This chapter lays out one way through the argument of Capital Volume 1, with the intention of showing that we have now fully entered the realm of the actualization of philosophy. Marx does not impose any preordained dialectical schema or procedure, but shows in detail how the exploitation of workers that commodity production under capitalism requires leads to the expropriation of the expropriators, and thereby to communism. In doing so, he performs the critique of political economy, not as the critique of some field of study, but through the concrete demonstration of how things function, and thereby how they are to function.

Shelley’s engagement with economics is central to his work. From Queen Mab (1813) to ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (composed 1819–20), his discussion of economic events and ideas helped him to critique the social world and propose how it could be improved. His work responds to the productive activities of the labouring poor in the factories and the fields, and to the financial phenomena reshaping Britain’s economy, from public debt to fiat currency. Crucial to Shelley’s economics was the perception that orthodox ideas, such as the labour theory of value and the quantity theory of money, could be used to promote radical ends. The chapter outlines the role of such ideas in Shelley’s work and his response to key economic writers, including Thomas Robert Malthus and William Cobbett. It also outlines how, for Shelley, the production of credible economic knowledge was vital to attaining economic change to benefit the many.

The concept of value is deeply embedded in debates about the economy, yet it is also deeply problematic. There are many different ways of understanding value, including many that are not directly concerned with economic questions, and we must begin by establishing some clarity over which versions we are engaging with. This chapter will argue, however, that even the best-established economic understandings of value are radically unsatisfactory. It is therefore essential, before outlining a more coherent understanding of value, to clear some ground by explaining what is wrong with the established approaches. This chapter criticises three in turn: the theory of value implicit in the marginalist tradition in economics, Marx’s labour theory of value, and the notion of value at work in more popular discourses of value creation and value extraction such as the recent work of Mariana Mazzucato. This discussion, however, is not intended as a comprehensive critique of these traditions, but rather as a means to mark out the space that the argument of this book aims to occupy.

The chapter aims to show how many conceptual points of the classical-Keynesian analysis are essentially based on a suitable interaction between causal and interdependent relationships. Throughout the analysis, the terms ‘causality’ and ‘interdependence’ are interpreted following the interpretation given by Herbert Simon as analytical characteristics of the relations between the magnitudes involved in the theory, rather than a feature of economic reality. A meticulous work of revisiting the analytical formulations of some important foundations of both classical and Keynesian theories has been presented here to bring to the surface the sequential or the simultaneous nature of the determination of the main variables and the economic meaning attached to these analytical properties.