ABSTRACT
There is a second closely related feature of Marx’s reading of the record. It is that the ‘bourgeois’ reaction against Ricardo-the so-called ‘dissenting’ literature of the 1830s and 1840s-must be understood as a reaction to the use made of Ricardian doctrine by the labour writers. What is referred to as ‘vulgar’ political economy ‘only becomes widespread’, Marx wrote,
when political economy itself has, as a result of its analysis, undermined and impaired its own premises and consequently the opposition to political economy has come into being in more or less economic, Utopian, critical and revolutionary forms…. Ricardo and the further advance of political economy caused by him provide new
nourishment for the vulgar economist…: the more economic theory is perfected, that is, the deeper it penetrates its subject-matter and the more it develops as a contradictory system, the more is it confronted by its own, increasingly independent, vulgar element, enriched with material which it dresses up in its own way until finally it finds its most apt expression in academically syncretic and unprincipled eclectic compilations.
