Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

An unfinished economic and philosophic manuscript by Marx. Written from April to August of 1844. The manuscripts were the initial result of his political research, which were not published in Marx’s lifetime, and some of its contents have been lost. In 1927, the Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engelsa, published by the Soviet Union, summarized and published in the appendix to Volume 3 the Russian translation of the “Third Manuscript” (i.e. Notebook III), but this part of the manuscript was mistakenly considered preparatory material for The Holy Family. The Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I/3, published in 1932, published the entire manuscript in its original German, and added the title Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

From the collision of theory and reality in the Rheinische Zeitung period to the thorough reflection in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Marx confirmed that state and right are rooted in civil society. Therefore, according to Marx, in order to understand the social reality it was necessary to anatomize civil society with economics. After arriving in Paris, Marx came into contact with a great deal of socialist ideas and experienced the reality of the workers' movement at close quarters, which made him realize even more that the critique of the existing world was by no means just a theoretical question, but a practical one that was closely related to the reality, and that the solution to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism required a proletarian revolution. Meanwhile, the publication of Engels’ Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy also prompted Marx to study political economy. In October 1843, Marx devoted himself to extensive research on political economy with great enthusiasm, and carefully read 19 economic works of 15 classical economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, James Mill and F. Skarbek, and wrote the first manuscripts on the study of political economy.

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 consists of three manuscripts written in three notebooks: Notebook I, 27 pages in total, mainly includes a comparative analysis of the three economic categories of wages, profit from capital and rent in Smith’s theory, reveals the contradiction of Smith’s theory, and discusses in detail the question of estranged labor in capitalist society; Notebook II only retains the next four pages (p. 40–43) of the manuscript all of which has been scattered before, and mainly deals with the question of private property; Notebook III is a loose sheet of disjointed pages, is mainly a treatise about private property and labor, private property and communism, an examination and review of the various communist theories of the time, a critique of the Hegelian philosophy, two fragments on the division of labor and money, and a Preface. In the Manuscripts, starting from the materialistic world outlook and the communist standpoint, Marx made a systematic critical investigation of various historical literature and intellectual views dealing with philosophy, political economy and theory of communism, and put forth new economic, philosophical and communist theoretical views in the analysis of capitalist economic system and bourgeois economics.

First of all, Marx made a profound critique of bourgeois economics. He pointed out that bourgeois economists regard the interests of capitalists as their final basis, strive to beautify capitalism, promote the unity of the working class and capitalists, and strive to maintain the capitalist system forever. In their expositions, bourgeois political economists took fictitious situations as the starting point of their theories, abandoned from specific historical facts, and die not understand the practical connections and laws of operation of the economic movement, thus “political economy throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital, and between capital and land.” On the basis of critique, Marx put forth his task and direction of studying capitalism, that is, starting from the real economic facts, not only to study the capitalist system by saying that whilst the division of labor raises the productive power of labor and increases the wealth and refinement of society, it impoverishes the worker and reduces him to a machine, but also to make a scientific prediction of the development of capitalism on this basis, that is, “this contradiction, driven to the limit, is of necessity the limit, the culmination, and the downfall of the whole private property relationship.”

Further, Marx has critically changed the concept of estrangement in classical German philosophy, put forth the theory of estranged labor, and by combining it with the capitalist social relations, he has preliminarily demonstrated the inevitability of communism. In the Manuscripts, Marx has critically assimilated the thought of estrangement of the classical German philosophy, but instead of starting from abstract thinking, he developed the thought of estranged (alienated) labor from economic relations, especially from capitalist private property. Through the analysis of estranged labor, Marx exposed the irreconcilable antagonism between capital and labor in bourgeois society, clarified the relationship between the existence of private property and estranged labor, and the disastrous consequences of estranged labor for the working class and mankind as a whole. Estranged labor must therefore be eliminated so as to liberate society from the domination of private property, and this can only be accomplished in the political form of the emancipation of the workers. In this regard, Marx emphasized that this required actual communist action, and “history will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process”, thus made his first elucidation of communism.

Finally, in the Manuscripts, Marx also expounded on the great significance of the practice of labor for human civilization and historical progress, and pointed out that the history of the world is nothing but the creation of man through human labor. At the same time, while criticizing Hegel’s idealism, Marx also elucidated the positive results of Hegelian dialectics, and drew on this idea of dialectics, so as to construct three stages of human historical development within the theoretical framework of estranged labor, i.e., the stage in which labor is not estranged, the stage of estranged labor and the stage in which estranged labor is sublated, and put forth a series of profound opinions on natural history, human history and the laws of beauty.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 still bears obvious traces Feuerbachian humanism in its elaboration of some questions has not prevented it from becoming a landmark work in the formation of Marxism. The Manuscripts expounded a series of economic questions from the practice of productive labor, and clarified a series of fundamental principles of historical materialism on the basis of an in-depth critique of bourgeois political economy, Hegel’s philosophy and utopian socialism. The Manuscripts used estranged labor to prove the overcoming of estrangement under communist conditions, and drew the conclusion of the inevitable downfall of capitalism and inevitable victory of communism, and all these show that Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the brilliant starting point of Marxist political economy and “the riddle of history [of human society] solved”.