ABSTRACT
Marx summed up the essence of Classical Political Economy as the belief that “there has been history but there is no longer any”. The transcendence of capitalism meant not the abolition of property as Proudhon thought, but the substitution of socialist property for capitalist property. Classical political economy did not distinguish clearly between the spheres of production and of circulation. It telescoped the two instead of keeping them conceptually separate and examining their mutual relationship. Commodities do not exchange at their values because if they did then the rates production would be different, because of which prices represent a “modification” of values. The idea of the bourgeois society being a “self-acting economic order” was first advanced by the French Physiocrats and was taken over by English Classical Political Economy. It is universal from its very inception in the sense that it acquires control over a variety of labour processes apart from the one directly and visibly under its supervision.
