ABSTRACT
In every economic system, goods and services are produced by employing means of production and labour power. For this production to be repeated, the economic system has to reproduce itself. This holds true for all types of economic system: slave economy, feudal economy and full-blown capitalist economy. How this reproduction takes place, however, differs from system to system, with the economic classes in the system – workers, peasants, craftsmen, commercial intermediaries, etc. – all playing their own specific role. The reproduction of an economic system relates to the workings of the so-called economic circuit, which was first conceptualised and coherently analysed by the French Physiocrat, François Quesnay (1694-1774), in his Tableau économique. The economic circuit concept was further developed and applied by Marx in Volume 2 of Das Kapital, where he uses his famous schemes of reproduction.1
