 First, a Japanese school of Marxist economics, also known as “analytical Marxism”, developed in the 1930s and was associated with the work of Shibata Kei and others based at Kyoto University. Shibata pioneered the critical use of tools of modern neoclassical economics to the problems of Marxist economics; in particular, contributing to a mathematical theorem which maintains that viable innovations in production methods will only increase or maintain the equilibrium rate of profit (Howard &amp; King 1992; Negishi 2004; Rieu 2009).