Political Economy, Classical Bourgeois, a progressive trend in bourgeois economic thought which arose in the period of the establishment of the capitalist mode of production and the undeveloped class struggle of the proletariat. It protected the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie in its struggle against feudalism, and reached its highest development in Britain which at that time was the most developed capitalist country. Its outstanding representatives were William Petty, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, while in France there were Pierre Boisguillebert and the physiocrats, and Simonde de Sismondi in Switzerland. Marx wrote that "by classical Political Economy, I understand that economy which, since the time of W. Petty, has investigated the real relations of production in bourgeois society" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 85). Classical bourgeois political economy is one of the sources of Marxism. What lent distinction to its representatives was that they laid the foundation of the labour theory of value, and made the first attempts to examine certain forms of surplus value and to study capitalist reproduction. For this they used a new method, i. e., to penetrate the heart of the matter by using abstract scientific concepts. At the same time their method was, however, unhistoric and metaphysical. Recognising capitalism as an eternal and natural form of production, classical bourgeois political economy viewed the economic categories of capitalism as eternal and natural, which changed only quantitatively. It failed to realise that economic categories expressed the relations of social production, and that under capitalism these relations are fetishised and represent the social properties of things. A major achievement of classical bourgeois political economy was the discovery of the labour theory of value. Its theorists established that the value of a product is determined by the labour required for its manufacture. They noticed that the 278 value of a certain commodity is inversely proportional to labour productivity. But they failed to study the character of labour creating these commodities, as they also failed to investigate why a product of labour assumes a form of commodity, and confined themselves to an analysis of the magnitude of value. Although maintaining that the magnitude of value is determined by necessary labour, classical bourgeois political economy could not scientifically validate this conclusion since it lacked the qualitative characteristic of value as an expression of production relations in commodity production. For the same reason the bourgeois classical economists could never produce a form of value, i. e., exchange value, from the analysis of a commodity. They considered the form of value as something external and remote from the nature of a commodity. As they failed to study the form of value, bourgeois economists could not understand the essence and functions of money. While believing correctly that the labour theory of value represents the point of departure in analysing capitalism, Ricardo tried to reduce all the most important economic categories to this common basis. Thus, considering that wages and profits were two parts of value created by labour, and noting the opposite directions of their movement, Ricardo in fact pointed to the opposite interests of the capitalists and workers. Classical bourgeois political economy could not, however, provide a scientific explanation for the way profit was appropriated from the viewpoint of the labour theory of value, since it believed that the worker sells his labour, not his labour power. While equalising surplus value and profits, Ricardo could not resolve the contradiction between the law of value and the tendency to obtain equal profits from equal amounts of capital. Classical bourgeois political economy laid the cornerstone for the analysis of capital. Karl Marx called the economic table drawn up by the leading physiocrat Francois Quesnay the result of an idea of genius. This was the first attempt to schematically present the process of reproduction by using abstract scientific notions. While discussing the structure of capital, the representatives of classical political economy noticed the difference between fixed and circulating capital. They could not, however, see in capital the expression of production relations. They associated capital with its physical forms such as money, means of production, and commodities. For the same reason they could not explain why the commodities possessed by a capitalist are capital, and are income when owned by a worker. While erroneously believing that the value of the social product completely disintegrates into incomes (Adam Smith’s thesis), classical political economy obscured the way to an understanding of capitalist reproduction. The advocates of classical bourgeois political economy pointed to certain contradictions of capitalism. Thus, Sismondi criticised capitalism from the pettybourgeois viewpoint; he put forward the idea of the working masses’ impoverishment and maintained that economic crises were inevitable under capitalism. However, Sismondi, a typical representative of romanticism in the economic science, failed to understand the reason for these contradictions and the ways to resolve them. He tried to turn the wheel of history backwards, to small-scale production. The bourgeoisie’s winning of political power and the aggravation of the class struggle of the proletariat "sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy" (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 25). Apart from the scientific elements, classical bourgeois political economy also contained vulgar elements, as the theorists did not always try to look behind the surface of things in bourgeois society so as to gain greater insight. Among such, for instance, were their notions that wages are the price of labour, and that rent is a godsend, etc. These vulgar elements magnified into vulgar bourgeois political economy whose purpose was to provide a foundation for the struggle against the working-class movement. The decay of classical political economy was accelerated by the fact that the Utopian Socialists (see Utopian Socialism), being the first spokesmen of the working people’s interests, tried to turn the labour theory of value against the bourgeoisie by advancing the slogan that the 279 working people had the right to the whole product of their labour and that society had to be transformed to achieve this goal. Modern bourgeois economists try to bury in silence the achievements of classical bourgeois political economy in developing the labour theory of value by highlighting its vulgar elements. Some critics try to oppose classical bourgeois theory to the ideas of Marx by claiming that its representatives did not write anything about the contradictions of capitalism or the worsening of the working people’s living standards. Others, on the contrary, believe that Marx borrowed the labour theory of value from Ricardo, and criticise Marx in the same way as vulgar economists once criticised Ricardo. At the same time there are several economists who advocate a "neoclassical synthesis" which combines modern methods of the microeconomic analysis of national product and income with the principles of classical bourgeois political economy. However, here again its vulgar elements are involved. To a certain extent, all these trends testify to the crisis of modern bourgeois political economy, which has turned to classical bourgeois theory in the search for the means of struggle against Marxism-Leninism.