Marxism and the Debate on the Transition to Capitalism in Prewar Japan

• Published in: Critical sociology Vol. 47; no. 1; pp. 17 - 36
• Main Author: Aoki, Hideo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.01.2021; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Agricultural production; Analysis; Capitalism; Capitalist societies; Data analysis; Hunger; Imperialism; Marxism; Peasants; Productivity; Research methodology; Stage theory; Working class; Japan; Japanese Marxism; level of abstraction; Three-Stage Theory; Debate on Japanese Capitalism
• ISSN: 0896-9205; 1569-1632
• DOI: 10.1177/0896920520914074

After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan rapidly industrialized, greatly raising its level of economic productivity. However, the peasants were kept in a state of hunger under a semifeudal agricultural system. How should this semi-feudality be understood? About this question arose a debate among Japanese Marxists in prewar Japan: the Debate on Japanese Capitalism. This article examines the methodologies of three analysists of Japanese capitalism focusing on the level of abstraction of the analysis of capitalism, whose ideas were derived from Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s methodology of downward analysis and upward development: Moritarō Yamada of Kōzaha, Itsurō Sakisaka of Rōnōha, and Kōzō Uno, who distanced himself from both sides. Uno criticized Yamada and Sakisaka for directly analyzing a particular Japanese capitalism with a highly general theory such as Capital, and proposed the Three-Stage Theory: the Pure Theory, which is based on the assumption of a pure capitalism, such as Marx’s Capital; the Stage Theory, which clarifies the historical developmental stage of capitalism, such as Lenin’s Imperialism (1917); and the Empirical Analysis, which analyzes capitalism in each country at a given time. However, Uno’s main concern was to analyze Japanese capitalism in the Stage Theory, doing little to further advance it in the Empirical Analysis. Therefore, this article divided the Empirical Analysis into two levels of abstraction: the domain of theoretical construction of Japanese Capitalism, such as Lenin’s Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), and of data analysis of specific conditions of Japanese capitalism, such as Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844), and thus proposed the Four-Stage Theory. It is a hypothesis for complementing Uno’s Three-Stage Theory, which should be further developed by data. Finally, such methodological consideration for analyzing capitalism is applicable to non-Japanese capitalist societies.