ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises Marx's theory of economic development and its relevance for his sociological analysis. Throughout, the link between economics and sociology is maintained by reliance upon the law of value, as a principle of exchange relations between commodities, as well as a determinant of the manner in which the social product is distributed among the major classes. Marx in turn emphasised the capital-labour relationship as being central to the functioning of capitalism in its fully developed phase. Marx considered that capital had become 'the all-dominating power of bourgeois society', from which it followed that industrial production was the logical starting-point for an analysis of the system. Perhaps the only summing-up which might commend itself equally to adherents and critics of the Marxian approach would be to say that it represents an attempt to relate the sociology of capitalism to a theory of how the social product is allocated by way of the price mechanism.
