expropriate the rich, consisting mostly of the
leisured class of which the members earn their incomes, not from work,
but from wealth. We must invent a suitable device to accomplish this
in a relatively peaceable fashion, which the bourgeois nation-state could
not have managed given that the latter’s economic functioning was still
tethered to gold money. However, now that gold has long been “demone-
tized” and we must willy-nilly employ fiat paper money, printed by virtue
of the seigniorage right of the sovereign nation-state, we should be able
to skilfully devise the way to painlessly and humanely accomplish the
euthanasia of the rentier. I suggest in Part II of this book that there
is one possible way to circumvent the hoarding of money by the rentier,
without resorting to its taxation or expropriation. That, however, can be
done only by combining monetary and fiscal policy in the traditional sense
into one, which in turn becomes possible, only when the state can entrust
the central bank (not the Treasury) to create “active money” through its
fiscal (as opposed to its banking) channel. So far, under the vague precon-
ception of a continuing gold standard, “fiscal policy” has been frequently
thought to be the exclusive prerogative of the Treasury, as monetary
policy was of the Central Bank. Yet when the traditional bourgeois state
expires, the two policies will have to be combined more explicitly under
a welfare state.
As usual, the whole text of this book has been very carefully and
competently edited, by my old friend, Professor John R. Bell. For his
PREFACE ix
generous and very highly prized help, I wish to express here my heart-felt
thanks. Another friend of mine, Professor Richard Westra, was also kind
enough to read part of the text of this book and offered some valuable
comments and suggestions, of which I have been the grateful beneficiary.
Tokyo, Japan Thomas T. Sekine
December 2017