Introduction

Insofar as the criticism of political economy represents a class, it can, according to Marx, "only represent that class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the proletariat." ¹ In Marx's view, political economy was the theoretical expression of the rising capitalist society, which found nothing contradictory in the specific class relations that made its own development possible. The critique of political economy focused exactly on the contradictions inherent in capital production in both theoretical and practical terms. The practical critique remained, at first, the actual struggle between labor and capital over wages and profits within the framework of capitalist production relations. But this struggle implied and expressed a definite developmental trend of capitalism, pointing in the direction of its eventual dissolution. To lay bare this trend was the function of the theoretical critique of political economy.