Brussels Notebooks

Marx’s notebooks on economics during his sojourn in Paris; an important work on the second of the four phases of Marx’s early study of political economy. The full text is included in the Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), IV/3.

Since 1844, Marx began to conduct economic research, and during the Paris period, his research formed the Paris Notebooks and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. On February 3, 1845, Marx, expelled by the Paris authorities, moved to Brussels, Belgium. By this time, he had signed a publishing contract with a German publisher and was ready to publish the two-volume Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie. After arriving in Brussels, he once again devoted himself to the systematic study of economics, and successively made excerpts and comments on the works of dozens of economists such as Boisguilbert and List among others, and formed the Brussels Notebooks.

There are six notebooks in the Brussels Notebooks, including mainly the three-volume earlier excerpts from February 1845 and the four-volume later excerpts from May–July 1845. The main contents of the earlier excerpts include: treatises on poverty in political economics, exposing the poverty of the working class in capitalism, understanding the people’s poverty, discovering the heterogeneity of poverty in each concrete period, and revealing the different attitudes of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat towards poverty. The most theoretically valuable core of the later excerpted notes is on material production and the productive forces, in which the thought made a big step forward compared to Entwurf über Friedrich List (Draft on Friedrich List). The main contents are as follows: First, it criticized Boisguilbert’s viewpoint of “true value” (la juste valeur) and moved towards the labor theory of value. Marx called Boisguilbert’s “true value” which confused the conditions for the realization of value and the factors determining value, “conceptual, scholastic value” and consistently moved towards the labor theory of value on the level of economics. Second, it looked for the inherent tension of history and explored the driving forces of the development of capitalist society from the perspective of economics itself. Marx criticized Boisguilbert and Say’s viewpoint that capitalist production is not necessarily in excess, and pointed out that in capitalist production, workers are deprived of the right to enjoy the fruits of labor, forming an antagonism between labor and production, which was very close to the discovery of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production in capitalist society. Third, it clearly pointed out that the the theory of the emancipation of civil society comes from the civil society itself. Marx criticized Boisguilbert for conceiving the natural process of civil society as the foundation of the supreme order in the world, and pointed out that the root of overproduction in capitalist society root cause of overproduction in capitalist society is precisely that social production is carried out in an inhuman manner under the precondition of the estrangement of private property, and put forth that “civil life has to be emancipated”, and believed that only by establishing an ideological basis that transcends the civil society can one correctly grasp the inner contradictions of civil society, and has answered the question whether “labor” can lead to the emancipation of civil society. Fourth, it formed the concept of “practice” in the philosophical discourse system to express the achievements of economic research. Marx transcended Boisguilbert and List’s two theoretical methods and injected dialectics into the concept of “practice”, making it have a rich connotation embodying the fundamental character of materialist dialectics, thus distinguished himself from the Feuerbachians and the classical bourgeois economists. Fifth, it put forth the concept of “productive forces”, thereby replaced “estrangement” as the key concept for explaining history and reality. The substitution of the concept of “estrangement” by the concept of “productive forces” in Marx’s study of political economy provided the theoretical resources and empirical materials for a radical change in the concept of productive forces and the construction of the materialist conception of history in The German Ideology.

Brussels Notebooks is an important achievement of Marx’s economic research before and after the Revolutions of 1848. Through the research of this period, Marx understood and assimilated some important economic theories at that time, promoted the communication and integration of economics and philosophy, and became the real perfecter of the philosophical revolution in the field of vision of economics. The in-depth study and explication of a series of viewpoints represented by practice directly promoted his creation of a scientific world outlook and the theory of scientific socialism.