This article sets out the foundatons of an axiomatc theory of value and money. Its purpose is to equip the public to explain the four facts that define the modern capitalist economy: the long-term post-war decline of the economies of the global North, the financial instability which produced the 2008 crash, the prolonged post-war growth in inequality between the global North and the global South, and the exceptonal thirty-year growth of China.The axiomatic method is poorly understood among economists. It allows us to interrogate empirical evidence in a systematc way, and is therefore the necessary preconditon for an inductvist, scientific enquiry into economic events, that is, an enquiry whose starting point is the explanaton of facts. The second part, to follow, deals with the empirical conclusions especially the analysis of accumulaton, the rate of profit, and financial crashes.
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