Political Economy, Vulgar Bourgeois, unscientific, political economy, whose principal objective is to provide an overt apologia for capitalism; in the 1830s it replaced 281 classical bourgeois political economy (see Political Economy, Classical Bourgeois) as a result of the radical change in the social role of the bourgeoisie: from a progressive class combatting feudalism it had become a reactionary class, whose sole interest was to maintain its domination. It prevails to this day. The theorists of vulgar political economy confine themselves to describing the outer appearance of economic processes, as they are unable to scientifically analyse the laws of social development. The theory seeks to interpret the economic phenomena that are on the surface and adjust them to the practice of capitalist enterprise. The triumph of vulgar political economy signified the emergence of a crisis in bourgeois political economy. The vulgarisation of political economy is a long and contradictory process of the degradation of bourgeois economic science. Four stages can be determined: 1) Emergence of vulgar political economy alongside and in the struggle against the classical school (late 18th and early 19th centuries). Its representatives were Thomas Robert Malthus in Britain and Jean Baptiste Say in France. 2) Its domination of bourgeois economic literature and evolution in the stage of Free Competition (1830s-1870s). Representatives: John Stuart Mill, John Ramsay McCulloch, Nassau William Senior, Alfred Marshall (all in Britain). 3) Vulgar political economy of the imperialist stage (1870s-1920s). Representatives: Karl Biicher, Gustav von Schmoller, and Werner Sombart in Germany; John Bates Clark in the USA; Carl Menger and Eugen Bohm-Bawerk in Austria, and Pyotr Struve in Russia. 4) Bourgeois political economy of the epoch of the general crisis of capitalism (from the 1920s to the present), represented by greatly varying trends in the developed capitalist countries. Vulgar political economy emerged as a result of the isolation and systematisation of unscientific elements in the theory of classical bourgeois political economy by those who tried to use them to refute the scientific discoveries of the classical school. For example, in regard to the theory of value and surplus value, vulgar economists do not recognise that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour required to produce it, and that profit is the embodiment of that unpaid labour of wage labourers which the capitalist has appropriated without compensation. To explain the sources of commodity value and profit, they suggest "factors of production"—labour, land and capital (see Theory of Factors of Production). This approach conceals the real source of value and surplus value and thus negates the fact that the working class is exploited by the capitalists. The vulgar nature of these economic theories is heightened as capitalism enters its highest and last stage— the stage of imperialism, and as ideas of scientific socialism spread among workers, and mass working-class parties appear. In this setting, alongside the methods of economic apologetics, applied in their old or modified forms, the non-economic form of vulgarisation of bourgeois political economy becomes increasingly widespread, and eventually prevails; phenomena, which are in fact outside the sphere of the economy, are cited to explain economic processes that take place under capitalism. Examples are the psychological (Austria, Britain and the USA), social and legal, new historical, biological (neo-Malthusianism), sociological (see Institutionalism), and other schools and trends. As the general crisis of capitalism set in and the world’s first socialist state appeared as a result of the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, thus proving the transitory nature of capitalism, the apologetical myth that the capitalist system would exist for ever collapsed. Bourgeois political economy was now vulgarised through the invention of unscientific concepts about the nature and historical trends of development in the capitalist and the socialist economies and through the elaboration of apologetical theories of statemonopoly regulation of the capitalist economy. In the 1920s, bourgeois-reformist theories of “neo-capitalism” made their appearance (concepts of people’s capitalism, full employment, general welfare, etc.). Their emergence testified to the fact that in the new conditions bourgeois economists had to recognise the existence of acute conflicts and grave crisis processes in the 282 capitalist economy. However, they tried to say these phenomena were accidental, and therefore remediable within the framework of capitalism. After World War II, the contradictions inherent in capitalism became unprecedentedly acute. The formation of the world socialist system and its dynamic evolution, the new level attained by the working-class movement in the industrialised capitalist countries, and the collapse of the colonial system under the blows of the national liberation movement wrought important changes in the forms of capitalism’s ideological defences; this was expressed in the wide spread of vulgar concepts, e. g., the "trasformation of capitalism" (see Theories of Transformation of Capitalism) into a kind of a noncapitalist system (the theories of consumer society, stages of economic growth, of industrial, post-industrial, post-capitalist, technetronic, super-industrial, post- civilised, programmed, post-bourgeois society, etc.). It all testified to the bankruptcy of bourgeois ideology, which is looking for more sophisticated ways to defend capitalism, because it is no longer in a position to cavalierly deny that tremendous social and economic changes are taking place in the world. What is vulgar and apologetical about the above-mentioned theories is that they describe contemporary state-monopoly capitalism as a system in which, thanks to the impact of certain factors, capitalism has evolved, or is evolving, into a kind of a non-capitalist organisation of society. The theories of the convergence, hybridisation, etc., of capitalism and socialism comprise a special group of concepts in the trend of vulgar political economy (see Theory of Convergence). As the world socialist system wins new positions, and socialist ideas become more attractive to the working people in the capitalist countries, while the antagonistic contradictions inherent in the world capitalist system are heightening during the third stage of its general crisis, vulgar political economy dons a pseudo-socialist and pseudo-Marxist attire. Real socialism is counterposed by alternative concepts of market, “ democratic”, and humane varieties of socialism, all of which amount to a sophisticated form of defending the capitalist system. The neo-classical trend in bourgeois political economy and Keynesianism are also currents of vulgar political economy; their main purpose is to find a mechanism through which the capitalist economy can be regulated. Attempts by proponents of these theories to ameliorate the capitalist economy have all failed. Some bourgeois economists tried to find a way out of the impasse by the so-called "neo-classical synthesis"—a blend of neo-Keynesian and neo-classical concepts of reproduction aimed at “synthesising” the regulating role of the bourgeois state and the spontaneous self-regulation of capitalist reproduction through the market. The world economic crisis of 1974-75, however, proved that this variety of vulgar concepts of capitalist reproduction is utterly inconsistent. Another concept, that of "zero growth”, and a monetary theory emerged in its place, each of them offering its own highly impracticable recipe for stimulating the capitalist economy. At the same time, some bourgeois economists strongly insisted on introducing direct state planning into the capitalist economy (John K. Galbraith); of course, this is futile, because private capitalist ownership of the means of production, capitalist competition and the aggravation of inherent class antagonisms in the capitalist economic system preclude economic planning in the interests of the working people on the national scale. Vulgar bourgeois economists are trying to adjust the apologetical dogmas of bourgeois political economy to the ongoing course of the world revolutionary process, of the aggravated general crisis of capitalism.