Samuel Bailey e a crítica da economia política

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to investigate how the Political Economy of Samuel Bailey (1791- 1870) was absorbed by the Critique of Political Economy of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Bailey, an English political economist, had as its main theoretical task the attempt to revoke the labour-value theory of Ricardo, posing in its place, a theory of value that fluctuates from psychological foundations until ending up in a multicausal-value theory. According to Bailey, the equalization of the value and the forms in which it expresses itself would be more important than the foundation of the value content. His main work, the Critical Dissertation, was published in 1827, when the dissolution and the vulgarization of the ricardianism was taking place in the debate of Political Economy. Marx, at least since 1857-58, has been reading through the works of Bailey, starting by his work on money, Money and its vicissitudes, from which he passed to the study of the Critical Dissertation. As we tried to demonstrate, the reception of Bailey by Marx passed from a relatively passive reading on his texts on money, going through the examination of Bailey’s analyses against Ricardo, towards two fundamental issues of Capital, critically: the value-form and the commodity fetishism.