After writing for Yomiuri Shimbun, he attained a professorship in economics at Kyoto Imperial University.

Increasingly inclined toward Marxism, he was involved in the March 15 incident of 1928 and was expelled from the university as a subversive.

Kawakami went on to publish a Marxist-oriented economics journal, Studies of Social Problems.

After joining the outlawed Japanese Communist Party, he was arrested in 1933 and sent to prison.

Kawakami spent the remainder of his life writing essays; novels; poetry; and his autobiography, Jijoden, which was written secretly between 1943 and 1945 and serialized in 1946.