Paris Notebooks

Notebooks formed during Marx’s first study of political economy during his sojourn in Paris. Written between October 1843 and January 1845. The original text was first published in the international edition of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels, I/3, published in Berlin in 1932. It is now included in the Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), IV/2.

In April 1843, after the Rheinische Zeitung was seized by the reactionary authorities, Marx left Germany in October of that year and moved to Paris, the center of the world socialist movement at that time, and actively threw himself into the struggle of various movements, and came into direct contact with the proletarian movement and gained a deep understanding of it, which confirmed even more the necessity of carrying out the study of political economy, which he had already perceived before. As a result, Marx devoted himself to intensive theoretical research work, and in more than a year, he read more than 20 works of more than a dozen famous English and French economists, including A. Smith, D. Ricardo, J. Mill, J.R. MacCulloch, and excerpted them to form the Paris Notebooks.

There are seven notebooks retained in the Paris Notebooks, and among them, there are not only excerpts of the works, but also a lot of commentaries and expositions of Marx’s own thoughts, represented in particular by the Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy (which is also known as the Mill Notes or Comments on James Mill). In the Paris Notebooks, Marx began to shift from philosophical critique to the critique of political economy, from the search for social change by the Young Hegelians through the philosophy of right and the field of ideology, to the study of the grievances of social relations and their historical causes in the real concern for “civil society”. He criticized private property and bourgeois political economy from the viewpoints of materialism and communism, exposed the class essence of bourgeois political economy which was in defense of private property from beginning to end, and expounded that private property was the real reason why workers fell into misery. Meanwhile, Marx also used the concept of estrangement in philosophy to study the essence of money, pointing out that the essence of money “is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man.” In his view, it is the development of private property and exchange that has stripped the laborer’s labor of its original significance of creative activity and make it a kind of “gainful labor” (“Erwerbsarbeit”) and “estranged labor”. These ideas of Marx laid the foundation for the later theory of estranged labor.

Paris Notebooks is an important work in the history of Marxist development, and marks the beginning of Marx’s study of political economy, thus opening a new chapter of theoretical research, made direct preparations for the writing of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and became one of the basic works of his later creation of the Capital.