Capitalism and the Dialectic: The Uno-Sekine Approach to Marxian Political Economy

From the 1960s to the 1990s the ground-breaking Japanese economists Kozo Uno and Thomas Sekine developed a masterful reconfiguration of Marxist economics. The most well-known aspect of which is the levels of analysis approach to the study of capitalism. Written in Japanese, the Uno-Sekine approach to Marx’s work is little understood in West. John Bell seeks to correct this, explaining how problematic elements of Marxian Political Economy such as the law of value and the law of relative surplus population can be solved by using a more rigorous dialectical analysis. Bell’s clear and accessible synthesis provides economists with the tools to interrogate capitalism in a more powerful way than ever before.

John R. Bell taught for over three decades at Seneca College, Toronto, Canada. His ’Dialectics and Economic Theory’ appeared in ’A Japanese Approach to Political Economy ’(1995); ’From Hegel to Marx to the Dialectic of Capital’ appeared in ’New Dialectics and Political Economy’ (2003). He and Thomas Sekine co-authored ’The Disintegration of Capitalism: A Phase of Ex-Capitalist Transition’ in ’Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations’ (2001). In 2004 he co-edited ’New Socialisms’, to which he contributed, ’Marx’s Anti -Authoritarian Ecocommunism. Currently, he is providing editorial assistance to Thomas Sekine, who is translating ’Economic Policies’, Uno’s major contribution to the stages theory of capitalism’s historical development.