Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844Karl Marx

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, often called the Paris Manuscripts, are a set of notebooks Marx wrote in 1844 and never published. They first appeared in full in the twentieth century. The First Manuscript works through wages, the profit of capital, and rent of land in the language of classical political economy, then breaks into the analysis of estranged labor that made the text famous. The later manuscripts take up private property, communism, the relation of political economy to Hegel, and a critique of Hegel's Phenomenology.

Marx's central claim is that under capitalism the worker is alienated in four related ways: from the product of labor, which confronts him as an alien power; from the activity of labor itself, which becomes forced and external; from his species-being, the free, conscious life-activity that distinguishes human production from animal need; and from other human beings, as mutual relations become market relations. The more the worker produces, the poorer he becomes in his inner life. Private property is both the product and the cause of this estrangement. Communism, in these pages, is the positive abolition of private property and the recovery of human powers for human beings.

The Manuscripts answer Hegel and Feuerbach by relocating alienation in economic life rather than in consciousness or religion alone. They stand behind later debates about young Marx and mature Marx, humanist Marxism, and the critique of labor under industrial capitalism. What they contribute to the Great Conversation is a philosophical account of work: how productive activity can either realize or destroy the humanity of the producer.