Can political economy be non-Marxist? Relevance of applied political economy

Abstract

Initially political economy was non-Marxist but under the influence of ideology it has become Marxist; with rejection of official ideology of Marxism, it can and should again become non-Marxist. Marxism is an ideology/ policy that proclaims the inevitable death of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. Ideology forced political economy to abandon the subject —«the wealth of nations» (Smith) which was transformed into «social relations developing in the process of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods, and economic laws governing their development in socio-economic formations historically replacing each other». Marxian economics was identified with the ideology of Marxism. The three constituent parts of Marxism have lost their relevance. The materialistic foundation of Marxism rested on three discoveries (the cell, energy conservation, and Darwinism). A new social organism was believed to have been born from a cell that existed in an old organism; the birth of a new one means the death of the old one. The history of all societies was represented by the history of the struggle between the exploiting and exploited classes, the result of which was a progressive change of formations. The discoveries of the XIX century were either refuted by modern natural science (cell theory), or significantly modernized (synthetic theory of evolution). The theory of class exploitation as a deduction from the product of labor was refuted by Marx. Rejection of Marxism does not mean rejection of the materialist understanding of history, but an understanding based on modern materialism. The subject of political economy in broad sense is various modes of life reproduction (analogue of a species) and their modification (population). The history of all previous societies was the history of struggle, not classes, but of modes of production of life. The subject of the non-Marxist political economy of capitalism is the relationship of the reproduction of the life of three large classes (capitalists, hired workers, landowners). The method is an analogue of the method for constructing genomes of biological species. Non-Marxist political economy and economics have a common subject and form two components of a new academic discipline «applied political economy», in which the descriptive method of economics is complemented by an explicative one.