Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

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Marx, Karl (1992) [1844]. "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts". Early Writings. Translated by Livingstone, Rodney; Benton, Gregory. London: Penguin Classics. pp.279–400. ISBN 0-14-044574-9. For labor, life activity, productive life itself, appears to us merely as a means of satisfying a need – the need to maintain physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species, its species-character, is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is our species-character. Life itself appears only as a means to life. This, too, is an aspect of alienation. In spite of this intense interest, copies of the published volumes of the Manuscripts subsequently became difficult to locate, as the Marx–Engels-Gesamtausgabe project was effectively cancelled shortly afterward. [81] In English this work was first published in 1959 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House (now Progress Publishers), Moscow, translated by Martin Milligan.

The whole paragraph, including the quotation from Ricardo’s book in the French translation by Francisco Solano Constancio: Des principes de l’economie politique, et de 1’impôt, 2-e éd., Paris, 1835, T. II, pp. 194-95 (see the corresponding English edition On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, London, 1817), and from Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d’économie politique..., Paris, 1819, T. II., p. 331, is an excerpt from Eugéne Buret’s book De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.... Paris, 1840, T. I, pp. 6-7, note. Marx explains how capitalism alienates man from his human nature. Man's basic characteristic is his labor, or his commerce with nature. [28]

Kołakowski, Leszek (1978). Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 1: The Founders. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-19-824547-5. Hegel uses the term “thinghood” ( Dingheit) in his work Phänomenologie des Geistes to denote an abstract, universal, mediating link in the process of cognition; “thinghood” reveals the generality of the specific properties of individual things. The synonym for it is “pure essence” ( das reine Wesen). The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of our species-life: for we see ourselves in the world we create. In tearing away from us the object of our production, therefore, estranged labor tears from us our species-life, transforms our advantage over other animals into the disadvantage that our inorganic body, nature, is taken from us. In the manuscript “sein für sich selbst,” which is an expression of Hegel’s term “für sich’ (for itself) as opposed to “an sich” (in itself). In the Hegelian philosophy the former means roughly explicit, conscious or defined in contrast to “an sich,” a synonym for immature, implicit or unconscious. 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.

Loudon’s work was a translation into French of an English manuscript apparently never published in the original. The author did publish in English a short pamphlet - The Equilibrium of Population and Sustenance Demonstrated, Leamington, 1836. The manuscript has “als für sich seiende Tätigkeit.” For the meaning of the terms “für sich” and “an sich” in Hegel’s philosophy see Note 25. Sperber, Jonathan (2013). Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780871404671. Marcuse, Herbert (1972) [1932]. "The Foundation of Historical Materialism". Studies in Critical Philosophy. Beacon Press Boston. pp.1–48. ISBN 0-8070-1528-8 . Retrieved 21 September 2020. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 deprived poor people considered able to work (including children) of any public relief except a place in the workhouse, where they were compelled to work.XXII| We have proceeded from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property, the separation of labor, capital and land, and of wages, profit of capital and rent of land – likewise division of labor, competition, the concept of exchange value, etc. On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers.

Until now we have been considering the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects – her relationship to the products of her labor. But the alienation (also known as estrangement) is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity, itself. In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a servant of his object, first, in that 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.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] 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. 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. A second terminological difficulty is the translation of the German words "Entäusserung" and "Entfremdung". [18] 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. [20] 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. [18]

Leopold, David (2007). The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics and Human Flourishing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-511-28935-4. 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. 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 poverty of philosophy - Karl Marx

The fourth and final dimension of alienation is drawn from alienation's other three dimensions: Marx believes that man is alienated from other men. Marx has argued that the product of a worker's labor is alien and belongs to someone else. [39] The worker's productive activity is a torment for the worker; it must therefore be the pleasure of another. [40] Marx asks who is this other person? [39] Since the product of man's labor does not belong to nature nor to the gods, these two facts point out that it is another man who has control of a man's product and a man's activity. [41] 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. Marx discusses his conception of communism in his third manuscript. [45] For Marx, communism is "the positive expression of the abolition of private property". [46] Marx here claims that previous socialist writers had offered only partial, unsatisfactory insights on the overcoming of alienation. [45] He mentions Proudhon, who advocated the abolition of capital, Fourier, who advocated a return to agricultural labor and Saint-Simon, who advocated the correct organization of industrial labor. [45] Marx discusses two forms of communism that he deems inadequate. The first is "crude communism" — the universalization of private property. [45] This form of communism "negates the personality of man in every sphere," as it does not abolish the category of worker but instead extends it to all men. [47] It is an "abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization." [47] Here the only community is a community of (alienated) labor and the only equality is one of wages paid out by the community as universal capitalist. [48] The second form of communism that Marx sees as incomplete is of two sorts: "(a) still of a political nature, democratic or despotic; (b) with the abolition of the state, but still essentially incomplete and influenced by private property, i.e. by the alienation of man." [49] David McLellan takes Marx to here refer to the utopian communism of Etienne Cabet as democratic, the despotic communism to be the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by the followers of Gracchus Babeuf, and the abolition of the state to be the communism of Théodore Dézamy. [45] As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal. Marx apparently refers here not only to the identity of Hegel’s views on labour and some other categories of political economy with those of the English classical economists but also to his profound knowledge of economic writings. In lectures he delivered at Jena University in 1803-04 Hegel cited Adam Smith’s work. In his Philosophie des Rechts (§ 189) he mentions Smith, Say and Ricardo and notes the rapid development of economic thought.