The Dialectics of Capital

by Thomas T. Sekine

The single most important work in English to build on the theory of Japanese economist Kōzō Uno

Volume 1 of The Dialectics of Capital

This is the first book written in English to build upon the important and underappreciated work of Japanese economist Kōzō Uno (1897-1977) and his efforts to expose the "thing-in-itself (or inner logic)" of capitalism. Following the form of argument first elaborated in Hegel's Logic, Sekine shows that neither "bourgeois-liberal" nor even "conventionally-Marxist" economics possess a logical (and thus objective) knowledge of capitalism as such, and therefore fail to understand some of its fundamental aspects.

Originally completed in typescript and privately published at York University, Canada, in 1983, The Dialectics of Capital's influence was profound despite its very small first run. As contemporary capitalism stumbles from crisis to crisis, this book can serve as a dependable guide for those aiming to correctly terminate a system that has long since outgrown its usefulness.

Genres: Economics, Nonfiction

424 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2021

Reviews

[Jon]

This book is another take on what Christopher J. Arthur calls the "homology theory:" that Marx's Capital and Hegel's Logic share the same structure. Sekine even goes as far to say:

At times the correspondence is so close that I am almost forced to believe what is unbelievable, namely, it is as if Hegel already had a complete knowledge of the dialectic of capital, but for some reason feigned ignorance and deliberately equivocated it with his metaphysical language! (What a cunning teacher!)

Sekine was a student of Kozo Uno (a mirror of another "homology theory" pair, Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin B. Anderson), but Sekine and Uno's take was quite different. For example, after Uno, Sekine limits the scope of a materialist dialectic:

Uno – who talked of hôhô no mosha (the copy of the object's own method of self-abstraction) – was the first to explicitly warn against an indiscriminate attribution of the dialectic to 'nature and history', and to establish the real meaning of a dialectical copy theory. By claiming that capitalism alone possesses a genuine materialistic dialectic, he did not in any way deprive the dialectic of its weight. On the contrary, he made the materialistic dialectic what it should be, namely, the method of objective social science and the theory of knowledge of materialism. Because it is a commodity-economy, capitalism unmistakably possesses a self-reifying force, and this fact justifies a purely capitalist society as the objective presupposition of economic theory.

So in other words there is plenty to disagree with here. And that's not even to mention Itoh's criticisms in Value and Crisis: Essays on Marxian Economics in Japan of Uno's fairly loose economic reinterpretations of Marx, reinterpretations which Sekine follows closely. But on the other hand what Sekine has produced closely follows the logic of Capital, and where he diverges for the most part he points it out:

Marx was obviously misled by the writings of classical authors whose labour theory of value was thoroughly confused because of the absence of a general definition of productive labour, such as Marx's first definition, and because of their related failure to distinguish the labour theory of value from the explanation of equilibrium or natural prices. Marx's dialectical method enabled him to begin with the commodity, which is 'a thing outside us', rather than 'a personal service rendered between us', and to establish the first fundamental definition of productive labour as the labour that acquires a use-value, directly or indirectly, from nature. Once this was accomplished, what Marx should have done was to establish that under capitalism his original definition becomes equivalent to the second definition ('productive labour is the labour that forms value'), as well as the third definition ('productive labour is the labour that produces surplus value'). The proof is very simple. Since, in a purely capitalist society, no use-value can be produced except as a commodity, which must possess a value, productive labour that produces a use-value necessarily forms value. Since, moreover, no use-value can be produced there except as an instrument of capitalist chrematistics [wealth creation], labour that produces a use-value necessarily produces surplus value as well.

Overall I find Sekine's general rejection of both historical materialism and wider application of the dialectic problematic, but his comparison of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1 and Science of Logic had been very detailed and very insightful.

[Aidan Corrie]

"Social science worthy of its name must explain the social process objectively that is to say free from subjective interpretations wishful thinking and value judgments."

"Marx was at the same time an exceptionally penetrating and dependable economist whose theoretical acument arguably surpassed that of Adam Smith and David Ricardo."

"This book intends to fill that gap that persistent lassuna in the history of economics the reclaiming of which has long been overdue."

"To understand why this is so a capernican revolution economics will be necessary."

"The Marxian economic doctrine as a whole constitutes a self-contained system no part of which can be adequately comprehended in isolation from the rest."

"The capitalist mode of production is the only social process susceptible to objective analysis."

"To claim that the revolutionary proletariat to which history assigns a progressive mission is necessarily equipped with a god-given clairvoyance is merely to confuse ideology with objective knowledge."

"If a materialist dialectic that is supposed to generate objective and subjective knowledge is to be found anywhere in Marxism Marxist capital is the only place to find it."

"Nature is not created by man and may therefore retain the unknowable thing in itself but society which is a human contrivance cannot maintain the same degree of mystery within it."

"The dialectic defines truth as the subject object identity or as the completeness of explanation and thus avoids the correspondence theory of truth."

"Metaphysics is not such an artificial language constructed to serve a particular purpose it is figuratively speaking the language of God of reason or of the whole universe."

"What makes the dialectic of capital quote materialist instead of quote idealist is not the factual existence of a purely capitalist society but the self-abstraction of capitalism itself."

"The dialectic of capital proceeds by solving the recurrent contradiction between value the social and use value the natural and the synthesis must occur by letting value prevail over use values."

"The great advantage of the materialistic dialectic of capital lies in the fact that ‘use values’ represent only the non-being of capitalism a historical and transient social institution."

"Socialism properly speaking must be an antithesis of capitalism and cannot be meaningfully posited except as an inverse image of the dialectic of capital."