Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Why did unpublished manuscripts become so important?

These manuscripts are not a book written for others but a set of notes in which Marx worked out his ideas for himself. Three notebooks survive, none of them complete; of the second only four pages remain. Marx did not publish them, and neither Engels nor anyone else knew their content. According to the German Wikipedia, David Riazanov and Siegfried Landshut found them in the archive of the Social Democratic Party in the late 1920s under the title "Political Economy and Philosophy", and in 1932 they were first published in two separate editions: volume I/3 of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), issued in Berlin by the Moscow institute, and the Early Writings edited by Landshut and J. P. Mayer for the Kröner firm in Leipzig.

The timing decided their fate. Half a century after Marx's death, when Marxism had hardened into the state doctrine of the Soviet Union and the programme of social-democratic parties, a young Marx talking about "alienation" and "human essence" suddenly appeared. The English Wikipedia records that György Lukács, who worked on deciphering the manuscripts, later said the experience changed his understanding of Marxism permanently, and that Herbert Marcuse held they put "the entire theory of 'scientific socialism' on a new footing". But the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933 and the beginning of the purges in the Soviet Union in 1934 sharply curbed their first reception.

How are the manuscripts organised?

After moving to Paris in autumn 1843 Marx met French workers' secret societies and German émigré artisans for the first time and began to read English and French political economy in earnest. The editorial note of the Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the SED describes the manuscripts as the result of Marx's first serious study of Smith, Ricardo and the other classical political economists and of his first encounter with the communist workers' movement in Paris.

The first notebook begins with pages ruled into three columns headed "Wages", "Profit of Capital" and "Rent of Land", in which Marx copied and commented on the economists. From page XXII he wrote straight across the columns; these six pages are the passage the editors titled "Alienated Labour". Of the second notebook only "The Relationship of Private Property" survives. The third notebook consists of "Private Property and Labour", "Private Property and Communism", "Need, Production and Division of Labour", "Money" and "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole", together with a preface written in the same notebook.

What does the theory of alienated labour say?

Marx starts from the premises of political economy. "We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws." By that science's own words the worker sinks to a commodity, and the most wretched commodity. "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. … The devaluation of the human world grows in direct proportion to the increase in value of the world of things."

Mit der Verwertung der Sachenwelt nimmt die Entwertung der Menschenwelt in direktem Verhältnis zu.

Marx analyses this fact as a fourfold alienation: from the product of labour, from the activity of labour itself, from man's species-essence, and from other human beings. "The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself." And he sets it beside religion: "The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself." The four forms and the history of the concept are treated in detail in the entry on alienation, so here it is enough to note that these manuscripts are the classic of the theory. What matters for this entry on the work is the conclusion: Marx turns around the appearance that private property causes alienated labour and argues that it is rather its result. Alienation is not a state of mind but a fact arising from relations of production.

What does communism look like in the manuscripts?

"Private Property and Communism" in the third notebook examines communism in several stages. After criticising "crude communism", which merely generalises private property by giving everyone an equal share and is nothing but envy demanding levelling, Marx writes: "Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-alienation, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man. … This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism. … It is the solved riddle of history, and it knows itself to be this solution."

Er ist das aufgelöste Rätsel der Geschichte und weiß sich als diese Lösung.

"Solved riddle" is the phrase the Kreuznach manuscript had applied to democracy the year before; now communism takes its place. In the same notebook Marx calls the history of industry "the open book of man's essential powers" and analyses money as the power that turns every human quality into its opposite.

Where do Hegel and Feuerbach stand in the manuscripts?

In the preface Marx states that the criticism rests on Feuerbach's discoveries. "Positive humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins with Feuerbach." His writings are "the only writings since Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic that contain a real theoretical revolution". Key concepts such as species-being (Gattungswesen) come from Feuerbach.

The final section, "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole", judges Hegel two ways. The greatness of the Phenomenology lies in seeing man's self-creation as a process and grasping "the essence of labour", but Hegel "stands on the standpoint of modern political economy", sees only the positive side of labour, and knows only "abstract mental labour". Because it ties Hegel's dialectic and the critique of political economy together in this way, the German Wikipedia describes the manuscripts as the first work in which Marx joined the critique of political economy and his materialist philosophy into a system of his own. Much of the material went into The Holy Family a few months later.

What was the young Marx controversy?

Interpretations divided as soon as the manuscripts appeared. As the English Wikipedia summarises it, the Soviet Union largely ignored them as "early writings" expressing a line of thought that had led Marx nowhere. In Western Europe, by contrast, Henri Lefebvre made the first translation, into French, in 1933, the existentialist Marxism of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre drew heavily on them, and the American New Left of the 1960s took up the English edition introduced by Erich Fromm (1961) with enthusiasm. Because the language of alienation does not appear prominently in Capital, the manuscripts became the centre of the debate over whether the young Marx and the mature Marx were the same thinker.

At one end stood readings for which the humanist young Marx of the manuscripts was the real Marx. At the other stood Louis Althusser, who argued for a "break" in Marx's thought around 1845, dividing an "ideological" period before it from a "scientific" period after. Many scholars take a position in between, reading the commodity fetishism and reification of Capital as the 1844 theory of alienation reappearing within economic analysis. Whichever side one takes, the manuscripts document the very moment at which the philosophy of Hegel and Feuerbach passes over into the critique of political economy.