Crisis theory in Marxian political economy has been regarded to be of utmost significance for the critical study on capitalism in spite of its incompleteness in Karl Marx's own literatures and has been one of the most fiercely debated subjects among Marxian economists. Enormous amount of theoretical studies in Japan on this topic can be largely categorized into two types according to the view on the principal cause of crisis: one is overproduction theory and the other is profit squeeze theory. This categorization, however, often overlooks the importance of historical perspective that Kozo Uno provided in his studies on crisis. It is true that Uno's crisis theory considers wage rise as the cause of profit squeeze, but what distinguished his work from other Japanese Marxian literatures was the linkage between the crisis theory and the stage theory, in which historical development of capitalism is theoretically conceptualized and empirically investigated with the theoretical image of crisis being one of the standards of analysis. If we are to understand the surge of drastic transformation that recent capitalism is experiencing, this historical sensitivity in Uno's crisis theory must be sophisticated further. That is to say, Uno's crisis theory cannot stay the same as a simple profit squeeze theory and must seek for a reasonable kind of multi-causal approach in order to capture the diversity of crisis phenomena. In Uno's schema, profit squeeze caused by wage rise does not indicate the outbreak of crisis itself. It is literally just a fundamental cause of crisis and practically marks the end of stable growth of capital accumulation by itself. What follows it is an unstable boom, not an immediate downturn. Indeed, wage rise is important not because it directly leads to crisis, but because it is a distinctive turning point of the stability of economy. We must, then, reconsider the process of accumulation towards labour shortage, which might bear another trigger for instability. While capital accumulation expands its scale of production and employs more labourers, it also accompanies technological innovations that are put into practice through fixed capital investment and lets plural conditions of production coexist. The process of accumulation has two aspects: the expansion of employment of labourers and the stratification of conditions of production. The latter should be discussed in relation to market circumstances, since industrial capital tries to evaluate the productivity of condition of production in monetary terms. As the accumulation goes on, the stratification of conditions of production deepens and makes the price system in capitalistic market increasingly complex, thus it becomes more and more difficult for individual industrial capitals to evaluate each production technology. The level of this difficulty in the price evaluation differs among industries, hence affecting investment choice in industries and disturbing the balance in social production. The following market disruption should be another consequence of the process of accumulation than the exhaustion of industrial reserve army. Wage rise is not the exclusive moment that precedes crisis. The systemic defect in capitalistic market with regard to the price evaluation must be conceived of as the other fundamental cause of crisis. These two factors constitute the dichotomy in the concept of crisis under capitalism.
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