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.