Uno school
우노학파
A major current of post-war Japanese Marxian economics formed by Uno Kōzō (1897–1977) and his followers. It is known for its three-level method, which divides the study of political economy into the "theory of principles", setting out the logic of a purely capitalist society, "stages theory", dealing with the stages of capitalist development (mercantilism, liberalism, imperialism), and the "analysis of the present situation", the concrete study of actual capitalism. It placed Capital at the level of principles and Lenin's Imperialism at the level of stages, rebuilt Capital starting from the doctrine of circulation, and sought to establish political economy as a social science separate from socialist ideology. Makoto Itoh and Thomas Sekine, among others, introduced it to the English-speaking world.
In depth
The Uno school began in the great debate of Japanese Marxism in the 1930s. In the "debate on Japanese capitalism" the Kōza-ha, loyal to the line of the Comintern and the Japanese Communist Party, held that Japan after the Meiji Restoration was still semi-feudal and needed a two-stage revolution, while the Rōnō-ha held that Japan was already fully capitalist and ready for a one-stage socialist revolution. Uno Kōzō, who was close to the Rōnō-ha, laid the foundations of his economics in an attempt to move beyond this opposition, and was arrested in the Popular Front Incident of 1938. After the war, as professor at the Institute of Social Science of the University of Tokyo, he set off the debate on Marx's theory of value with Theory of Value (1947) and published Principles of Political Economy (1950–52) and Theory of Crisis (1953). The researchers who followed him, centred on the University of Tokyo, came to be called the Uno school or Uno economics.
The school's signature is the three-level method. Why was it needed? Uno thought Marx's Capital methodologically "impure" because it mixed the abstract, logical analysis of capitalism with concrete historical narrative and statistics from nineteenth-century England. He therefore separated three levels strictly. The most abstract, the "theory of principles", sets out the economic laws of a hypothetical "purely capitalist society" free of all historical contingencies and non-capitalist elements, with only three classes: capitalists, workers and landowners. The middle level, "stages theory", divides the historical development of capitalism by the dominant form of capital and the corresponding state policy of each period: mercantilism, dominated by merchant capital; liberalism, with industrial capital and laissez-faire; and imperialism, dominated by finance capital. The most concrete level, the "analysis of the present situation", studies contemporary capitalism in particular countries and periods empirically, and Uno saw it as the basis for direct socialist practical action.
On this division Marx's Capital belongs to the theory of principles and Lenin's Imperialism to stages theory, so that Capital does not lose its validity as a theory of principles when capitalism passes from the liberal stage of the nineteenth century to the imperialist stage of the twentieth. Uno held that the pure capitalism studied in the theory of principles was not, like Max Weber's "ideal type", a model built in the researcher's head: because capitalism in nineteenth-century England itself showed a tendency to develop into a pure form, classical political economy and Marx could take the method of depicting it from the object itself. This is called the "copying of method" thesis.
In Principles of Political Economy Uno rebuilt the architecture of Capital. At the opening of Capital Marx demonstrated the labour theory of value by a so-called "distillation": abstract from the use value of commodities and only labour remains as the substance of value. Uno held that the labour theory of value is fully established only in capitalist society, where labour power is bought and sold as a commodity, so that deriving it directly from simple exchange relations was a mistake. His Principles therefore begins with the "doctrine of circulation", treating the forms of commodity, money and capital without presupposing the substance of value, and only then, in the "doctrine of production", demonstrates the labour theory of value. It grounds it in the fact that propertyless workers, having sold their labour power, must buy back with their wages the means of subsistence they have produced. For Uno the defining feature of capitalism was the "commodity economy", a society dominated by commodity exchange.
Uno's theory of crisis is largely a theory of the business cycle. When labour power runs short in a boom, wages rise and profits are squeezed, and crisis and depression follow. During the depression new, more productive technologies are introduced, a relative surplus population is created again, and this prepares the next boom. Through this cyclical process, regulated by the "law of population", capitalism sustains itself. The core of the theory is that labour power is a commodity capital cannot produce directly.
The Uno school sought to separate economics from socialist ideology. Uno held that the theory of principles sets out the laws of capitalism but does not prove the necessity of the transition to socialism, and that Marxian economics can demonstrate the necessity of crises but not of revolution. He called his discipline "Marx's economics" rather than "Marxist economics", and criticised treating Capital as a scripture of which not a word could be changed, or branding every criticism of it "revisionism". In later life he said he had never thought of himself as a Marxist, or even a socialist in the broad sense. His deliberate distance from the official ideology of the Japanese Communist Party and the Comintern and his outspoken anti-Stalinism won him a large following, and the Uno school influenced Japan's New Left and the Socialist Association.
The school had its own branches. Suzuki Kōichirō, Iwata Hiroshi and others advanced a "theory of world capitalism", arguing that the theory of principles should depict from within the development of world capitalism rather than a national economy. Ōuchi Tsutomu wrote State Monopoly Capitalism (1970), and Yamaguchi Shigekatsu and Sakurai Tsuyoshi refined the theory of principles. In the English-speaking world the school became widely known after Thomas T. Sekine translated the Principles into English in 1980, and Makoto Itoh published Value and Crisis (1980) and The Basic Theory of Capitalism (1987) and, with Costas Lapavitsas, Political Economy of Money and Finance (1999). The Canadian Robert Albritton developed Uno's stages theory further.
Criticism was plentiful. In Japan Kuruma Samezō criticised Uno on the theory of the value form and Umemoto Katsumi on the methodology of economics. More recently Elena Louisa Lange has called Uno's reconstruction a theory of "value without fetish" that brackets Marx's critique of commodity fetishism and falls back on the framework of classical and neoclassical bourgeois "economics", which "no longer offers an incentive to change or question the capitalist mode of production". Others argue that Uno's view of the law of value as a "corrective process" ensuring social equilibrium between supply and demand portrays capitalism as a self-regulating system that satisfies social needs, pushing its contradictions, exploitation and crisis tendencies into "impure" historical reality, and that his theory of crisis deals only with the business cycle rather than the inescapable long-term crisis of capitalism.