HKB
class, is quite timely, but its slight value as furnishing proof for a given period is shown by the fact that one finds an abundance of it in every epoch.
Political economy, as the science of the conditions and forms under which various human societies have produced and exchanged and according to which they have distributed the products of their labor,--political economy, in this broad sense, has yet to be planned for the first time. All that we have so far of political economic science is almost entirely limited to the beginning and development of the capitalistic mode of production. It begins with the genesis and growth of the capitalistic mode of production, and exchange, recognises the necessity of the disappearance of these by means of the capitalistic forms, then develops the laws of the capitalistic methods of production and their corresponding forms of exchange on the positive side, that is on the side on which they further the objects of society, as a whole and closes with the socialist criticism of the capitalistic methods of production, that is, with the exhibition of its laws on the negative side, with the proof that this method of production arrives at the point, by its own development, where it is no longer possible. This criticism proves that the capitalistic methods of production and exchange constitute more and more an insufferable fetter upon production itself. The mode of distribution which is necessarily associated with this form of production has brought about a class condition which grows daily more unbearable. It has produced the daily sharpening antagonism between the continually less numerous but constantly richer capitalists and the more numerous, but on the whole, continually poorer propertyless wage-workers. Finally the tremendous productive forces of the capitalistic methods of production, which are practically unlimited, are only awaiting their seizure at the hands of an organized co-operative society to secure for all the members of that society the means of existence and the fuller development of their faculties in an ever increasing degree.
In order to fully accomplish this criticism of the bourgeois economy acquaintance with the capitalistic form of production of exchange and of distribution was not enough. Preceding forms and others, existing side by side with the capitalistic mode in a few highly developed countries, had to be examined and compared at least in their chief features. Such an investigation and comparision has been undertaken as a whole by Marx alone and we consider that this investigation practically sums up all that has been established respecting theoretical economy prior to that of the bourgeois.
While political economy in a narrow sense arose in the minds of a few geniuses of the seventeenth century, it is, in its positive formulation by the physiocrats and Adam Smith, substantially a child of the eighteenth century, and expresses itself in the acquisitions of the great contemporary French philosophers with all the excellencies and defects of that time. What we have said of the French philosophers applies also to the economists of that day. The new science was with them not the expression of the condition and needs of the time but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange discovered by them were not the laws of a given historical form of those facts but were eternal natural laws; they derived them from the nature of man. But this man, seen clearly, was a burgher of the Middle Ages on the high road to becoming a modern bourgeois, and his nature consisted in this that he had to manufacture commodities and carry on his trade according to the given historical conditions of that period.
(Herr Duehring having applied the two man theory to political economic conditions and having decided that such conditions are unjust, upon which conclusion he bases his revolutionary attitude, Engels remarks as follows):