Manchester Notebooks

Nine notebooks formed in Marx’s study of economics in Britain. Written in 1845, the full text is included in the Marx-Engels Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe (MEGA2), IV/4 and IV/5.

From July to August 1845, Marx and Engels first visited Britain together. During this period, Marx collected and collated some new economic data in Manchester, studied the economic treatises of bourgeois political economists such as Petty, Tooke and Cooper, and the works of British utopian socialists, especially Owen-type economists, and these excerpts formed the Manchester Notebooks.

There are nine notebooks in the Manchester Notebooks, which are very rich in content, and the main contents and viewpoints are as follows: First, recognizing that the immediate driving force for changes in the theoretical viewpoints of economics were changes in socio-economic reality. In the excerpts and studies of the relevant economic treatises of the early stages of British bourgeois political economy before Smith, especially through the analysis of the British mercantilist treatises with the theoretical focus on the question of social wealth and its source, Marx discovered the theoretical changes in economics and realized that they were rooted in the changed socio-economic reality. Second, realizing the scientificity of the historically concrete and actual economic study of the capitalist mode of production. In his excerpts and studies of English economic literature after Ricardo, Marx came to understand three kinds of questions: general theoretical principles of economics, circulation of money and credit, the question of crisis and population. In the course of these excerpts and studies, Marx realized that only a concrete, actual and historical study of the capitalist mode of production is a scientific economic study in accordance with the essence of economics. Third, discovering the inheritance between Thompson and Ricardo’s labor theory of value and the value significance of his theory of productive forces and other viewpoints. In the study of excerpts from English utopian socialists, especially Owen-type economists, Thompson’s theoretical argument for socialism in the perspective of political economy has received much attention from Marx. Thompson once compared labor to the only father of wealth, believing that only labor could bring surplus-value in capitalist production and that most of this surplus-value was taken away by capitalists. Marx recognized that Thompson actually started from the affirmation of Ricardo’s labor theory of value, and also discovered Thompson’s viewpoints on the relationship between knowledge and productive forces as well as the program designs such as carrying out competition among individuals on an equal footing, a mode of production based on mutual assistance and cooperation, etc., all of which became useful intellectual inspirations for Marx in forming his theory of productive forces, founding his materialist conception of history, and probing the path to the emancipation of man.

As an important part of Marx’s research on bourgeois political economy, the Manchester Notebooks played an irreplaceable part in the development of Marx’s thought. Through his studies, Marx realized that bourgeois political economy should be understood from the perspective of capitalist material production itself, which led him to discover that Ricardo’s labor theory of value had the important ideological value of directly leading to the conclusion that socialism negates capitalism “in a unique way”, realized an ideological refinement rising from economic theory to philosophical theory and directly pushed forward the philosophical revolution and the theoretical construction of historical materialism by Marx.