China Social Science Review

No.3, 2022

The Current State of Marxist Studies in Japan: With a Focus on Marxist Economics

(Abstract)

Ehara Kei

Since the translation of Capital into Japanese coincided with the country’s all-round economic development, the study of Marxist thought in Japan initially centered on economics. The “Debate on Japanese Capitalism” was followed by the formation of three schools of thought: the monopoly capitalism school, the civil society school, and the Uno school. Against the background of neoliberalism and globalism, the Uno school, born in Japan, grasped the torturous course of the development of capitalism to constructed a Marxist economic theory of dynamic change, a theory of “other-regulated value-forms,” using the example of monetary theory. The Japanese school of mathematical economics and the study of Marx’s manuscripts, rooted as it is in European and American academe, have respectively achieved striking results in their research on the wealth gap and environmental problems. Faced with post-capitalist society, the question of how the Uno school can overcome the language problem and speak to the world, is a topic for future research in Japan’s Marxist economics.