Early Writings

"The 1844 Manuscripts were written by Marx in Paris and they are on economic and philosophical topics. They therefore go by three different names: Paris Manuscripts , 1844 Manuscripts , and The Economic and Philosophical Writings . They were written by Marx for himself, never intended for publication — or certainly not in this form. I think some of them are really first drafts with Marx writing in a high state of excitement. Marx had a philosophical training: he wrote his PhD on post-Aristotelian ancient philosophy, on atomism. He wanted to work as an academic but he was an atheist and moved in radical circles, so it was not possible for him to get an academic job. He was steeped in Hegelian philosophy and the philosophy of his day, the Young Hegelians — or the Left Hegelians — who were left-wing critics of Hegel but still followed Hegelian methodology. He found he could survive as a journalist, so he started paying attention to the issues of the day. Even though he was a left-wing, radical philosopher, he hadn’t paid much attention to what was actually going on in his country or elsewhere — or at least, not in the detail that he needed to. For example, he was very exercised by the rights of the Moselle workers to collect fallen timber. The landowners had decided that the peasants could no longer collect their kindling from the forest. This is a perennial theme in development economics: the poor person’s right to collect fallen wood from the forest, and someone deciding that they have to pay for that now, causing huge problems. Under the influence of Engels, Marx also realised that he should pay attention to economic writing. Engels was ahead of him. Engels was writing about economics in 1842, two years before Marx. Engels convinced Marx that if he was going to understand the society he lived in, he had to understand economics and therefore read Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Marx was one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, with the most penetrating mind, and a philosophical training. In the 1844 Manuscripts he is exploring the classic works in economics and writing notes as a student as well as copying extracts. There was no photocopier, so you had to copy things out. Some parts are copied, some parts are paraphrased. And there is also Marx’s own commentary. You see him taking Adam Smith’s writings — and the mythology is that Smith is one of the great defenders of capitalism — and Marx finds, in the Wealth of Nations , a whole range of criticisms of capitalism that sound just like Marx. So, for example, Adam Smith argues that the natural rate of wages is the minimum wage — what it costs to keep the worker and his family alive for the day; that labour has become a commodity; that labour is deskilled. Many of Marx’s criticisms of capitalists from the point of view of labour are already there in Adam Smith. Then, as a philosopher, he takes Smith’s ideas and turns them into a type of Hegelian theory of alienation. The idea is that everything we lose as labour in the labour process returns to us in some sort of alien form. As the worker gets poorer and poorer, the worker creates a world rich in commodities owned by other people. More importantly, the worker comes to create a social structure that turns out to be very bad for people in the position of the worker. A worker makes the capitalist rich; the capitalist has a stronger bargaining position, and wages become even lower. The things that are taken from the worker return to dominate the worker and make the worker feel estranged in the world. Marx goes on to talk about private property and Communism and some other themes that he returned to later on in his life. But I think it’s in the 1844 Manuscripts where we see this excitement of Marx discovering and analysing new economic texts, bringing his training as a philosopher to think about those issues, and doing it in a completely private way. His other writings around this time are incredibly florid, full of literary analogies; you can see they’re worked over and over and they’re often overwritten. In much of Marx’s early writings, he was grandstanding. Here he was writing for himself. It’s not easy to read but nearly not as difficult as some of the things he wrote for the public. He kept things relatively simple, and there’s this directness and excitement that makes it a wonderful text. I think you can. You have to look pretty hard, though, because he’s such an accomplished writer. There’s one thing I point out to students when I’m teaching this material. Marx tries to deduce different categories of alienation from each other. Ultimately, what he aims to do is deduce all the categories of economics — rent, wages, commodities, exchange — from the concept of alienation, as a way of showing that the capitalist economy has alienation at its roots. He does this in a Hegelian style. If you’re familiar with Hegel’s writings, you’ll know that Hegel typically begins with a simple concept and from that he deduces other concepts until he generates a very elaborate conceptual framework. Marx, in these writings, was trying to be the Hegel of economics. He thought you could deduce all the central categories of economics just out of the concept of alienation. I think he got halfway through and thought, “This is stupid: the way to understand economics is by empirical investigation rather than conceptual analysis”, and broke off. You almost see Marx maturing as an economic thinker as he’s going through this, going, “Ok, you can be Hegel but where does that get you?” You have to, as Marx will do later, look at statistics, reports, trade figures, and try to understand causal relations rather than conceptual relations. But at this stage of his life, Marx is still writing about economics in conceptual terms rather than more mechanical terms."