Political economy (n.) is the formal intellectual manifestation of the socially and politically dominant vision of early nineteenth century capitalism. It is a distorted vision within which lies buried the essential structure and nature of capitalism as a human social and economic system.
Political economy (n.) is a theology of private property: like the theologian who keeps humanizing the superhuman, it keeps describing inhuman relations as human and rational.
Political economy (n.) reached its climax in Ricardo, who recklessly drew its ultimate conclusions, while Sismondi completed it by impersonating its doubts.
Political economy (n.) makes production obey eternal laws so that bourgeois relations can be smuggled in as natural laws of society, while distribution is left to arbitrary human choice.
Political economy (n.) has had two ways to fail: keep value as its basis by ignoring the gap between surplus-value and profit, or keep the visible gap and lose any scientific foundation.
Political economy (n.) holds its laws only as tendencies, approximations that grow more exact the more developed capitalism is and the less it is adulterated by survivals of older conditions.
Political economy (n.) never found the solution to the falling rate of profit — which ceases to be a puzzle once you see it never separated surplus-value from profit.
Political economy (n.) clung for a whole century to Smith's muddle of fixed and circulating capital, because the muddle submerged the basis of capitalist exploitation at one blow.
Political economy (n.) turns apologetic when it has the same money realize two capitals: the capitalist's, and the worker's 'capital' in the form of his own labour-power.
Political economy (n.) calls on the general public — landlords, money-lenders, officials, doctors, lawyers — and their 'services' to explain what it leaves unexplained.