ABSTRACT
Uno's brief memorandum entitled “The Development of Capitalism after the First World War,” appended to the revised edition of his Keizai-Seisakuron (now translated into English as The Types of Economic Policies under Capitalism), 1971, has always been a source of great inspiration as well as of embarrassing mystification to Japanese Unoists. 1 For many years, Tsutomu Ôuchi's influential book, A Study of State-Monopoly Capitalism (in Japanese), 1971, was believed to be the standard guide to a correct apprehension of Uno's intention in that essay. I believe, however, that the book was on the wrong track. For Ôuchi and his followers interpret the 1929 crisis to have been just another capitalist crisis. The reason why capitalism was subsequently mired in a decade of depression instead of automatically recovering from it as would have been expected from the theory was that, according to them, the bourgeois states, then under the imminent “general crisis” of capitalism, had to intervene politically, unable to wait long enough for the lengthy process of its self recovery from crisis, which involved a reorganization of industry with a set of new technical innovations, to work its way through. Most of them actually believe that the post-1914 world economy continued to belong to the stage of imperialism, though under the novel threat of “the general crisis.” Yet, this, in effect, ignores Uno's fundamental thesis that the post-1914 world economy could no longer mark a new stage of capitalist development, and so must be studied directly as the economic history of the present.
