Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (First Instalment)

A book review by Engels on Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (First Instalment). Written from August 3 to 15, 1859. The book review has three parts in total. The first and second parts were published in Das Volk, No. 14 and No. 16, on August 6 and 20, 1859, while the third part could not be published for some reason, and the manuscript has been lost.

On June 11, 1859, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (First Instalment), the result of Marx’s 15 years of intensive study of political economy, was published. Nevertheless, the bourgeois media attempted to strangle the proletarian political economy in its cradle with unprecedented “silence”. In this situation, Marx, in a letter to Engels, suggested that he should, through a book review, “briefly” write “on the method and what is new in the content” of this economic work, and clarify “1. that it extirpates Proudhonism root and branch, 2. that the specifically social, by no means absolute, character of bourgeois production is analysed straight away in its simplest form, that of the commodity.” In order to crush the plot of silence of the bourgeoisie and also and also at the request of Marx, Engels wrote this book review and assumed the important task of defending and disseminating Marxist political economy.

In Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (First Instalment), Engels criticized the limitations of bourgeois political economy and highly praised Marx’s great contribution in founding the materialist conception of history and materialist dialectics. He pointed out that “the theoretical aspect [of the German proletarian party] was wholly based on a study of political economy”; the essential foundation of Marx’s political economy was the materialist conception of history, and the fundamental principles of the materialist conception of history, as briefly outlined in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, were “a revolutionary discovery not only for economics but also for all historical sciences and all branches of science which are not natural sciences are historical”, and that the most gigantic revolution that has ever taken place presented itself to us as soon as we pursue our materialist thesis further. At the same time, Engels fully affirmed the significance of Marx’s materialist dialectics, which was founded on the basis of absorbing the rational kernel of Hegelian philosophy, pointing out that this method “is a result hardly less significant than the basic materialist conception”, that his research was based on the facts of the historical development of capitalism, starting from the most fundamental and most common commodities in people’s daily life, grasping the inner fundamental contradiction between the value and the use-value of commodities, and making a logical analysis in a circular manner, thus revealing the insurmountable contradiction of the capitalist society and arriving at the conclusion of the inevitable fall of capitalism, and realizing the dialectical unity of the logical and historical methods in the research of Marx’s political economy. In addition, in his work, Engels also outlined and introduced Marx’s doctrine of commodity, value and money, emphasizing that political economy begins with commodities, but “economics is not concerned with things but with relations between persons, and in the final analysis between classes.”

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (First Instalment) is an important work in the history of Marxist thought. In this book, Engels summed up the quintessence of Marx’s political economics, expounded Marx’s method of conducting research in political economy, which was of great significance for understanding and disseminating the political economy founded by Marx and for theoretically arming the ranks of the proletariat.