The Political Economy of Capitalism

One half of a machine. This teaches the Marxist economics of a single mode of production across eight chapters, running from the subject-matter and method of the discipline through commodity production, surplus value, accumulation and the industrial reserve army, the distribution of surplus value among the propertied classes, the reproduction of social capital and crises, monopoly and finance capital, and finally state-monopoly capitalism. It stops exactly at the frontier of the system it has anatomised.

The long central stretch, from commodity production through to the reproduction schemes, is an exposition of Capital, and a competent one. It proceeds in Marx's order and by Marx's logic: the commodity as the simplest cell of the analysis, the twofold character of labour, the value form and the genesis of money, then surplus value stated without flinching as the basic production relation of capitalism. It handles wages, the general law of accumulation, the average rate of profit, ground rent, the circuit of capital and the theory of crises, and in its last third expounds Lenin's Imperialism - concentration, finance capital, the export of capital, the division of the world.

As a teaching text it does what it was built to do, and it is one of the clearest short statements of the orthodox Marxist account of capitalism produced in the Soviet academy.

One caution on dating: although the imprint reads 1974, the text has been revised well beyond it. It treats the world slump of 1980-82 as a completed event, cites the Twenty-Sixth Congress of 1981, and gives unemployment figures for 1984. Read it as a book of the mid-1980s.

Edited by M. N. Ryndina and G. P. Chernikov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.