Critique of political economy

In the 1860s, John Ruskin published his essay Unto This Last which he came to view as his central work. The essay was originally written as a series of publications in a magazine, which ended up having to suspend the publications, due to the severe controversy the articles caused. Ruskin attempted to mobilize a methodological/scientific critique of new political economy, as it was envisaged by the classical economists. Ruskin viewed the concept of "the economy" as a kind of "collective mental lapse or collective concussion", and he viewed the emphasis on precision in industry as a kind of slavery. Due to the fact that Ruskin regarded the political economy of his time as "mad", he said that it interested him as much as "a science of gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have skeletons." Ruskin coined illth to refer to unproductive wealth. Ruskin is not well known as a political thinker today but when in 1906 a journalist asked the first generation of Labour Party members of Parliament in the United Kingdom which book had most inspired them, Unto This Last emerged as an undisputed chart-topper. Criticism Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded much of Ruskin's critique as reactionary. His idealisation of the Middle Ages made them reject him as a "feudal utopian". == Karl Marx ==

Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three-volume magnum opus, (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy), as one of his most famous books (Capital volume 1 appeared in 1867; the later volumes were published posthumously, by Friedrich Engels.) Marx's companion Engels engaged in critique of political economy in his 1844 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which helped lay down some of the foundation for what Marx was to take further. for example abstract labour. In contrast to the classics of political economy, Marx was concerned with lifting the ideological veil of surface phenomena and exposing the norms, axioms, social relations, institutions, and so on, that reproduced capital. The central works in Marx's critique of political economy are , A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and . Marx's works are often explicitly named for example: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. This was also the common understanding of Marx's work on economy that was put forward by Soviet orthodoxy. The critique of political economy is considered the most important and most central project within Marxism, which has led (and continues to lead) to numerous approaches advanced within and outside academic circles. Foundational concepts • Labour and capital are historically specific forms of social relations, and labour is not the source of all wealth. • Labour is the other side of the same coin as capital, labour presupposes capital, and capital presupposes labour. • Money is not in any way something transhistorical or natural, which goes for the whole economy as well as the other categories specific to the mode of production, and its gains in value are constituted due to social relations rather than any inherent qualities. Marx's critique of the methodology of economics Marx described the view of contemporaneous economists and theologians on social phenomena as similarly unscientific. Marx continued to emphasize the ahistorical thought of the modern economists in the , where he among other endeavors, critiqued the liberal economist Mill. Marx also viewed the viewpoints which implicitly regarded the institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally deprived of historical understanding. According to the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, what Marx understood, and what the economists failed to recognise was that the value-form is not something essential, but merely a part of the capitalist mode of production. On scientifically adequate research Marx offered a critique regarding the idea of people being able to conduct scientific research in this domain. He wrote: On vulgar economists Marx criticized what he regarded as the false critique of political economy of his contemporaries, sometimes even more forcefully than when he critiqued the classical economists he described as vulgar economists. In Marx's view, the errors of some socialist authors led the workers' movement astray. He rejected Ferdinand Lassalle's iron law of wages, which he regarded as mere phraseology. He also rejected Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's attempts to do what Hegel did for religion, law, and so on for political economy, as well as regarding what is social as subjective, and what was societal as merely subjective abstractions. Other scholars who engage with Marx's critique of political economy affirm the critique might assume a more Kantian sense, which transforms "Marx's work into a foray concerning the imminent antinomies that lie at the heart of capitalism, where politics and economy intertwine in impossible ways." that was popularised as late as toward the end of the 20th century. == Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues ==

One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity. While other authors, which the critics of political economy would consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of the economy, have a naturalized understanding of these social processes. Hence the epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists can also at times be very large. == Others ==

Contemporary Economists • Richard D. Wolff • Steve Keen • John Komlos • Edward S. Herman • Yanis Varoufakis Sociologists • Orlando Patterson, John Cowles professor of sociology at Harvard University, argues that economics is a pseudoscience. Philosophers • Slavoj Žižek Linguists • Noam Chomsky • Roman Rosdolsky Poets • Carl Jonas Love Almqvist • August Strindberg Miscellaneous • Paul Lafargue == See also ==