The Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union first published this book in 1954, considering political economy as the science of the laws of development of the relations of production in human society. Updated in 1957, this text deals not only with the capitalist economic system but also with pre-capitalist economic relations and with the economics of socialism. Here, reprinted for the first time in decades, is an essential text for understanding how the Soviet Union viewed its own economic and political project as well as for understanding the very engine of the world we live in, an engine that powers everything from the movement of nations to the joys and concerns of the working class.