The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (), also known as the Paris Manuscripts () or as the 1844 Manuscripts, are a series of unfinished notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. They were compiled and published posthumously in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. They were first published in their original German in Berlin, and there followed a republication in the Soviet Union in 1933, also in German.
The Manuscripts provide a critique of classical political economy grounded in the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. The work is best known for its articulation of Marx's argument that the conditions of modern industrial societies result in the estrangement (or alienation) of wage-workers from their own products, from their own work, and in turn from themselves and from each other. Marx argues that workers are forced by the capitalist productive process to work solely to satisfy their basic needs. As such, they merely exist as commodities in a constant state of drudgery, evaluated solely by their monetary value, with capital assuming the status of a good in and of itself.
The publication of the Manuscripts greatly altered the reception of Marx by situating his work within a theoretical framework that had until then been unavailable to his followers. While the text's importance was often downplayed by orthodox Marxists as being "philosophical" or "anthropological" rather than "scientific", the notebooks provide insight into Marx's thought at the time of its first formulation.
Context The Manuscripts were composed during the summer of 1844, when Marx was 25 or 26 years old. Marx was at this time resident in Paris, then seen as the center of socialist thought. Several members of the philosophical milieu that he then belonged to, the Young Hegelians, had moved to Paris in the previous year to establish a journal, the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. Marx himself had taken up residence in 38 Rue Vaneau, in the Left Bank of the city, in October 1843. In Paris, he came into contact with German revolutionary artisans and secret meetings of French proletarian societies. It was in this period that Marx made the acquaintance of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre Leroux and most importantly, Friedrich Engels.
The Manuscripts evolved from a proposal Marx had made in the Jahrbücher to write separate pamphlets critiquing the various topics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of law — law, morals, politics, etc. — ending with a general treatise that would show their interrelations. The notebooks are a fragmentary, incomplete work, consisting of four manuscripts that range from extracts from books with comments, loosely connected notes and reflections on various topics, to a comprehensive assessment of Hegel's philosophy.
The text marks the first appearance together of what Engels described as the three constituent elements in Marx's thought: German idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English economics. In addition to Hegel, Marx addresses the work of various socialist writers, and that of the fathers of political economy: Francois Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Jean-Baptiste Say, and James Mill. Die Bewegung der Produktion by Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz is also a key source. Ludwig Feuerbach's humanism is an influence that underlies all of Marx's notes.
Because the 1844 Manuscripts show Marx's thought at the time of its early genesis, their publication in the twentieth century profoundly affected analysis of Marx and Marxism. At the time of their first publication, their most striking feature was their dissimilarity to the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was official within the Soviet Union and the European Communist Parties. The Manuscripts offer a trenchant analysis of Hegel that is far more difficult and complex than the "dialectics of nature" that Georgi Plekhanov and his disciple Lenin had derived from Engels's Anti-Dühring.
Terminology István Mészáros notes that the language and terminology of the Manuscripts are one of the work's main difficulties. He mentions that a key term "Aufhebung" can be translated from German to English simultaneously as "transcendence", "suppression", "preserving" and "overcoming". Christopher J. Arthur comments that the term, which appears in Hegel's Science of Logic, has in ordinary language the double meaning of "to abolish" and "to preserve". Arthur translates the word as "supersede" when the stress is more on abolition, and as "sublate" when the emphasis is more on preservation. Gregory Benton translates the word as "transcendence" and "supersession", and notes that Marx's concept of "critique" is an instance of this double movement.
A second terminological difficulty is the translation of the German words "Entäusserung" and "Entfremdung". While both words can be translated to English as "alienation", Entfremdung is often translated as "estrangement" and Entäusserung as "alienation", to draw a distinction between the two concepts. Christopher J. Arthur notes that Entäusserung is an unusual German word that can also be translated as "renunciation", "parting with", "relinquishment", "externalization", "divestiture" or "surrender". Arthur believes "externalization" is the closest of these translations, but he avoids using this word as it may be confused with a distinct term that Marx uses elsewhere: "Vergegenständlichung" or "objectification". Arthur claims "Entfremdung" is a narrower concept than "Entäusserung" in that it applies only to cases of interpersonal estrangement. He takes estrangement to be a state and alienation to be a process.
The dialectical structure of Marx's theory is another difficulty of the text, as the definition of certain key concepts can be hard to understand for those trained in positivist and empiricist philosophical traditions. What is more, the meaning of certain terms borrowed from Marx's contemporaries such as Feuerbach is often changed by Marx's appropriation of them.
Themes
In the Manuscripts, Marx relates economic categories to a philosophical interpretation of man's position in nature. Marx's notebooks provide a general philosophical analysis of the basic concepts of political economy: capital, rent, labor, property, money, commodities, needs, and wages. Their key concept appears when Marx uses philosophical terminology to advance a critique of capitalist society based in "alienation". Marx's theory is adapted (not without changes) from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841). Alienation is not merely a descriptive concept, it is a call for de-alienation through radical change of the world.
Alienated labor The first part of Marx's first manuscript mainly consists of excerpts or paraphrases from the economic texts he was reading at the time. These excerpts are divided into three sections: wages, capital, and rent, each occupying one of the three vertical columns on Marx’s pages. In the first section, Marx, drawing on Adam Smith, discusses the bitter struggle between capitalists and workers over wages. This struggle reduces the worker to the status of a commodity. Whether society’s wealth is growing or shrinking, the worker suffers. In a declining economy, workers experience increasing misery; in a growing economy, their misery is more complicated, and in a stable economy, they face stagnant suffering. Marx critiques political economy for treating humans like commodities, similar to objects like houses. Political economy does not consider man in his free time or as a fully human being; this is left to other disciplines.
Marx then rises above political economy to ask two key questions based on his reading:
What does it mean for humanity that most people are reduced to abstract labor? What mistakes do reformists make when they aim to raise wages or promote equality in wages, seeing them as the solution to social problems?
To answer these, Marx quotes from three sources. First, German liberal writer Wilhelm Schulz on the pauperization of workers, the dehumanizing effects of machinery, and the growing number of women and children working. Second, Constantin Pecqueur’s thoughts on workers’ dependence and degradation under capitalism. Third, Eugene Buret’s analysis of the misery and exploitation of the proletariat. In the second section, Marx focuses on the "Profit of Capital." He quotes Adam Smith to define capital as the power to command labor and its products. He then explains how capitalists profit from wages and raw materials, the motivations driving capitalists, and the accumulation of capital and competition between capitalists. He draws from Smith, Ricardo, Schulz, and Pecqueur to elaborate these points.
In his third section, Marx discusses rent as a manifestation of the perpetual opposition of interests inherent in capitalist society. He critiques Smith’s view that the interests of landlords and society are always aligned, arguing instead that the more an individual benefits, the less society does. Marx outlines the similarities between landlords and capitalists and concludes that, ultimately, society is divided into two main classes: workers and capitalists. He argues that the character of landed property has radically changed since feudal times, and neither large estates nor small properties can avoid precipitating a crisis.
Marx next addresses the problem of alienated labor. Marx criticizes the classical economists for having an abstract and superficial understanding of labor, arguing that their theories miss the deeper connections between various economic factors. Unlike classical economists, who start with presuppositions and offer general laws, Marx aims to explain the essential connections among private property, competition, division of labor, capital, and land ownership. He criticizes the economists for constructing an abstract, fictitious state of nature, similar to how theology explains the origin of evil through the fall of man, instead of understanding the historical and necessary development of economic factors.
Marx further develops the idea of alienation, arguing that a worker is alienated in four ways:
From the product he produces From the act by which he produces this product From his nature and himself From other human beings
Marx starts with the fact that the more a worker produces, the more impoverished he becomes. Marx explains this by stating that in the process of alienation, the product of labor becomes something external to the worker, a power independent of him. This alienation means that the product of labor is no longer owned by the worker but becomes something that confronts him as hostile or alien. Marx draws a parallel with religion, stating that the more man attributes to God, the less he retains of his own essence. Similarly, in the economy, the more a worker invests in his product, the less control he has over it, as it becomes an alien force. This alienation deprives workers not only of their connection to the products they create but also of the objects they need to live. The relationship between the worker and his product, Marx argues, is the core of understanding labor under capitalism.
The act of production of the object is the second dimension of alienation. It is forced labor and not voluntary. The labor is external to the worker and not part of his nature. The worker's activity belongs to another, causing the loss of his self. The worker is only at ease in his animal functions of eating, drinking and procreating. In his distinctly human functions, he is made to feel like an animal.