ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most indubitable contribution of Marx to economic theory was the idea implied in our current use of the word “capitalism.” Marx was the first to realize the full extent of the evolution that has taken place in human industry. He realized that many of the most fundamental of those “Laws of Political Economy,” which so startled the intellectual world in the eighteenth century, were but laws of that capitalistic system of economy which had begun its existence about two hundred years before. But Marx not only perceived more clearly than others how profoundly the economic process has changed in the last three or four hundred years. The classical economy had settled in Marx’s day upon a conception of the “value” of commodities—the rate at which they exchange on the market—as ultimately determined by the labor necessary to their production.
