The Necessity of Levels of Analysis in Marxian Political Economy

Abstract

Uno’s approach to economics, as the study of capitalism, is characterized by its method of sharply distinguishing the three levels of abstraction: (1) the level of the pure theory of capitalism (his genriron), (2) that of its stages-theory of capitalist development (his dankaïron) and (3) that of concrete-empirical history of all capitalisms (his genjô-bunseki). Uno often criticized the usual practice typical of conventional Marxists in applying the same term “necessity (Notwendigkeit)” indiscriminately to characterize the theoretical regularity of “periodic economic crises”, the predictability of the outbreak of an “imperialist war”, or the desirability of the victory in a “proletarian revolution”. According to him, the first necessity is a purely logical one, which can be rigorously demonstrated; the second necessity has to do with the stages-theoretic prognosis that capitalism will most likely end in a military confrontation between a coalition of old imperialist powers and several newly emerging imperialist nations, which are vying with them on the other; while the third necessity has to do only with the ideological wish or belief that Marxism may eventually prevail in history. He also rejected the Marxists’ easy practice of flaunting an undependable claim to the dialectical unity of theory and history, of logic and practice and so on, which amounts to no more than their ideological self-deception. Theory (the “logical synthesis of capitalism”) and history (the “empirical histories of manifold capitalisms”) must be mediated by the mid-range theory (or “stages-theory”) of capitalist development, in just the same way as Hegel’s “metaphysical logic” and “empirical studies of factual disciplines” must be mediated by his “philosophies of nature and of finite spirit” (I also wish to add here that”imperialism” as the final stage of capitalist development ended irrevocably with the world war of 1914–18, and cannot directly explain such more recent phenomena as “Fordism”, “neo-liberalism”, “globalization” and the like, which appear in the subsequent phase of the “disintegration of capitalism” as opposed to that of its “development”).