Can Political Economy Be Redeemed?

Political economy emerged at the heart of Europe s capitalist transformation, not as a neutral science seeking to understand phenomena, but as an epistemic apparatus tracking market mechanisms to legitimize them, reproduce them, and convince those who must submit to them. From Smith and Ricardo, the goal wasn t just de-script-ion, but establishment: establishing a "system" that treats the market as nature, labor as a necessity, inequality as law, and profit as part of a cold cosmic engineering. Only Marx attempted to object, to carve a path within this apparatus, to deconstruct its concepts from within, to say: this isn t nature, but history. These aren t laws, but relations. These aren t numbers, but bodies. But is what Marx did enough to save political economy?´-or-was this "science" flawed from the start in its centrality, its tools, its language? Isn t the very idea of "value," as formulated in the early days of classical economics, based on the illusion of measurement? On transforming living time into a quantity, turning labor into a mere unit of production, and transforming relationships into rates? I don t reject political economy as a field of thought, but I reject it when it disavows its initial idea: that it is a question of value. And if it doesn t redefine value, and doesn t scrutinize the way it s measured, it won t be a science but a device for deception.
I see political economy now as a body that got lost at a crucial moment in its history, when it abandoned the question of value and went chasing growth, markets, employment, data, and commodities. It was a moment when this science detached itself from life, becoming managed by numbers, not people-;- by tables, not experiences-;- by models, not history. Even Marx, when re-cycled within economic schools, was stripped of his dialectical tendency and transformed into a silent mathematician, thinking about accumulation, not suffering, invoked to explain capitalism, not to detonate it. Political economy died the day it began to be taught without risk, read without instinct, and analyzed without crisis. And it died the day it ceased to be a field of doubt and became a field of repetition.
Nevertheless, I m not saying we should abandon it and move on. Rather, I say we must re-occupy it. To re-ask the question: What is value? Who determines it? What is its relationship to time? What is its relationship to human energy? Who works? Who is exploited? And who reproduces the world? Saving political economy isn t about recovering old books, but about breaking them. Not by repeating Marx, but by exercising his critical action on Marx himself, on his tools, and on his scale. To say: time isn t just duration, but experience. And labor isn t just an activity, but a relationship. And value isn t measured by time alone, but by the type of social energy invested, and by the structure that originally produces that time.
Can political economy be saved? Perhaps. Provided that we first admit that it was neither innocent, nor scientific, nor complete. And that we redefine it not as a science of the market, but as a science of the law of value. And if there is no value, there will be no political economy. And when value loses its meaning, this science loses all justification for its existence. This is why I write. Not to save a science, but to save questions. For a science that doesn t produce new questions isn t a science, but a system of justification. And political economy, if it wishes to survive, must forget its moment of foundation and begin anew… by addressing its initial shortcomings.

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