The dominant view of Marx is to regard him as a student of and successor to the Classical economists ; as an economist who ‘completed’ that work .(1) The result is a precisely formulated conception : the labour theory of value, as expounded by Smith and Ricardo, in essence leads on to socialism – a consequence left unstated by the theory’s founders . Marx was the first to think Ricardo’s theory through to its conclusion, completing the latter’s final unstated words, as it were . (2) However, this interpretation begins to look extremely questionable when it is viewed from the vantage point provided by the crtique of political economy, which posits that ‘the development of political economy and of the opposition to which it gives rise keeps pace with thereat development of the social contradictions and class conflicts inherent in capitalist production’ .(3)

Marx distinguishes four phases in the development of political economy : the first embraces the period of ‘Classical political economy’, and the remaining three the various stages of ‘Vulgar Economics’. For Marx, the factor which unites the representatives of Classical political economy into one intellectual school is the basic similarity of their historical situation, despite their sometimes great individual differences, e .g . between Petty, Hume and the Physiocrats, and between the latter and Smith or Ricardo .(4) This period was that of the coming into being of modern capitalism, hence the modern working class, and consequently a time in which the ‘class struggle . . . was as yet undeveloped’ . (5)

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