Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

[A.R.Amistad]

These are some of my favorite works by Marx, but Althusser for some reasons seems to try to disregard them. Why is this? Are these manuscripts essential to Marxist theory? I think they are, but for some reason the "anti-humanists" want to discredit them.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

[mikelepore]

The 26-year-old Marx had no historical theory and no economic theory. All he had was the idea that humanity is degraded because people put so much energy into seeking money, put a price on everything, and judge other people according to how rich they are.

[S.Artesian]

The 26-year-old Marx had no historical theory and no economic theory. All he had was the idea that humanity is degraded because people put so much energy into seeking money, put a price on everything, and judge other people according to how rich they are.

That's not quite right. The 26 year old Marx was developing his analysis of history and economics after his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right and these essays were essential to that development.

Althusser rejected both the dialectic so evident in these essays, and the 'humanism' - actually social being- that the essays display, so that he, Althusser could posit a mythical rupture between the "young" and the "mature" Marx of Capital.

No such rupture exists in Marx's work, but then again Althusser never actually read much Marx.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

S Artesian:


Althusser rejected both the dialectic so evident in these essays, and the 'humanism' - actually social being- that the essays display, so that he, Althusser could posit a mythical rupture between the "young" and the "mature" Marx of Capital.

And, according to his own words, so did Marx (in Das Kapital) -- or rather, he abandoned the traditional form of the dialectic Hegel inflicted on humanity, happy merely to 'coquette' with a few Hegelian terms-of-art.


No such rupture exists in Marx's work, but then again Althusser never actually read much Marx.

He read it far more carefully than you traditionalists seem to have done.

[mikelepore]

That's not quite right. The 26 year old Marx was developing his analysis of history and economics after his critique of Hegel's philosophy of right and these essays were essential to that development.

Silly semantic distinction. I said he didn't yet "have" the theory. You said, no, he was "developing" it. My time is too valuable to play games with words.

[gilhyle]

I dont think he is wasting your time. The EPM are very interesting but I think it is the point that Marx was developing his ideas. The point is that if you superimpose the kind of theory of history Marx had about a year later on the ideas set out in the EPM, the EPM theoretical framework isnt contradicted but it is made redundant. This is why Althusser is wrong to use a concept of 'rupture' taken from French philosophy of science. There is a radical change - clearly. But it isnt a rupture, its more of the character of an evolution. Unfortunately, some who see that, try to use it to argue that the 'humanist' framework upon which Marx rests in the EPM will do the work which Marx tried to make it do in 1844. However, Marx was involved in some quite convoluted speculations on human nature inthe EPM in order to make it work and it isnt really credible as a doctrine for a class, however much an individual might choose (and good luck to him/her) to try to rely on these kind of ideas.

[S.Artesian]

He read it far more carefully than you traditionalists seem to have done.

I knew, I just knew that despite your protests I had nailed it correctly when I said that you parallel Althusser's "epistemological rupture" between the young Marx and the old Marx.

Now I know that you dear Rosa don't ascribe to epistemology, but you still posit the same old same old Althusserian separation between the "young, humanist, dialectical" Marx, and the "mature, structural," and cranky [carbuncles will do that to you] Marx.

That view is of course hogwash because if you actually study Marx's works, the historical development of his development of history, you find continuity rather than rupture, and the continuity is in the labor process, which is exactly what Marx is coming to grips with in the EPM. There's no waste of time in reading the EPM nor in pointing out the essential developmental role the manuscripts play after the critique of the Philosophy of Right, and the move to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Yeah, coquetting... that's Marx. Contradiction, antagonism, negation, opposite... the frequent application of those terms to capital was Marx just teasing people after he made his "epistemological rupture," or his radical break, which according to you Rosa, took place sometime between the Grundrisse and Vol 1 of Capital despite the fact that his notebooks of his work between those works contain no indication of such a break, not a word of the "new" Marx methodology, despite the fact that Marx says nothing of this anywhere until he mentions his great admiration for Hegel, and his enduring use of dialectic in 1873 in the preface, or afterword, to the 2nd edition of volume 1.

Sure that sounds just like Marx.

As for Althusser.... no, he didn't read much Marx, as he himself admitted.

[BAM]

As for Althusser.... no, he didn't read much Marx, as he himself admitted.

Indeed:


... my philosophical knowledge of texts was rather limited. I was very familiar with Descartes and Malebranche, knew a little Spinoza, nothing about Aristotle, the Sophists and the Stoics, quite a lot about Plato and Pascal, nothing about Kant, a bit about Hegel, and finally a few passages of Marx which I had studied closely. My way of picking up and then really getting to know philosophy was legendary: I used to enjoy saying that it was all done by 'heresay' (the first confused form of knowledge according to Spinoza). I learned from Jacques Martin, who was cleverer than me, by gleaning certain phrases in passing from my friends, and lastly from the seminar papers and essays of my own students. In the end I naturally made it a point of honor, and boasted that 'I learnt by hearsay." This distinguished me quite markedly from all my university friends who were much better informed than me, to arouse astonishment, incredulity, and admiration in other people."

"I had another particular ability. Starting from a simple turn of phrase, I thought I could work out (what an illusion!), if not the specific ideas of an author or a book I had not read, at least their general drift or direction. I obviously had certain intuitive powers as well as a definite ability for seeing connections, or a capacity for establishing theoretical oppositions, which enabled me to reconstruct what I took to be an author's ideas on the basis of the authors to whom he was opposed. I proceeded spontaneously by drawing contrasts and distinctions, subsequently elaborating a theory to support this."

His theory of history as a process without a subject is ridiculous.

[Zanthorus]

And, according to his own words, so did Marx (in Das Kapital) -- or rather, he abandoned the traditional form of the dialectic Hegel inflicted on humanity, happy merely to 'coquette' with a few Hegelian terms-of-art.

Marx broke with Hegel's "logical pantheistic mysticism" as early as the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. In that work he continously berates Hegel for making everything a movement of the Logic instead of starting from the actual empirical world:


In truth, Hegel has done nothing but resolve the constitution of the state into the universal, abstract idea of the organism; but in appearance and in his own opinion he has developed the determinate reality out of the universal Idea. He has made the subject of the idea into a product and predicate of the Idea. He does not develop his thought out of what is objective, but what is objective in accordance with a ready-made thought which has its origin in the abstract sphere of logic. It is not a question of developing the determinate idea of the political constitution, but of giving the political constitution a relation to the abstract Idea, of classifying it as a member of its (the idea’s) life history. This is an obvious mystification.

Indeed in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx tells us that he first began to develop his ideas in the Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right:


The first work which I undertook to dispel the doubts assailing me was a critical re-examination of the Hegelian philosophy of law; the introduction to this work being published in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher issued in Paris in 1844. My inquiry led me to the conclusion that neither legal relations nor political forms could be comprehended whether by themselves or on the basis of a so-called general development of the human mind, but that on the contrary they originate in the material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French thinkers of the eighteenth century, embraces within the term “civil society”; that the anatomy of this civil society, however, has to be sought in political economy.

So according to the theory that Marx did not have his ideas about history etc fully developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the only interpretation we can possibly make of this passage would be that Marx started off by discovering the materialist conception of history and suddenly magically dropped it a year later in the Paris Manuscripts to magically pick it up again in the German Ideology.

Or it could be that the Paris Manuscripts are based on the schema that would be used by Marx in both his "early" and "late" works.

And as for what this schema is it is most certainly not Hegelian as he tells us himself in the manuscript:


Feuerbach both in his Thesen in the Anekdota and, in detail, in the Philosophie der Zukunft has in principle overthrown the old dialectic...

Feuerbach is the only one who has a serious, critical attitude to the Hegelian dialectic and who has made genuine discoveries in this field. He is in fact the true conqueror of the old philosophy.

And what are Feuerbach's chief discoveries? Well according to Feuerbach himself his new Dialectic is not a form of "logic" but about knowledge as a social and collective process which humans undertake:


The single man in isolation possesses in himself the essence of man neither as a moral nor as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community, in the unity of man with man – a unity, however, that rests on the reality of the distinction between “I” and “You”.

Solitude means being finite and limited, community means being free and infinite. For himself alone, man is just man (in the ordinary sense); but man with man – the unity of “I” and “You” – that is God.

The absolute philosopher said, or at least thought of himself – naturally as a thinker and not as a man – “vérité c'est moi,”, in a way analogous to the absolute monarch claiming, “L’État c‘est moi,” or the absolute God claiming, “L’être c’est moi.” The human philosopher, on the other hand, says: Even in thought, even as a philosopher, I am a man in togetherness with men.

The true dialectic is not a monologue of the solitary thinker with himself. It is a dialogue between “I” and “You”.


Marx himself tells us that Feuerbach's "great achievment" consists of the following:


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;

The establishment of true materialism and of real science, by making the social relationship of “man to man” the basic principle of the theory;

His opposing to the negation of the negation, which claims to be the absolute positive, the self-supporting positive, positively based on itself.

The first point that Philosophy is religion rendered into thought and another form of alienation under capitalism is pure Wittgenstein so I can't see why you of all people are trying to posit a distinction between an early "dialectical" Marx and a later unmystical Marx. The second point is exactly what Feuerbach tells us his "dialectic" is all about which means at this point it's safe to assume that Marx is not using "dialectics" in the traditional Hegelian sense.


He read it far more carefully than you traditionalists seem to have done.

Traditionalists? The orthodox view seems to have been that there was a definite rupture between the "early" and "late" Marx, the former being a Feuerbachian humanist and the latter being the cold-nosed dialectical materialist and economist. Noam Chomsky for example:


My impression, for what it is worth, is that the early Marx was very much a figure of the late Enlightenment, and the later Marx was a highly authoritarian activist, and a critical analyst of capitalism, who had little to say about socialist alternatives.

Of course Chomsky is totally correct when he remarks that he is "not enough of a Marx scholar to make an authoritative judgement". Indeed he seems not to have read Marx at all if he thinks that Marx had "little to say about socialist alternatives".


Unfortunately, some who see that, try to use it to argue that the 'humanist' framework upon which Marx rests in the EPM will do the work which Marx tried to make it do in 1844. However, Marx was involved in some quite convoluted speculations on human nature inthe EPM in order to make it work and it isnt really credible as a doctrine for a class, however much an individual might choose (and good luck to him/her) to try to rely on these kind of ideas.

As Artesian notes this "humanist" framework which you decry is also the basis of the Grundrisse which was partly the basis for Kapital so in rejecting it you must also reject a substantial part of Marx's work or at least attempt to crudely remove it from it's original framework into the framework of "dialectical materialism" which Marx himself tells in the Theses on Feuerbach only sees things from the point of view of "civil society".

[A.R.Amistad]

So is it correct to say that Marx maintained his Humanist ideas? I find it hard to believe their was a real "rupture" since the Manifesto was published only a few years later.

[blackwave]

In my estimationm without a humanistic core, Marxism is ultimately pointless.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Zanthorus:


Traditionalists? The orthodox view seems to have been that there was a definite rupture between the "early" and "late" Marx, the former being a Feuerbachian humanist and the latter being the cold-nosed dialectical materialist and economist. Noam Chomsky for example:

Well, don't think Chomsky is at all representative of the traditional view, nor is Althusser, who proposed just such a 'rupture'. The traditional view I was alluding to is that which was pushed by Engels and Lenin, and accepted in whole or in part by the vast majority of Marxists since.

And it is this view that is out of kilter with what Marx himself argued in Das Kapital.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

S Artesian:


I knew, I just knew that despite your protests I had nailed it correctly when I said that you parallel Althusser's "epistemological rupture" between the young Marx and the old Marx.

Not at all; but I do think he read Marx more carefully than you traditionalists. And the fact that I said that no more suggests I agree with anything else Althusser said (which I don't) than it would imply I agreed with, say, Plotinus's philosophy if I argued that he read Plato more carefully than Aristotle.


Now I know that you dear Rosa don't ascribe to epistemology, but you still posit the same old same old Althusserian separation between the "young, humanist, dialectical" Marx, and the "mature, structural," and cranky [carbuncles will do that to you] Marx.

And that is because Marx subscribed to this view, as I have shown. Perhaps you will now argue that Marx was an Althusserian, too?


That view is of course hogwash because if you actually study Marx's works, the historical development of his development of history, you find continuity rather than rupture, and the continuity is in the labor process, which is exactly what Marx is coming to grips with in the EPM. There's no waste of time in reading the EPM nor in pointing out the essential developmental role the manuscripts play after the critique of the Philosophy of Right, and the move to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Well, you keep saying stuff like this, but you have signally failed to support it with a single published source contemporaneous with, or subsequent to Das Kapital.


Yeah, coquetting... that's Marx. Contradiction, antagonism, negation, opposite...

His words, not mine.


the frequent application of those terms to capital was Marx just teasing people after he made his "epistemological rupture," or his radical break, which according to you Rosa, took place sometime between the Grundrisse and Vol 1 of Capital despite the fact that his notebooks of his work between those works contain no indication of such a break, not a word of the "new" Marx methodology, despite the fact that Marx says nothing of this anywhere until he mentions his great admiration for Hegel, and his enduring use of dialectic in 1873 in the preface, or afterword, to the 2nd edition of volume 1.

Since I haven't argued for an 'epistemological rupture' of any sort (nor will I), much of this is mis-directed. You should aim it at any Althusserians you manage to find, not me.

And yes, there is just such an indication -- in Das Kapital itself, where Marx added a summary of 'his method', the 'dialectic method', which contained not one atom of Hegel, no 'contradictions', no 'negation of the negation', no 'unity of opposites', no 'quantity passing over into quality', etc.

You seem to think I made all this up.


Sure that sounds just like Marx.

Except, given what he actually published, not what you would like him to have published, this is indeed what Marx thought.

Unless, of course, you can show otherwise, from a published source.

Oh, wait -- you can't...!:)


As for Althusser.... no, he didn't read much Marx, as he himself admitted.

But, he read what little he did read far more carefully than you traditionalists.

[S.Artesian]

Gil:



But, according to you mystics, evolution takes place in 'leaps', and what else is a 'rupture' but a 'leap'?

Jesus, Rosa, get a grip. Stop it. Not all threads, not all discussions have to be about your personal bete noire. Somebody asked about the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts-- if you don't have something to say about those manuscripts, about their place in the development of Marx's history, and Marx's development of history, then just cede the floor to others who can actually contribute to a comrade's honorable request.

[S.Artesian]

Marx broke with Hegel's "logical pantheistic mysticism" as early as the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right. In that work he continously berates Hegel for making everything a movement of the Logic instead of starting from the actual empirical world...

Indeed in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx tells us that he first began to develop his ideas in the Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of right....



So according to the theory that Marx did not have his ideas about history etc fully developed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts the only interpretation we can possibly make of this passage would be that Marx started off by discovering the materialist conception of history and suddenly magically dropped it a year later in the Paris Manuscripts to magically pick it up again in the German Ideology.

Or it could be that the Paris Manuscripts are based on the schema that would be used by Marx in both his "early" and "late" works...

And as for what this schema is it is most certainly not Hegelian as he tells us himself in the manuscript.....


And what are Feuerbach's chief discoveries? Well according to Feuerbach himself his new Dialectic is not a form of "logic" but about knowledge as a social and collective process which humans undertake:


As Artesian notes this "humanist" framework which you decry is also the basis of the Grundrisse which was partly the basis for Kapital so in rejecting it you must also reject a substantial part of Marx's work or at least attempt to crudely remove it from it's original framework into the framework of "dialectical materialism" which Marx himself tells in the Theses on Feuerbach only sees things from the point of view of "civil society".

I, for one, really appreciate this post from comrade Zanthorus as it provides certain critical insights into the historical development, and continuity of Marx's work.

The value of the EPM is in that Marx is "throwing himself" into the study of society not as a projection of reason but as a material process of humans, a product of their labor, and specifically the alienation, the expropriation, of that labor.

Marx maintains this fundamentally human, fundamentally materialist, fundamentally social-ist analysis throughout all his published and unpublished works.

Marx is not a Hegelian-- no one, at least I haven't, claims he was. He found Hegel inadequate to the task, not of how humanity knows what is existence, but what human existence is; what determines the conditions of human existence.

That does not mean that he simply shit-canned the dialectic, since the dialectic of capital-- where labor exists in antagonism to the conditions of labor, where the relations of labor are concealed in things, and things appear to dictate those relations-- exists independently of thought, even Hegel's.

We certainly can read the EPM and understand why Marx did not publish them, as they form part of his "self-education." But Marx could never have published volume 1 of Capital had he not educated himself through the EPM, or if he had abandoned that education.

PS to Mikelepore: No you did not say, "didn't yet have a ...theory," you said: "The 26-year-old Marx had no historical theory and no economic theory." Big difference... as you clearly indicate the EPM are not worth reading because Marx had NO theory. The value in reading the EPM is that you can read Marx as he develops his theory, and the salient points of that theory that will endure throughout his investigations.

[Leo]

These are some of my favorite works by Marx, but Althusser for some reasons seems to try to disregard them. Why is this? Are these manuscripts essential to Marxist theory?

Althusser being a Stalinist intellectual snob, and the 1844 Manuscripts being one of the most important works of Marx, providing a basis for all the future work he was to develop, I think the answer to your question is obvious enough.

[S.Artesian]

Althusser being a Stalinist intellectual snob, and the 1844 Manuscripts being one of the most important works of Marx, providing a basis for all the future work he was to develop, I think the answer to your question is obvious enough.


There are other factors, if I remember correctly-- no sure thing these days. Althusser was motivated by an opposition to the turn the PCF took to the "humanist" Marx in order to recuperate ground and membership the party lost after the death of Stalin and Khruschev's speeches.

Althusser was basically a conservative, even reactionary, all dressed up in his structuralist pseudo-Marxism, and with no place to go, despite the efforts of some editors at New Left Review to transform him from the sow's ear that he was.

He invented the "epistemological rupture" of Marx in order to avoid coming to grips with a materialist critique of the history, the practice, of the PCF, and the practice of Soviet Marxism from... pick a date-- 1921, 1924, 1927,1933, 1939, 1954.

[Hit The North]

I've trashed some off-topic posts. I hope everyone will continue to develop the discussion around the EPM and not get side-tracked into other issues.

- Bob

[A.R.Amistad]

I haven't come across anything where Marx or Engels repudiate what they posed in the EPM. I think, counter to Althusser, to try to rob Marxism of Humanism is a form of revisionism that generally only benefits authoritarian or reformist perversions of "Marxism."