Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Contents

1. [Preface] 8 min 9

   Written last, on the closing pages of the third manuscript. Marx explains that he has given up his planned critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right in favour of separate pamphlets on law, morality, politics and so on, beginning here with political economy. He insists that his results come from an empirical study of the economists; credits the French and English socialists, Weitling, Hess and Engels’s “Outlines”; hails Feuerbach as the founder of positive humanistic and naturalistic criticism; and justifies the closing settlement of accounts with Hegel’s dialectic against the “critical theologians”, who cannot face their own Hegelian presuppositions.

2. I.1 Wages 36 min 12

   The first manuscript opens with three parallel columns on wages, profit and ground-rent, built largely from quotations out of Smith, Say, Ricardo and others. Wages are fixed by the struggle between capitalist and worker, which the capitalist wins; the worker becomes a commodity whose price follows supply and demand, and political economy knows him only as a working animal. In a declining, a growing and a stationary society alike the worker suffers. Marx then rises above political economy to ask what the reduction of most of mankind to abstract labour means for human development, quoting Schulz, Pecqueur, Buret and Loudon on the misery and overwork of the industrial population.

3. I.2 Profit of Capital 40 min 8

   Capital is stored-up labour, and command over labour; the capitalist’s power is the purchasing power of his capital. Following Smith, Marx sets out the rate of profit and its relation to interest, the capitalist’s ways of raising profit above the ordinary rate (trade secrets, monopoly, keeping price changes secret), and the accumulation of and competition among capitals, which ends in concentration: large capitals ruin small ones, and the capitalist class shrinks as its wealth grows.

4. I.3 Ground-Rent 37 min 9

   Ground-rent comes from the landlord’s monopoly, not from any service: landowners, like all men, love to reap where they have not sown. Rent rises with the productivity of the land and with the misery of the population. Marx takes Smith’s claim that the landlord’s interest coincides with society’s and turns it round: the landlord is hostile to tenant, labourer and consumer alike. Competition turns landed property into capital and the landlord into an ordinary capitalist; against feudal romanticism about the land, Marx shows how the market already dissolves it, and the alternative to large estates is not small parcels but association applied to the land.

5. I.4 [Estranged Labour] 36 min 16

   The most famous section of the manuscripts. Starting from the economic fact that the worker grows poorer the more wealth he produces, Marx analyses estranged labour in four aspects: the worker’s estrangement from the product of his labour, from the activity of labour itself, from his species-being (man’s free, conscious, universal life activity), and from other men. Private property, which political economy takes as given, turns out to be the product and consequence of alienated labour, though it later reacts back on it. Wages and private property are identical; the emancipation of society from private property takes the political form of the emancipation of the workers, because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production.

6. II [The Relation of Private Property] 18 min 6

   All that survives of the second manuscript. Capital is man wholly lost to himself; production produces man as a commodity and as a mentally and physically dehumanised being, and the worker exists only as long as he exists as capital. Marx traces the conflict between landed property and movable property, each praising itself and accusing the other, and the necessary victory of the capitalist over the landowner as developed private property defeats undeveloped. The relation of private property is labour, capital and the relation between them, which moves from unity through mutual opposition to the opposition of each against itself: hostile mutual opposition.

7. III.1 [Private Property and Labour] 10 min 4

   The third manuscript begins with notes on the lost part of the second. Labour is the subjective essence of private property. The political economy that recognised labour as its principle (Adam Smith, “the Luther of political economy”) took private property into man himself, and under the appearance of recognising man completed his denial; its cynicism grows from Smith to Ricardo and Mill as it follows its principle more consistently. The Physiocrats form the transition: they make labour the essence of wealth, but only agricultural labour. All wealth becomes industrial wealth, and private property completes its rule over man as a world-historical power.

8. III.2 [Private Property and Communism] 37 min 22

   Marx traces the supersession of self-estrangement through the forms of communism. Crude communism, which generalises private property, levels down out of envy and treats women as communal property, only shows the vileness of private property; the relation of man to woman measures how far human nature has become human. Communism proper is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, “the riddle of history solved”: as fully developed naturalism it equals humanism. Man is a social being even in solitary activity; the senses become human only through humanised nature, and their forming is the labour of all world history; industry is the open book of human essential powers; natural science will become the basis of a single science of man. The question of creation is an abstraction answered by the self-generation of man through labour; communism is the necessary form of the immediate future, but not as such the goal of human development.

9. III.3 [Need, Production and Division of Labour] 48 min 15

   Under private property every new need becomes a lever of mutual exploitation, and the need for money is the only need political economy produces: refinement of needs on one side breeds bestial simplicity on the other, as the worker returns to a cellar he must pay for. Political economy is a science of asceticism whose ideal is the saving worker; money can do everything the worker may not. Marx surveys the quarrel over luxury and thrift, the displacement of the extravagant rich by the calculating industrialist through the fall in interest, and the economists’ accounts of the division of labour and exchange (Smith, Say, Skarbek, Mill), which he reads as the estranged expression of human activity as species-activity. In passing he notes that the idea of communism suffices to abolish the idea of private property, but abolishing real private property needs real communist action, and describes the new need for company among French socialist workers.

10. III.4 [Money] 13 min 8

    Taking passages from Goethe’s Faust and Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Marx analyses money as the pander between need and object. What money can buy, I am: it turns ugliness into beauty, lameness into twenty-four legs, mindlessness into cleverness. As the alienated capacity of mankind it inverts all human and natural qualities, fraternises impossibilities and is the universal whore. Effective demand separates being from thinking: without money a need or a vocation is unreal. In a human relation to the world, love could be exchanged only for love and trust only for trust.

11. III.5 [Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General] 1 h 3 min 21

    Marx settles accounts with the Hegelian dialectic, which the Young Hegelian critics (Strauss, Bauer) had never questioned, and credits Feuerbach with showing that philosophy is religion in thought. Hegel’s greatness in the Phenomenology is to have grasped the self-generation of man as a process, and labour as man’s essence; but he knows only abstract mental labour, treats objectivity itself as estrangement, and so supersedes estrangement only in thought, confirming religion, the state and the rest in their alienated form. Against this Marx sets man as a natural, objective, suffering and passionate being whose history is his act of coming into being. Hegel’s logic is the “money of the spirit”, and the passage from the absolute idea to nature is abstraction, bored with itself, resolving to look at the world.