Dr. Ken Kawashima, University of Toronto
Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis Today
Abstract:
My talk discusses Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis (恐慌論), a book originally published in Japan and in Japanese in 1953, and which I have translated into English (Brill Publishers, Historical Materialism Series, 2021; Haymarket Books, 2022, forthcoming). I discuss how this is a useful book—not only for Marxist theory but also for the social sciences and humanities in general—because it gives us a clear theory, method and narrative to understand and explain a deeply complex problem of the world of capital, a problem that has not only defined the experience of modernity, but also the experience of our historical present today. This is the problem of why the phenomenon of capitalist crisis repeats periodically, and why crisis is inevitable and necessary for the reproduction of what Marx called the capitalist mode of production.
