Political economy

Political economy belongs to the category of the social sciences. The name of this science, “political economy”, comes from the Greek words “politeia” and “oikonomia”. The word “politeia” means “social organisation”. The word “oikonomia” is made up of two words: “oikos”-household, or household affairs, and “nomos”-law. The science of political economy received its name only at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It studies the laws of the social production and distribution of material wealth at the various stages of development of human society.^[1]

‘Political Economy’ was used prior to the 20th century, (when the term ‘Economics’ supplanted it); for its earliest exponents such as William Petty and Adam Smith, Political Economy was a branch of Ethics. With the growth of positivism in the 19th century, however, Political Economy, like Sociology, came to be seen as a branch of science.

The British pioneers of Political Economy contributed much to the development of Hegel's views in that they showed the relation between human thinking and social relations and how these social relations developed through specific historical stages related to the progress of techniques of production.

After the completion of his earliest investigations, Marx concentrated the majority of his theoretical work on the critique of political economy because Marx saw that the work of the political economists most clearly exhibited the ideological forms which dominated bourgeois society: explaining the science of economics through the perspective of the large and small scale capitalist, not through the perspective of the working class.^[2]

What is Political Economy? A detailed answer to this question

Political Economy explains how men get their living, it deals with the production and distribution, within human societies, of the material needs of life—food, clothing, shelter, transport, etc. It is not—directly, at least—concerned with the technical side of production, but with the relations between men in the process of production and exchange. It is concerned with what we call the system of production.^[3] The simple fact that production is social is repeatedly neglected by capitalist economists who delight in making false abstractions, as when, for example, they construct from the behaviour of an imaginary Robinson Crusoe on a desert island economic theories which are assumed to be applicable to any and every economic system This was equally true of the capitalist economists in Marx’s day, and in criticism of them he wrote -

Man is a Zoon politikon [political animal] in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can be individualised only within society. Production by a solitary individual outside society – a rare event, which might occur when a civilised person who has already absorbed the dynamic social forces is accidentally cast into the wilderness – is just as preposterous as the development of speech without individuals who live together and talk to one another.^[4]

Another common error of capitalist economists is their neglect of change and development. Marxist theory pays particular attention to social change and development and to changes in the laws of social development themselves. Political economy seeks to explain economic systems, that is, the relations in which men, and classes, stand to one another in the getting of their living; it is, in Lenin’s words, "the science dealing with the development of historical systems of social production".

It is necessary to find out not only how it works at one point of time, but also how it came into being, how and why it changes, how and why it decays, and how it must be replaced by a new economic system. In short, the object of studying political economy is to find out “ the law of motion of modem society ” (Marx, Capital, I, p xix) in order that we may hasten the end of capitalism and bring m Socialism.

What is Political Economy? A detailed answer to this question

Further Reading