Introduction [to] Marx, classical political economy and the problem of dynamics by Henryk Grossman

Abstract

At the centre of Marx’s critique of bourgeois economics and his own approach to understanding capitalism’s anatomy and laws of motion was the dialectic between the use value and value of commodities. After decades of neglect, Henryk Grossman2 insisted on this aspect of the revolutionary core of Marx’s analysis. Marx had identified scientific content and weaknesses in the work of the classical political economists and its subsequent degeneration through three phases of vulgar economics. Grossman revisited Marx’s critique and extended it to the latest, sophisticated and sophistical, versions of vulgar economics’ final phase, marginalist economics which is today popularly known as ‘economics’. Show more