The Internal Logic and Implications of Uno Economics Integrating the Critique of Political Economy and Historical Materialism

The integration of the critique of political economy and historical materialism has been an important theoretical issue in Marxist scholarship. Kozo Uno’s three-stage(sandankairon)theory attempts to provide an answer to this question. He separates economics from the materialist conception of history, treating economics as an external economic foundation to provide scientific justification for the materialist conception of history. With this understanding, he separates value from use-value at the level of the principles of economics, reconstructs the logic of capital—that is, revealing its intrinsic logic through the affirmative dialectic of capital—and thereby progressively substantiating the materialist conception of history. The outcome of this theoretical framework is that Uno’s economics is materialist yet ahistorical, and historical yet lacking materialism. Its essence lies in the dismemberment of historical materialism within the critique of political economy. This demonstrates that the intrinsic integration of the critique of political economy with historical materialism must first entail the demonstration of historical materialism as an indivisible whole within the critique of political economy. That is to say, within the logic of capital, materialism and historical dialectics must be united as one. Only thus can the intrinsic critique of capital possess not only a social foundation but also the social impetus for the historical negation of capital.