The Rise, Decline, and Revitalization of the Marxist Tradition in Japanese Science and Technology Studies

Abstract

Japanese science and technology studies has historically developed under the influence of Marxism, which generally had a great impact on prewar and postwar Japanese social sciences. However, since the late 1970s, the Marxist tradition was taken over by postmodernism and then neoliberalism. The global immiserization of working class recently brought back Marx and his critique of capital. The Marxist tradition should be revitalized by reviewing neo-Marxist works in the 1960s and 1970s, which rightly made science and technology the subject of criticism for the first time.