Marx never published this book, never finished it, and for the last thirty-eight years of his life seems never to have looked at it again. He wrote it in Paris in the spring and summer of 1844, at twenty-six, across three notebooks that break off in mid-sentence, cross out whole passages, and jump from wages to Hegel and back as the reading drove him. It sat in his papers, then in the archives, until the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow printed the German original in 1932, in its Gesamtausgabe — the complete edition — nearly half a century after his death. So the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 are the strangest of the classics: a private workbook that its author abandoned, published by the state that claimed him, and then read by almost everyone except that state as the answer to it. This edition is worth having because it lets you see why a rough draft of 1844 became, in the twentieth century, the most dangerous thing in Marx's name that a bureaucratic regime could be asked to print.
The present text is the Moscow one: first put into English by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1959, in Martin Milligan's translation, and issued here by its successor, Progress Publishers, in a revised edition whose wording is drawn from Volume 3 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. It is a full working edition. It carries Marx's own Preface; the three manuscripts, with the editors' section headings supplied in square brackets and the Roman sheet-numbers of the original leaves reproduced in the margin (set here as ‖I, 1‖ and so on) so the reader can see how fragmentary the thing really is; Engels's 1843 essay Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy as an appendix, the piece that first turned Marx to economics; the notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, numbered here [Note 1] and following; and four indexes. The page-bottom notes are Marx's own, marked with an asterisk, and the editors', marked with a letter and closing "—Ed.". It is a scholarly edition in every respect, and, as so often, its apparatus is where the real argument lies.
What the book does — the thing it does so well that no later work of Marx's replaced it — is describe estranged labour. Marx starts, dutifully, from the categories of the economists, but he keeps asking the question they never ask: what does the wage-relation do to the human being who lives it? His answer is the theory of alienation, and it is stated in sentences of terrible plainness. "The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size," he writes; "the devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things." The labourer puts his life into the object, and the object confronts him as something alien and hostile; the more he produces, the less he is. Marx breaks the estrangement into layers — the worker is estranged from the product of his labour, from the act of labouring, from what Marx calls his species-being (his human nature as a conscious, universal, self-creating being), and, through all of these, from other people. It is the most influential single idea in the book, and it is the reason students who never open Capital have read these pages.
Two further things in the manuscripts have never lost their force. One is the section on money — "Money is the procurer between man's need and the object, between his life and his means of life," Marx writes, and then lets Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare's Timon of Athens say the rest: money is the alienated power of humanity, the visible god that turns loyalty into betrayal and ugliness into beauty because it can buy them. The other is the confrontation with Hegel that closes the third manuscript, where Marx credits Hegel with grasping "the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle" — the insight that a thing develops by producing and overcoming its own opposite — while charging him with making that whole drama happen inside thought rather than in the world. Both passages show the young Marx at full stretch, using philosophy to cut into economics and economics to cut into philosophy.
And yet the honest reader has to say plainly what the book is not. It is not finished, and it is not settled. The framework of "species-being" is borrowed almost whole from Ludwig Feuerbach, and it rests on the idea of a fixed human essence from which man has been separated and to which he will return. Within a year Marx had turned against exactly this. The Theses on Feuerbach of 1845 deny that there is any human essence "inherent in each single individual" and locate human nature instead in the changing ensemble of social relations; the German Ideology of 1845-46 drops the vocabulary of alienation almost entirely. There is a real question, then, about how much of the 1844 language Marx himself would have stood by, and the mature analysis of Capital — the fetishism of commodities, the sale of labour-power, surplus value — is in one sense the theory of alienation done again without the Feuerbachian scaffolding. The manuscripts are a beginning, brilliant and unstable, not a conclusion; to read them as Marx's last word is to freeze him at twenty-six.
Which brings us to the question this edition cannot escape. Was the state that printed it consistent in its use of it? The answer is that it was deeply, revealingly uneasy. These manuscripts surfaced in 1932, at the precise moment when Stalinism was hardening the whole of Marx's thought into a catechism — "dialectical and historical materialism," soon to be codified in the Short Course of 1938. A text about how labour under private property dehumanises the labourer, written by a Marx who had not yet heard of dialectical materialism, was an embarrassment to a regime presiding over forced collectivisation, the camps, and a factory discipline modelled on the American assembly line. The official response was not to suppress it — it could not suppress a canonical Marx text — but to manage it: to file the 1844 Marx as "immature," a not-yet-Marxist stage superseded by the "scientific" Marx of Capital, and so to be honoured and quietly set aside. The Publisher's Note to this very edition performs the manoeuvre in its first sentence, calling the work "the rough draft of Marx's earliest economic study... based on his dialectical-materialist and communist conclusions" — projecting the later doctrine back onto a text that predates it, the better to absorb the humanist Marx into the official one.
The reason for the unease is not hard to find, and it is the sharpest test of consistency in the whole programme. Turn the theory of estranged labour homeward. Under the Soviet system the worker was still estranged from his product — the state took it — still estranged from the act of labour, driven by Taylorism, one-man management and the Stakhanovite speed-up, and still estranged from any control over the process, which a bureaucracy ran in his name. The concept the regime was obliged to print condemned the regime that printed it. Marx had even described the outcome in advance. In the section on communism he distinguishes true communism from what he calls "crude communism," the mere levelling that abolishes private property only to generalise it — where society becomes "a community of labour, and equality of wages paid out by communal capital — by the community as the universal capitalist." A regime that had made itself the universal capitalist, the single employer of a whole society, was holding in its hands the young Marx's exact portrait of its own crude counterfeit of the thing he wanted, which he defined instead as "the positive transcendence of private property... the complete return of man to himself."
So it is no surprise that the manuscripts did their real twentieth-century work outside the Soviet frame, and largely against it. In the West they became the founding text of "Marxist humanism" — Herbert Marcuse wrote on them the year they appeared, Erich Fromm built a book around them, and the New Left read alienation as the key to a world of full shops and empty lives. More pointedly, in the East they became a weapon in the hands of reform communists and dissidents: the Yugoslav Praxis group, the Prague Spring's demand for "socialism with a human face," the Marxists who asked why, if socialism was meant to end alienation, the workers of the workers' states were as alienated as ever. This is the reflexivity the apparatus was built to prevent. The Fourth International had made the same move on firmer ground: Ernest Mandel and George Novack insisted that alienation was not a youthful phase Marx outgrew but a category he deepened — the commodity fetishism of Capital is alienation given its economic anatomy — and that it persisted under bureaucratic rule precisely because commodity production, the wage-form and the division of labour persisted there. On that reading the malaise of "actually existing socialism" was not a betrayal of the young Marx by the old, but the young Marx coming true in the country that had buried him.
None of this is a charge against Marx, and none of it against the revolution. The estrangement Mandel diagnosed in the Soviet Union was the mark of a workers' state deformed by isolation and scarcity and then usurped by a bureaucratic caste — the degeneration Trotsky traced to the failure of the revolution to spread, not to any flaw in the emancipation Marx described. The tragedy is exact: the doctrine that embalmed Lenin and recited "Marxism-Leninism" as a liturgy could print, in millions of copies, a text whose whole subject is the reduction of the human being to a thing, and never once let the category look in the mirror.
What, then, is this rough draft worth now? More than ever, and for the reason it was always read against the grain. The theory of estranged labour speaks directly to a world of precarious and gig work, of lives measured in output, of a consumerism that offers things in place of the human relations it has hollowed out; it remains, for good reason, the most widely read thing Marx wrote. Against the Stalinist picture of a science without a human subject, and against the liberal celebration of the market that succeeded it in the same countries, the young Marx keeps insisting that the point is human emancipation — "the complete return of man to himself" — and that a socialism which changes the owner while leaving the wage, the plan-as-master and the division of labour intact has produced only the community as universal capitalist. That warning was written in 1844, in a notebook the author threw in a drawer. The regime that finally published it proved him right by the way it read him. Read him instead as he meant to be read — as a beginning to be carried forward, not a relic to be catalogued — and the Manuscripts remain what they have always secretly been: the measure of every socialism that forgets it is about people.