Royal Road to Science — Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 3, Marx and Engels 1843–1844
Volume 3 of the Marx Engels Collected Workers (MECW) is the first to contain works of both Marx and Engels, and more importantly, is the first to contain their initial works studying (and sharply criticizing) political economy. It also is a step toward their close collaboration, specifically when Marx mentions in his economic manuscripts that he agrees with what he read from Engels’ own notes about political economy. But it is not until Volume 4 that they begin their actual “close collaborations.”
The organization of my post will be as follows:
- This Introduction
- Marx’s “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”
- Engel’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”
- Notes on various other works of Marx and Engels within this volume (letters, newspaper entries, and philosophical notes.)
From the preface, we get a preview of their nearly parallel development at the time: “The main efforts of Marx and Engels during this period were directed towards working out the scientific basis of a new, revolutionary-proletarian world outlook. Each had arrived at materialist and communist convictions, and set about studying a broad spectrum of philosophical, historical, economic and political problems. Marx was engaged upon a number of theoretical projects: he began writing a work on Hegel’s philosophy of law, intended to write a history of the Convention, and was also planning works devoted to the criticism of politics and political economy; Engels, for his part, was studying social developments in England, the condition of the English working class. Each clearly realised the necessity to dissociate himself from current economic, philosophical and sociological doctrines; each considered the criticism of these essential if the theoretical principles of a new world outlook were to be arrived at. They both clearly understood the inconsistency of Hegel’s idealism, the narrow-mindedness of the bourgeois economists, and the weaknesses of the Utopian Socialists, but at the same time they tried to make use of all that was rational in the views of their predecessors. They were deeply impressed by Feuerbach’s materialism, but had already gone far beyond Feuerbach in their approach to theoretical and practical problems, particularly in interpreting the life of society.”
Marx combined his philosophical studies and criticisms of Hegel with that of the classics of political economy (e.g. Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, James Mill) and began his first step towards a materialist dialectic. More from the International Publishers preface: “From the criticism of the conservative aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, such as the idealisation of monarchical and bureaucratic institutions, Marx went on to a critical reconsideration of the very basis of Hegel’s idealism. He arrived at the conviction that idealism inevitably leads to religion and mysticism. But Marx did not reject the rational content of Hegel’s philosophy or his dialectics, and stressed that Hegel had succeeded in presenting, though in an abstract, mystified form, many of the real processes of social life. Contrary to Feuerbach, Marx continued to attach great importance to Hegel’s dialectical method and made the first step towards a materialist transformation of dialectics, towards freeing it from its mystical shell.”
Marx maintained an essentially humanist “communism” at this point with a philosophical focus on estrangement/alienation. These early publications caused quite the controversies, especially in Western Marxism, when they were finally translated to in English in 1959; as well as a earlier when German and French texts read by Lukács, Marcuse, Lefevbre etc. on one hand and eventually Althusser and Della Volpe responding on the other battled over Marx’s changing legacy. Personally I worried in advance about having a hard time disentangling “the humanist controversy” from my own reading of this more humanist Marx, but I was happily surprised to find myself deeply immersed in Marx (and Engels’) notes on rent, monopolies, circulating capital, value, overproduction, antagonistic contradictions, and other concepts that are eventually elaborated in later, published works with very little distraction. Even if my bias is still that the “Economic Manuscripts” should be indeed treated as the fragmentary journals they are — and not an excuse to try to create a new Marxism cut off from where he went next — they are very interesting explorations into political economy and philosophy, starting to form at least some of the “critique”.
Finally, MECW V3 also has a few other works of historic note like Marx’s “On the Jewish Question”, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law”, and Engel’s “The Condition of England” that I will briefly touch on.
2. Marx’s “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”
First, what were the manuscripts and what was the goal in Marx writing these notes?
From the end notes: The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the first work in which Marx tried to systematically elaborate problems of political economy from the standpoint of his maturing dialectical-materialist and communist views and also to synthesise the results of his critical review of prevailing philosophic and economic theories. Apparently, Marx began to write it in order to clarify the problems for himself. But in the process of working on it he conceived the idea of publishing a work analysing the economic system of bourgeois society in his time and its ideological trends. Towards the end of his stay in Paris, on February 1, 1845, Marx signed a contract with Carl Leske, a Darmstadt publisher, concerning the publication of his work entitled A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy. It was to be based on his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and perhaps also on his earlier manuscript Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. This plan did not materialise in the 1840s because Marx was busy writing other works and, to some extent, because the contract with the publisher was cancelled in September 1846, the latter being afraid to have transactions with such a revolutionary-minded author. However, in the early 1850s Marx returned to the idea of writing a book on economics. Thus, the manuscripts of 1844 are connected with the conception of a plan which led many years later to the writing of Capital.
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is an unfinished work and in part a rough draft. A considerable part of the text has not been preserved.
I found it quite unfortunate that of the three extant manuscripts, the second likely has much missing many pages, as it was entirely exciting material cut short at the start and end.
From April to August 1844, Marx began this dual study/critique of political economy and of Hegelian dialectics, which at times can feel disjointed — though one can hardly blame an author for the content or form that their own notes take!
Now to the text itself:
In his “preface”, Marx takes a few thinly-veiled shots at Bruno Baer again (to be continued in “The Holy Family” in V4) and speaks of some initial influences on this work: French, English, and German socialists, including Engels in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. And outside of critiques of political economy, that “it is only with Feuerbach that positive, humanistic and naturalistic criticism begins.”
The first manuscript begins, as it should, with “The Wages of Labour”.Some key points:
- “Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker.” But the capitalist, often as landlowner and in unity with other capitalists, can outlast the worker, and has the upper hand.
- “The separation of capital, rent, and labour is thus fatal for the worker.” The wages of the workers then can be reduced to a “cattle-like” (Marx quoting Smith) subsistence wage.
- Rules of supply and demand apply to labour, therefore the worker lives in the same conditions as other commodities.
- Workers only sometime benefit when capitalists gain, but they always share the pain when the capitalists lose.
- “The prices of labour are much more constant than the prices of provisions. Often they stand in inverse proportion.”
So how does this work in a growing economy, a “society of advancing wealth”, when economists claim things are good?
A.) Accumulation of labour (i.e. “capital”. “Capital” being “accumulated labour”, or “stored up labour” according to classical political economy) leads to concentration of property in the hands of the capitalist.
B.) Division of labour rises with the number of workers, creating “machine-like” human labour, reaching its climax in the “factory system” where the worker is an “abstract activity and a belly.”
C.) The very rich can live on money interest, the rest of capitalists have to compete with each other in trade or run a business. The number of capitalists diminish as wealth concentrates among the winners, some falling into the working class, and some members of the working class fall into “beggary or starvation”.
Remember, Marx is saying this is in the condition of capitalist society in the situation most favorable to workers: “Thus in a declining state of society — increasing misery of the worker; in an advancing state — misery with complications; and in a fully developed state of society — static misery.”
After critiquing political economists for their relaxed attitudes about such a state of affairs, Marx uses the term “proletarian” for the first time in these collections: “It goes without saying that the proletarian, i.e., the man who, being without capital and rent, lives purely by labour, and by a one-sided, abstract labour, is considered by political economy only as a worker. Political economy can therefore advance the proposition that the proletarian, the same as any horse, must get as much as will enable him to work. It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics and to the poor-house overseer.”
Marx continues with some specific examples now, especially that the “mania” for more profits even after labor-reducing devices of British textile factory owners led to 12–16 hour work days for women entering this poorly-paid work force, children pushed into the mills. In fact Marx claims part of the motivation is that adding children was cheaper than upgrading to new machines, so children it was. Marx then quotes a Wilhelm Schulz, “In France it has been calculated that at the present stage in the development of production an average working period of five hours a day by every person capable of work could suffice for the satisfaction of all the material interests of society…Notwithstanding the time saved by the perfecting of machinery the duration of the slave-labour performed by a large population in the factories has only increased.” Along the same lines, Marx notes that the workhouses prefer to hire women and children because it generally costs less than men.
Marx’s next (well sort of! the manuscript is organized in a complicated fashion) section is “Profit of Capital”
What is the basis of capital? Here Marx looks at the law, inheritance: “Even if capital itself does not merely amount to theft or fraud, it still requires the cooperation of legislation to sanctify inheritance.” And “The person who [either acquires, or] succeeds to a great fortune, does not necessarily [acquire or] succeed to any political power […. ] The power which that possession immediately and directly conveys to him, is the power of purchasing; a certain command over all the labour, or over all the produce of labour, which is then in the market.” (Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, Vol. I, pp. 26–27.)
So Marx concludes capital is governing power over labour and its products. The capitalist did not reach this point by their personal, human qualities but because they are an owner of capital so therefore has purchasing power of his capital. This is governing power then over labour. What is capital? Marx, summarizing Smith again, “stored up labour”, and also stock when it yields the owner a profit.
The profits of capital are regulated by the value of the capital employed. The lowest rate of profit must be something more than the minimum to compensate occasional losses, a “clean or neat profit.” The same for the lowest possible rate of interest. But the highest rate of profit (exemplified by the British East India Company) would have no rent and bare subsistence for the workers. In fact it may even be higher than this “natural” highest price if the capitalist keeps “trade secrets”, reaches a monopoly in market, or is unique production for a locality (e.g. a rare wine.)
Capitalists can further increase the rate of profit on capital by acquiring new territories, new branches of trade, and also simply by producing more and more quantities of a commodity: “Thus the advance made by human labour in converting the product of nature into the manufactured product of nature increases, not the wages of labour, but in part the number of profitable capital investments, and in part the size of every subsequent capital in comparison with the foregoing.”
Marx continues to take notes on Smith to understand accumulation of capital and competition among capitalists: “The increase of stock, which raises wages, tends to lower the capitalists’ profit, because of the competition amongst the capitalists.
If, for example, the capital which is necessary for the grocery trade of a particular town “is divided between two different grocers, their competition will tend to make both of them sell cheaper than if it were in the hands of one only; and if it were divided among twenty, their competition would be just so much the greater, and the chance of their combining together, in order to raise the price, just so much the less.” (Adam Smith, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 322.)
Marx understands Smith’s argument that monopoly prices are as high as possible in “hostile opposition to society”. But he also understands that with the increase of capital the profit on capital diminishes because of competition — so the small capitalist suffers against the large. The large capitalist can also buy cheaper than the small one because they buy larger quantities and can then also undercut the small with lower prices. “The necessary result of this competition is a general deterioration of commodities, adulteration, fake production and universal poisoning, evident in large towns.”
Marx uses this study of competition to make his first notes on fixed capital (e.g. improvement of land, purchasing of machines — yielding no profit) and circulating capital (manufacturing, purchasing, or reselling goods — changing forms is required to make a profit), again taking note from Smith. But Marx draws his own conclusions as well: “It is clear from the outset that the relation of fixed capital and circulating capital is much more favourable to the big capitalist than to the smaller capitalist. The extra fixed capital required by a very big banker as against a very small one is insignificant. Their fixed capital amounts to nothing more than the office. The equipment of the bigger landowner does not increase in proportion to the size of his estate. Similarly, the credit which a big capitalist enjoys compared with a smaller one means for him all the greater saving in fixed capital — that is, in the amount of ready money he must always have at hand. Finally, it is obvious that where industrial labour has reached a high level, and where therefore almost all manual labour has become factory labour, the entire capital of a small capitalist does not suffice to provide him even with the necessary fixed capital.”
Marx continues his study of profit according to political economy by now moving to Ricardo:
“Ricardo in his book [On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation] (rent of land): Nations are merely production-shops; man is a machine for consuming and producing; human life is a kind of capital; economic laws blindly rule the world. For Ricardo men are nothing, the product everything.
Ricardo and Smith’s conclusions lead Marx to talk of “over-production” for the second time (first time simply quoting Schulz’s observation that capitalist concentration causes overproduction which in turn causes bankruptcies, the pain trickling down hardest to the wage-labourers.) The system eventually being imagined is described for dramatic effect: “nothing remains to be desired but that the King, living quite alone on the island, should by continuously turning a crank cause automatons to do all the work of England”
Marx finishes his notes on the profit of capital with a few incomplete sentences, including “The enormous profit which the landlords of houses make out of poverty. House rent stands in inverse proportion to industrial poverty.”
This feeds nicely into “The Rent of Land”.
The very first sentence shows a fairly different take by Adam Smith on landlords as opposed to other, peaceful forms of “original accumulation” in his other writing (later changed and translated roughly in Marx’s works more critically as “primitive accumulation”): “Landlords’ right has its origin in robbery. The landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.”
Smith believes the rent of land is naturally a monopoly price. Marx though starts to find room for his own conclusions again: “These propositions of Smith are important, because, given equal costs of production and capital of equal size, they reduce the rent of land to the greater or lesser fertility of the soil. Thereby showing clearly the perversion of concepts in political economy, which turns the fertility of the land into an attribute of the landlord. Now, however, let us consider the rent of land as it is formed in real life. The rent of land is established as a result of the struggle between tenant and landlord. We find that the hostile antagonism of interests, the struggle, the war is recognized throughout political economy as the basis of social organization.”
Struggle! Hostile antagonisms of interest! Fetishism for landlords’ fertility! This begins to sound like the Marx we know.
Marx now moves to J.B. Say, who observes “the landlords operate a certain kind of monopoly against the tenants. The demand for their commodity, site and soil, can go on expanding indefinitely; but there is only a given, limited amount of their commodity…. The bargain struck between landlord and tenant is always advantageous to the former in the greatest possible degree…. Besides the advantage he derives from the nature of the case, he derives a further advantage from his position, his larger fortune and greater credit and standing.”
And back to Smith, “Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land.”
Marx breaks with Smith very strongly though as well: “But it is silly to conclude, as Smith does, that since the landlord exploits every benefit which comes to society the interest of the landlord is always identical with that of society. In the economic system, under the rule of private property, the interest which an individual has in society is in precisely inverse proportion to the interest society has in him — just as the interest of the usurer in the spendthrift is by no means identical with the interest of the spendthrift. We shall mention only in passing the landlord’s obsession with monopoly directed against the landed property of foreign countries, from which the Corn Laws, for instance, originate. Likewise, we shall here pass over medieval serfdom, the slavery in the colonies, and the miserable condition of the country folk, the day-labourers, in Great Britain.”
Marx continues his argument against the landlords by mentioning their inherent motivation against tenant farmers, their interest in lowering the wages of manufacturing workers because cheaper manufactured goods raises the rent of land, and because large landlords can live on rent alone and eventually accumulate the land of the small.
I believe we start to see that Marx’s understanding of the competition (again, see the battle over the Corn Laws in Britain where landed property had cast off its feudal character and government eventually sided with its industrial character) between capitalists and land owners starts to point Marx in the direction of his eventual theory of historical materialism in regards to modes of production: “The final consequence is thus the abolition of the distinction between capitalist and landowner, so that there remain altogether only two classes of the population — the working class and the class of capitalists. This huckstering with landed property, the transformation of landed property into a commodity, constitutes the final overthrow of the old and the final establishment of the money aristocracy”…”The division of landed property negates the large-scale monopoly of property in land — abolishes it; but only by generalizing this monopoly. It does not abolish the source of monopoly, private property. It attacks the existing form, but not the essence, of monopoly. The consequence is that it falls victim to the laws of private property.”
Marx ends this section writing that as landlords compete with foreign capital as well, “Eventually wages, which have already been reduced to a minimum must be reduced yet further, to meet the new competition. This then necessarily leads to revolution.”
Finally, “Landed property had to develop in each of these two ways so as to experience in both its necessary downfall, just as industry both in the form of monopoly and in that of competition had to ruin itself so as to learn to believe in man.”
The last section of the first manuscript is Estranged Labour. First, a translation note: “In this manuscript as in the other works published in this volume Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, ‘Entäusserung’ and ‘Entfremdung’ to express the notion of ‘alienation’. In the present edition the former is generally translated as ‘alienation’, the latter as ‘estrangement’, because in the later economic works (Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word ‘alienation’ as the English equivalent of the term ‘Entäusserung’.
The beginning is again an excellent hook, especially for what were unfinished notes!: “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.
Critiquing political economy, Marx says political economy starts with private property as a “fact”. It is not explained. The accepted premises do not question why competition is this war of the greedy.
“Now, therefore, we have to grasp the intrinsic connection between private property, greed, the separation of labor, capital and landed property; the connection of exchange and competition, of value and the devaluation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc. — the connection between this whole estrangement and the money system.”
Marx claims he will instead come from economic fact: “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity — and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.”
The rest of this section is more Hegelian than some of the previous notes. There is a focus on the concept of labour’s product as alien; an independent power from its producer. There is talk of the “species-being” (Gattungswesen) from Feuerbach. Multiple things-”for-themselves”. This section was an inspiration for a later focus of Humanist Marxists on concepts like alienation, reification, and commodity fetishism (each a specialized subset of the previous) that are better explored later and I believe somewhat disjointed from the political economy critique +notetaking in this raw form.
Then Marx begins a strongly worded argument against Proudhoun’s focus on equality of wages: “Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other.”
His first manuscript finishes before Marx finishes what he said he would further describe here.
The second manuscript has only one relatively short extant entry, “Antithesis of Capital and Labour. Landed Property and Capital.”
The beginning of this manuscript starts mid sentence, which is too bad because it’s a heck of a start as well: “… forms the interest on his capital. The worker is the subjective manifestation of the fact that capital is man wholly lost to himself, just as capital is the objective manifestation of the fact that labour is man lost to himself. But the worker has the misfortune to be a living capital, and therefore an indigent capital, one which loses its interest, and hence its livelihood, every moment it is not working. The value of the worker as capital rises according to demand and supply, and physically too his existence, his life, was and is looked upon as a supply of a commodity like any other. The worker produces capital, capital produces him — hence he produces himself, and man as worker, as a commodity, is the product of this entire cycle.”
Contrasting his own views again with that of the political economy Marx was actively studying: “Political economy, therefore, does not recognise the unemployed worker, the workingman, insofar as he happens to be outside this labour relationship. The rascal, swindler, beggar, the unemployed, the starving, wretched and criminal workingman — these are figures who do not exist for political economy but only for other eyes, those of the doctor, the judge, the grave-digger, and bum-bailiff, etc.; such figures are spectres outside its domain. For it, therefore, the worker’s needs are but the one need — to maintain him whilst he is working and insofar as may be necessary to prevent the race of labourers from [dying] out. The wages of labour have thus exactly the same significance as the maintenance and servicing of any other productive instrument, or as the consumption of capital in general, required for its reproduction with interest, like the oil which is applied to wheels to keep them turning.”
Again, we get a preview of, what becomes essentially, [a?] Marxism: “The distinction between capital and land, between profit and rent, and between both and wages, and industry, and agriculture, and immovable and movable private property — this distinction is not rooted in the nature of things, but is a historical distinction, a fixed historical moment in the formation and development of the contradiction between capital and labour. In industry, etc., as opposed to immovable landed property, is only expressed the way in which [industry] came into being and the contradiction to agriculture in which industry developed. This distinction only continues to exist as a special sort of work — as an essential, important and life-embracing distinction — so long as industry (town life) develops over and against landed property (aristocratic feudal life) and itself continues to bear the feudal character of its opposite in the form of monopoly, craft, guild, corporation, etc., within which labour still has a seemingly social significance, still the significance of the real community, and has not yet reached the stage of indifference to its content, of complete being-for-self i. e., of abstraction from all other being, and hence has not yet become liberated capital.”
Liberated industry(for itself) + liberated capital = requirement for necessary development of labour.
Marx continues along these lines to contrast the landowner and the capitalist. The landowner maintains a romantic, poetic disposition towards agriculture and views themselves as a capitalist actually; but as a capitalist threatened by the sly, deceitful, heartless industrial capitalist. The landowner can rely on their noble lineage, “feudal souvenirs”, perhaps political connections. The actual capitalist meanwhile believes the landowner as idle, cruel, the egotist of yesteryear and most importantly, as a limit to free capital independent of “natural limitations”. The capitalist and their “movable property” can point to the miracles of industry and progress in opposition to the Quixotic land owner, who had castles as workshops of baseness, cruelty, and infamy. Regardless, Marx believes there is a historical “necessary victory” of the capitalist over the landowner. This is like the general victory of movement over immobility, of enlightenment over the parochial, and ultimately of money over other forms of private property.
But then remains another contradiction. Though this manuscript doesn’t cleanly transition, I believe the intent is clear and we will of course see this in the rest of Marx’s works: “The character of private property is expressed by labour, capital, and the relations between these two. The movement through which these constituents have to pass is:” (paraphrased below)
- Unity of labour/capital
- Labour and capital in opposition, mutually excluding each other and trying to rob each other of their existence
- Opposition of each to itself (e.g. splitting of labour into labour itself and the wages of labour.) Leading to the clash of mutual contradictions
The second manuscript ends prematurely here.
The third and final manuscript begins with “Private Property and Labour. Political Economy as a Product of the Movement of Private Property.”
It starts with a reference to a missing part of the second manuscript. And then “The subjective essence of private property — private property as activity for itself, as subject, as person — is labour.”
Here Marx references Engels again, clearly having read and approved of Engels’ own political economy study, which we will explore later: “To this enlightened political economy, which has discovered — within private property — the subjective essence of wealth, the adherents of the monetary and mercantile system, who look upon private property only as an objective substance confronting men, seem therefore to be fetishists, Catholics. Engels was therefore right to call Adam Smith the Luther of Political Economy.”
[This reminds me of a reference that would later be published in Capital Volume 3 that I immediately tried to find: “The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution. The credit system essentially Protestant. ‘The Scotch hate gold.’ In the form of paper the monetary existence of commodities is only a social one. It is Faith that brings salvation. Faith in money-value as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the individual agents of production as mere personifications of self-expanding capital. But the credit system does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism has emancipated itself from the foundations of Catholicism.”]
The brief section continues with a series of criticisms of physiocracy before concluding with what Marx had already observed, “All wealth has become industrial wealth, the wealth of labour, and industry is accomplished labour, just as the factory system is the perfected essence of industry, that is of labour, and just as industrial capital is the accomplished objective form of private property.”
Next Marx moves to “Private Property and Communism”
Again, the opening “slaps”: “The antithesis between lack of property and property, so long as it is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation, not yet grasped as a contradiction…. It does not yet appear as having been established by private property itself. But labour, the subjective essence of private property as exclusion of property, and capital, objective labour as exclusion of labour, constitute private property as its developed state of contradiction — hence a dynamic relationship driving towards resolution.”
Marx also uses this section to argue how natural sciences have remained alien from philosophy, and vice versa and any “momentary unity” has been a “chimerical illusion.” Marx believes here that Feuerbachian sense-perception is the basis of all science. And that “History itself is a real part of natural history — of nature developing into man. Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.”
I found most of the rest of this section less helpful, but it is worth also publishing a footnote from the editors here as well: “This part of the manuscript shows clearly the peculiarity of the terminology used by Marx in his works. At the time he had not worked out terms adequately expressing the conceptions of scientific communism he was then evolving and was still under the influence of Feuerbach in that respect. Hence the difference in the use of words in his early and subsequent, mature writings. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the word ‘socialism’ is used to denote the stage of society at which it has carried out a revolutionary transformation, abolished private property, class antagonisms, alienation and so on. In the same sense Marx used the expression ‘communism equals humanism.’ At that time he understood the term ‘communism as such’ not as the final goal of revolutionary transformation but as the process of this transformation, development leading up to that goal, a lower stage of the process.”
Next is “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”
Marx uses his powerful rhetorical skills to take a conflict between political economists to reject them both, as well as propose his own interpretation on their actually unified in opposition hypocrisy:
“It is true that a controversy now arises in the field of political economy. The one side (Lauderdale, Malthus, etc.) recommends luxury and execrates thrift. The other (Say, Ricardo, etc.) recommends thrift and execrates luxury. But the former admits that it wants luxury in order to produce labour (i.e., absolute thrift); and the latter admits that it recommends thrift in order to produce wealth (i.e., luxury). The Lauderdale-Malthus school has the romantic notion that avarice alone ought not to determine the consumption of the rich, and it contradicts its own laws in advancing extravagance as a direct means of enrichment. Against it, therefore, the other side very earnestly and circumstantially proves that I do not increase but reduce my possessions by being extravagant. The Say-Ricardo school is hypocritical in not admitting that it is precisely whim and caprice which determine production. It forgets the “refined needs”, it forgets that there would be no production without consumption; it forgets that as a result of competition production can only become more extensive and luxurious. It forgets that, according to its views, a thing’s value is determined by use, and that use is determined by fashion. It wishes to see only “useful things” produced, but it forgets that production of too many useful things produces too large a useless population. Both sides forget that extravagance and thrift, luxury and privation, wealth and poverty are equal.”
Marx continues this section in three consecutive paragraphs: one Hegelian, one classical quotation, and one possibly prefigurative observation, respectively.
“If we characterise communism itself because of its character as negation of the negation, as the appropriation of the human essence through the intermediary of the negation of private property — as being not yet the true, self-originating position but rather a position originating from private property (…) in old-German fashion — in the way of Hegel’s phenomenology — (…) finished as a conquered moment and (…) one might be satisfied by it, in his consciousness (…) of the human being only by real […] transcendence of his thought now as before since with him therefore the real estrangement of the life of man remains, and remains all the more, the more one is conscious of it as such, hence it (the negation of this estrangement) can be accomplished solely by bringing about communism.
In order to abolish the idea of private property, the idea of communism is quite sufficient. It takes actual communist action to abolish actual private property. History will lead to it; and this movement, which in theory we already know to be a self-transcending movement, will constitute in actual fact a very rough and protracted process. But we must regard it as a real advance to have at the outset gained a consciousness of the limited character as well as of the goal of this historical movement — and a consciousness which reaches out beyond it.
When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end. In this practical process the most splendid results are to be observed whenever French socialist workers are seen together. Such things as smoking, drinking, eating, etc., are no longer means of contact or means that bring them together. Association, society and conversation, which again has association as its end, are enough for them; the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.”
Next is “The Power of Money” (which is not a Morris Day song apparently.)
Here Marx turns to literature — Shakespeare and Goethe — and then the section ends. What he had in mind for a larger piece, I don’t know, but it is quite separate from the rest of the work in tone. What is this power of money then, from this literary section? “By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It is therefore regarded as an omnipotent being. Money is the procurer between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”
Finally we come to “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General”. This last section of the third and final manuscript also remained unfinished. It also stands further apart as well in that it is closer in subject to Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” and “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” than the manuscript sections on Smith, Say, and Ricardo.
I believe the important section is Marx’s opinion at this point on Feurebach’s dialectic, contrasting the Young Hegelians use of a Hegelian dialectic with an uncritical eye towards itself/themself:
“Feuerbach’s great achievement is:
(1) The proof that philosophy is nothing else but religion rendered into thought and expounded by thought, i.e., another form and manner of existence of the estrangement of the essence of man; hence equally to be condemned;
(2) The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory;
(3) His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.
…
Feuerbach thus conceives the negation of the negation only as a contradiction of philosophy with itself — as the philosophy which affirms theology (the transcendent, etc.) after having denied it, and which it therefore affirms in opposition to itself.”
Continuing in a series of critiques of Hegel’s process after summarizing eight points of The Phenomenology of Spirit, “[Hegel’s] process must have a bearer, a subject. But the subject only comes into being as a result. This result — the subject knowing itself as absolute self-consciousness — is therefore God, absolute Spirit, the self-knowing and self-manifesting idea. Real man and real nature become mere predicates — symbols of this hidden, unreal man and of this unreal nature.”
It is a long series of notes but it contains this, which is a good place to stop my 1844 Manuscripts summary: “atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world created by man — of man’s essential powers born to the realm of objectivity; they are not a returning in poverty to unnatural, primitive simplicity. On the contrary, they are but the first real emergence, the actual realisation for man of man’s essence and of his essence as something real.”
3. Engel’s “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”
Engels as noted above had produced his own similar work to Marx, written in October and November 1843 and published in 1844. It starts, like Marx, by pulling no punches: “Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.” The expansion of trade led to the “licensed fraud” that is political economy. “This political economy or science of enrichment born of the merchants’ mutual envy and greed”.
Also born was the Mercantile System. Its core component was the concept of “balance of trade.” Exports were compared to imports as chests of gold and silver no longer represented wealth as effectively. Then came the 18th century, with its revolutions, and its revolutions of economics:
“But just as all the revolutions of this century were one-sided and bogged down in antitheses — just as abstract materialism was set in opposition to abstract spiritualism, the republic to monarchy, the social contract to divine right — likewise the economic revolution did not get beyond antithesis. The premises remained everywhere in force: materialism did not attack the Christian contempt for and humiliation of Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian God as the Absolute confronting Man. In politics no one dreamt of examining the premises of the state as such. It did not occur to economics to question the validity of private property.”
In this revolution of economics, Engels believes the more contemporary political economists have less excuses to have strayed further and further from honesty.
Engels finds contradictions to explore in contrasting liberal capitalist economists and mercantilism: “This is why modern liberal economics cannot comprehend the restoration of the Mercantile System by List, whilst for us the matter is quite simple. The inconsistency and ambiguity of liberal economics must of necessity dissolve again into its basic components. Just as theology must either regress to blind faith or progress towards free philosophy, free trade must produce the restoration of monopolies on the one hand and the abolition of private property on the other.”
Engels accused the economists of a love for generalizations, including the concept of “the national wealth”. But who’s wealth? “The ‘national wealth’ of the English is very great and yet they are the poorest people under the sun.” “[That] ought to be called private economy, for its public connections exist only for the sake of private property.”
Within trade, there is a natural antagonism. Engels finds it inevitable that trade has diametrically opposed interests leading to corrupt dealings. One could argue here he may have been confusing “markets”(which are quite old and present in all previously existing modes of production.) Regardless, here we finally get to the passage Marx had said in his manuscripts that he found accurate from Engels: “The Mercantile System still had a certain artless Catholic candour and did not in the least conceal the immoral nature of trade. We have seen how it openly paraded its mean avarice. The mutually hostile attitude of the nations in the eighteenth century, loathsome envy and trade jealousy, were the logical consequences of trade as such. Public opinion had not yet become humanised. Why, therefore, conceal things which resulted from the inhuman, hostile nature of trade itself?
But when the economic Luther, Adam Smith, criticised past economics things had changed considerably. The century had been humanised; reason had asserted itself, morality began to claim its eternal right. The extorted trade treaties, the commercial wars, the strict isolation of the nations, offended too greatly against advanced consciousness. Protestant hypocrisy took the place of Catholic candour.”
The major contribution I found in this section is on value. Engels states by way of antithesis that value is a double value based on abstract or real value on the one hand and exchange-value on the other. He also separates economists positions on the nature of the “real value” between the English (defining costs of production as the expression of the real value) and Frenchman J.B. Say (who measured “real value” by the utility of the object.) Engels sharply notes this debate was never resolved because economists cannot resolve anything.
McCullouch and Ricardo “assert that the abstract value of a thing is determined by the costs of production.” But what about building a pointless, hard to produce, giant object? Would that be valuable? Or for Say, Engels wonders why then luxuries are more expensive than the very necessities of life if their utility is by definition lower.
Engels own conclusion: “The difference between real value and exchange-value is based on a fact — namely, that the value of a thing differs from the so-called equivalent given for it in trade; i.e., that this equivalent is not an equivalent. This so-called equivalent is the price of the thing, and if the economist were honest, he would employ this term for “’value in exchange’.”
Moving on, Engels summarizes the three elements for production costs according to economists:
- Rent
- Capital including profit
- Wages required for the labour of production
But, Engels notes, economists also argue that capital itself is “stored up labour”. And what of the value of inventions? Engels wonders what about the value of James Watt’s steam engine? This shows there are really just two elements according to Engels, nature and man*. [*Here I should note I am not really sure how to approach gendered pronouns when I am summarizing someone else’s work — but someone else’s work I would like to be part of a feminist socialism? For now I’ll try to use their own gendered language summarizing, but my own more gender neutral choices in conclusions or more independent observations.)
As for nature, Engels says if land was easy to gain as air, no one would pay rent. The landlord thus monopolizes the land taken through an original act of appropriation as well.
However, Engels says if we abandon private property, the various “unnatural” divisions like that of labour and capital disappear. Labour he believes is the main factor in production, the main source of wealth. Eliminating private property then also eliminates the unnatural separation that is wage labour.
Engels has already discovered something socialists have repeated many many times since: “The opposite of competition is monopoly. Monopoly was the war-cry of the Mercantilists; competition the battle-cry of the liberal economists. It is easy to see that this antithesis is again a quite hollow antithesis. Every competitor cannot but desire to have the monopoly[!]”
Engels can also use some colorful language as well: “We have seen that in the end everything comes down to competition, so long as private property exists. It is the economist’s principal category — his most beloved daughter, whom he ceaselessly caresses — and look out for the Medusa’s head which she will show you!”
Supply and demand strive to compliment each other, but this causes a constant fluctuation as demand tries to meet supply. Engels contrasts this fluctuation with an “emulation of human nature” he has found in English socialists and of Fourier.
Engels then summarizes a series of struggles: capital vs. capital/labour vs. labour/land vs. land that drives production to a fevered pitch via increasing competition. He describes what is now thought of as a prisoner’s dilemma, how each worker, for example, must exert the maximum labour of their body in competition for work to the detriment of both of their bodies. Already Engels has identified a boom/bust cyclical economy of overproduction crisis in England. He finds this easy to explain, as there is massive productive power in the technology and labour that can be applied, say, to soil. However, Engels also identifies Robert Thomas Malthus, eviscerating him in the process, for his “vile, infamous theory, this hideous blasphemy.” For “it is absurd to talk of over-population so long as there is ‘enough waste land in the valley of the Mississippi for the whole population of Europe to be transplanted there.’”
Engels does end the piece, being a final published work unlike Marx’s manuscripts. But it also leaves something for another day: “In turning my attention to the effects of machinery, I am brought to another subject less directly relevant — the factory system; and I have neither the inclination nor the time to treat this here. Besides, I hope to have an early opportunity to expound in detail the despicable immorality of this system, and to expose mercilessly the economist’s hypocrisy which here appears in all its brazenness.”
In conclusion, it is a pretty radical break for Engels, embracing and formulating emerging communist arguments only months after it may have seemed quite unlikely for him to do so!
4. Notes on various other works
This Volume begins with Marx’s “Contribution to the Critque of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (sadly HIAW’s mirror of Marxists.org seems to have both confused this and “Contribution to the Critique of Philosophy of Law” and not included the entirety of the piece for some reason, so I cannot link.) This was not translated into English until 1967 for Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society. I took six set of notes that in retrospect I don’t find all that useful. Marx did use this essay though to start to start to seriously study and move away from Hegel’s own idiosyncratic and ultimately conservative legal-political views. Marx does have this nice quote: “Only the French Revolution completed the transformation of the political classes into social classes, in other words, made the class distinctions of civil society into merely social distinctions, pertaining to private life but meaningless in political life. With that, the separation of political life and civil society was completed.” Mostly for Marx this becomes shooting fish in a barrel, as Hegel had championed primogeniture and ancestral states, implying an inherent political quality to estates and bloodlines Marx found of course irrational.
Another important work in MECW V3 is Marx’s “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”. This has a few of Marx’s more debated quotes on religion: 1. “Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself” and 2. “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” In the full, proper context these are better understood. Personally I found the “opium” quote in that broader paragraph a good one (for what it’s worth, a late philosophy professor once told me that “opium” in that quote is closer to Tylenol than to heroin based on Marx’s time, though I am not sure either metaphor to today’s drugs may be that accurate?) The “root itself” quote made sense for Marx at that particular time, but it definitely does not sound like the “mature” Marx focused on exploitation later in his life and I wonder if he would have agreed with it even a decade later.
Marx also wrote more letters during this time, others published in the later letters-only volumes, but some here are interesting as well. For instance, to Feurerbach, Marx proposed a new journal to contribute to rallying various representatives of progressive democratic and socialist thought in France and Germany, and to become the organ of “a Franco-German scientific alliance”. Invitations were also extended to Engels, Proudhon, Louis Blanc, and many others.
Out of a new journal came “On the Jewish Question”, published in February 1844, which may have avoided a lot of contemporary controversy if Marx had named it something like “Anti-Bauer” and not used/had a word translated to “huckstering.” Of local note, there is a reference here to the Constitution of Pennsylvania (something I no longer consider a “progressive” document!) But coming from William Penn, Marx quotes my state’s constitution: “All men have received from nature the imperceptible right to worship the Almighty according to the dictates of their conscience, and no one can be legally compelled to follow, establish, or support against his will any religion or religious ministry. No human authority can, in any circumstances, intervene in a matter of conscience or control the forces of the soul.” Ultimately I find that the piece wants to solve a “theoretical puzzle” via the political emancipation of Jews, the dissolution of old society, the throwing off of feudal characteristics, unlimited freedom of press and generally fits into the “young Marx.) Not bad! But the section arguing “The Jew is perceptually created by civil society from its own entrails”, and that compares this to of the merchant-North American preachers would have been a much better ending than the more infamous one that the young Marx used instead: the one hoping to “emancipate mankind from Judaism.”
Among Engel’s key passages in this book outside of his economic entry:
- From “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, an early plea for internationalism: “It has always been in some degree surprising to me, ever since I met with English Socialists, to find that most of them are very little acquainted with the social movement going on in different parts of the continent. And yet there are more than half a million of Communists in France, not taking into account the Fourierists, and other less radical Social reformers; there are Communist associations in every part of Switzerland, sending forth missionaries to Italy, Germany, and even Hungary; and German philosophy, after a long and troublesome circuit, has at last settled upon Communism. Thus, the three great and civilised countries of Europe — England, France, and Germany, have all come to the conclusion, that a thorough revolution of social arrangements, based on community of property, has now become an urgent and unavoidable necessity. This result is the more striking, as it was arrived at by each of the above nations independently of the others; a fact, than which there can be no stronger proof, that Communism is not the consequence of the particular position of the English, or any other nation, but that it is a necessary conclusion, which cannot he avoided to be drawn from the premises given in the general facts of modern civilisation. It must, therefore, appear desirable, that the three nations should understand each other”
- In The English Condition, a class and identity-based critique of the English constitutional tradition of trial by ones peers in practice: “The poor man is not tried by his peers, he is without exception tried by his born enemies, for in England the rich and the poor are openly at war with one another. The jury must have certain qualifications, and their nature is evident from the fact that the jury list in Dublin, a city of 250,000 inhabitants, contains only 800 qualified persons. At the most recent Chartist trials at Lancaster, Warwick and Stafford the workers were tried by landlords and tenant farmers, who are mostly Tories, and by manufacturers or merchants, who are mostly Whigs, but in any case they are the enemies of the Chartists and the workers. But that is not all. A so-called impartial jury does not exist. When O’Connell was tried four weeks ago in Dublin, every member of the jury, being a Protestant and Tory, was his enemy.”
- In pieces like “News from Prussia”, “Progress of Communism in Germany, Persecution of the Communists in Switzerland”, “News From France”, “News from St. Petersburg”, “Further Particulars of the Silesian Riots”, and “Beer Riots in Bavaria” (“If the people once know that they can frighten the government out of their [beer] taxing system, they will soon learn that it will be as easy to frighten them as far as regards more serious affairs.”), Engels put his effort where he had argued socialists should go — which is understanding the conditions in different countries at the time.
Next up is Volume 4. This covers a couple well known works in “The Holy Family” and “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”.
