Kan'ichi Kuroda

Kuroda Kan'ichi 黒田寛一 (October 20 1927 - June 26 2006) was a 20th century Japanese philosopher and social theorist. The son of a doctor, he began studying Marxist philosophy at the age of twenty, in 1947, following the defeat of Japanese imperialism and the subsequent U.S. occupation of Japan. At this time the workers movement in Japan was quite strong, but very influenced by pro-Soviet Stalinist politics. Kuroda began studying closely works by prominent Japanese philosophers, among them Katsumi Umemoto, Akihide Kakehashi and Kozo Uno.

In 1956, following the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Kuroda joined Toichi Kurihara in forming the first Trotskyist organization in Japanese history. Kuroda criticised the mechanical "materialism" that was prevalent in the orthodox Marxism, and instead developed a philosophical theory of "Materialist Subjectivity".

In 1959, Kuroda became the Chairman of the Japan Revolutionary Communist League. He wrote over fifty books published both in Japan and other countries on such subjects as Marxist philosophy, the analysis of Soviet society, Japanese cultural history, theory and praxis of organization building, and contemporary politics.

Works

• Hegel and Marx , May, 1952
• Destruction of the Revolution , 1991
• Gorbachev's Nightmare , 1992
• Praxiology , 1998
• Kuroda's Thought on Revolution , 2000
• Engels' Political Economy , 2000
• Dialectics of Praxis , 2001
• On Organizing Praxis , 2001
• Studies on Marxism in Postwar Japan , 2002
• Dialectics of Society , 2003
• Methodology of Social Science , 2005

For box in English see Akane Books

Notes

• Praxiology (英語版改訂) is defined as the philosophy of Inter-Human Subjectivity