2017 Volume 81 Issue 4 Pages 21-40
In this article, we survey Michiaki Obata’s recent three books as one coherent achievement, thereby examining his contributions to overhaul Marxian political economy in Japan. The three books are The Critique of Methodology of Marxian Political Economy (Ochanomizu-shobo, 2012), The Critique of Theory of Value (Kobundo, 2013) and The Critique of Theory of Crisis (University of Tokyo Press, 2014). In the three Critiques, Obata argues Marxian political economy is reaching its deadlock in our age of globalism, mainly focusing on Kozo Uno’s development. For all inadequacy, we believe Uno’s stages theory is an epoch-making fruit of establishing Marxian political economy as general social science, which can be essentially discriminated from the content of Karl Marx’s Capital. We regard Obata’s advance to its overall reform as a foundation for recovering loss of persuasiveness of Marxian political economy. Nevertheless, much work remains to be done: (1)theorising the transformation of business cycles, (2)designing historically transformative principles of political economy by distinguishing empirical factors from theoretical but extrinsic conditions, (3)reorganising stages theory to reinterpret historical diversity of capitalism. In order to tackle these issues, more effort must be devoted to theoretical and empirical research of Marxian political economy on the basis of abundant preceding studies.
