The Japan Society of Political
Economy (JSPE) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2015 JSPE-Routledge
Book Prize.
The JSPE is an interdisciplinary association devoted to the study,
development, and application of political economy to social problems.
It has been the largest organization of heterodox economists in
Japan since its foundation in 1959, providing important occasions
for developing and debating ideas about capitalism and its dynamics.
The book prize is financially supported by Routledge, which is the
world's leading academic publisher in the Humanities and Social
Sciences. The prize promotes the study of heterodox economics throughout
the world with the aim of challenging the dominant position of orthodox
neo-liberal economics among economists and policy-makers. The prize
will be awarded to a living political economist based on his or
her "lifetime achievement" as embodied in a distinguished
book (or books) which reflects the analytical perspectives represented
by the Japan Society of Political Economy.
The 2015 JSPE-Routledge Book Prize winner
The 2015 prize winner is Professor Makoto Itoh (The University of
Tokyo) based on his two books Political Economy for Socialism, Macmillan,
238 pages, 1995, and The Japanese Economy Reconsidered, Palgrave,
153pages, 2000.
Professor Makoto Itoh started his academic career with his doctoral
research on business cycle and crisis. He worked out the formation
of Marx’s crisis theory mainly by comparing Grundrisse, Theories
of Surplus Value and Capital. He found that the labour shortage
type of over-accumulation theory of crisis was presented for the
first time in Capital, and that the credit system played an important
role in Capital. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1973
as Credit and Crisis and was highly acclaimed in Japan.
A turning point in Professor Itoh’s career came when he had an opportunity
to undertake research in 1974-75 in the UK and the USA. A renaissance
in the study of Marx in the field of economics had been underway
in these countries and in Europe since 1970; however, this renaissance
was little known to Japanese economists. At the same time, the substantial
body of Japanese contributions to Marxist economics were little-known
by Western colleagues. Considering this situation, Professor Itoh
made an effort to build connections between Western and Japanese
political economy. In his attempts to bridge the Western and Japanese
traditions, he helped to expand the scope and depth of scholarly
exchange among Marxian scholars.
Among his own scholarly achievements, contributions in four major
areas should be highlighted, as follows.
In his earlier works Itoh contributed to the theory of value and
the theory of credit and crisis (Value and Crisis, Monthly Review,
and Pluto, 1980, and The Basic Theory of Capitalism, Macmillan,
1988). On value theory, following Kozo Uno, Professor Itoh dimensionally
distinguishes prices of production as a form of value and labour-time
embodied in commodities as the substance of value. Professor Itoh’s
three-tables approach in the transformation problem starts from
the first table on the substance of value produced, and arrives
at the third on the substance of value acquired through the second
on the prices of production deducted from the first. He argued that
Marx’s propositions of equality between total value and total prices,
as well as between total surplus value and total profit, should
be understood as concerning the relations between the first and
the third table, not between the first and the second. He also presented
new interpretations of negative value and negative surplus value,
and also of complex labour. Second, on the theory of credit and
crisis, he clarified the relationship between the Marxist political
economy of money and finance and crisis theory, and emphasized the
role of growing speculative trading and credit mechanism in bringing
about the end of prosperity.
On contemporary capitalism (Itoh 2000), he demonstrated that an
underlying cause of the end of high post-World War II economic growth,
and of the 1973-75 economic crisis which followed it, was the over-accumulation
of capital in relation to the inelastic supply of both of labour
power and primary products. He then argued that the advances in
information technology that accompanied the process of restructuring
induced three reversals in the historical pattern of capitalist
development that had prevailed during the 20th century: (1) capital
investment became lighter and flexibly mobile, thus intensifying
competition and globalization; (2) trade unions weakened as workers
were more flexibly (and irregularly) employed; (3) the role of the
state was reduced, as the era of neoliberalism emerged.
Finally, Professor Itoh applied his theory of value and crisis to
the basic issues of socialism (Itoh 1995). Adopting his theory of
the transformation problem, he argued that if Lange’s method of
trial and error method is used to achieve equilibrium prices in
a socialist economy – and thus to achieve a full “s-wage model of
economy,” wherein the entire net national product is initially distributed
among workers – then the relationship between embodied labour time
and socialist prices can be fully specified. He also argued that
his theory of money and finance could be applied to the socialist
economy. Building a stages theory of socialist development, Professor
Itoh clarified that a single model of socialism should not be defined
as a uniquely correct scientific path to be followed; various possibilities
for socialism might be chosen by people according to their social
and historical conditions.
In sum, Professor Itoh has, during the course of his career, extended
Marx’s theories as well as Uno’s theories so as to contend with
important issues in political economy. In so doing, he has made
contributions that offer useful guidance for identifying better
futures for people around the world. His intellectual achievement
richly merits the JSPE Routledge Book Prize; it is a pleasure to
award the 2015 Prize to Professor Makoto Itoh.
Kiichiro Yagi
(Chairperson of the JSPE)
Contact: Nobuharu Yokokawa at Jspecice2014@jspe.gr.jp
(The JSPE International Committee)
Musashi University, Toyotama-kami 1-26-1, Nerima-ku, Tokyo 1768534,
Japan
December 10, 2015.