Introduction

This chapter introduces the varied foci of this book. With “economics” as a discipline colonized by neoclassical economics and Marxism largely abdicating concern over economic theory to pursue questions of historical directionality, sociology of class struggle and Marx’s purported prophesizing of a socialist historical outcome, critique of neoclassical economics has devolved to a diverse “school” of heterodox economics. Yet heterodox economics largely buys in to what constitutes the root of all cognitive distortions in economic theory. This is the shrugging of ontology in the belief that the economic life of human society can be studied directly when, in fact, it only appears transparently in human history in the capitalist era in its specific capitalist form. Because it is only by problematizing this point that sense can be made out of what constitutes economic science, this book is driven to consider vital questions in the philosophy of science, the rethinking of Marxist theory and development of Marxian economics in a novel approach to Marxism, and the critique of neoclassical economics, heterodox economics and conventional Marxism.