The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the rough draft of Marx’s earliest economic study, his first attempt at a critical examination, based on his dialectical-materialist and communist conclusions, of the economic pillars of bourgeois society and the views of bourgeois economists. The work reflects the process of synthesis of new philosophical, economic and historical-political ideas, of the integral world outlook of the proletariat, in which Marx saw the key to a theoretical substantiation of communism.
Marx wrote the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in Paris in the summer of 1844. By this time he had studied the contemporary Germany, the conditions in other countries, the history and experience of the French Revolution, and had critically re-viewed the preceding philosophical doctrines, first and foremost that of Hegel, the empirical evidence and theoretical conclusions of bourgeois political economy, the views of the Utopian Socialists. This led him to conceive some of the essential principles of the new revolutionary scientific world outlook of the working class. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (which he wrote in the summer of 1843 in Kreuznach) and in articles for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (the sole, double issue of which appeared in February 1844) he had shown that the material living relations rather than legal relations or the form of state constituted the basis for the development of society. This placed the economic sphere of society in the centre of his investigation. Not only a political revolution, but above all a deep-going social revolution was required to liberate humanity from all oppression. Explaining the convictions shaping in his mind, Marx demonstrated that the political revolution changed nothing but the form of the state power, while the deep social revolution affected mainly the social basis. And the prime mover of that revolution, Marx had come to understand, was the proletariat. He expressed-then still in general terms-the idea of the great historical liberative mission of the working class.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 reflected the new step forward made by Marx in the elaboration of his revolutionary teaching. They represent an important stage in the elaboration of the theory of scientific communism.
The Paris manuscripts embrace various fields of social science. In all these fields Marx used and developed materialist dialectics as a penetrative instrument of knowledge. He achieved a new stage of comprehension of the structure and development of society. Here for the first time he emphasised the decisive role of production in the social process and pointed out that private property and the division of labour are the material basis of society’s division into classes. Analysing the economic structure of bourgeois society, he stressed that the class contradictions of capitalism would inevitably grow deeper as wealth became concentrated in the hands of capitalist owners. Extremely penetrating are Marx’s thoughts on the influence that man’s productive labour and his social relations exercise on science and culture. He noted in particular the process not only of social enslavement, but also of spiritual impoverishment of the working man resulting from the domination of private property.
In these manuscripts Marx put forward materialist criteria for assessing the development of economic thought, a development which, he explained, is a reflection in the ideological sphere of the evolution of actual economic relations. The development of science, according to Marx, repeats the development of society itself. He considered the teaching of the leading bourgeois economists-Adam Smith, Ricardo and others-as the highest achievement of political economy. But although he had not yet undertaken an analysis of the labour theory of value, he noted the limitations of their views-their failure to understand the true internal connections and dynamics of the economic phenomena described, and their metaphysical approach to them. In their striving artificially to perpetuate the basis of capitalism and the relationships of inhuman exploitation, Marx discerned the anti-humanist tendencies of the bourgeois economists.
In the manuscripts of 1844, as in his other works of this period, Marx used the traditional terminology, partly of Feuerbach and partly of Hegel. Thus, in accordance with Feuerbach’s usage Marx wrote that “communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism”. In fact, however, Marx gave these terms an essentially new content, and put forward views which were in many respects opposed to Feuerbach’s abstract humanism and supra-class anti-historical anthropologism. His manuscripts are pervaded with a sense of history and an understanding of the significance of revolutionary practice, and are distinguished by their class approach to the social phenomena under consideration. As regards Hegel, it can be seen from the manuscripts of 1844 that Marx had achieved a quite mature understanding of the relationship between the rational and conservative aspects of his teaching. He showed the fallacy of Hegel’s attempts to treat nature as another mode of existence of the mystical Absolute Idea. At the same time, he stressed the positive aspects of the Hegelian dialectic and in particular the significance of Hegel’s conception-although it was expressed in an idealistic form-of the development and resolution of contradictions.
One of the central problems in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the problem of estrangement or alienation. Hegel had made extensive use of this concept. With him, however, it is not real living people but the Absolute Idea that undergoes alienation. Feuerbach operates with a similar concept in his theory of the origin of religion, reducing it to the alienation of the universal (generic) qualities of abstract man, which are imputed to an illusory divinity.
Marx used the concept of alienation for purposes of a profound analysis of social relations. For him alienation was characteristic of those social relations under which the conditions of people’s life and activity, that activity itself, and the relations between people, appear as a force which is alien and hostile to people. So in Marx’s interpretation alienation is by no means a supra-historical phenomenon. Marx was the first to link alienation with private property and the social system it engenders. He saw that alienation could be overcome only by the abolition of private property and all its consequences.
Marx’s views on alienation appeared in a concentrated form in his treatment of “estranged labour”. ‘ The concept of “estranged labour” summed up the enslaved condition of the worker in capitalist society, his being tied down to a definite job, his physical and moral degradation as a result of labour which is forced on him, “the loss of his self”.
Labour embodied in an object of labour which has become materialised, Marx stressed, is objectification of labour. And inevitably in a society dominated by private property, objectification of labour denies the worker the joys of life, makes him the bondman of the object of his labour. The product of his labour becomes an alien product. Objectification of labour becomes alienation of labour, and objectified labour becomes alienated labour. The labour process loses its creative substance, and is not attractive to the worker. The worker has no stimuli to produce by the laws of beauty and the universal needs. He does not freely develop his body and his mental energy; he suppresses them, mortifies his body and ruins his mind. He is reduced to the state of an animal with an animal’s primitive needs, while losing features implicit in the human species. He belongs not to himself, but to the owner of capital. He forges his own chains.
Set forth in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the concept of “estranged labour” constituted the initial expression of the future Marxist theory of the appropriation of the labour of others by capital, a preliminary approach to the important ideas developed later, especially in Capital.
The wide application of the concept of alienation was distinctive of the initial stage in the shaping of Marx’s economic teaching. In his subsequent works this concept was superseded to a considerable degree by other, more concrete determinations revealing more completely and more clearly the substance of the economic relations of capitalism, the exploitation of wage-labour. However, as a philosophically generalised expression of the exploiting, inhuman character of the social system based on private property, and of the destitution of the working masses in that society, it continues to be used in Marx’s later works.
The theoretical generalisations contained in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the first attempt at a scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production, at determining its antagonistic intrinsic contradictions, at examining the law of its movement which is leading capitalism to inevitable doom, to its replacement with a higher and more sensible social structure. Yet Marx makes clear his conclusion that the system of private property can be overthrown only as a result of the revolutionary struggle of the broad masses. “In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property”.
As Marx saw it, the future social system represents the antipode of the existing society of exploitation. At that stage of social development man will have become capable of freeing himself from social antagonisms and all forms of alienation. Marx criticised the various primitive theories of egalitarian communism with their tendencies towards asceticism, social levelling, and a return to the 11 unnatural simplicity of the Poor and crude man who has few needs”. The future society must give scope for the all-round satisfaction of man’s requirements and the full flowering of the human personality.
Marx makes some highly penetrating observations about the communist reconstruction of agriculture through the conversion of land from private into public property and the introduction of collective forms of labour. Showing the advantages this holds for the farmers, he wrote: “Association, applied to land, shares the economic advantage of large-scale landed property.... In the same way association also re-establishes, now on a rational basis, no longer mediated by serfdom, overlordship and the silly mysticism of property, the intimate ties of man with the earth, since the earth ceases to be an object of huckstering, and through free labour and free enjoyment becomes once more a true personal property of man”.
The ideas set forth in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 were projected in Marx’s and Engels’ later works, notably their joint works, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism, The German Ideology and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which consummated the elaboration of the theoretical bases of the scientific proletarian world outlook. Marx’s first economic work, the 1844 manuscripts were in many respects the point of departure for the Marxist political economy, crowned by the Capital.
The supplement to this volume contains Engels’ article, “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, written at the end of 1843 and early in 1844. Marx thought very highly of this article. So much so that he mentioned it specially in the Preface to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Later, too, he referred to the article, which had unquestionably influenced his own scientific interests, as a work of genius. It is remarkable for its profound revolutionary dedication, its materialist approach to economic phenomena and theories, and its clear understanding of the failure of the metaphysical method used by bourgeois economists. It was the first experiment in applying the materialist world outlook and materialist dialectics to the analysis of economic categories.
The work is devoted mainly to a critical examination of private property, the economic basis of the capitalist system. Engels proved that the main cause of the social antagonisms in the bourgeois world, and of the future social revolution, was the development of the contradictions inherent in and engendered by private property. He investigated the dialectical interconnections between competition and monopoly resulting from the nature of private property, and the profound contradiction between labour and capital.
Though criticising bourgeois economists, Engels made no distinction at that time between the representatives of the classical school, Smith and Ricardo, and vulgar economists of the type of Say, McCulloch, and others. He had not yet accepted Smith’s and Ricardo’s labour theory of value and was unable properly to assess its place in the development of economic teachings. But he did put forward the profound thesis of the correspondence between the development of political economy and the achieved level of economic relations. He strongly protested against the unscientific and man-hating population theory of Malthus and proved that poverty and destitution are in no way to be accounted for by the allegedly limited possibilities of production and of applied science. On the contrary, Engels stressed that “the productive power at mankind’s disposal is immeasurable”. Social calamities, he concluded, are engendered by the existing economic system, which must be subjected to a revolutionary communist reconstruction.