How to criticize political economy?

Rereading Engels (and Marx)

 
Michael Heinrich
Friedrich Engels was born on November 28, 1820 in Barmen (now Wuppertal). A friend
and unfailing collaborator of Karl Marx, a tireless revolutionary militant, he was for a
very long time considered on a par with Marx as one of the founders of Marxism. How-
ever, in the twentieth century, in Western heterodox Marxism, Engels was regularly criti-
cized for being at the origin of the scientistic and dogmatic deviation from Marxism, and
thus responsible for all that there was to be rejected in Marxism.
On the occasion of the bicentenary of Engels, we propose to return to this important figure
of Marxism. In the following text, Michael Heinrich studies the relationship between
Marx and Engels through a detailed analysis of Engels’ review of Marx’s Contribution to
a critique of political economy (1859).
Michael Heinrich is the author of several books on the work of Marx, and is involved
in the recent renewal of the reading of Marx’s texts1, and is currently in the process of
producing a monumental intellectual biography of Marx, the first volume of which has
been published2.

For a long time it was considered that Marx and Engels formed an indissoluble unit,
both politically and scientifically. What one of them had written must have been valid
for both. Such a conception not only dominated the “Marxism-Leninism” of the of-
ficial party line in the Soviet Union, but was widely diffused among many Marxist
writers who were far beyond this orthodoxy. The first doubts about this unity were
expressed by Georg Lukács, who noted the differences between Marx and Engels in
their conceptions of dialectic and criticized in particular Engels’ attempt to extend the
dialectic to nature3.
1Voir en français, Michael Heinrich, Comment lire Le Capital de Marx? Introduction à la lecture et com-
mentaire du début du Capital; et Michael Heinrich, Alix Bouffard Alix, Alexandre Féron et Guillaume
Fondu, Ce qu’est Le Capital de Marx, Paris, Les Éditions sociales, coll. « Les parallèles », 2017, 152 p.
2Voir à ce sujet sur Contretemps, “Biographie de Marx et travail théorique. Entretien avec Michael Hein-
rich”.
3Georg Lukács, History and class consciousness [1923], trans. K. Axelos and J. Bois, Éditions de Minuit,
1960, p. 33.
Since the 1970s, there has been growing suspicion that all of Engels’ late work, espe-
cially the Anti-Dühring, not only popularized but also falsified Marx’s analyses. Engels
was thus conceived as the true initiator of a problematic “Marxism”, which no longer
has much to do with Marx’s criticism. The proponents of an intellectual unity of Marx
and Engels retorted that, despite the intensity of their exchanges on all issues over the
years, no fundamental differences ever arose between them. On the contrary, not only
was Marx familiar with the Anti-Dühring, but he would also have collaborated with En-
gels in its drafting; part of the Anti-Dühring, in the section on economics, would be
based directly on preparatory work written by Marx.
Both the idea of a complete unity of Marx and Engels from a scientific and political
point of view, and the image of an Engels who would have impoverished and falsified
Marxian criticism seem untenable to me. Not only is there a lot of striking evidence of
the differences in conceptions between Marx and Engels; it would also be very unusual
that two equally remarkable minds, but with different experiences and scientific inter-
ests, would arrive at identical answers to all scientific and political questions. But it is
also grossly simplistic to think that Engels would be solely responsible for the impov-
erishment of Marxian criticism. Just as Marx cannot be blamed for Stalinism, neither
can Engels be blamed for the origin of any dogmatic element in Marxism.
The intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels is not only much more nuanced
than the positions we have just outlined suggest. It must also be clarified each time ac-
cording to the different fields and themes, as well as according to the different periods,
because both Marx and Engels were capable of learning very quickly, so that their con-
ceptions evolved over time. The relationship between Marx and Engels will be studied
in detail in my biography of Marx ⁴. In this article, I will discuss only a small episode
of this relationship : Engels’ two-part review of the text published by Marx in 1859,
Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. First book ⁵.
In this review, Engels expressed himself above all on the Marxian method of cri-
tique of political economy. Engels distinguishes a “logical” method from a “historical”
method, but then came to the conclusion that there would be a fundamental agreement
between logical and historical development. From this comes, in reception, the idea
of a “logical-historical method” (an expression Engels does not use anywhere), which
for decades was considered the “Marxist method”; Engels’ remarks in this review were
then used as simple explanations of Marx’s text. Such an approach was common not
⁴Michael Heinrich, Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society. Intellectual biography. Volume 1: 1818-
1841 [2018], trans. V. Béguin, A. Bouffard, G. Fondu, C. Fradin and J. Quétier, Les éditions sociales,
2019.
⁵Karl Marx, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique, trans. G. Fondu and J. Quétier, Les éditions
sociales, 2014. The review of Engels can be found at pp. 221-229.
 only in Soviet Marxism-Leninism⁶, but also among authors such as Ronald Meek or
Ernest Mandel⁷.
Since the end of the 1960s, the new debates of criticism of political economy that have
emerged give an important role not only to Capital, but also to Grundrisse and Results
of the immediate production process ⁸ – the Introduction of 1857 also arousing strong
interest. The fact that in the methodological passage of the Introduction of 1857, Marx
clearly leads to the opposite result: the historical development and exposition of the
categories do not follow parallel paths ⁹.
The supporters of the unity of Marx and Engels have tried to minimize this obvious
contradiction with arguments that are not very convincing, whereas those who crit-
icize this unity were generally content to identify the contradiction, and to take it as
proof of Engels’ fundamental misinterpretation, without ever, as a general rule, asking
the question of what had led Engels to make such remarks.1⁰11

⁶As for example in Zeleny (Die Wissenschaftslogik bei Marx und “Das Kapital”, Berlin, Akademie Verlag,
1968) and Rosental (Die dialektische Methode der politischen Ökonomie von Karl Max, Berlin, Dietz,
1973).
⁷Ronald Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1956, p. 148ff;
Ökonomie und Ideologie. Studien zur Entwicklung der Wirtschaftstheorie, Frankfurt/M., EVA, 1973,
p. 130ff; Ernest Mandel, Introduction, in Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973,
p. 21ff.
⁸Karl Marx, Chapter VI, manuscripts of 1863-1867, trans. G. Cornillet, L. Prost, L. Sève, Les éditions
sociales, 2010.
⁹See e.g. Helmut Reichelt, Zur logischen Struktur des Kapitalbegriffs bei Karl Marx, Frankfurt/M., EVA,
1970, p. 233ff; Hans-Georg Backhaus, Materialien zur Rekonstruktion der Marxschen Werttheorie 2, in
Gesellschaft. Beiträge zur Marxschen Theorie 3, Frankfurt/M., Suhrkamp, 1975, p. 139ff.
1⁰As for example Klaus Holzkamp (Die historische Methode des wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus und ihre
Verkennung durch J. Bischoff, in Das Argument 84, Jg. 16, H. 1/2, 1974, p. 1–75) in his reply to Joachim
Bischoff (Gesellschaftliche Arbeit als Systembegriff. Über wissenschaftliche Dialektik, Westberlin, VSA,
1973).
11The most comprehensive and nuanced discussion of the Engels review in the German-speaking world
has been proposed by Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner (“Logisch” und “Historisch”). Über Differenzen des
Marxschen und des Engelsschen Systems der Wissenschaft (Engels’ Rezension ” Zur Kritik der politischen
Ökonomie ” von 1859), in IWK, Jg. 13, H. 1, 1977, p. 1–47), who seeks to find the reasons behind the
conceptions of Marx and Engels. On many points I agree with Kittsteiner’s argument. However, his
attempt to attribute all the differences between Marx and Engels to a different concept of science is, in
my opinion, questionable, For this reason, Kittsteiner is led to compare Engels’ statements in his review
with his book Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie [*Ludwig Feuer-
bach and the Exit from Classical German Philosophy], which was written more than 25 years later, as if
Engels’ writings were a unified and coherent work. In fact, we do not have documents to establish what
Engels’ conception of science was at the end of the 1850s. Among the English-language contributions
to the Engels review, Arthur’s (Engels as Interpreter of Marx’s Economics, in Christopher J. Arthur, (ed.),
Engels Today. * A Centenary Appreciation. London, Macmillan, 1996, pp. 179-188) deserves special at-
 I.
Engels had arrived before Marx at the critique of political economy. The son of an
industrial family, he was introduced to the family business at an early age and at the
end of his secondary school studies he trained as a salesman. By the age of 18, he had
already accompanied his father to Manchester, where he was a partner in a company.
In 1844, Engels participated in the “Franco-German Annals” with his Esquisse d’une
critique de l’économie nationale, an essay that Marx still praised in 1859 in his foreword
to the Contribution to the Criticism of Political Economy as a “brilliant sketch” 12 and
which he later praised again in Book I of the Capital. It was notably through this essay
that Engels contributed to the young Marx taking the path of economic criticism.
However, Marx was already quickly catching up in the 1840s. And from 1850, while
in exile in London, Marx undertook a second study of economics – a more in-depth
study first found in the London Papers written between 1850 and 1853. Only then did
Marx move beyond the purely critical use of the categories of political economy that
characterized his writings of the 1840s. It was only in London that Marx developed
a genuine critique of economic categories that would become the hallmark of a crit-
ical factory of political economy. (Ce n’est qu’à Londres que Marx a développé une
véritable critique des catégories économiques qui sera le trait de fabriquesa critique de
l’économie politique.) The first major result of this critique was the Grundrisse, writ-
ten in the winter of 1857-58. It was on the basis of these manuscripts that Marx then
wrote the “First Book”, which appeared in 1859 and which Engels then reviewed.
Many authors, starting from the idea of a complete intellectual unity between Marx and
Engels, considered Engels’ text as a brilliant study of Marx’s method. But in doing so,
the circumstances of its writing were totally ignored. While in the 1850s Marx devoted
himself ardently to political economy, Engels spent most of his time in Manchester in
the firm “Ermen und Engels”, in which his father was a partner. At that time, Engels
was not in a very enviable position. Engels was viewed with a lot of suspicion (when
he was not simply being watched), both by his father, who did not agree at all with
his son’s political ideas, and by his father’s partner, Peter Ermen, as well as his father’s
brother, Gottfried. With the money he earned, Engels supported the Marx family for
years, and in the time he had left he often wrote articles for the New York Tribune
that appeared under the name of Marx. Articles for the Tribune were Marx’s most
important source of income in the 1850s. This left Engels no time to devote to his own

tention, although the author was not able to read about the intense German debate of the 1970s because
the texts were not translated.
12MEGA II/2: 101; MEW 13: 10, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique, Les éditions sociales,
2014, p. 64.
 research in economic theory. This becomes clear when, in a letter to Engels dated April
2, 1858, Marx first explains to his friend how he conceives the work he is preparing,
and he obviously expects a discussion on the substance. Engels’ reply of April 9, 1858 is
very brief, and underlines how abstract thought has become foreign to him: “The study
of the abstract tone of the first fascicle took me a long time, it is very abstract indeed,
which cannot be avoided in such a short exposé; and I am often obliged to go to great
trouble to look for dialectical transitions because I have completely disaccustomed
myself to all abstract reasoning” 13.
When Marx asked him a good year later, on July 19, 1859, to write a review of the
Contribution, which had appeared in the meantime, for the following week,1⁴ there is
no indication that the situation had changed and that Engels had more time to devote
to the study of economics. Engels does not react at first, so that Marx tells him again
about the review on July 22. On July 25, Engels replies, somewhat reluctantly, that he
will not be able to deliver the article within the week: “it represents work, and for that
I should have notice a little earlier”1⁵. On August 3, he sends the first part of his review
to Marx – with obvious uneasiness:
Here is the beginning of the article on your book. Review it carefully and,
if you don’t like it in toto [as a whole], tear it up and tell me your opinion.
For lack of exercise, I have become so out of practice with this kind of
paper that your wife will laugh a lot at my clumsiness. If you can touch
it up, do so. It would be a good idea to give some striking examples of
materialistic design… » 1⁶.
Since the examples suggested by Engels cannot be found and there are no references
in the correspondence to changes in the text, Marx probably published the text in the
journal as he received it from Engels 1⁷. As Engels’ letter shows, he was far less con-
vinced of his text than many of his readers in the twentieth century.

13MEGA III/9: 126; MEW 29: 319, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, volume 5, 1857-1859,
Éditions sociales, 1975, p. 175ff.
1⁴cf. MEGA III/9: 515; MEW 29: 460, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 361.
1⁵MEGA III/9: 522; MEW 29: 464, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 365.
1⁶MEGA III/9: 534; MEW 29: 468, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 369.
1⁷Contrary to the assertion of the publishers in the reprint of the review annexed to the Contribution
(Éditions sociales, 2014) who write: “It is probable that the author of the Contribution is also to a large
extent that of the said review. ”(p. 221) [Editor’s note].
 II.
Engels’ review was to appear in three parts in Das Volk [The People], the journal of the
London Association for the Training of German Workers. Das Volk was at the time de
facto (but not officially) directed by Marx. The first part, dealing with the materialist
conception of history outlined in the Foreword to Marx’s work, appeared on August 6,
1859. The second part, dealing mainly with method, appears on August 20. The third
part, which was to deal with merchandise and money, will not be published because
Das Volk ceased publication for financial reasons. It is likely that Engels did not write
this third part.
In the first part of the review, Engels first undertakes a historical re-enactment of
Marx’s work. Because of its economic backwardness, the German bourgeoisie, un-
like the English bourgeoisie, had not yet produced any economic literature. But the
“German proletarian party” finds itself in a completely different situation: “It is from
the study of political economy that its entire theoretical existence stemmed, and it
is from its entry on the scene that the scientific and autonomous”German economy”
also dates back. When Engels speaks here of the “German proletarian party”, he is not
thinking of a party in the present sense of the word, that is, a fixed form of organization
with party statutes, members and the election of permanent members – such a party
did not exist at the time – but of all those who consciously defend the interests of the
proletariat, sometimes as individuals, sometimes in small, more or less formal groups.
All of them criticized, in different ways, the economic conditions.
What Engels says in the following sentence, however, does not apply to the “German
proletarian party” as a whole: “This German economy is essentially based on the ma-
terialist conception of history, the main features of which are presented in the Foreword
to the above-mentioned work.”1⁸ This materialist conception was by no means domi-
nant. At the beginning of the German workers’ movement, religious representations,
among others, occupied an important place.
From the second half of the 1840s onward, Marx and Engels in particular defended
such a “materialist conception of history” and sought to impose it against the mor-
alizing criticism of “true socialism.1⁹ They succeeded in doing so in the League of
Communists with the”Communist Manifesto,” but at that time it represented only a
small part of the workers’ movement. Engels himself mentions that this new concep-
tion met with resistance not only from the bourgeoisie, “but also from the mass of
French socialists who want to turn the world upside down with the help of the magic

1⁸MEGA II/2: 247; MEW 13: 469, Contribution…, Les éditions sociales, 2014, p. 222.
1⁹Ibid.
 formula : freedom, equality, fraternity”2⁰.
When Engels writes at the end of this first part that after the defeat of the 1848-49
revolution “our party abandoned the bickering of the émigrées” to others and “was
quite happy to find some moments of calm for study”, it becomes clear that by “our
party” Engels was then referring mainly to Marx and himself. However, the assertion
that they did not take part in emigrant squabbles is not entirely accurate. In 1852, then
in exile in England, Marx and Engels wrote a very detailed book on these emigrant
squabbles 21, which, for lack of a publisher, was not printed and therefore remained
unknown.
The fact that Engels insists so strongly on the conception of history outlined in Marx’s
Foreword certainly contributed to the fact that, in reception, this text was considered
one of the founding writings of “historical materialism”. However, in his text Engels
does not yet speak here of a great theory called “historical materialism”, but only of
one “conception”: the materialist conception of history. He thus emphasizes that this
is a specific perspective in the study of history, which – Engels also emphasizes this –
must first be demonstrated by means of concrete historical material facts, because “we
are not dealing here with simple formulas” 22.

III.
In dealing with method in the second part of his review – the part on which twentieth-
century reception has focused – Engels follows the indications of Marx in his letter of
July 19, 1859: “Something short on method and on what is new in content” 23. How-
ever, the problem is that there is absolutely no explicit remark on method in Marx’s
work, and likewise, in his letter, Marx does not give any details on this point.
Engels begins with Hegel and the criticism of the Hegelian dialectic. For readers of
Marx’s work, starting this way may have been somewhat surprising, since there is no
mention of the Hegelian dialectic. Why does Engels refer to Hegel? The reception of
Hegelian philosophy and its criticism – notably in Marx and Engels’ first joint work The
Holy Family – were decisive steps in the history of their respective intellectual develop-
ment. Moreover, Engels was informed by various letters of Marx that the confrontation
with Hegel also played a very concrete role in his elaboration of the Contribution. On
2⁰MEGA II/2: 249; MEW 13: 471, ibid. p. 223.
21Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, “The Great Men of Exile”, Agone, 2015.
22MEGA II/2: 249; MEW 13: 471, ibid. p. 224.
23MEGA III/9: 515; MEW 29: 460, Correspondence, op. cit., p. 361.
 January 16, 1858 – Marx was then working on the manuscript of the Grundrisse – he
informed Engels of the following:
In the method of elaboration of the subject, something has done me a
great service: By mere accident, I had gone through Hegel’s Logic again –
Freiligrath found some Hegel volumes that originally belonged to Bakunin
and sent them to me as a gift” 2⁴.
Marx is even clearer in his letter of February 1, 1858. He remarks on the economic
work that Ferdinand Lassalle plans to write:
I retain from the note in question [a note from Lassalle’s book on Her-
aclitus, which refers to the analysis of money, M.H.] that our good man
proposes to expose in his 2nd grand opus, political economy according
to the Hegelian method. He will realize at his expense that it is a com-
pletely different matter to first bring, through criticism, a science to the
point where it can be exposed dialectically, or to apply a system of abstract
logic, closed, to the premonitions of such a system precisely.2⁵
With this last sentence, Engels could easily recognize Marx’s own intentions 2⁶. The
beginning of the second part of the review reads almost like a commentary on this re-
mark. Engels begins by asserting that Marx’s criticism of economics is not aimed only
at isolated questions, but at economic science as a whole. It was Hegel who succeeded
(which has not been done since) in “developing a science in the whole of its own inter-
nal relations” 2⁷. However, Engels continues, “Hegel’s method, in its present form, was
absolutely unusable. It was essentially idealistic … It was based on pure thought, and
here one had to start from the most stubborn facts” 2⁸. However, Hegelian thought
would have an important historical significance for its foundation:
However abstract and idealistic its form may have been, the development
of its thought was no less parallel to the development of world history, and

2⁴MEGA III/9: 24ff; MEW 29: 260, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 116.
2⁵MEGA III/9: 52; MEW 29: 275, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 129.
2⁶In a letter to Lassalle written three weeks later, on February 22, 1858, Marx characterizes his enterprise as
follows: “The work in question is, first of all, the criticism of economic categories, or, if you like, the system
of bourgeois economy presented in a critical form. It is both a picture of the system, and the critique of
the system through the exposition itself. ”(MEGA III/9: 72; MEW 29: 551, Correspondence, Volume 5,
p. 143). However, Engels was not familiar with this statement by Marx, which is very frequently quoted
today and which names much more clearly than the letter quoted above the relationship of the critique
to the exposition through which it is conducted .
2⁷MEGA II/2: 250; MEW 13: 472, Contribution to the critique of political economy, op. cit., p. 225.
2⁸MEGA II/2: 250; MEW 13: 472, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 226.
 the latter development was in fact only the test of the former” 2⁹.
These statements actually raise more questions than they provide answers. On the one
hand, Engels equates Hegelian philosophy with an “idealism” alien to the world and
enclosed in “pure thought”. On the other hand, he is forced to recognize how much this
philosophy is dependent on reality. To explain this strange observation, Engels asserts
that the development of Hegelian thought and the real development of history took
place “in parallel”. Now if the Hegelian method started from “pure thought” and not
from “facts”, how can we explain that the development of Hegelian thought is “parallel
to the development of world history”?
With his thesis of parallelism, Engels can rely only to a very limited extent on Hegel.
In the Principles of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel noted: “…it may be that the temporal
order of actual appearance is in part different from the order of the concept. Thus,
one cannot say, for example, that the property was there before the family, and yet
it is treated before the family”3⁰. Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy might
support Engels’ interpretation. In the introduction, Hegel asserts that “the succession
of systems of philosophy is in history the same as the succession of determinations of
the notion of the Idea in its logical derivation” 31.
However, he immediately limits this parallelism, stating somewhat cryptically that ”
it is also true that on the one hand succession, as temporal succession in
history, differs from succession in the order of concepts. But to show this
side would divert us too much from our object. 32.
He then comes to the decisive point:
… in order to recognize in the empirical form and phenomenon that phi-
losophy historically assumes its succession as a development of the Idea,
one must first have knowledge of the Idea… 333⁴
In other words: the alleged parallelism between the historical development of philo-
sophical systems and the logical development of the determinations of the idea can
only be recognized when the logical development of the idea has already been under-
stood. Parallelism is thus by no means a direct result, but rather a mediated result –
without Hegel making it a basis for his presentation of the history of philosophy.
2⁹MEGA II/2: 251; MEW 13: 473, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 226.
3⁰HW 7: 86, §32 addition, GWF Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Law (1821), addition to § 32, trans.
J.-F. Kervégan, Paris, PUF, 2013, p. 680.
31G.W.F. Hegel, Leons sur l’histoire de la philosophie, Gallimard, 2007, p. 50.
32Ibid.
33Ibid.
3⁴Ibid.
 The fundamental problem in trying to make the “idealism” of Hegel’s philosophy co-
incide with its anchoring in reality seems to me to consist in the fact that Hegelian
philosophy cannot fundamentally be simply called “idealist” (a name found not only
in Engels, but also in Marx). For Hegel’s contemporaries, such a classification was far
from obvious. One can still read in 1848 in the Wigand’s Conversations-Lexikon 3⁵,
at the entry ‘idealism’, that Hegel cannot precisely be qualified as an idealist (Vol. 6:
872). This deficit in the characterization of Hegel, both in Marx and Engels, cannot,
however, be deepened here, and I will treat this subject in detail in the second volume
of my biography of Marx.
After his description of Hegelian philosophy, Engels returns – very briefly – to the
Marxian critique of Hegel. Marx would have been the only one who could have
compelled himself to the work of extracting the core of Hegelian logic,
which contains Hegel’s actual discoveries in this field, and to the devel-
opment of dialectic, stripped of its idealistic envelopes, under the simple
figure in which it is the only correct form of the development of thought
3⁶.
The expression with which Engels characterizes Marx’s critique remains completely
vague. Neither the “simple figure” of this method, nor the consequences it has for the
critique of political economy are specified. It does little more than state that Marx
would have succeeded in criticizing Hegel and that he would have retained what was
to be retained from Hegel.

IV.
The following paragraph was decisive in the history of the reception of the Engels re-
view. According to him, criticism of political economy can be applied either “histor-
ically” or “logically”. Engels does not explicitly specify what he means by “historical”
and “logical”; we must infer this from his statements:
Since in history, as in its literary reflection, development progresses roughly
from the simplest to the most complex relationships, the historical-literary
development of political economy offered a thread to which criticism could
be attached, and roughly the economic categories would appear in the
same order as in the logical development. 3⁷
3⁵Otto Wigand was the editor of many writings of the Young Hegelians, and also published Engels’ Situ-
ation of the Working Class in England.
3⁶MEGA II/2: 252; MEW 13: 474, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 227.
3⁷MEGA II/2: 252; MEW 13: 474f, ibid.
 “Historical” appears here in two forms: as real economic history and as its “literary
reflection”, i.e. the history of economic theories. The “logical development” of the cat-
egories apparently consists in a representation that progresses from the simplest to the
most complex conditions. But what are “simple” conditions? Does this concern the
process of work? Is it about the commodity? Is it money? Or is it the interaction of the
three factors of production: labor, capital and land? The “simple” relationship and the
category expressing this relationship are anything but obvious, their determination is
itself still an act underpinned by a theory. It is by no means possible to decide on the
basis of the mere description of a factual sequence whether economic history and its
literary reflection really begins with the simplest relations.
Although Engels considers “historical-literary development” as a “common thread”, he
notes in the same paragraph that the representation cannot be oriented to it, because
history often goes “by jumps and zigzags”. Engels concludes:
Only the logical mode of processing had its place here. But this is in fact
nothing other than the mode of historical treatment stripped only of his-
torical form and disruptive contingencies. It is with what history begins
that the path of ideas must necessarily begin, and its further pursuit will
be nothing other than the reflection, in an abstract and theoretically con-
sequential form, of the historical process….3⁸
The “logical” mode of exposition becomes here a corrected “historical” exposition: a
historical development without “leaps and zigzags”. This is how the “logical-historical
method” was understood in the twentieth century, and those who assumed an intel-
lectual unity of Marx and Engels also attributed it to Marx.
Critics of this conception had little difficulty in giving themselves up. In the 1857
Introduction, Marx had examined in detail the relationship between the historical ap-
pearance and the logical development of categories and came to the following result:
It would therefore be both unfeasible and wrong to make the economic
categories succeed one another in the succession in which they were his-
torically in turn decisive. Their order is rather determined by the relation
they have to each other in modern bourgeois civil society, which is pre-
cisely the opposite of what appears as their natural order or corresponding
to the series constituted by historical development3⁹.

3⁸MEGA II/2: 253; MEW 13: 475, Ibid.

3⁹MEGA II/1.1: 42; MEW 42: 41, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, op. cit., p. 54.
 What matters to us is first to understand how Engels came to his conception of the
parallelism of the development of logical and historical (literary) categories. One im-
portant reason seems to me to be the lack of communication between Marx and Engels.
Although they exchanged many letters about the political problems of the time, about
the actions of friends as well as opponents, there is no real discussion of the theoretical
issues of political economy criticism.
Marx gave very little information about his work. He never sent Engels an unfin-
ished manuscript to discuss it with him. Engels never saw either the Grundrisse or the
manuscript of the Contribution. And this did not change afterwards. Engels had the
text of Book I of the Capital in his hands for the first time when Marx sent him the
proofs ⁴⁰. In the correspondence of the 1850s and 1860s, there are several examples of
Marx relying on Engels’ knowledge of commerce, but no real theoretical debate takes
place between the two of them. Therefore, at the time of Marx’s death, Engels had no
idea what state of elaboration books 2 and 3 of the “Capital” were in; he only became
aware of them when he examined the manuscripts left by Marx.⁴1
The first and only somewhat detailed account of the Contribution project is to be found
in the above-mentioned letter from Marx to Engels of 2 April 1858. Marx begins by
setting out his draft plan in six books (capital, land ownership, wage-labour, state, in-
ternational trade, world market) and adds as an explanation :
The transition from capital to landed property is at the same time histori-
cal, since the modern form of landed property is the product of the action
of capital on feudal landed property, etc. In the same way, the transition
from landed property to wage labor is not only dialectical, but also histor-
ical, since the last product of modern landed property is the generalized
establishment of wage labor, which then appears as the basis of all this
crap ⁴2.
In the same way, Marx writes when presenting the determination of money “as money”:
The simple circulation of money does not imply the principle of self-
reproduction, and thus refers to other categories beyond itself. In money
– as the development of its determinations shows – the demand is made
for the value that enters into circulation, is conserved in it, and at the same
time implies it: capital. This transition is also historical. The antediluvian
⁴⁰See on this stage of the elaboration of Capital, Michael Heinrich, Ce qu’est le Capital de Marx, Les éditions
sociales, 2017, p. 47-48. [Editor’s note]
⁴1See his letters to Lavrov of April 2, 1883 (MEW 36: 3), to Nieuwenhuis of April 11, 1883 (MEW 36: 7)
and to Bernstein of April 14, 1883 (MEW 36: 9).
⁴2MEGA III/9: 122, MEW 29: 312 , Correspondence, volume 5, op. cit. p. 171.
 form of capital is trading capital, which always develops money. At the
same time, birth of true capital [is] from money or trade capital that takes
over production” ⁴3.
If one knows, as Engels does, only this letter, one can easily come to the idea that Marx
assumes a systematic parallelism of the “logical” (dialectical-conceptual) development
of categories and of the way in which the economic conditions corresponding to these
categories impose themselves. But as the Introduction of 1857 shows, Marx did not
assume such a parallelism: sometimes the historical development may correspond to
the order of the categories in the conceptual development, and sometimes it is exactly
the opposite. The quoted passages from his letter on “historical” transitions were not
systematic in their scope, and were, so to speak, complementary observations, which
Engels could not understand on the basis of this letter alone.
The question of the parallelism of the historical and conceptual development of the
categories was not at all central to Marx. As is clear from the early 1858 version
(sometimes referred to as the “Urtext” of the “Contribution”), he was interested in
a completely different question concerning the relationship between conceptual and
historical development. Towards the end of the primitive version, Marx wrote: “At
this point, we can see precisely how the dialectical form of the exposition is only right
when it knows its limits.”⁴⁴. Marx deals here with the existence of the “free worker”,
that is, workers who are, as persons, legally free to sell their labor-power and who are at
the same time deprived of means of subsistence and production, so that they are forced
to sell their labor-power. This is a historical precondition “for the birth and even more
so for the existence of capital as such”⁴⁵, which cannot be deduced dialectically.
The “dialectical form of exposition” assumes that capital already exists, it can show the
immanent determinations of capital and its immanent dynamics (such as the develop-
ment of the productive forces, accumulation, propensity to crisis), and it can also make
clear on which preconditions capital is based (the existence of “free” workers). How-
ever, only a historical analysis can show how these preconditions have come about,
and it is then that the “dialectical form of exposition” is no longer sufficient, that the
historical view becomes part of the exposition. In Book I of Capital, this happens in
the framework of the analysis of “primitive accumulation” – after the determinations
of the capitalist production process have been exposed.
Another limit of the dialectical representation appears in Capital: the conceptual anal-
ysis has made it clear that the limits of the working day cannot be determined concep-

⁴3MEGA III/9: 125; MEW 29: 317, Correspondence, vol. 5, op. cit., p. 174.
⁴⁴MEGA II/2: 91, Contribution à la critique de l’économie politique, Éditions sociales, 1957, p. 253.
⁴⁵Ibid.
 tually, they are the result of the struggle between capitalists and workers. In other
words, the length of the working day is a historical result that can only be explained by
historical analysis. Historical analysis is therefore part of the presentation of the cri-
tique of political economy, but at times and under conditions that can only be obtained
through a “logical” treatment. This no longer has anything to do with the search for
parallels between “logical” and “historical” evolution, as Marx envisaged in his letter
of April 2, 1858.
The other meaning of “historical” as Engels explains it in his review, the “historical-
literary development” and its parallel with the “logical” development of categories, is
to some extent suggested in the Contribution: after dealing with a category, Marx ex-
plains the historical evolution of the theories about this category. The analysis of the
commodity in the first chapter is followed by the section “History of commodity anal-
ysis”, after the analysis of money as a measure of value follows the section “Theories
of the unit of measure of money”, and at the end of the chapter on money comes the
section “Theories of means of circulation and money”.
In the Manuscript 1861-63, which were conceived as a direct extension of the Contri-
bution, the Theories of Surplus Value are found after the analysis of capital and surplus
value. Such a fragmented analysis presupposes that the theories of the different cate-
gories can be presented largely independently of each other and in the same order as
the “logical” development of the categories, which Engels thus interpreted as a paral-
lelism of the historical-literary and logical development.
But in working on the “theories of surplus-value” it then became clear to Marx that
this fragmented historiography of theory was no longer practicable: the theories of
surplus-value – a category that the bourgeois economy did not explicitly have, and
which was at best implicitly present – could not be formulated at all, at least not without
the “theories of profit”. This is why Marx abandoned the project of writing a separate
history of the theory for each individual category when he wrote the Capital from 1863
onwards. A “history of theory” was to be gathered in a separate volume, Book IV of
Capital ⁴⁶.

Neither Marx nor Engels ever returned to this review. Those who believe in the com-
plete intellectual unity of Marx and Engels conclude from Marx’s silence that they

⁴⁶This volume was never written. Since the Theories of surplus value owe their existence to the later aban-
doned conception of a history of isolated categories, they cannot – contrary to widespread opinion –
be considered as a project for this fourth book of Capital either.
agree: Marx knew the review and did not contradict it, so he must have accepted it
as an adequate presentation of his own positions – so goes the usual argument. It
seems to me that the opposite is true. Marx appreciated Engels both as a scientist and
as a friend who supported him throughout his life, both materially and in his research.
Whenever possible, Marx tried to quote Engels’ writings. In Book I of the Capital, En-
gels’ 1844 Outline of a Critique of the National Economy is cited four times, his 1845 Sit-
uation of the Working Class in England eleven times, and his 1850 essay on the English
Ten-Hour Law twice. The fact that he did not cite the Engels review once weighs all
the more heavily because in the afterword to the second edition he deals precisely with
the methodological problems of the exposition, as well as its relationship to Hegelian
philosophy, which are central themes in the Engels’ review. If he had agreed with En-
gels, he would probably have been happy to quote his analysis then. However, the fact
that he avoided it suggests that he did not agree.
Engels’ review is thus neither a brilliant treatise on the Marxian method nor an im-
poverishing reading of Marxian criticism of political economy, inevitably paving the
way for its increasing impoverishment. In his review, Engels had to take a stand on
questions that he had not studied himself for a long time, and on which he knew very
little about the state of Marx’s reflections. From the few clues at his disposal, he tried
– in a very short period of time – to do the best he could. Thanks to our much more
complete knowledge of Marx’s texts and the evolution of the questions he was asking
himself, such as the gradual disappearance of the question of dialectical and historical
transitions, it is easy for us today to identify the errors and inadequacies of Engels’
review. But to consider it simply as the first expression of a progressive impoverish-
ment, or even falsification, of Marx’s work is to ignore the conditions under which it
was written, as well as the role that Marx’s statements may actually have played in the
errors made by Engels.
Translated from the German by Ivan Jurkovic

Acronyms
HW: Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp
1970
MEGA: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter
MEW: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Berlin: Dietz