3. Economic laws and their objective character.

In modern society, law is the written, authentic, public system of rights and sanctions enforceable by the state. In earlier forms of society, law was not written, and the enforcing institution was not the state. In science, law is the expression of regularity in phenomena.

So, the economic law is necessary, steady, cause-effect relation between the phenomena and processes of an economic life of a society.

Variety of economic laws forms the system of laws in which structure usually distinguish the general, especial and specific economic laws.

The general economic laws are laws which operate in all modes of production and stages of historical development of a society. For example: the law of steady growth of labour productivity, the law of economy of time, the law of advancing growth of needs in relation to possibilities of their satisfaction, etc.

Especial economic laws are laws which operate within several modes of production or stages of social and economic development. For example laws of commodity production, in particular, the Law of value.

Specific economic laws are the laws which operate only in one mode of production or one stage of evolution of a society. For example, the surplus value law, the law of average profit, etc.

4. The subject and functions of Political Economy.

To define a subject of any science – means to answer a question: That does this science study?

Political Economy is a branch of science concerned with the production of commodities and the accumulation of wealth.

The term ‘Political Economy’ was used prior to the 20th century, (when the term ‘Economics’ supplanted it); for its earliest exponents such as William Petty and Adam Smith, Political Economy was a branch of Ethics. With the growth of positivism in the 19th century, however, Political Economy, like Sociology, came to be seen as a branch of science.

The British pioneers of Political Economy contributed much to the development of Hegel's views in that they showed the relation between human thinking and social relations and how these social relations developed through specific historical stages related to the progress of techniques of production.

After the completion of his earliest investigations, Marx concentrated the majority of his theoretical work on the critique of political economy because Marx saw that the work of the political economists most clearly exhibited the ideological forms which dominated bourgeois society: explaining the science of economics through the perspective of the large and small scale capitalist, not through the perspective of the working class.

Bourgeois ideology reifies human activity into separate branches of science, philosophy and so on, whereas for Marxism, it is essential to understand human life as a whole. Marx explained the relation between political economy and ethics:

“It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick - ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other. ... the opposition between political economy and ethics is only an apparent opposition and just as much no opposition as it is an opposition. All that happens is that political economy expresses moral laws in its own way”.

The point is that political economy does not describe immutable laws that govern humanity, or rather they only appear so, so long as people continue to participate in the forms of production, distribution and exchange on which they are based.

The political economy carries out three basic functions: informative, methodological and practical.

Informative function of political economy is shown in a scientific explanation of processes and the phenomena of an economic life of a society, the laws operating its development. And also forms the scientific outlook and economic thinking of people.

Methodological function – is expressed that the political economy is the theoretical base to other applied economic sciences, such as economy state regulation, regional economy, finance, the credit, monetary circulation etc.

Practical function – is shown that the political economy forms a theoretical basis for economic policy of the state development.