Abstract
The author of this essay believes that the popular version of Unoism has so far failed to uphold the core of Uno's intellectual legacy. Contrary to the popular idea, which continues to regard Marx as primarily a social revolutionary, Uno venerated him as the founder of non-modernist (i. e., non-bourgeois) economics and hence social science, and extracted from out of Capital what he called Genriron or the "pure theory of capitalism". The latter constitutes that which logically defines capitalism (in the sense of "the capitalist mode of production"), or, to put it more simply, the "software" which makes a society's real economic life operate as capitalism. This author, however, chooses to call it "the dialectic of capital" because it is, in his view, "isomorphic" in structure to Hegel's logic. It is essential to see this Hegel connection which is implicit in Uno's thought. For, his pure theory of capitalism is "pure" in the sense of Hegel (that the logic transcends materiality), and not in the sense of Walras or of neoclassical economics (that theory is a tautological model based on axioms). The failure to grasp this point leads to a haphazard understanding of the relationship between Uno's Genriron and his stages-theory, which, as it turns out, exactly parallels that between Hegel's Science of Logic and Realphilosophien, as represented by the Philosophy of Nature. At each of the three stages of capitalist development (mercantilism, liberalism and imperialism), the bourgeois state successfully preserved capitalism, by resorting to economic policies with a view to "internalizing" the "externalities" that blocked the sound operations of the capitalist market. After the War of 1914, according to Uno, the world economy entered a phase of transition away from capitalism, since the real economic life of society increasingly involved use-values which created externalities that were beyond the power of the bourgeois state to internalize by means of its economic policies. That signalled the fall of the bourgeois state and, hence, of capitalism as well. Mainstream Unoism, unable to comprehend this profound insight of Uno, goes as far as to propose outrageous amendments to his approach in such a way as to make it more palatable to the superficial analyses of today's world economy, predicated on the vulgar dogma that our economic life continues to operate as "capitalism". This author believes, on the contrary, that such a premise disables us from correctly grasping the present state of the world economy. The error which main-stream Unoists share with dubious "political economists" of the present days stems from their common confusion between "capitalism in the sense of the capitalist mode of production" and "capitalism in the more general sense of application of capital as a form of simple circulation" (i. e., in the sense of "using money to make more money"). If capitalism in the second sense remains ever more rampant today, it does not follow that capitalism in the first sense also remains secure, and ensures the capitalist reproduction of society's real economic life. The author believes that the real virtue of "Marxian economics" (which is in crisis today) lies in its potentiality to rise above the narrow confines of modernism (or bourgeois thought), a task which can be achieved only by following the trail blazed by Uno.
