Political Economy, Petty-Bourgeois, a trend of bourgeois political economy reflecting the ideology of the intermediary class of capitalist society—the petty bourgeoisie. It appeared at the beginning of the 19th century following the extensive proletarianisation of the petty bourgeoisie engendered by the industrial revolution of the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. Its founders are the Swiss economist Simonde de Sismondi (main work Nouveaux Principes d’economie politique—1819) and the French economist Pierre Joseph Proudhon (Systeme des contradictions economlques ou philosophie de la misere—1846). The dual social and economic nature of the petty bourgeoisie, which on the one hand, like the working class, is exploited and impoverished by big business, and on the other is a class possessing private property, predetermines the dual character of petty-bourgeois political economy. It both criticises those manifestations of capitalism which directly clash with the interests of the petty bourgeoisie (commercial and banking capital, high concentration of capital and private land ownership, capitalist monopolies, economic crises, etc.) and, on the other, defends the general foundations of the capitalist economy (private ownership of the means of production, free enterprise, etc.), although it is they that give birth to big monopoly capital, which exploits and even ruins it. It is this duality of petty-bourgeois political economy which prevents it from revealing the socio-economic essence and the real means of resolving the contradictions of capitalism. The methodology of petty-bourgeois political economy is also dual and eclectic. As ideologists of a socially unstable class, petty-bourgeois economists see the foundation of the historical process not in the development of the social mode of production, but in the moral ideals of “good”, “justice”, etc., which they interpret in a petty-bourgeois way. They use the ethical method, which instead of a scientific analysis of the objective laws of social development utilises an ethical appraisal of them from the standpoint of petty-bourgeois interests—in fact the essence of "economic romanticism”. Side by side with it, the contradictions between the interests of the small and big business cause those expounding this trend to interpret several socioeconomic processes from the materialist position, although not going beyond metaphysical materialism. Big business exploits the petty bourgeoisie, primarily in the sphere of circulation. Therefore capital is usually identified with the forms which it assumes in the sphere of circulation, i. e., with commercial and loan (usurious) capital, while the content of the process of exploitation is treated as a non- equivalent exchange, ensuing from deviations from the law of value. For the same reason the sphere of circulation is treated as the subject matter of political economy, and the exchange conception becomes its method. The idealisation of commodity relations, which are treated as “just”, “equivalent”, etc., are typical of petty-bourgeois economy. Petty-bourgeois political economy is 280 utopian because it criticises capitalism from the standpoint of the obsolete forms of economic relations, and advocates the restoration of petty-bourgeois relations which are incompatible with present-day level of the productive forces of society. Marx and Engels singled out two main currents of petty-bourgeois political economy. The first tries to restore "the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society" (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, pp. 509-10). Associated with this current are the theories of the liberal Narodniks in 19th-century Russia, and the modern theories of African, Asian, Indian, etc., “socialism” which extol the communal organisation of agriculture, the development of the petty handicraft industry, original and national socio- economic development, and a third road—- neither capitalist nor communist—way of social development. Those espousing this current deny the objective necessity of a high level of development of productive forces and socialisation of production on socialist basis as the objective and necessary conditions of socialism. The second current aspires "to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means" (K. Marx, F. Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 510). An example is the theory of "democratic socialism" in the developed capitalist countries, which presents socialism as a certain "mixed economy”, which combines social and private ownership of the means of production, free enterprise, competition, and the economic regulation by the bourgeois state ostensibly to ensure " universal welfare”. The ideas of this theory about some kind of “fraternity” of workers and capitalists as the foundation of socialism, about the development of the socialist structure within the capitalist system, the denial of the necessity of class struggle, socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the working class as necessary conditions for the victory of socialism are the modern modification of the ideas of 19 thcentury petty-bourgeois socialism. Among the revisionist forms of this current is the conception of market socialism (see Theory of Market Socialism) which in the final analysis undermines the economic and political pillars of socialism, replaces the planned socialist economy by chaotic market relations and creates conditions for restoring capitalism. In today’s world imperialism tries to use both currents against the revolutionary working-class and national liberation movements. To extend its social base, the bourgeoisie tries to cloak several economic theories of big business in a petty-bourgeois form (such as economic conceptions of fascism with its ideology of the elimination of "percentage slavery”, theories of people’s capitalism, democratisation of capital, nee-liberalism, Keynesianism, human capital, monopoly competition, etc.). The contradictory position of the petty bourgeoisie in modern capitalism and its vacillations between the working class and bourgeoisie predetermine the dual social orientation of modern conceptions of petty-bourgeois political economy. On the one hand, this involves the extolling of reformist ways to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, conciliation with imperialism and a reactionary Utopian search for a "third road" of social development, and on the other, at times sharp, although not always consistent criticism of the most odious manifestations of the contradictions of contemporary imperialism, especially in the concepts of the petty-bourgeois wing of "radical political economy" and the New Left, which, however, do not advance any positive programme to eliminate these contradictions. The true interests of the petty bourgeoisie should be directed towards securing its alliance with the revolutionary working class in the struggle to eliminate all forms of exploitation of man by man and to build a socialist society. Marx, Engels and Lenin provided a profoundly scientific and critical analysis of petty-bourgeois political economy in their works.