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.

This article aims at investigating “degrowth” from the perspective of Marxian economics, thereby demonstrating a persuasive path toward degrowth.

In Japan, Kohei Saito′s “degrowth communism” has attracted attention to the idea of degrowth. However, abolishing the market system is too ambitious to be an immediate remedy for climate change. Marxian economics is a key to finding out how to step toward this ideal.

First of all, we must strictly distinguish economic growth and the profit-seeking. Some argue that the end of growth is the end of profit, yet this is not necessarily the case. The “Fundamental Marxian Theorem” shows that the condition of accruing profit is the exploitation of labor, not the economic growth. This means that it is possible to envision a society in which profit is pursued even in the absence of growth.

This would be a society with profit but without accumulation. In such a society, we will still see various serious problems associated with the pursuit of profit, but degrowth will be realized. Since a society without accumulation cannot overcome class society, it cannot be described by terms such as socialism or communism, which refer to post-capitalist social systems. However, this is a realistic first step toward the future, while inheriting some of the ideas of state socialism and market socialism that have been proposed so far.