Political Economy: Its Contemporaneity

Political economy has emerged as a scientific discipline in the wake of capitalist development in England. It has discovered the laws of capitalist production, exchange and distribution, and the laws of development in general. This whole exercise owes to the classical trinity ¿Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx. The central point of political economy is value. It is Ricardo who for the first time unraveled the mistry of value. ¿The value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended in producing it¿. It is rightly so. Although commodities differ from one another, say, in length and weight, one common feature of all commodities is that they are the products of human labour. Neo-classics is no match to the classical political economy because it is concerned with man and his behavior in a class polarized society. But neo- classical economics is mostly shibboleths, because it theorizes a world which is far from real. In fact, it is an apologetic reaction to the Ricardian system. That is why Marx remarked that the post ¿ Ricardian economists are ¿prize-fighters¿.