The Inner Life of Value:  Exploring Fundamental Premises in Marxist and Classical Political Economy

This thesis will examine some of the basic principles of Classical and Marxian Political Economy. At the center of the project is an examination of two distinct but related subjects: 1) value and 2) internal critique. I begin with a broad overview of the methodological and theoretical principles integral to the study of Marxian political economy and highlight its link to the content of Marx's work. I demonstrate the riven-ness of the concept of value throughout the thesis and show that this riven-ness is integral to rather than accidental to the concept of value itself. In essence, I propose that in order to fully grasp how Marx is taken up by political economists, feminists, ecologists, and critical race scholars in order to understand exploitation and oppression, it is necessary to return to the basic premises of political economy as the foundation of many of these theories.