In Volume 1 of , Karl Marx ventures the opinion that “classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin.”Capital Marx and the bourgeois economists confront the same material realities, but they interpret, explain, and use them very differently. For example, both David Ricardo (the leading bourgeois figure in nineteenth-century political economy) and Marx