ABSTRACT
Many undergraduate students in Britain taking subjects such as sociology, geography and anthropology tend to come across the term Political Economy when they are first introduced to Marxism as part of the degree course. The central player in the rise of virtualism is economics itself; that is, not economies, but the academic discipline of economics. This claim is, of itself, quite a radical departure from most studies of the contemporary political economy. The chapter suggests that under virtualism, the discipline of economics no longer merely describes the economy but rather the economy is increasingly forced to change itself in order to match the descriptions of abstracted models that are produced by academic economists. Structural adjustment in Trinidad was not one iota Trinidadian, because economics has a form of power that again surpasses capitalism, that is the legitimate authority to transform the world into its own image.
