One of Marx's central criticisms of classical political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo was that they failed to treat the capitalist mode of production as a historically specific socio-economic system. As a result, they failed to treat the actual social relations and the various economic categories (like value and capital) of capitalism as being historically specific to it. This consequently meant that they failed to grasp the historically specific differences between capitalism and feudalism for instance, which are both founded on different types of social structures - with the former founded on the capital/wage-labour social relation of production and the latter founded on the landlord/peasant-tenant social relation of production.
In light of Marx's 'historicist' criticisms of Smith and Ricardo, something similar (and pertinent) can be said about contemporary mainstream neoclassical economics. As an example, the faux Nobel Prize winner in Gary Becker treats all economic systems, whether they be ancient Greek slave societies through to feudalism and capitalism as being nothing more than market societies. Indeed, he goes even further than this to include such institutions as marriage and dating, plus social problems like crime, as well as ant colonies from the world of nature, into his ambit of treating everything as a market economy. In so doing, he looks at everything in an ahistorical way and consequently overlooks the historically specific differences of all these different types of societies, let alone the obvious differences between the social and natural worlds.
Therefore, just as the classical political economy of Marx's time was an ahistorical body of work, so is contemporary mainstream neoclassical economics an ahistorical body of work.
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As might be noted, I refrain from calling modern orthodox neoclassical economics a work of science, although I would call classical political economy a work of science. This is principally because the former, unlike the latter, fails to go beyond the appearances of the capitalist economic system in an attempt to discover its underlying essence, which as far as a Marx is concerned (and myself included, given what else I've said so far throughout these blog posts, as well as in my PhD Thesis) is one of the hallmarks of science. This failure is evident in its fixation on the market, where everything takes place in front of us: hence, at the level of appearances, not at the level of essence. For it to go beyond the appearances of the capitalist economic system (the market) in order to discover its essence, it would have to delve into its production side of things - as this is where it will discover the causal foundations of the capitalist economic system. This is what it doesn't do, whether out of ideological reasons or simply because it thinks it's irrelevant given its own so-called scientific aims - which seems to be to examine capitalist market economies on the basis of their Walrasian or general equilibrium model of a perfectly competitive market economy.
NB. Since modern orthodox neoclassical economics fails to go beyond the immediate appearances of the capitalist economic system, it is consequently the 'vulgar economics' of the day, as noted by many on the basis of Marx's own philosophical critique of the 'vulgar political economy' of his time - which also failed to go beyond the immediate appearances of things in its analysis of capitalism.
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