Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

“A general introduction” written by Marx for A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Written in late August 1857, unpublished in Marx’s lifetime. In March 1903, Kautsky published it for the first time in the Neue Zeit, 21th Year (1902–1903), Vol. 1, Nos. 23–25.

In 1857, a worldwide economic crisis erupted in the capitalist world that swept through European countries and North America, and Marx sped up the process of study and writing on political economy. From October 1857 to May 1858, using the intellectual material accumulated in the past 15 years of economic research, Marx wrote the manuscript with the general title A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, that is, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Manuscripts of 1857–1858), of which the Introduction was made a part.

In the Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx first expounded clearly the object and method of inquiry of political economy. He criticized the bourgeois economists for taking distribution as the main object of inquiry, and then proceeded from the production by a solitary individual to study material production as well as the erroneous point of view that bourgeois production is said to be eternal through the study of “production in general”. Marx pointed out that the object of inquiry of political economy should first of all be “material production”, and that the study of “material production” should be placed in concrete stages of social development. That is, what the political economy studies is not an abstract “production in general” and “general production” detached from the concrete historical stage, but the concrete, actual social production of various stages or at a given historical stage of human history. It is a mode of production in which productive forces and relations of production are unified. This concrete social production consists of four dialectically unified moments: production and distribution, exchange and consumption. These four moments influence and interact with each other, among which production is decisive and dominant over the other moments, and the other elements also determine production under certain conditions. Therefore, Marx pointed out that the object of inquiry of political economy should be the capitalist mode of production, with a focus on the study of capitalist relations of production. Next, he clarified the scientific method of inquiry of political economy. Marx carefully examined the methods used by economists to set up their theoretical systems in the history of economics, critically assimilated their positive achievements, carried out a materialistic transformation of the Hegelian dialectics, and founded his own logical method of constructing an economic system—rising from the abstract to the concrete. Grounded in reality, this method begins with simple abstract determinations and gradually rises to more and more concrete ones, thus theoretically enabling the process of development and the internal connection of objective things to be scientifically illustrated and reproduced. Only this method, Marx said, is the correct scientific one, and the logical progression from the simple to the complex is in general consistent with the actual historical process. In addition to this, in this document Marx also expounded the relationship between the ideological superstructure and the economic base, and between literature and art and material production.

The Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is the opening part of Marx’s unfinished economic manuscripts, which incisively discussed the object and method of inquiry of political economy, revealed the objective laws of the process of production of human society, showing its unique scientific value and significance in the history of the development of Marxist political economy.