4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST ago. Changing reality, incomprehensible within the theoretical system of bourgeois economics, has forced changes in the system itself to an extent where it is even difficult to talk'of a comprehensive system of bourgeois theory. There is no unified body of thought holding sway at the moment in the world of bourgeois economics, as there was a hundred years ago. This also has meant, however, an end of the smugness and self-confidence of bourgeois economics, which was so evident a century ago. An important part of this changing reality of course has been the triumph of socialism in a part of the world covering a third of humanity, and the progress of decolonisation in the third world which has thrown up social and economic problems for which bourgeois economics has no answers. But perhaps an even more immediate factor behind the break-up of the unity and the dominance of the theoretical system of bourgeois economics, which held sway a century ago, has been the eruption of severe economic crises in the heartland of the bourgeois world itself, in the advanced capitalist countries. This disintegration of the bourgeois theoretical system, together with the changing attitude of bourgeois economics towards Marx, constitute the objects of investigation of the present paper. Marginal Utility Theory The writings of David Ricardo, the last great representative of English classical political economy, had been put to use in developing a socialist doctrine by a number of writers in the 1820's, who are often referred to as Ricardian Socialists. Among them were such authors as Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson, J.F. Bray and John Gray. The Ricardian Socialists put forward what was essentially a natural right doctrine, i.e., that labour as the 3ole active creator of wealth, had a natural right to the whole produce, and that profits and rent alike were snatched from labour as a consequence of "the legal or artificial" right endowed on property owners to appropriate the products of other peoples' labour.2 Hodgskin whose two pamphlets were referred to by Marx as "among the most significant products of English political economy'93, stated categorically that society needed capital, not capitalists. While this ^'natural right" conception of socialism was evidently pre-scientfic, a reaction against Ricardo and indeed the entire tradition of value theory represented by Ricardo, developed in bourgeois economics owing to the "dangerous use" to which the Ricardian concepts were being put. When Marx too]^ over the achievements of English political economy, embedded them in the comprehensive theoretical system of scientific socialism, and established political economy as a historical science, the entire classical tradition of value theory, of which Ricardo was the* most consistent exponent, became further anathema to bourgeois economics. A wholly new theoretical system, first advanced systematically in 1871, came to dominate bourgeois economies, which sought to ^cut itself off from its moorings in English classical political economy, especially those very achievements of it which Mafx had lauded, developed and enriched. The