ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with Marx's economics but it is impossible to understand him in this field except in relation to his general view of society and its development. For it was precisely Marx's relating of the political economy at any time and place to its sociology and history that distinguishes his thought from most modern economics. Marx's major work was concerned with 'the system of bourgeois economy', as he called it in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, of which Capital was, he says, 'the continuation'. Enough has been said about Marx's general theory of society for it to be clear that he feeds into his economic model a quite specific set of socio-economic assumptions. The whole working of Marx's model is contained within one law – the law of value – which is reminiscent of the law of the conservation of motion in the Newtonian system.
