10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST The law of value in its rudimentary form holds in a precapitalist economy as well; with the advent of capitalism it turns into the law of price, which is still organically related to the law of value. Similarly, class struggles take place in every class-ridden society, capitalist or pre-capitalist. An underdeveloped economy of Asia, Africa or Latin America essentially harbours more than one mode of production, where the capitalist mode is, or is becoming, predominant. The specific features of such an underdeveloped capitalism arc a historical product of how and under what conditions it came to be assailed by imperialism. Individual peculiarities vary according to the way it was penetrated under ihe dominance of merchant capital, commodity capital and finance capital and its internal structure at that time. Even though it is not yet a full-fledged capitalist economy, it can nevertheless be conceptualized in terms of the law of value (which, according to Marx and Engels, holds in capitalist as well as pre-capitalist economies). Marx's main contribution to the law of value is the concept of surplus value. Besides, he shows the origin and development of surplus value in its generic form, which then gets split into its particular forms, namely, rent, interest, and profit. As Marx puts it: "In contrast to all former political economy, which from the very outset treats the particular fragments of surplus value with their fixed forms of rent, profit, and interest as already given, I first deal with the general form of surplus value, which all these fragments are still undifferentiated—in solution, as it were. ... The treatment of the particular forms by classical economy, which always mixes them up with the general form, is a regular hash".20 He considers this to be one of "the three fundamentally new elements of the book" (Capitial). Now, the germ of struggles between the ruling classes (landlords, finance capitalist, merchant capitalist, and industrial capitalist) lies in the fight over the surplus value;at once it also points to the source of class conflicts between the exploiter and the exploited. The ruling classes, in order to reduce their internal tension, step up the rate of exploitation and extract greater surplus value for division among themselves. Thus the law of value and class struggles operate simultaneously. Usually we are more familiar with the concept of class conflict between the exploiter and the exploited, and somewhat less aware of the internal contradictions of the ruling classes. Partly it is due to the obsession with a very simplified version of the Marxian law of value where the entire surplus value is taken to be converted into profit.31 la an underdeveloped capitalist economy the landlords, merchants and finance tycoons are no less