Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy

Economic work by Engels and also the first economic work in the history of Marxist thought. Written from late September or early October 1843 to mid-January 1844, published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, February 1844.

In November 1842, Engels arrived in Manchester, after which he studied the knowledge of philosophy, socialism and communism. While observing real life on the ground, he actively participated in the workers' revolutionary practice. Social practice made Engels increasingly aware that in order to advance the workers' movement, it was necessary to study all the economic facts of capitalism and to understand the nature and laws of motion of the capitalist system. In this regard, Engels later recalled: “While in Manchester, it was tangibly brought home to me that the economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis for the origin of the present-day class antagonism; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history.” Hence, Engels began to study political economy in depth, read the works of economists including Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, James Mill, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and criticized capitalist political economy on the basis of his research.

In this work, Engels expounded the origin of bourgeois political economy and its influence, analyzed and criticized its main categories, pointed out that it is a theoretical manifestation of capitalist private property, exposed the inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and emphasized that only by abolishing private property and comprehensively reforming the existing social relations can the grievances of capitalism be eliminated. Engels pointed out that political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and the evolution of political economy was related to the development of trade and private property, and the class character of bourgeois political economy determined that it serves private property, and its purpose is to cover up the plunder of the working people. Engels examined the basic categories of political economy, emphasized that these categories are based on private property, analyzed private property and its related categories, and expressed a series of economic thoughts. Engels criticized Malthus’ reactionary theory of population and pointed out that “surplus population or labor-power is invariably tied up with surplus wealth, surplus capital and surplus landed property”, and proposed that under the capitalist system, the accumulation of wealth and poverty coexists thus revealing the class status of capitalist society in a certain sense. Engels discussed the dialectical relationship between competition and monopoly, pointing out that “Competition is based on self-interest, and self-interest in turn breeds monopoly. In short, competition passes over into monopoly, on the other hand, monopoly cannot stem the tide of competition—indeed, it itself breeds competition.” Engels analyzed that the economic crisis is decided by the capitalist society itself, because in this society production is to make money, not to satisfy the needs, so the expansion of production was inevitably interrupted cyclically by the contraction of production. With the development of capitalism, each successive crisis is bound to become more universal and therefore worse than the preceding one. In his view, the capitalist private property system is the root of all contradictions in capitalism, and it is this private property system that separates land from labor, divides labor itself into living labor and “stored-up labor”, into labor and capital, and thus gives rise to class contradictions in capitalist society. These were the inherent laws of private property, and the solution to these contradictions and problems required a social revolution to abolish private property. As Lenin later commented, it was “an examination on the principal phenomena of the contemporary economic order from a socialist standpoint, regarding them as necessary consequences of the rule of private property.”

Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy is an important work by Engels during his transformation from idealism to materialism and from revolutionary democracy to communism. Although at that time Engels had not yet overcome the influence of the utopian socialist thought, it studied for the first time in the history of the development of Marxism the categories and laws of bourgeois economics and raised the question of the origin of private property, thus laying the foundation for the critique of bourgeois political economy and giving Marx great inspiration to advance his study of political economy. Marx highly praised this work, calling it the “genius outline of critical economics”, “a rich and original work of German Socialists in the field of political economics”.