Paris is a ‘monstrous miracle, an astounding assemblage of movements, machines and ideas, the city of a thousand different romances, the world’s thinking-box’.1 This is how Honoré de Balzac [1799–1850] described in one of his tales the effect of the metropolis on those who did not know it thoroughly.
During the years before the 1848 revolution, the city was inhabited by artisans and workers in constant political agitation. From its colonies of exiles, revolutionaries, writers and artists, and the general social ferment, it had acquired an intensity found in few other epochs. Women and men with the most varied intellectual gifts were publishing books, journals and newspapers, writing poetry, speaking at meetings, and discussing endlessly in cafés, in the street, and on public benches. Their close proximity meant that they exercised a continual influence on one another.2
Mikhail Bakunin [1814–1876], having decided to cross the Rhine, suddenly found himself ‘amid those new elements which have not yet been born in Germany [… ] [in a climate where] political ideas circulate among all strata of society’.3 Lorenz von Stein [1815–1890] wrote that ‘life in the populace itself was beginning to create new associations and to conceive of new revolutions’.4 Arnold Ruge [1802–1880] was of the view that ‘in Paris we shall live our victories and our defeats’.5 In short, it was the place to be at that particular moment in history.
For Balzac ‘the streets of Paris have human qualities and such a physiognomy as leaves us with impressions against which we can put up no resistance’.6 Many of these impressions also struck Karl Marx, who at the age of twenty-five had moved there in October 1843; they profoundly marked his intellectual evolution, which matured decisively during his time in Paris.7
Following the journalistic experience on the Rheinische Zeitung [Rhenish Newspaper], Marx’s abandonment of the conceptual horizon of the Hegelian rational state, and an associated democratic radicalism, meant that he had arrived in the French capital with a certain theoretical openness.8 But this was now shaken by the tangible vision of the proletariat. The uncertainty generated by the problematic atmosphere of the times, which saw the rapid consolidation of a new social-economic reality, was dissipated once he made contact, both theoretically and experientially, with the Parisian working class and its living and working conditions.
The discovery of the proletariat and, through it, of revolution; the new commitment to communism, still unclearly defined and semi-utopian; the critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s speculative philosophy and the Hegelian Left; the first outline of the materialist conception of history and the beginnings of his critique of political economy: these were the set of fundamental themes that Marx would develop during this period.
Political economy was not Marx’s first intellectual passion. It was only just emerging as a discipline in Germany during his youth, and he encountered it only after various other subjects. When he had been working with the Rheinische Zeitung, Marx had already grappled with particular economic questions, albeit only from a legal or political viewpoint.9 However, the censorship struck at the paper and caused him to end the experience, ‘to withdraw from the public stage to my study’.10 So he continued his studies of the state and legal relations, in which Hegel was a leading authority, and in 1843 wrote the manuscript that was posthumously published as A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Having developed the conviction that civil society was the real foundation of the political state, he formulated, for the first time, the importance of the economic factor in social relations.
But it was only in Paris that Marx made a start on a ‘conscientious critical study of political economy’,11 having received a crucial impetus from contradictions in law and politics that could not be solved within their own sphere and from the inability of either to furnish solutions to social problems. Engels’s ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’ – one of his two articles to appear in the first and only volume of the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher [Franco-German Yearbooks] – also made a decisive impact on Marx at this time. From that point his studies, hitherto mainly philosophical, political and historical, turned to the new discipline that would become the fulcrum of his scientific concerns and mark out a new horizon he would never abandon.12
Under the influence of Moses Hess’s Essence of Money (1845) and his transposition of the concept of alienation from a speculative to a social-economic plane, Marx first concentrated on a critique of the economic mediation of money as an obstacle to the realization of the human essence. In a polemic against Bruno Bauer’s On the Jewish Question (1843), he considered the Jewish question to be a social problem that represented the philosophical and social-historical presupposition of capitalist civilization as a whole:
Selling is the practical aspect of alienation. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity – money – on them. […] Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realised and secularised, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. […] Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism-huckstering and its preconditions the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanised, and because the conflict between man’s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.13
The Jew was the metaphor and the historical vanguard for the relations it produced, a worldly figure that became synonymous with capitalism tout court.14
Immediately afterwards, Marx began massive reading in a new field of study, and wrote, both in his manuscripts and notebooks of excerpts, many critical comments that he compiled, as usual, from the reading material. The guiding thread of his work was the need to unveil and oppose the greatest mystification of political economy: the idea that its categories were valid at all times and in all places. Marx was deeply affected by this blindness and lack of historical sense on the part of the economists, who thereby tried to conceal and justify the inhumanity of the economic conditions of their time by presenting them as a fact of nature. In a comment on a text by Jean-Baptiste Say [1767–1832], he noted that ‘private property is a fact whose constitution does not concern political economy yet which is its foundation. […] The whole of political economy is therefore based on a fact devoid of necessity’.15 Similar observations recur in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 where Marx emphasizes that ‘political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us’. ‘The economist assumes in the form of a fact, of an event, what he is supposed to deduce’.16
Political economy, then, takes the regime of private property, the associated mode of production and the corresponding economic categories as immutable for all eternity. The man of bourgeois society appears as if he were natural man. In short, ‘when one speaks of private property, one thinks of dealing with something external to man’.17 Marx’s rejection of this ontological switch could not have been clearer.
His deep and wide study of history had given him a first key to read the temporal evolution of social structures, and he had also taken over what he regarded as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s [1809–1865] best insights, including his critique of the idea of private property as a natural right.18 With these supports, Marx was able to grasp of the provisional character of history. The bourgeois economists presented laws of the capitalist mode of production as eternal laws of human society. Marx, by contrast, made his exclusive and distinctive object of study the specific relations of his time, ‘the ruptured world of industry’;19 he underlined its transitoriness as one stage produced by history, and set out to investigate the contradictions that capitalism generates, which are leading to its supersession.
This different way of understanding social relations had important consequences, chief of which were undoubtedly those concerning the concept of alienated labour (entfremdete Arbeit).20 Unlike the economists, or Hegel himself, for whom it was a natural and immutable condition of society, Marx set out on the path that would lead him to reject the anthropological dimension of alienation in favour of a conception that rooted it historically in a certain structure of production and social relations: man’s estrangement amid the conditions of industrial labour.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, alienation is presented as the phenomenon through which the labour product confronts labour ‘as something alien, as a power independent of the producer’. For Marx,
The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.21
Alongside this general definition, Marx listed four ways in which the worker is alienated in bourgeois society: (1) from the product of his labour, which becomes ‘an alien object that has power over him’; (2) in his working activity, which he perceives as directed against himself, as something that ‘does not belong to him’;22 (3) from ‘man’s species-being’, which is transformed into ‘a being alien to him’; and (4) from other human beings, and in relation to their labour and the object of their labour.23
For Marx, in contrast to Hegel, alienation was not coterminous with objectification as such, but rather with a particular phenomenon within a precise form of economy: that is, wage labour and the transformation of labour products into objects standing opposed to producers. The political difference between these two positions is enormous. Whereas Hegel presented alienation as an ontological manifestation of labour, Marx conceived it as characteristic of a particular, capitalist, epoch of production, and thought it would be possible to overcome it through ‘the emancipation of society from private property’.24 He would make similar points in the notebooks containing extracts from James Mill’s [1773–1836] Elements of Political Economy (1821):
My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life, for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means of life. My work is not my life. Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property. Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need, not through an inner, essential one.25
So, even in these fragmentary and sometimes hesitant early writings, Marx always discussed alienation from a historical, not a natural, point of view.26
The notes accompanying Marx’s excerpts from James Mill highlight how ‘political economy defines the estranged form of social intercourse [die entfremdete Form des geselligen Verkehrs] as the essential and original form corresponding to man’s nature’. Far from being a constant condition of objectification, of the worker’s production, alienated labour is for Marx the expression of the social character of labour within the limits of the present division of labour, which turns man into ‘a machine tool […] and transforms him into a spiritual and physical monster’.27
The peculiarity of the individual, the execution of his necessary need, is affirmed in working activity of a need peculiar to himself. But ‘this realization of labour appears as a derealization [Entwirklichung] for the worker’.28 Labour could be human affirmation, free creative activity, but, ‘presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a degree that this activity is indeed hateful to me, a torment, and rather a semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced activity [erzwungene Thätigkeit] and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous need’.29
Marx reached these conclusions by collecting what he considered to be the sound theories of economic science, criticizing their constitutive elements and inverting their results. This involved him in the most intense and unremitting effort.
In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx also expounded his idea of communism. But since he had not yet deepened his study of economics, and since his experience of politics had not yet matured, his idea of communism remained highly abstract. At some point, he described it as the ‘negation of the negation’, as a moment in the ‘Hegelian dialectic’, or ‘the positive expression of annulled private property’.30 At others, taking inspiration from Ludwig Feuerbach [1804–1872], he wrote:
Communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species.31
Some passages are influenced by Hegel’s teleological philosophical of history: for example, ‘the entire movement of history [is] communism’s actual act of genesis’; communism is ‘the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’.32
The Parisian Marx was ravenous for reading material and devoted day and night to it. He was a man filled with enthusiasms and projects, who drew up work plans so huge that he could never have seen them through, and who studied every document relevant to the object of investigation; he was absorbed in the lightning advance of his knowledge and the shifting interests that for a time carried him towards new horizons, further resolutions and still more areas of research. This is proved by the statements of those who were in touch with him during that period. Ruge, for example, wrote in May 1844: ‘He reads a lot, works with uncommon intensity […] but does not see anything through to the end, always leaves things halfway to plunge headlong into an endless sea of books; he works until it almost makes him ill, not going to bed night after night until three or four.’33 The situation had not changed in August:
If Marx does not kill himself with his intemperance, pride and quite desperate work, and if communist extravagance does not annul in him any sensitivity to the simplicity and nobility of form, something should be expected to come of his endless reading and even his dialectic without a conscience. […] He always wants to write about the things he has just finished reading, but then he always starts reading and taking notes again. Sooner or later, however, I think he will succeed in completing a very long and abstruse work, in which he will pour forth all the material he has heaped together.34
Absorbed by such vast interests, Marx planned the draft of a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law, embarked on studies of the French Revolution in order to write a history of the Convention, and mooted a critique of existing socialist and communist doctrines. Then, he threw himself like a madman into political economy, but – taken by the priority of criticizing Bauer and his followers in Germany – he interrupted this work in order to write his first finished book: The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company (1845). Yet the most prolific young man in the Hegelian Left had still published less than many of the others. There was something incredible about his meticulousness, as he refused ‘to write a sentence if he was unable to prove it in ten different ways’.35 Marx’s belief that his information was insufficient and his judgements immature prevented him from publishing a large part of the work on which he embarked; it therefore remained in the form of outlines and fragments. His notes are thus extremely precious. They allow us to gauge the scope of his research; they contain some reflections of his own, and should be considered an integral part of his oeuvre. This is also true of the Parisian period, when his manuscripts and reading notes testify to the close and indissoluble link between what he wrote and the comments he made on the work of others.36
Despite the incomplete and fragmentary character of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, nearly all readings of them have either ignored or treated as unimportant the philological problems they present.37
It was further wrongly assumed that Marx wrote these texts only after he had read and compiled excerpts from the works of political economy,38 whereas in reality the process of composition alternated among different groups of manuscripts, and the corresponding excerpts were spaced out through the whole of his Parisian period, from the articles for the Deutsch-französische Jahrbücher to The Holy Family.
Despite these evident problems of form, despite confusion following the publication of different versions and, above all, the knowledge that much of the second manuscript (the most important but scattered one) was missing from the set, none of the critical interpreters or compilers of new editions undertook a re-examination of the originals. Yet this was especially necessary for the text that weighed so heavily in debates among the various interpretations of Marx.
Written between May and August, the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is not a work that develops in a systematic or prearranged manner. All the attributions to it of a settled direction – both those that detect the full completeness of Marx’s thought and those that see a definite conception opposed to his scientific maturity39 – are refuted by a careful philological examination. Not homogeneous or even closely interconnected between their parts, the manuscripts are an evident expression of a position in movement. Scrutiny of the nine notebooks that have come down to us, with more than 200 pages of excerpts and comments, shows us Marx’s way of assimilating and using the reading material that fuelled them.40
The Paris notebooks record the traces of Marx’s encounter with political economy and the formative process of his earliest elaborations of economic theory. A comparison of them with his writings of the period, published or unpublished, decisively demonstrates the importance of his reading for the development of his ideas.41 A list of excerpts from political economists alone would include texts by Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith [1732–1790], David Ricardo [1772–1832], James Mill, John Ramsay McCulloch [1789–1864], Guillaume Prevost [1751–1839], Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy [1754–1836], Eugène Buret [1810–1842], Pierre de Boisguillebert [1646–1714], John Law [1671–1729], and James Lauderdale [1759–1839].42 In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and Marx’s articles and correspondence of the time, one also finds references to Proudhon, Wilhelm Schulz [1797–1860], Constantin Pecqueur [1801–1887], Charles Loudon [1801–1844], Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi [1773–1842], Charles Ganihl [1758–1836], Michel Chevalier [1806–1879], Thomas Robert Malthus [1766–1834], Édouard de Pompery [1812–1895] and Jeremy Bentham [1748–1832].
Marx made his first excerpts from Say’s Treatise of Political Economy (1803),43 transcribing whole sections as he acquired his knowledge of the fundamentals of economics. The only note was added later, on the right side of the sheet in question, which was the place he usually kept for this purpose. His subsequent compilation from Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)44 served a similar goal of familiarizing himself with basic economic concepts. In fact, although these are the most extensive excerpts, they contain virtually no comments. Yet Marx’s thought stands out clearly from his montage of passages and, as it often happened elsewhere, from his way of setting alongside one another the divergent theses of several economists. The picture changes, however, in the case of Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817),45 where the first observations of his own make their appearance, especially in relation to the concepts of value and price that were still conceived as perfectly identical. This equation of commodity value and price is located in Marx’s initial conception, which conferred reality only on the exchange-value produced by competition and consigned natural price to the realm of abstraction. As these studies advanced, his critical notes were no longer sporadic but punctuated his summaries and expanded with his knowledge as he moved from author to author. There were individual sentences, then longer remarks, and finally – apropos of James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy – a sustained critical comment on the mediation of money as representing the complete domination of things over human beings; here, the relationship between excerpts and Marx’s own text is completely reversed, so that it is the former that are spaced out through the latter.46
To underline once more the importance of the excerpts, it should be pointed out just how useful these notes were to him both when he made them and subsequently. In 1844, some of them were published in Vorwärts! [Forward!], the bi-weekly of German émigrés in Paris, as a contribution to the intellectual education of its readers.47
To conclude, Marx developed his ideas both in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and in the notebooks of excerpts from his reading. The manuscripts are filled with quotations, the first being almost a straightforward collection, and the notebooks of compilations, though largely centred on the texts he was reading at the time, are accompanied with his comments. The contents of both, the formal division of the sheets into columns, the pagination, and the time of their composition confirm that the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is not a work that stands by itself but is part of Marx’s critical production, which then consisted of excerpts from texts he was studying, critical reflections on that material, and drafts that he put on paper, either in one go or in a more thought-out form. To separate these manuscripts from the rest, to extrapolate them from their context, may therefore lead to errors of interpretation.
Only these notes taken as a whole, together with a historical reconstruction of how they ripened in Marx’s mind, really show the itinerary and the complexity of his thought during the highly intense year of work in Paris.48
The setting in which Marx’s ideas developed, and the influence they exercised at a theoretical and practical level merit a last brief remark. Those were times of profound economic and social transformation, and especially of a huge increase in the numbers of the proletariat. With his discovery of the proletariat, Marx was able to break up into class terms the Hegelian concept of civil society. He also gained an awareness that the proletariat was a new class, different from ‘the poor’, since its poverty derived from its conditions of work. The task was to demonstrate one of the main contradictions of bourgeois society: ‘The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size.’49
The revolt of the Silesian weavers in June 1844 afforded Marx a last opportunity to develop his thinking. In the ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” (1844)’, published in Vorwärts!, he used a critique of Ruge, and of a previous article of his that had seen the revolt as lacking in political spirit, to take his distance from Hegel’s conception that made the state the only representative of the general interest and relegated any movement of civil society to the private sphere of partial interests.50 For Marx, on the contrary, ‘a social revolution is found to have the point of view of the whole’,51 and under the stimulus of the Silesian events, with their considerable and explicitly revolutionary character, he underlined the gross error of those who sought the root of social ills ‘not in the essential nature of the state but in a definite state form, which they wish to replace by a different state form’.52
More generally, Marx considered that those who advocated the reform of society (the objective of socialist doctrines at the time), wage equality and a reorganization of work within the capitalist system were still prisoners of the assumptions they combatted (Proudhon) or, above all, did not understand the true relationship between private property and alienated labour. For, ‘though private property appears to be the reason, the cause of alienated labour [entäusserten Arbeit], it is rather its consequence’; ‘private property is the product, the result, the necessary consequence of alienated labour’.53 In opposition to the theories of the socialists, Marx proposed a radical transformation of the economic system – a project for which it is ‘capital which is to be annulled “as such”’.54
The working out of his own conception led him into constant comparisons between the ideas around him and the results of his ongoing studies. The speed with which he was maturing made this a necessity. The same fate lay in store for the Hegelian Left. Indeed, his judgements of its main exponents were the most severe, since they also represented self-criticism of his own past. The Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung [General Literary Paper], the monthly edited by Bauer, peremptorily declared from its pages: ‘The critic refrains from involving himself in the sufferings or joys of society […] he dissects majestically in solitude.’55 For Marx, by contrast, ‘criticism is no passion of the head, […] it is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. […] Criticism appears no longer as an end in itself, but only as a means.’56 Against the solipsism of ‘critical criticism’,57 which started from an abstract conviction that to recognize estrangement was already to overcome it, Marx had clearly realized that ‘material force must be overthrown by material force’, and that social being could be changed only by means of human practice. To discover and become conscious of man’s alienated condition meant at the same time to work for its actual elimination. Between a philosophy closed in speculative isolation, which produces only sterile battles of concepts, and the criticism of philosophy, which is ‘criticism in hand-to-hand combat’,58 there was a difference that could scarcely be greater. It was the gulf separating the quest for free self-consciousness from the quest for free labour.
Marx’s thought underwent a decisive evolution during his year in Paris. He was now certain that the transformation of the world was a practical question, ‘which philosophy could not solve precisely because it conceived this problem as merely a theoretical one’.59 He bid farewell forever to philosophy that had not reached this awareness and achieved its necessary conversion into philosophy of praxis. From now on, his own analysis took its starting point not from the category of alienated labour but from the reality of the workers’ wretched existence. His conclusions were not speculative but directed towards revolutionary action.60
His conception of politics itself changed profoundly. Without adopting any of the narrow socialist or communist doctrines of the time, indeed while taking his distance from them, he achieved a full awareness that economic relations weave the connecting web of society and that ‘religion, family, state, law, morality, science, art, etc. are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law’.61 The state has here lost the primary position it had in Hegel’s political philosophy; absorbed into society, it is conceived as a sphere determined by, rather than determining, relations among human beings. According to Marx, ‘only political superstition still imagines today that civil life must be held together by the state, whereas in reality, on the contrary, the state is held together by civil life’.62
Marx’s conceptual framework also changed fundamentally with regard to the revolutionary subject. From an initial reference to ‘suffering humanity’,63 he moved to a specific identification of the proletariat, considering it first as an abstract concept based on dialectical antitheses – the ‘passive element’64 of theory – then, after his first social-economic analysis, as the active element in its own liberation, the only class endowed with revolutionary potential in the capitalist social order.
So, a somewhat vague critique of the political mediation of the state and the economic mediation of money, conceived as obstacles to the realization of a Feuerbachian common human essence, gave way to the critique of a historical relation in which material production begins to appear as the basis for any analysis and transformation of the present: ‘the whole of human servitude [menschliche Knechtschaft] is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation’.65 What Marx proposed is no longer a generic demand for emancipation but a radical transformation of the real process of production.
As he came to these conclusions, Marx was planning various other investigations. He continued with the studies and excerpts of political economy, outlined a critique of Max Stirner [1806–1856], drew up a sketch for a work on the state,66 wrote a series of notes on Hegel, and prepared to draft a critique of the German economist Friedrich List [1789–1846] that he went on to complete shortly afterwards.67
Some of Marx’s visitors attested to his intense work during this period. The radical journalist Heinrich Bürgers [1820–1878] said of him in late 1844: ‘Marx had begun profound investigations in the field of political economy and nurtured the project of writing a critical work that would refound economic science.’68 Engels, too, who first met Marx in the summer of 1844 and forged a friendship and theoretical-political solidarity with him that would last the rest of their lives, was driven by hopes of an imminent social upheaval to urge Marx in the first letter of their forty-year correspondence to publish as quickly as possible: ‘See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world. It’s high time, heaven knows!’69 Marx’s sense of the inadequacy of his knowledge held him back from completing and publishing the manuscripts. But he did write, together with Engels,70 The Holy Family, a polemical broadside against Bauer and other figures in the Left Hegelian movement from which Marx had distanced himself in 1842, on grounds that it operated in speculative isolation and was geared exclusively to sterile conceptual battles.
In some parts of the text, Marx and Engels also took up the theme of alienation. First of all, they argued that:
The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence.71
Further on, in a clear polemic against the abstractions of Bauer and his philosophical circle, they added: ‘But workers […] in the Manchester or Lyons workshops […] know that property, capital, money, wage labour and the like are no ideal figments of the brain but very practical, very objective products of their self-estrangement and that therefore they must be abolished in a practical, objective way.’72 Their struggle could not take place on the terrain of ideas, but only on that of real conflict:
But as those practical self-alienations of the mass exist in the real world in an outward way, the mass must fight them in an outward way. It must by no means hold these products of its self-alienation for mere ideal fantasies, mere alienations of self-consciousness, and must not wish to abolish material estrangement by purely inward spiritual action.73
While working on The Holy Family, Engels urged his friend in a letter in early 1845 to complete the other work in preparation:
Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are still dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron is hot. […] now it is high time. So try and finish before April, do as I do, set a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly.74
But these entreaties were of little avail. Marx still felt the need to continue his studies before trying to give a finished form to the drafts he had written. In any event, he was sustained by the conviction that he would soon be able to publish, and on 1 February 1845 – after he had been ordered to leave France because of his collaboration with the German-language workers’ bi-weekly Vorwärts! – he signed a contract with the Darmstadt publisher Carl Friedrich Julius Leske [1784–1886] for a two-volume work to be entitled ‘Critique of Politics and Political Economy’.75
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the notebooks of excerpts and notes marked the beginning of Marx’s critical study of this new discipline. They were filled with theoretical elements derived from predecessors and contemporaries. None of the outlines or works from this period can be classified under a single discipline: there are no texts that are purely philosophical, essentially economic or solely political. Marx had the capacity to combine experiences of Parisian proletarians with studies of the French Revolution, readings of Smith with the insights of Proudhon, the Silesian weavers’ revolt with a critique of Hegel’s conception of the state, and Buret’s analyses of poverty with communism. His ideas, and particularly the economic observations that began to develop, were not the fruit of a sudden fulmination but the result of intense study.76
1Honoré de Balzac, The History of the Thirteen. Ferragus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p. 33.
2Cf. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx. London: Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 81f.
3Mikhail Bakunin, Ein Briefwechsel von 1843, in MEGA2, vol. I/2, 1982, p. 482.
4Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Ein Beitrag zur Zeitgeschichte. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1848, p. 509.
5Arnold Ruge, Zwei Jahre in Paris. Etudien und erinnerungen. Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1975, p. 59.
6Balzac, The History of the Thirteen. Ferragus, p. 31.
7For an intellectual biography of Marx in Paris see Auguste Cornu, Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, vol. III. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962; Jacques Grandjonc, Studien zu Marx erstem Paris-Aufenthalt und zur Entstehung der ‘Deutschen Ideologie’. Trier: Schriften aus dem Karl Marx Haus, 1990, pp. 163–212; and Jean-Louis Lacascade, Les métamorphoses de jeune Marx. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002, pp. 129–62.
8‘Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be’, Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 142.
9See Karl Marx, ‘Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood’ and ‘Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel’, in MECW, vol. 1, pp. 224–63 and pp. 332–58.
10Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in MECW, vol. 29, p. 263.
11Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 231.
12Cf. Maximilien Rubel, ‘Introduction’, in Maximilien Rubel (ed.), Karl Marx, Œuvres. Economie II. Paris: Gallimard, 1968, pp. liv–lv.
13Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 174.
14Cf. Walter Tuchscheerer, Bevor ‘Das Kapital’ entstand. Berlin: Dietz, 1968, p. 56.
15Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus Jean Baptiste Say [1767–1832]: Traité d’économie politique’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, p. 316.
16Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 270–1.
17Ibid., p. 281.
19Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1890, p. 44f.
19Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 292.
20In Marx’s writings, one finds the term Entfremdung (‘estrangement’) as well as Entäusserung. These had different meanings in Hegel, but Marx uses them synonymously. See Marcella D’Abbiero, Alienazione in Hegel. Usi e significati di Entäusserung, Entfremdung, Veräusserung. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1970, pp. 25–7.
21Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 272.
22Ibid., p. 274.
23Ibid., p. 277. For an account of Marx’s four-part typology of alienation see Bertell Ollman, Alienation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 136–52.
24Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 280.
25Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’économie politique’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 228.
26When Marx began to write about economics again in the 1850s and in the 1860s, he more than once used the term ‘alienation’. The way he used it recalled in many respects the analyses of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, although the studies conducted in between had allowed him to make them considerably more profound. The account of alienation in Capital and its preparatory manuscripts is enriched by a greater understanding of economic categories and by more rigorous social analysis. See Marcello Musto, ‘Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation’, in Marcello Musto (ed.), Marx for Today, pp. 108–14.
27Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’économie politique’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 217 and p. 220.
28Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 272.
29Marx, ‘Comments on James Mill, Élémens d’économie politique’, in MECW, vol. 3 p. 228.
30Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 294.
31Ibid., p. 296.
32Ibid., p. 297.
33Arnold Ruge to Ludwig Feuerbach, 15 May 1844, in Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 23–4.
34Arnold Ruge to Max Duncker [1811–1886], 29 August 1844, in Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, vol. 1, p. 31.
35See Paul Lafargue, in Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, p. 32.
36On this complex relationship, see David Ryazanov, ‘Einleitung’, in MEGA, vol. I/1.2, p. xix, which for the first time pointed out how difficult it is to establish a precise boundary between the simple books of excerpts and the notebooks that should be considered true preparatory work.
37Cf. Jürgen Rojahn, ‘Marxismus – Marx – Geschichtswissenschaft. Der Fall der sog. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”’, International Review of Social History, vol. XXVIII, n. 1, 1983, p. 20. Moreover, they were first published in their entirety only in 1932 – in two separate editions. In the collection put together by the social democrat scholars Landshut and Mayer, entitled Der historische Materialismus, they appeared under the title Nationalökonomie und Philosophie, in Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus. Die Frühschriften (eds) Siegfried Landshut and Jacob Peter Mayer. Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1932, pp. 283–375, while in the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe they were Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in MEGA, vol. I/3, pp. 29–172. Not only the name but also the content varies between the two, and there are major differences in the order of the sections. The Lanshut-Mayer edition, teeming with errors because of poor deciphering of the original manuscript, failed to include the first group of papers, the so-called First Manuscript, and misattributed directly to Marx a fourth manuscript that was actually a resumé of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Nevertheless, too little consideration has been paid to the fact that the editors of the first MEGA too, in choosing their name for the manuscripts, in placing the preface at the beginning – when in reality it is part of the third manuscript – and in organizing the whole set of papers in the way they did, made one think that Marx’s intention had always been to write a critique of political economy and that everything had originally been divided into chapters. Cf. Jürgen Rojahn, ‘The Emergence of a Theory: The Importance of Marx’s Notebooks Exemplified by Those from 1844’, Rethinking Marxism, vol. 14 (2002), n. 4, p. 33. See also, Margaret Fay, ‘The Influence of Adam Smith on Marx’s Theory of Alienation’, Science & Society, vol. 47 (1983), n. 2, pp. 129–51.
38David McLellan, for example, is guilty of this error in Marx before Marxism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 210–11.
39Although they in no way exhaust the never-ending debate on Marx’s text, the reader is referred to two of the most important works that advance these respective positions. Landshut and Mayer were the first to read it as ‘in a sense Marx’s central work […] the nodal point in his entire conceptual development’, which ‘in nuce already points ahead to Capital’, Karl Marx, Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, in MEGA, vol. I/3, pp. 29–172; while the second approach is present in Althusser’s famous thesis of an ‘epistemological break’, Louis Althusser, For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p. 33f. See also Marcello Musto, ‘The myth of the “young Marx” in the interpretations of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’, Critique, vol. 43 (2015), n. 2, pp. 233–60.
40They are included in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, pp. 279–579, and MEGA2, vol. IV/3, pp. 31–110.
41According to Rojahn, Marx’s ‘manuscripts of 1844 literally grew out of his exzerpte from that period’, ‘The Emergence of a Theory’, p. 33.
42During this period Marx still read the British economists in French translation.
43Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus Jean Baptiste Say: Traité d’économie politique’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, pp. 301–27.
44Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus Adam Smith: Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, pp. 332–86.
45Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus David Ricardo: Des principes de l’économie politique et de l’impôt’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, pp. 392–427.
46Karl Marx, ‘Exzerpte aus James Mill: Élémens d’économie politique’, in MEGA2, vol. IV/2, pp. 428–70.
47Jacques Grandjonc, Marx et les communistes allemands à Paris 1844. Paris: Maspero, 1974, pp. 61–2. Above all, given that Marx was in the habit of re-reading his notes at a distance of time, he was able to use these exhaustive materials in the Grundrisse, in Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, and in Capital, Volume I.
48Cf. Rojahn, ‘The Emergence of a Theory: The Importance of Marx’s Notebooks Exemplified by Those from 1844’, p. 45.
49Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 271–2.
50Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx. Boston: Brill, 2003, pp. 29–30.
51Karl Marx, ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian”’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 205.
52Ibid., p. 197.
53Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 279.
54Ibid., p. 294.
55Bruno Bauer (ed.), Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, vol. 6. Charlottenburg: Verlag von Egbert Bauer, 1844, p. 32.
56Karl Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 177.
57Marx used the epithet in The Holy Family to designate and deride Bruno Bauer and other young Hegelians working with the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung.
58Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, p. 178.
59Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 302.
60Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx. London: New Left Books, 1971, p. 210.
61Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 297.
62Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, p. 121.
63Karl Marx, ‘Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher’, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 141.
64Marx, ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction’, p. 183.
65Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 280.
66Karl Marx, ‘Draft Plan for a Work on the Modern State’, in MECW, vol. 4, p. 666.
67Karl Marx, ‘Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book Das Nationale System der Politischen Oekonomie’, in MECW, vol. 4, pp. 265–94.
68Heinrich Bürgers, in Enzensberger (ed.), Gespräche mit Marx und Engels, p. 46.
69Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, beginning of October 1844, in MECW, vol. 38, p. 6.
70In reality, Engels contributed only ten or so pages to the text.
71Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, in MECW, vol. 4, p. 36.
72Ibid., p. 53.
73Ibid., p. 82.
74Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx, 20 January 1845, in MECW, vol. 38, pp. 17–18.
75The contract is published in MECW, vol. 4, p. 675.
76The Marxist-Leninist hagiography that held sway for so long used to attribute an impossible immediacy and an instrumental final goal to Marx’s thought, thereby presenting a distorted and highly impoverished account of his path to knowledge. The aim should instead be to reconstruct the genesis, the intellectual debts and the theoretical achievements of Marx’s labours, and to highlight the complexity and richness of his work.