Intellectual Journey to the Scientific Core of Marxism: An Obituary for Thomas T. Sekine Richard Westra 1. Introducing Thomas T. Sekine’s Academic Journey While it was with extreme sadness and sense of loss that I learned of the passing of Thomas T. Sekine on 16 January 2022, I am honoured to be able to celebrate his extraordinary contribution to Marxian economic and political economic thought in this short article. Sekine’s academic journey commenced in 1953 when he entered the undergraduate programme in Social Science at Hitotsubashi University in Japan. By his own admission, he was not drawn to economic studies specifically. Yet he found himself caught up in a controversy raging at that time in Japanese academia between bourgeois and Marxian economics, forcing him to publicly declare which side of the divide he stood on. That Sekine was proficient in reading French, German and English at that time greatly aided him in his quest to achieve knowledge in Marxian economics to which he felt most disposed toward. To offer a brief contextualisation here, many readers will certainly be surprised to learn of a contestation between Marxian and bourgeois economics in Japanese universities in the 1950s! After all, across much of the western academy bourgeois economics in its neoclassical mode had largely achieved hegemony early in the twentieth century. In the post-war period, its growing sense of triumphalism empowered it to begin a process of expelling non-neoclassical, “heterodox” research and teaching foci, such as economic history, from economic departments. Yet, in Japan, by the 1960s it was estimated that a full 50 percent of all economists in economics departments were Marxian. As summed up by Hoff, 1 ‘it is still safe to assume that there is scarcely another capitalist country in the world where scientific interest in the Marxian critique of political economy is greater than in Japan’. Within this fecund milieu for Marxian economic studies, the work of Kozo Uno, and the ‘school’ he established, arguably gained prominence. 2 Uno, a professor of economics at Japan’s prestigious Tokyo University, also gave weekly lectures on Marxian economics at Hitotsubashi University. Attending Uno’s lectures is where Sekine first learned about Marxian economics. Not only did Uno inspire Sekine academically but also deeply impressed him on a personal level. On the one hand, for Uno’s seeming inscrutability. On the other hand, for his approachability and warmth notwithstanding the fact that Uno was a venerated academic in Japan. What particularly struck Sekine as a student of Uno was Uno’s claim that he learned over 90 percent of his economics directly from Marx by going head-to-head, so to speak, with the three volumes of Marx’s Capital, rather than participating in this or that study group as was generally the fashion in Japan. 3 Influenced by Uno, Sekine proceeded to delve further into Marxian economics. As Sekine turned to graduate studies, however, he felt a compulsion to study bourgeois economics as