The controversy which has been going on for many years amongst theoretical economists about the meaning and measurement of capital must appear to outsiders (including the bulk of the profession itself) as mere scholasticism, yet it has important implications both for the formation of ideology and for understanding the world that we are living in. Academic teaching for the last hundred years has been concerned much more with the first task than the second. It has been concerned with propagating

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... he ideology of laisser faire and of the beneficial effects of the free play of market forces; it has done more to distract attention from the actual operations of the capitalist economy than to illuminate them. Yet it does not consist merely of slogans; it has an intellectual structure which has fascinated generations of students and provided generations of professors with position and with reputation for the brilliance with which they expound and elaborate it. Marxists generally dismiss the whole thing as a deception without bothering to understand it; their own categories such as surplus value, variable capital, and organic composition are not defined in a way that brings them to bear on the questions that the academics discuss. Thus the two systems of ideas are not confronted with each other in logical argument, and the choice between them is left to ideological prejudice. Prejudice, of course, as well as academic funds, is heavily on the side of orthodoxy, which thus grows and flourishes undisturbed. Joan Ro1;ljnspn is Professor of Economics at Cambridge University. 29 MONTHLY REVIEW JANUARY 1971