ABSTRACT
It is difficult to draw a line between the ideological and the scientific element in economic theory. The subject-matter here is the very essence of the egoistic struggle of men, a preoccupation of their unconscious natures. And it is only by conceiving this science as a thing apart from the expressions of class-interest which have been bound up in it, that we can adequately describe the economic contributions of Karl Marx. He contributed certain fundamental and enduring ideas or attitudes to the science of economics, and he replaced the business man's ideology that is usually bound up in that science with a proletarian ideology. Perhaps the most indubitable contribution of Marx to economic theory, was the idea implied in our current use of the word "capitalism". The classical economy had settled, in Marx's day, upon a conception of the "value" of commodities—the rate at which they exchange on the market—as ultimately determined by the labour necessary to their production.
