Rescuing Marx from a Ship of Fools

Abstract

Abstract When Marx refers to his Capital as the founding work of a new science, what he is adverting to is the fact of his science uncovering a unique ontological object in the social world with peculiar causal properties which demand a specific set of epistemological and methodological resources to capture in theory and, on that basis, to explain how that object operates and what it does in open systems of the world. Over the history of Marxism, as a body of thought claiming lineage to Marx, Marx’s profound scientific insights have been systematically distorted, even parodied, in ways that blunt the revolutionary potential of Marx’s most fundamental and important writing. This article reviews a major contribution by Thomas Sekine, in his two-volume Dialectic of Capital (2020), to rectify this for Marxian economics and political economy. Sekine has been the foremost exponent of the effort to reconstruct Marx’s Capital, initially undertaken by Japanese Marxian economist Kozo Uno.