The chapter reconstructs critique of political economy as a tradition of thought grounded in a nonconventional reading of Marx’s work. It starts from a rough outline of the key tenets of “political economy,” i.e., mainstream economic theory and what is defined as “traditional” Marxism, including their shared premises. The chapter then formulates a basic outline of the critique of political economy “in its ideal average” through a juxtaposition with traditional Marxism. The key distinctive feature of the critique of political economy, it is argued, is to be found in its reading of Marx’s category of the value form as a purely social category of mediation in capitalism, rather than an economic category valid for all historical societies. To demonstrate the full potential of the critique of political economy as denaturalization of both capitalism and bourgeois commonsense, the chapter briefly presents some of the most fruitful perspectives in the tradition—those of the Frankfurt School (in particular Max Horkheimer and Alfred Sohn-Rethel), Moishe Postone, and value-form theory. On the basis of this reconstruction, the concluding section further reflects on the central ethical implications of the critique of political economy.