Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, also known as the Paris Manuscripts or the 1844 Manuscripts, are a series of notes written between April and August 1844 by Karl Marx. They were compiled and published posthumously in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. They were first published in their original German in Berlin, and there followed a republication in the Soviet Union in 1933, also in German. The Manuscripts provide a critique of classical political economy grounded in the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach. The work is best known for its articulation of Marx's argument that the conditions of modern industrial societies result in the estrangement (or alienation) of wage-workers from their own products, from their own work, and in turn from themselves and from each other. Marx argues that workers are forced by the capitalist productive process to work solely to satisfy their basic needs. As such, they merely exist as commodities in a constant state of drudgery, evaluated solely by their monetary value, with capital assuming the status of a good in and of itself. 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. 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. Context The Manuscripts were composed during the summer of 1844, when Marx was 25 or 26 years old. Marx was at this time resident in Paris, then seen as the center of socialist thought. Several members of the philosophical milieu that he then belonged to, the Young Hegelians, had moved to Paris in the previous year to establish a journal, the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. Marx himself had taken up residence in 38 Rue Vaneau, in the Left Bank of the city, in October 1843. In Paris, he came into contact with German revolutionary artisans and secret meetings of French proletarian societies. It was in this period that Marx made the acquaintance of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre Leroux and most importantly, Friedrich Engels.