Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy

'Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy' is an article by Friedrich Engels, written in 1843, and first published in German, under the title 'Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie' in 1844 in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher.

The Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Annals) was a journal, published by Karl Marx and Arnold Ruge in Paris, that had only one issue.

The article has often been neglected, but played an important role in the development of the marxian critique of political economy.

It was published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1844, and "together with the programme articles written by Marx it determined the journal's communist trend.

"[8] The articles contributed by Marx were: 'Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie' ('Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right') and 'Zur Judenfrage' ('On the Jewish Question').

[10] Engels begin the article by claiming that "Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment".

This led to that "The art of the economists [...] consisted in ensuring that [...] exports should show a favourable balance over imports; and for the sake of this ridiculous illusion thousands of men have been slaughtered!"

Engels viewed Smith's new system as a necessary advance, but also claimed that "The nearer the economists come to the present time, the further they depart from honesty."

When have you been moral without being interested, without harbouring at the back of your mind immoral, egoistical motives?The liberal economic system transformed mankind into "a horde of ravenous beasts" which aim to devour each other, what remained for the economy after this was merely to dissolve the family.

The economists cannot decide anything.He then goes on by giving examples of this citing e.g. Say, and claimig the unsustainable and self contradictory nature of economic abstractions, nonentities.

(The interested reader may note that this subjectivist position is the basis for contemporary value theory in neoclassical (orthodox) economics.)

He then explains how we deal with two fundamental elements of production – nature and man, which he then contrasts to the position of those who claimed inherent value to property, while Engels argues that property in itself is worthless in economic categories, since one must have a wholly asociological understanding of exchange if one wants to argue for the inherent value of it.

To make land an object of huckstering – the land which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence – was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering.Engels claims that while capital and labour are initially identical, splits and divisions stem from the original separation of capital from labour divides mankind into capitalists and workers – a division which becomes ever more acute.

The culmination of this is the stock exchange, where mankind and history is demoted to a means to an end, by the gambling speculator.

Here Engels invites the readers to consult the writing of the English socialists of his time, to acquaint oneself with how a community could establish a rational condition for production and consumption.

Further Engels remarked that "Competition has penetrated all the relationships of our life and completed the reciprocal bondage in which men now hold themselves."

He leaves to the readers how to punish criminals under those circumstances, since he was more "concerned [with] demonstrating the extension of competition into the moral sphere, and in showing to what deep degradation private property has brought man."

Finishing of, Engels touches on issues of machinery and the factory system, which has some similarity to Marx fragment on machines.