The Economic And Philosophic Manuscripts Of 1844
Emir Ballard
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.[2] 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.[3] While the text's importance was often downplayed by orthodox Marxists as being "philosophical" rather than "scientific", the notebooks provide insight into Marx's thought at the time of its first formulation.
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.[11] 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.[12] Die Bewegung der Produktion by Friedrich Wilhelm Schulz is also a key source.[13][14] Ludwig Feuerbach's humanism is an influence that underlies all of Marx's notes.[15]
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.[1] 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.[5] 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-Dhring.[16]
Istvn Mszros notes that the language and terminology of the Manuscripts are one of the work's main difficulties.[10] He mentions that a key term "Aufhebung" can be translated from German to English simultaneously as "transcendence", "suppression", "preserving" and "overcoming".[17] 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.[18] Gregory Benton translates the word as "transcendence" and "supersession", and notes that Marx's concept of "critique" is an instance of this double movement.[19]
A second terminological difficulty is the translation of the German words "Entusserung" and "Entfremdung".[18] While both words can be translated to English as "alienation", Entfremdung is often translated as "estrangement" and Entusserung as "alienation", to draw a distinction between the two concepts.[20] Christopher J. Arthur notes that Entusserung 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: "Vergegenstndlichung" or "objectification". Arthur claims "Entfremdung" is a narrower concept than "Entusserung" in that it applies only to cases of interpersonal estrangement. He takes estrangement to be a state and alienation to be a process.[18]
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.[21]
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.[12] Their key concept appears when Marx uses philosophical terminology to advance a critique of capitalist society based in "alienation".[1] Marx's theory is adapted (not without changes) from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841).[22] Alienation is not merely a descriptive concept, it is a call for de-alienation through radical change of the world.[23]
Marx's first manuscript consists largely of extracts or paraphrases from the works of the classical economists, such as Adam Smith, that Marx was reading at the time of the Manuscripts' composition.[15] Marx here levels a number of criticisms at classical political economy. Marx argues that economic concepts do not deal with man as a human being, but as one would a house, a commodity, reducing the greater part of mankind to abstract labor. Marx follows Smith's definition of capital as the power of command over labor and its products.[24] He disagrees with Smith's distinction between a landlord and a capitalist, claiming that the character of landed property has been transformed from feudal times so that society is now (increasingly) divided into only two classes: workers and capitalists. He further criticizes the conception of labor found in the classical economists on grounds that their conceptions are superficial and abstract.[25] Marx argues that the classical economists start with a fictional primordial state that takes concepts such as private property, exchange and competition as facts, without seeing a need to explain them.[26] Marx believes he has offered a more coherent account that addresses the connection and the history of these factors.[27]
Marx explains how capitalism alienates man from his human nature. Man's basic characteristic is his labor, or his commerce with nature.[28]In earlier societies people could rely in part on nature itself to satisfy "natural needs". In modern society, where land ownership is subject to the laws of a market economy, it is only through money that one may survive. A worker's labor and his product have become alien from him. His productive powers are a commodity to be bought and sold like any other, at the market price determined by the minimum cost of maintenance. The worker does not toil to satisfy his need to work, but only to survive:[29] "he receives an object of labor, i.e., in that he receives work, and, secondly, in that he receives means of subsistence. This enables him to exist, first as a worker; and second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker."[30] While his work produces wealth for the capitalist class, the worker himself is reduced to the level of an animal.[29] If the wealth of society is diminishing, it is the worker who suffers the most; if it is increasing, then capital is increasing and the product of labor is increasingly alienated from the worker.[15]
The modern productive process does not promote the development and deployment of essential human capacities. Human individuals thus experience their lives as lacking meaning or fulfillment; they feel "estranged" or do not feel at home in the modern social world. Marx argues that the worker is alienated in four ways:
The relation of the worker to the objects of his production is the primary cause of his impoverishment and dehumanization.[31] The object produced by a worker's labor stands as an alien thing, a power independent of its producer.[32] The more the worker produces, the more he approaches loss of work and starvation.[31] Man is no longer the initiator in his interchange with the world outside himself; he has lost control of his own evolution.[33] Marx draws an analogy with religion: in religion, God is the subject of the historical process, and man is in a state of dependence. The more man attributes to God, the less he retains in himself. Similarly, when a worker externalizes his life in an object, his life belongs to the object and not to himself.[34] The object confronts him as hostile and alien.[31] His nature becomes the attribute of another person or thing.[33]
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.[31] 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.[35]
The third dimension of alienation that Marx discusses is man's alienation from his species.[36] Marx here uses Feuerbachian terminology to describe man as a "species-being".[37] Man is a self-conscious creature who can appropriate for his own use the whole realm of inorganic nature. While other animals produce, they produce only what is immediately necessary. Man, on the other hand, produces universally and freely. He is able to produce according to the standard of any species and at all times knows how to apply an intrinsic standard to the object.[36] Man thus creates according to the laws of beauty.[38] This transformation of inorganic nature is what Marx calls man's "life-activity", and it is man's essence. Man has lost his species-being because his life-activity has been turned into a mere means of existence.[39]
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