Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

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McLellan, David (1980) [1970]. Marx Before Marxism (Seconded.). London: The Macmillan Press Ltd. ISBN 978-0-333-27883-3. Marx apparently refers to Weitling’s works: Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte, 1838, and Garantien der Harmonic und Freiheit, Vivis, 1842. This statement is interpreted differently by researchers. Many of them maintain that Marx here meant crude equalitarian communism, such as that propounded by Babeuf and his followers. While recognising the historic role of that communism, he thought it impossible to ignore its weak points. It seems more justifiable, however, to interpret this passage proceeding from the peculiarity of terms used in the manuscript (see Note 32). Marx here used the term “communism” to mean not the higher phase of classless society (which he at the time denoted as “socialism” or “communism equalling humanism”) but movement (in various forms, including primitive forms of equalitarian communism at the early stage) directed at its achievement, a revolutionary transformation process of transition to it. Marx emphasised that this process should not be considered as an end in itself, but that it is a necessary, though a transitional, stage in attaining the future social system, which will be characterised by new features distinct from those proper to this stage. First Published: 1932 (the manuscripts had been thereto lost) in German, by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; Following this discussion of human nature, Marx comments on the last chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology. Marx criticizes Hegel for equating alienation with objectivity, and for claiming that consciousness has transcended alienation. According to Marx, Hegel holds that consciousness knows that its objects are its own self-alienation—that there is no distinction between the object of consciousness and consciousness itself. Alienation is transcended when man feels at one with the spiritual world in its alienated form, believing it to be a feature of his authentic existence. [72] Marx differs fundamentally from Hegel on the meaning of "transcendence" ( Aufhebung). While private property, morality, the family, civil society, the state, etc. have been "transcended" in thought, they remain in existence. [73] Hegel has arrived at genuine insight into the process of alienation and its transcendence: atheism transcends God to produce theoretical humanism and communism transcends private property to produce practical humanism. [74] However, in Marx's view, these attempts to arrive at humanism must themselves be transcended to generate a self-creating, positive humanism. [75] Needs, Production, the Division of Labor and Money [ edit ]

Our own active functions, our life activity, estranged labor estranges the species from us. It changes for us the life of the speciesinto a means of individual life. The expression “common humanity” (in the manuscript in French, “simple humanity”) was borrowed by Marx from the first volume (Chapter VIII) of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which he used in Garnier’s French translation (Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, Paris, 1802, t. I, p. 138). All the subsequent references were given by Marx to this publication, the synopsis of which is contained in his Paris Notebooks with excerpts on political economy. This edition is reproduced on the MIA and Marx’s citations are linked to the text.Marcuse, Herbert. [1932] 1972. " The Foundation of Historical Materialism." In Studies in Critical Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press.

In creating a world of objects by our personal activity, we prove ourselves a conscious species-being. Admittedly animals also produce. They build themselves nests, dwellings, like the bees, beavers, ants, etc. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, whilst we produce universally. An animal’s product belongs immediately to its physical body, while this is not true for us. The position of those who try to deny that there is any difference between the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and Capital, and find the essentials of the theses of Capital already present in the Manuscripts. Hegel believes that reality is Spirit realizing itself, and that alienation consists in men's failure to understand that their environment and their culture are emanations of Spirit. Spirit's existence is constituted only in and through its own productive activity. In the process of realizing itself, Spirit produces a world that it initially believes is external, but gradually comes to understand is its own production. The aim of history is freedom, and freedom consists in men's becoming fully self-conscious. [68] Unlike the quotations from a number of other French writers such as Constantin Pecqueur and Eugéne Buret, which Marx gives in French in this work, the excerpts from J. B. Say’s book are given in his German translation. In this manuscript Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, “ Entäusserung” and “ Entfremdung,” to express the notion of “alienation.” In the present edition the former is generally translated as “alienation,” the latter as “estrangement,” because in the later economic works ( Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word “alienation” as the English equivalent of the term “ Entäusserung.”Marx explains how capitalism alienates man from his human nature. Man's basic characteristic is his labor, or his commerce with nature. [28]

This emphasis on the social aspects of man's being does not destroy man's individuality: [53] "Man, however much he may therefore be a particular individual—and it is just this particularity which he makes him an individual and a real individual communal being — is just as much the totality, the ideal totality, the subjective experience of thought and experienced society for itself." [55] The Manuscripts were published for the first time in Moscow in 1932, as part of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe edition. [81] They were edited by David Ryazanov under whom György Lukács worked in deciphering them. Lukács would later claim that this experience transformed his interpretation of Marxism permanently. [82] On publication, their importance was recognized by Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre: Marcuse claimed that the Manuscripts demonstrated the philosophical foundations of Marxism, putting "the entire theory of 'scientific socialism' on a new footing"; [83] Lefebvre, with Norbert Guterman, was the first to translate the Manuscripts into a foreign language, publishing a French edition in 1933. [84] Lefebvre's Dialectical Materialism, written in 1934–5, advanced a reconstruction of Marx's entire body of work in the light of the Manuscripts. [85] As a result, therefore, a human being (the worker) only feels herself freely active in her animal functions – eating, drinking, reproducing, or at most in her dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in her human functions she no longer feels herself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material on which his labor is realized, in which it is active, from which, and by means of which it produces.

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But just as nature provides labor with [the] means of life in the sense that labor cannot live without objects on which to operate, on the other hand, it also provides the means of life in the more restricted sense, i.e., the means for the physical subsistence of the worker himself. This refers to Georg Ludwig Wilhelm Funke, Die aus der unbeschrdnklen Theilbarkeit des Grundeigenthums hervorgehenden Nachtheile, Hamburg und Gotha, 1839, p. 56, in which there is a reference to Heinrich Leo, Studien und Skizzen zu einer Vaturlehre des Slaates, Halle, 1833, p. 102.