COMMUNICATION MarXy Samuelson and King IN THE past, bourgeois economists chose to ignore Marx by conspicuous silence. The soundness of the picture of long-run capitalist development given by Marxian economic analysis has been proved beyond doubt since the publication of the three volumes of Capital, particularly during the last 75 years. It is therefore no longer possible for bourgeois economists to remain indifferent about Marx. Today they either openly avow hostility or pretend admiration but deliberately distort some of his theories which should be regarded as major contributions to the science of economics. Fault-finding often leads them to uninformed criticisms of Marx as drastically inconsistent, explaining nothing or unnecessarily roundabout. P A Samuelson's recent criticisms reveal such bias1 and should be squarely met. While J E King's article in the Social Scientist2 is a good attempt in this direction, one wonders if its conclusions are fully acceptable to those who have some knowledge of Marxian theory. King holds that Samuelson's criticism of Marx's law of falling rate of profit is completely unassailable. He presents Samuelson's argument as follows: The rate of profit can decline as a result of innovation only if the real wage increases, and Marx was wrong to predict a falling rate of profit with constant real wages. Given a constant real wage, the effect of technical change on the rate of profit operates in the direction opposite to that predicted by Marx. With a constant real wage technical progress will increase the rate of profit; conversely, if the rate of profit remains constant or falls, the real wage must increase. Samuelson's criticism is a new addition to the series of futile efforts that have been made by a large number of critics since the beginning of the century to dismiss Marx^s law of falling tendency of the rate of profit as a mere chimaera. All of them have failed to consider Marx^s argument in the light of his general dialectical analysis, forgetting that Marx's methodology of economic analysis consists in isolating from various phenomena the dominant, typical and characteristic element and pressing it to its conceptual limit with a view to identifying the predominant force that