ABSTRACT

The economic theory of Karl Marx is firmly embedded in his theory of History as the theory of class struggles, which he had formulated and developed jointly with Frederick Engels since the mid 1840s. The Marxist theory of History thus constitutes a theory of class power within class struggle. In pre-capitalist modes of production, in contrast, the ownership of the means of production on the ruling class was never complete. Marx's rupture with the humanist-anthropological premises of Classical Political Economy seemed to merge well with the Classical value theory. According to the main postulate of the Classical theory of value as "labour expended", commodities are exchanged with each other at relative quantities reflecting the relative quantities of labour necessary for their production. The theoretical object of Political Economy is not "the economy in general", but that specific notion which is considered to build the specific difference of economic relations.