Fundamentals of Political Economy

'Fundamentals of Political Economy' is a popular introductory economics text published in the People's Republic of China in 1974 by the Shanghai People's Press. It has come to be known popularly as the "Shanghai Textbook." It explains the fundamental principles of Marxist political economy in a very simple and comprehensible manner and presents a thorough analysis of the bourgeois mode of production. And most of all, the thorough investigation of the mode of production of Socialism, the socio-economic formation, the class relations, the base and the superstructure during the period of socialist transition, that Mao presented for the first time, based on his summation of the experiences of the Socialist experiments in the Soviet Union and China and the thoughts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Not only does this book positively present a correct Marxist exposition of historical materialism and Marxist political economy as opposed to its distortion by the revisionists (for instance, Liyontief's textbook on political economy published in Khrushchev's period and various textbooks published in Brezhnev's period), but also presents a positive criticism of the deviations that appeared in the field of political economy owing to the some mechanistic and metaphysical tendencies originating in the erroneous understanding of Marxist philosophy in Stalin's period and essentially because of these reasons of the mistake of failing to understand the real nature of Socialist society, production relations and the continuity of the class struggle during Socialist transition. Therefore, it will not be an exaggeration to say that this is a representative textbook of political economy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.