1.4 The object of the Objective Political Economy (OPE) is that which is specific to economic exchanges and to the transfer of the terms of these exchanges.

1. Economic exchanges and the economic transfers of the terms of these exchanges form a system.

The economic system is not closed, although commodities are exchanged, most often by intermediary money, only for commodities³⁷. In addition to the incessant creation of new commodities³⁸, technical knowledge and legal apparatus are part of the environment of the economic system and participate in its steering. In turn, the operation of the system alters its environment.

2. Economics has as its object the open system that the practice of economic exchanges and transfers of market terms of trade establishes.

A major characteristic of the economic system is that it has as its subsystems a monetary organization and a fiscal organization, with all that these devices entail in terms of empirical approximations. This is one of the reasons why the notion of equilibrium applied to the economic system is unrealistic.

3. There are no specific subjective causes for the practice of economic exchanges and transfers.³⁹

Subjective causes which would concern only the economic aspects of social life would exist if the appetite for purchasing power were of a different nature from the appetite for power; the desire to possess through commodity exchange or the capture of an economic transfer of a nature other than that of the desire to possess; the need satisfied by means of commodity exchange of a different nature from the need satisfied by the self-consumption of its production; the mentality of a different nature from the social mentality; Homo economicus a real constituent of homo sapiens.

4. Since Jean-Baptiste Say, it has been repeated that the economy is the production, distribution and consumption of wealth.

This assertion, even when it is specified that the wealth in question is only that which has an economic exchange value, and therefore does not include "human capital"⁴⁰, peddles a pseudo-definition of the economy. The argument in the following proposition explains why.

Notes

37. Argument for this statement in the next chapter, proposition 2.11. By atavism, the word "commodity" first evokes a material object. The services exchanged for remuneration must nevertheless be seen as commodities, otherwise one thing and its opposite are maintained: yes, these exchanges are marketable, as evidenced by the fact that they determine the existence of markets; No, because in each of these exchanges one of the two terms is not a commodity. ↩
38. Any new commodity is not a new material object (see previous note). ↩
39. See P. Fabra, Capital for Profit, Rowman & Littlefield, 1991, pp. 3–4 and 9. Smith and Ricardo set political economy on firmer ground than the subjective assessment of wants: a commodity must be useful to have a market value, but its value does not derive from its utility. By defining exchange value through use value, the marginalists brought economics back to its preclassical age. ↩
40. Between the economic analyses and prescriptions that make use of the notion of “human capital” and those that refuse to do so, there is in any case a rupture whose consequences cannot be merely venial. ↩