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Critique of political economy or critique of economy is a form of social critique that rejects the various social categories and structures which are constitutive of the contemporary form of resource allocation (ie "the economy"). Its adherents also tend to critique mainstream economists' use of what they believe are unduly unrealistic axioms, faulty historical assumptions, and the normative use of certain purportedly descriptive narratives. For example, they allege that economists tend to posit "the economy" as an a priori societal category.

Those who engage in critique of economy tend to reject the view that the economy, is to be understood as something transhistorical, but rather argue that it is a as relatively new mode of resource distribution which emerged along with modernity. Therefore, the economy, is seen as merely one type of historically specific way to distribute resources.

Critics of economy critique the given status of the economy itself, and hence don't aim to create theories regarding how to administer economies.

Critics of economy commonly view what is most commonly referred to as the economy as being bundles of metaphysical concepts, as well as societal and normative practices, rather than being the result of any "self-evident" or proclaimed "economic laws". Hence they also tend to consider the views which are commonplace within the field of economics as faulty, or simply as pseudoscience.

There are multiple critiques of political economy today, but what they have in common is critique of what critics of political economy tend to view as dogma, i.e. claims of "the economy" as a necessary and transhistorical societal category.

Ruskin's critique of political economy
In the 1860s, John Ruskin published his essay Unto This Last which he came to view as his central work. The essay was originally written as a series of publications in a magazine, which ended up having to suspend the publications, due to the severe controversy the articles caused. While Ruskin is generally known as an important art critic, his study of the history of art was a component that gave him some insight into the pre-modern societies of the Middle Agesc, and their social organisation which he was able to contrast to his contemporary condition. Ruskin attempted to mobilize a methodological/scientific critique of new political economy, as it was envisaged by the classical economists.

Ruskin viewed "the economy" as a kind of "collective mental lapse or collective concussion", and he viewed the emphasis on precision in industry as a kind of slavery. Due to the fact that Ruskin regarded the political economy of his time as "mad", he said that it interested him as much as "a science of gymnastics which had as its axiom that human beings in fact didn't have skeletons". Ruskin declared that economics rests on positions that are exactly the same. According to Ruskin, these axioms resemble thinking, not that human beings do not have skeletons, but rather that they consist entirely of skeletons. Ruskin wrote that he didn't oppose the truth value of this theory, he merely wrote that he denied that it could be successfully implemented in the world in the state it was in. He took issue with the ideas of "natural laws", "economic man" and the prevailing notion of "value" and aimed to point out the inconsistencies in the thinking of the economists. As well as critiqued Mill for thinking that ‘the opinions of the public’ was reflected adequately by market prices. Ruskin also coined the term 'Illth' to refer to unproductive wealth. Ruskin is not well known as a political thinker today but, when in 1906 a journalist asked the first generation of Labour MPs which book had most inspired them, Unto This Last emerged as an undisputed chart-topper. "[...] the art of becoming 'rich,' in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbours shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in our own favour.'"

Criticism of Ruskin's analysis
Marx and Engels regarded much of Ruskin's critique as reactionary. His idealisation of the Middle Ages made them reject him as a "feudal utopian".

Marx's critique of political economy


In the 21th century, Karl Marx is probably the most famous critic of political economy, with his three volume magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy as one of his most famous books. However Marx's companion Friedrich Engels also engaged in critique of political economy in his 1844 Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which helped lay down some of the foundation for what Marx was to take further. Marx's critique of political economy encompasses the study and exposition of the mode of production and ideology of bourgeois society, and its critique of Realabstraktionen ["real abstraction"], that is, the fundamental "economic", i.e., social categories present within what for Marx is the capitalist mode of production, for example abstract labour. In contrast to the classics of political economy, Marx was concerned with lifting the ideological veil of surface phenomena and exposing the norms, axioms, social relations, institutions and so on, that reproduced capital.

The central works in Marx's critique of political economy are Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Das Kapital. Marx's works are often explicitly named – for example: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, or Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Marx also cited Engels' article Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy several times in Das Kapital. However Trotskyists and other Leninists tend to implicitly or explicitly argue that these works constitute and or contain "economical theories" which can be studied independently. This was also the common understanding of Marx's work on economy that was put forward by Soviet orthodoxy. Since this is the case, it remains a matter of controversy whether Marx's critique of political economy is to be understood as a critique of the political economy or, according to the orthodox interpretation another theory of economics. The critique of political economy is considered the most important and central project within marxism which has led to, and continues to lead to a large number of advanced approaches within and outside academic circles.

Contemporary Marxian critique of political economy
Regarding contemporary Marxian critiques of political economy, these are generally accompanied by a rejection of more the more naturalistically influenced readings of Marx, as well as other readings later deemed weltanschaaungsmarxismus ("worldview marxism"), that was popularised as late as toward the end of the 20th century.

According to some scholars in this field, contemporary critiques of political economy and contemporary German Ökonomiekritik have been at least partly neglected in the anglophone world.

Foundational concepts in Marx critique of political economy

 * Labour and capital are historically specific forms of social relations, and labour is not the source of all wealth.
 * Labour is the other side of the same coin as capital, labour presupposes capital, and capital presupposes labour.
 * Money is not in any way something transhistorical or "natural" (which goes for the whole economy as well as the other categories specific to the mode of production), and gains its value/are constituted due to social relations rather than any inherent qualities.
 * The individual doesn't exist in some form of vacuum but is rather enmeshed in social relations.

Marx critique of the quasi-religious and ahistorical methodology of economists
Marx described the view of contemporaneous economists and theologians on social phenomena as similarly unscientific. "'Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations, therefore, are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws that must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal.'" Marx continued to emphasize the ahistorical thought of the modern economists in the Grundrisse, where he among other endeavors, critiqued the liberal economist Mill.

Marx also viewed the viewpoints which implicitly regarded the institutions of modernity as transhistorical as fundamentally deprived of historical understanding. "Individuals producing in society, and hence the socially determined production of individuals, is, of course, the point of departure. The solitary and isolated hunter or fisherman, who serves Adam Smith and Ricardo as a starting point, is one of the unimaginative fantasies of eighteenth-century romances a la Robinson Crusoe; and despite the assertions of social historians, these by no means signify simply a reaction against over-refinement and reversion to a misconceived natural life. No more is Rousseau's contract social, which by means of a contract establishes a relationship and connection between subjects that are by nature independent, based on this kind of naturalism. [...] The individual in this society of free competition seems to be rid of natural ties, etc., which made him an appurtenance of a particular, limited aggregation of human beings in previous historical epochs. The prophets of the eighteenth century, on whose shoulders Adam Smith and Ricardo were still wholly standing, envisaged this 18th-century individual – a product of the dissolution of feudal society on the one hand and of the new productive forces evolved since the sixteenth century on the other – as an ideal whose existence belonged to the past. They saw this individual not as a historical result, but as the starting point of history; not as something evolving in the course of history, but posited by nature, because for them this individual was in conformity with nature, in keeping with their idea of human nature. This delusion has been characteristic of every new epoch hitherto." According to Jacques Rancière, what Marx understood, and what the economists failed to recognise was that the value-form is not something essential, but merely a part of the capitalist mode of production.

On scientifically adequate research
Marx also offered a critique regarding the idea of people being able to conduct scientific research in this domain. Or, as he stated it himself: "'In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean, and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Nowadays atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations.'"

On vulgar economists
Marx also used to criticize the false critique of political economy of his contemporaries. Something he did, sometimes even more forcefully, than he critiqued the classical, and hence 'vulgar' economists. He for example rejected Lasalle's 'iron and inexorable law' of wages, which he simply regarded as mere phraseology. As well as Proudhon's attempts to do what Hegel did for religion, law, etc., for political economy, as well as regarding what is social as subjective, and what was societal as merely subjective abstractions. In Marx's view, the errors of these authors led the workers' movement astray.

Interpretations of Marx's critique of political economy
Some scholars view Marx's critique as being a critique of commodity fetishism and the manner in which this concept expresses a criticism of modernity and its modes of socialisation. Other scholars who engage with Marx's critique of political economy affirm the critique might assume a more Kantian sense, which transforms "Marx's work into a foray concerning the imminent antinomies that lie at the heart of capitalism, where politics and economy intertwine in impossible ways."

Baudrillard
The sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard has developed a critique of Marx's political economy in his 1973 book Le Miroir de la production. He views Marx as being stuck in the very categories he wanted to critique, in particular production. In contrast to this, Baudrillard rather places emphasis on consumption. Baudrillard claims that the structure of every sign is ingrained in every core of the commodity form. He claims that it establishes itself socially, as a total medium, a system which administers all social exchange. In Baudrillard's words, “[Marxism] convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the [...] hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power.”

Fisher
Mark Fisher critiqued economics, claiming that is was a bourgeois "science", that molded reality after its presuppositions, rather than critically examined reality. As he stated it himself:

"From the start, “economy” was the object-cause of a bourgeois “science”, which hyperstitionally bootstrapped itself into existence, and then bent and melted the matter of this and every other world to fit its presuppositions — the greatest theocratic achievement in a history that was never human, an immense conjuring trick which works all the better because it came shrouded in that damp grey English and Scottish empiricism which claimed to have seen off all gods."

Feminist critique of political economy
There has been a growing literature of feminist viewpoints in new critique of political economy in recent years.

Differences between critics of economy and critics of economical issues
One may differentiate between those who engage in critique of political economy, which takes on a more ontological character, where authors criticise the fundamental concepts and social categories which reproduce the economy as an entity. While other authors, which the critics of political economy would consider only to deal with the surface phenomena of "the economy", have a naturalized understanding of these social processes.

Hence the epistemological differences between critics of economy and economists can also at times be very large.

In the eyes of the critics of political economy, the critics of economic issues merely critique "certain practices" in attempts to implicitly or explicitly 'rescue' the political economy; these authors might for example propose universal basic income or to implement a planned economy.

Sociologists

 * Orlando Patterson, John Cowles professor of sociology at Harvard University has claimed that economics is a pseudoscience.

Philosophers

 * Mark Fisher
 * Slavoj Žižek

Historians

 * Moishe Postone

Historians

 * Roman Rozdolsky.

Poets

 * Carl Jonas Love Almqvist
 * August Strindberg

Others

 * Paul Lafargue.

Notes and references



 * Johnsdotter S, Carlbom A, editors. Goda sanningar: debattklimatet och den kritiska forskningens villkor. Lund: Nordic Academic Press; 2010.
 * Braudel F. Kapitalismens dynamik. (La Dynamique du Capitalisme) [Ny utg.]. Göteborg: Daidalos; 2001.
 * Ankarloo D, editor. Marx ekonomikritik. Stockholm: Tidskriftsföreningen Fronesis; 2008.
 * Eklund K. Vår ekonomi: en introduktion till världsekonomin. Upplaga 15. Lund: Studentlitteratur; 2020.
 * Tidskriftsföreningen Fronesis. Arbete. Stockholm: Tidskriftsfören. Fronesis; 2002.
 * Baudrillard J. The Mirror of Production. Telos Press; 1975.
 * Marx K. Till kritiken av den politiska ekonomin. [Ny utg.]. Göteborg: Proletärkultur; 1981.

General articles

 * (In Swedish) - Mortensen, Anders - Att göra "penningens genius till sin slaf". Om Carl Jonas Love Almqvists romantiska ekonomikritik - Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund. Årsbok.

Scholarly articles

 * Granberg, Magnus "Reactionary radicalism and the analysis of worker subjectivity in Marx’s critique of political economy"

Critique of political economy

 * Baudrillard, Jean - The Mirror of Production
 * Baudrillard, Jean - For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign
 * Gibson-Graham, J. K. - The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy
 * Bernard Steigler - For a New Critique of Political Economy

On Marx critique of political economy

 * Murray, Patrick (2016), The mismeasure of wealth - Essays on Marx and social form. - Brill
 * Pepperell, Nicole (2010), Disassembling Capital, RMIT University
 * Postone, Moishe (1993) - Time labour and social domination

History

 * Bryer, Robert - Accounting for History in Marx's Capital: The Missing Link
 * Kurz, Robert, 1943-2012, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus: ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft (also known as: The Satanic Mills) - 2009 - Erweit. Neuasg. ISBN 978-3-8218-7316-9
 * Pilling, Geoff - Marx's Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy

Classic works

 * Marx, Karl - Grundrisse
 * Ruskin, John, Unto this Last LibriVox.
 * Ruskin, John, Unto this Last LibriVox.

Essays

 * Postone, Moishe - Necessity, Labor and Time: A Reinterpretation of the Marxian Critique of Capitalism

Capital
Economics has been claimed to be a pseudoscience by a minority of scholars for the absolute majority of its history. However, many economists dispute this. There is also others scholars who don't view economics as a discipline as pseudo-scientific, but are concerned with issues like unfalsifiable theories, scientism, questionable research methods etc.
 * Wage-labour is the basic "cell-form" (trade unit) of modern society. Moreover, because commerce as a human activity implied no morality beyond that required to buy and sell goods and services, the growth of the market system made discrete entities of the economic, the moral, and the legal spheres of human activity in society; hence, subjective moral value is separate from objective economic value. Subsequently, political economy (the just distribution of wealth) and "political arithmetic" (about taxes) were reorganized into three discrete fields of human activity, namely economics, law and ethics—politics and economics were divorced.
 * "The economic formation of society [is] a process of natural history". Thus, it is possible for a economist to study administration of the modern epoch, given that its expansion of the market system of commerce has objectified human (economic) relations. The use of money (cash nexus) voided religious and political illusions about its economic value and replaced them with commodity fetishism, the belief that an object (commodity) has inherent economic value. Because societal economic formation is a historical process, no one person could control or direct it, thereby creating a global complex of social connections.


 * The structural contradictions in the economic system (German: gegensätzliche Bewegung) describe the contradictory movement originating from the two-fold character of labour. These economic contradictions operate "behind the backs" of the owners of capital, and the workers as a result of their activities, and yet remain beyond their immediate perceptions.
 * The crises (recession, depression, et cetera) that are rooted in the contradictory character of the commodity (cell-unit) of modern society.
 * In the mode of production where labour and capital are the axioms, technological improvement and its consequent increased production augment the amount of material wealth (use value) in society while simultaneously diminishing the economic value of the same wealth, thereby diminishing the rate of profit—a paradox characteristic of crisis in a capital economy. "Poverty in the midst of plenty" consequent to over-production and under-consumption.

Logically incoherent theory
American economist John Weeks for example states that the neoclassical theories very often don't correspond with reality at all. Weeks have stated that "Almost every generalization of neoclassical economics is logically false except under analytical constraints ("assumptions") so restrictive as to be absurd even in the abstract. [...] If a theory is logically flawed, empirical evidence for its predictions is no support.

Normative assumptions
The economic-historian Daniel Ankarloo has claimed that the "simplifications", of modern economy isn't "simplifications" but pure falsehood regarding human behavior. Ankarloo has also written about how the definition the economists have regarding "the market", is both logically incoherent with how the resource allocation in society really functions, and fundamentally ahistorical. He cites how a winner of The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel by the name of Oliver Williamson expressed it "Economics doesn't explain the market, it assumes its eternal existence".

Failure to revise theory
Ankarloo claims that the sciences has as a foundational principle to at first engage in observation of reality, and then as well as possible explain why reality is as it is. However, he finds that the relationship within economy is exactly the opposite. He finds that economics has conceptual apparatus without referent. The conceptual apparatus first posits reality as it de facto is not with terminology like "equilibrium price", "perfect information", "optimal decisions". Since reality according to Ankarloo is not structured with e.g. people with perfect information. Economists then have to explain why this is not the case even though the theories presuppose it. Here terminology like "market imperfections" and "Shock" is used.

Contrafreeloading
 * Acrodynia
 * Asbestosis
 * Asthma
 * Barotrauma
 * Berylliosis
 * Brucellosis
 * Byssinosis ("brown lung")
 * Chalicosis
 * Chimney sweeps' carcinoma
 * Chronic solvent-induced encephalopathy
 * Coalworker's pneumoconiosis ("black lung")
 * Concussions in sport
 * Decompression sickness
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 * Erethism
 * Exposure to human nail dust
 * Occupational psychosis
 * Occupational disease
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 * Farmer's lung
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 * Flock worker's lung
 * Glassblower's cataract
 * Golfer's elbow
 * Hearing loss
 * Hospital-acquired infection
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