Political Economy in the Wider Sense

Unlike political economy in the narrower sense, which is based on the capitalist mode of production, political economy in the wider sense is “the science of the conditions and forms under which the various human societies have produced and exchanged and on this basis have distributed their products”.

As the science that studies the conditions and the forms of production, exchange and the corresponding distribution of the products of the various human economic formations of society, political economy in the wider sense finds out the universal laws of movement of the emergence, operation, development, fall and supersession that can be applied to and followed by various economic formations of society, modes of production or relations of production.

In Anti-Dühring, Engels clearly raised the question of establishing the political economy in a wider sense, and then elaborated on some of its features.

Firstly, it is “essentially a historical science”. It deals with material, which is historical, i.e., in constant change; it must first investigate the special laws of each individual stage in the evolution of production and exchange, and only when it has completed this investigation will it be able to establish the few quite general laws which hold good for production and exchange in general.

Secondly, its task is to prove that that a certain mode of production, by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point at which it makes itself impossible, find out that the social abuses which have been disclosing are at the same time indications of its approaching dissolution, examine the hidden “points [in the old mode of production] at which the suspension of the present form of production relations gives signs of its becoming” as well as “the historic presuppositions for a new state of society”, i.e., “to reveal within the already dissolving economic form of movement, the elements of the future new organization of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses”.

Thirdly, in addition to the general methodology of dialectical and historical materialism, political economy in the wider sense uses the method of comparative analysis more. Marx pointed out that in order to complete this critique of bourgeois economics, an acquaintance with the capitalist form of production, exchange and distribution did not suffice. The forms which had preceded it or those which still exist alongside it in less developed countries, had also, at least in their main features, to be examined and compared. Such an investigation and comparison has up to the present been undertaken, in general outline, only by Marx, and we therefore owe almost exclusively to his researches all that has so far been established concerning pre-bourgeois theoretical economics.

Marx and Engels were the pioneers and founders of political economy in the wider sense. Their masterpieces include The Communist Manifesto, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Notebooks on the History of Ancient Society (1879–1882) (including excerpts and notebooks on Morgan’s Ancient Society), reply to the editorial board of Otechestvenniye Zapiski and to Zasulich, The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man, The Peasant Question in France and Germany, The Housing Question, etc.

“Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations”, written by Marx in the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858, is a masterpiece of Marx’s study of political economy in the wider sense. It is the most systematic and comprehensive part that deals with many forms of property or modes of production. It can even be said to be a “unique” part. It is regarded in academic circles as a classic of Marx’s theory of the evolution of economic formations of society and is widely cited in anthropological, archaeological, sociological and historical works and articles. It was first published separately in the Soviet magazine Proletarian Revolution, and then in 1940, under the title of “Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations”, it was edited and published by the Soviet Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Marx mainly dealt with the three forms of property that existed before capitalist production and made a comparative study of the Asiatic or tribal forms of property, ancient or Greek-Roman forms of property, and Germanic form of property. And later, the theories of the “three formations” and “five formations” were introduced.

After the death of the classic writers of Marxism Marx and Engels made further studies on various economic formations of society and the laws of their development. In particular, the contemporary Chinese communists, under the new historical conditions and in accordance with the practice of socialist revolution and construction, have upheld the Sinicization of Marxism and created the socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era, which has greatly enriched the political economy of Marxism in the wider sense.