PARIS 93Marx had been reading economics in a desultory manner since the
autumn of 1843 and by the spring of 1844 he had read and excerpted all
the main economists from Boisguillebert and Quesnay in the late seven-
teenth century to James Mill and Say. He also mentioned his debt to
unspecified French and English socialists and, among his fellow country-
men, to Weitling, Hess and Engels. Marx had been much impressed by
Engels' essay in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbiicher entitled 'Outlines of
a Critique of Political Economy' and excerpts from it headed Marx's Paris
notebooks. Central to the article was an indictment of private property
and of the spirit of competition that it engendered. The recurrent crises
were the result of anarchy in production; the growth and accumulation
of capital involving a lowering of salaries and accentuated the class
struggle. Science and technology, which could afford immense possibilities
under communism, only served, in a capitalist society, to increase the
oppression of the workers.
Marx later called Engels' article a 'brilliant sketch'^119 and quoted from
it several times in Capital. His reading it marked the real beginning of
his lifelong interest in economic questions. Engels (like Hess) would have
described himself as a disciple of Feuerbach; and certainly in all of Marx's
Paris notes Feuerbach's humanism is quite central. Positive criticism, and
thus also German positive criticism of political economy, was founded,
Marx claimed, on Feuerbach's discoveries in his 'Thesen' and Grundsatze.
'The first positive humanist and naturalist criticism dates from Feuer-
bach. The less bombastic they are, the more sure, deep, comprehensive
and lasting is the effect of Feuerbach's works, the only ones since Hegel's
Phenomenology and Logic to embody a real theoretical revolution.'^120
Marx's first manuscript was mainly economic and started with extracts
or paraphrases from the books on economics that he was reading at that
time.^121 He divided these extracts into three sections on wages, capital
and rent, each occupying one of the three vertical columns into which
Marx had divided his pages. In the first, drawing on Adam Smith, Marx
noted that the bitter struggle between capitalist and worker which deter-
mined wages also reduced the worker to the status of a commodity. The
worker could not win: if the wealth of society was diminishing, it was he
who suffered most; if it was increasing, then this meant that capital was
being accumulated and the product of labour was increasingly alienated
from the worker.
Political economy, said Marx, dealt with man much the same terms as
it dealt with, say, a house. It did not deal with man 'in his free time, as a
human being'; this aspect it left to other disciplines. And he continued:
Let us now rise above the level of political economy and seek from the