In frigid Restoration Europe, as the ancien régime tried to crush the populist tide — as it would be called today — unleashed by the French Revolution, David Ricardo’s shocking work, the Principles of Political Economics, was published in the heart of London.
It was April 19, 1817. “Mr. Ricardo’s system is one of discords. … Its whole tends to the production of hostility among classes and nations,” wrote the American economist Henry Charles Carey in 1848, denouncing Ricardo as the father of communism and his book as “true manual of the demagogue, who seeks power by means of agrarianism, war and plunder.” But how could a liberal rich bourgeois like Ricardo become a bearer of class struggle?
The intimately “subversive” character of the Principles, captured by Carey, resides in the particular explanation that Ricardo proposed of the division of social product among different classes, a formula that represents the distribution of income as a conflict between social classes over the division of a given product.
According to Marx, the “great significance of Ricardo for science” lies in having pushed the analysis beyond superficial appearances to reveal the “actual physiology of the bourgeois society.” On the surface of the economic system, we can see only the prices of goods, which offer us a dull image of the underlying economic relations. In fact, the social classes are contending dimensions of a product whose price varies with the subdivision itself, so it seems possible to imagine that the interests of capitalists, workers and landowners can converge around the common goal of growth, a growth that can satisfy everyone — simultaneously fueling profits, wages and income.