Economics
Economics[a] is a branch of social science that studies the relations of production or the specific aspects of production relations in a given sphere of social production and exchange.
As a field of human knowledge, economics entails (1) the study of the objective laws governing the economic structure of society within the framework of the socioeconomic formations that regularly follow and replace one another, (2) the theoretical analysis of the processes and phenomena in the various spheres and branches of the national economy, and (3) the elaboration of practical recommendations with respect to the production and distribution of the necessities of life. Economics is one of the social sciences. The economic sciences are the product of long-term historical development. The establishment of a system of economic knowledge was directly tied to the advent of political economy as a science.
Works by classical bourgeois political economists laid the scientific foundation for the development of the economic sciences; such works investigated many important socioeconomic processes in the capitalist economies. The consolidation of the capitalist mode of production, the increasingly antagonistic opposition between hired labor and capital, and the transformation of the bourgeoisie from a progressive into a reactionary class contributed to the emergence of vulgar bourgeois political economy, which supplanted the analysis of the internal laws of the capitalist economic system with the description and systematization of externally perceived economic processes and phenomena.
The possibility of creating a genuinely scientific system of economic knowledge arose with the advent of Marxist economics, which incorporated the highest achievements of previous economic thought and creatively reworked them in accordance with materialist historical principles.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ "economics", etymology. Wiktionary.
- ↑ "Economics". Great Soviet Encyclopedia.