Marx and modern economics

In the hundred years since the publication of Das Kapital, few generations can have been so well situated as the present one to appreciate Marx's real place in the his tory of economic thought. What has only recently become generally apparent in professional academic circles, and what the present volume makes amply clear. is that Marx was a major figure in the eco nomic tradition in precisely the sense in which Smith, Ricardo and Marshall were all major figures..

The error committed by orthodox econ omists, according to Marx, lies in not being aware of the socially conditioned character of general economic categories and relationships, and hence in taking the given social arrangement as natural, harmonious, or eternal. Or, rather, it is precisely because orthodox economists desire to see present social arrangement as natural and eternal, that they abstract from the historically specific character of economic categories and relationships. and treat only their universal characteris tics. "But," writes Marx, "political econ omy is not technology": its subject matter is, rather, the social determination of economic categories and relationships and their development:... 1

This placing of a primary sociological datum at the center of his analysis is cer tainly an important part of what has led some to speak of Marx "sense of reality" as being stronger than that of or thodox economists, who tend to abstract their analyses from the real conditions of existence in capitalist society. It is cer tainly, therefore, an important part of the impressive durability of his vision. But, whether one ascribes this sense of reality to a methodological approach or to great er "empirical knowledge," it remains un deniable, in the light of the historical data, that Marx was, in Professor Leontieff's formulation, "the great character reader of the capitalist system."