Abstract

The unique conceptual status of Thomas Sekine’s approach to Marx’s Capital and capitalism, heavily indebted to Kōzō Uno’s work, will be analyzed by setting against its own theoretical counterparts, orthodox dialectical materialism. It will also be shown that Sekine’s critique of dialectical materialism differs from other neo-Hegelian perspectives or Althusser’s anti-Hegelian structuralism. These comparisons unearth Sekine’s concealed epistemological preoccupations: totality, subsumption of labor, self-commodification, historical indeterminacy and the logico-historical error. Last, Sekine also considered neoclassical economics as another form of unfounded orthodoxy both in conceptual and empirical terms, which he emphasizes in his analysis of the current phenomenon of financialization.