Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy is an early work on political economy written by Engels independently, which contains the key elements for the establishment of historical materialism. It was Engels’s profound revelation and criticism of the economic facts of capitalist society in the Outlines that prompted Marx, who was in the process of ideological transformation, to enter the field of political economy research and opened up the theoretical vision and the way forward for the establishment of historical materialism. The Outlines creatively uses the theory of productivity to dialectically analyze the contradiction movements of supply and demand in the capitalist economic process, which provides an important inspiration for the establishment of historical materialism in terms of research methods and ideological paths, thus allowing Marx to see the fundamental consistency between Engels and himself from their political positions to their academic interests, making the cooperation between the two of them on the creation of a new worldview from a possibility to a reality. The further text study of the Outlines is conducive to a deeper understanding of Engels’s important contribution to the establishment of historical materialism, which helps to more strongly refute the error of the “Marx-Engels antithesis”, to strengthen the understanding and grasp of the totality of Marxism, and to continue to promote the sinicization of Marxism in the new era.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:Studies on Marxism.2022.No.3.