for Marx “Classical political economy,...............

for Marx “Classical political economy,”


belongs to a period in which the class struggle was as yet undeveloped.

 Its last great representative, Ricardo, ultimately (and consciously) made the antagonism of class interests, of wages and profits, of profits and rent, the starting-point of his investigations, naively taking this antagonism for a social law of nature, but with this contradiction the bourgeois science of economics had reached the limits beyond which it could not pass....

In France and England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. From this time on, the class struggle took on more and more explicit and threatening forms, both in practice and in theory. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economics. It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this or that theorem was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful expedient or inexpedient in accordance with police regulations or contrary to them.

In place of disinterested inquirers there stepped hired prizefighters, in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetics.