NOTES
1.These manuscripts were never published in Marx's lifetime. They
were first made available to the reading public in Russian in the
Arkhiv K. Marksa i F. Engelska (Moscow, 1927). The German original
of the 1844 manuscripts was first published in 1932 by David Riazanov,
when he included them in Volume 3. section 1, of the Marx-Engels
Gesamtausgabe (MEGA. Berlin, 1932). Complete editions of the
first three manuscripts are now available in English in T.B. Bottomore,
Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York. 1964). pp.61-219. and
Dirk J. Struik, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
(New York, 1964), pp. 63-l93. In this paper all references to Marx's
1844 manuscripts are taken from Bottomore's edition, which I find
the more readable, though Struik's edition is important because
it also carries the text of Engels' first attempt to apply the dialectical
method to English political economy, Outlines of a Critique of
Political Economy. pp. 197-226. In my text (Marx--) indicates
the page number in Bottomore's edition.
2. An exhaustive study of the philosophical origins and development
of Marx's theory of alienation. and of the secondary literature
that it has generated, is presented by lstvan Meszaros, Marx's
Theory of Alienation (New York, 1969). Me'szaros states (p.
11): "The number of books and articles written about or referring
to the Manuscripts of 1844 is countless. They are unquestionably
the most talked about philosophical work in this country.
3. I have been working from photocopies prepared by the Institute,
supplemented by information about the original notebook. currently
being prepared by Jurgen Rojahn. one of the directors of the Institute,
for a forthcoming Moscow edition of Marx's early writings. [The
Soviet scholar N.I. Lapin reinterpreted the originals; see Der
Junge Marx, Berlin. 1974.]
4. There is no available English translation, to the best of my
knowledge, of the fourth manuscript. German publications are MEGA
1/3 pp. 592-596; Siegfried Landshut's Karl Marx: Die Fruhschriften
(Stuttgart, 1953), pp 309-316; and H.J. Lieber and P. Furth, Karl
Marx: Fruhe Schriften, Erster Band (Stuttgart, 1962), pp 958-964.
It contains extensive excerpts, almost word-for-word from the final
chapter "Absolute Knowledge" of Hegel's Phenomenology
of Mind (New York, 1967), pp. 78-808.
5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth
of Nations, originally published in 1776. All references to
Smith are taken from the Modern Library Edition (New York, 1937)
and will be indicated in the text as (Smith --).
6. Cf.: 'In every society the price of every commodity finally resolves
itself into some one or other, or all of those three parts; and
in every improved society, all the three enter more or less, as
component parts, into the price of the far greater part of commodities.
"In the price of corn, for example, one part pays the rent
of the landlord, another pays the wages of maintenance of the labourers
or labouring cattle employed in producing it, and the third pays
the profit of the farmer. These three parts seem either immediately
or ultimately to make up the whole price of corn . . . the whole
price still resolves itself either immediately or ultimately into
the same three parts of rent, labour, and profit" (Smith 50).
7. To the best of my knowledge. it has been published only once,
in the 1927 edition of the Marx/Engels Historische-Kritische
Gesantausgabe (MEGA, Berlin 1932), pp. 457-492. Marx's
references in the Grundrisse (translated by Martin Nicolaus
[Harmondsworth 1973]) to his notebooks of l842-44 (see, for example,
p. 613, fn. 33) are evidence that these notebooks remained in his
possession throughout his life, and that he regularly consulted
them in his later work on political economy.
8. Karl Marx, Capital. Vol. I (New York, 1967), pp. t~2O.
9. I have not seen this bibliography published in any edition of
the 1844 manuscripts. Only seven of the items listed are quoted
in Marx's 1844 notebooks. 11 are recorded in his reading notes taken
during the three years from 1843 to 1846. It seems likely therefore
that this list represents Marx's agenda for future study, which
would follow up the issues raised in his 1844 manuscripts.
10. On the last two pages the numbers are not clearly visible because
the left-hand corner is low torn.
11. After countless efforts to produce a lucid explanation of the
pagination of Marx's notebooks, I have finally been convinced that
a simple demonstration is worth a thousand words. I have therefore
appended a step-by-step guide for interested readers to compile
their own facsimile [the Appendix to this article]. This includes
a schematic diagram of the pages of the original manuscript, which
summarizes the evidence for my claim of the original existence of
two separate parts, but which is likely to confuse readers who do
not attempt the 'do-it-yourself' exercise.
12. In the case of "Profit of Capital," this is an oversimplification.
Marx in fact uses three synonyms: i) Profit des Kapitals; ii) Kapitalgewinn
(pp- III, V-XI); and iii) Gewinn des Kapitals (pp. IV. XII). He
also uses on a later page (XIV) a fourth synonym, (iv) Gewinn der
Kapitolien.
13. cf.: Smith 270: ". . the price of every commodity necessarily
resolves itself into… these three parts: every part of it which
goes neither to rent nor to wages, being necessarily profit to somebody.
"Since this is the case… with regard to every particular
commodity, taken separately; it must he so with regard to all the
commodities which compose the whole annual produce of the land and
labour of every country, taken complexly." See also Marx's
opening sentence of Capital. Vol. I (Op. cit.), p.35: "The
wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities'
its unit being a single commodity."
14. Cf.: Smith 248: "The whole annual produce of the land and
labour of every country…naturally divides itself... and constitutes
a revenue to three different orders of people; to those who live
by rent, to those who live by wages, andd to those who live by profit.
These are the three great original and constituent orders of every
civilized society, from whose revenue that of every other order
is ultimately derived."
15. Marx himself, in his own life-time, had to correct the false
impression that he was the first to analyze the class structure
of contemporary society: see his letter to Weydemeyer, March 5,
1852 (MEW, Band 28, pp. 510-l2), quoted in Werner Blumenberg, Portrait
of Marx (New York. 1972), pp. 76-7: "1 do not deserve credit
for having discovered either the existence of the classes in modern
society, or the struggle between them. Long before me . . .bourgeois
economists had shown the economic anatomy of the classes."
16. Page xxvi is an exception. "Rent of Land" appears
in the center column, and "Profit of Capital" (which replaces
a crossed-out heading "Private Property") appears on the
right. "Wages," as usual, appears on the left.
17. I.e., pages I-XVI. The division of the notebook into core and
outer pages is not mentioned in any edition that I have seen.
18. These chapters are rarely discussed in the secondary literature
and some editions of the 1844 Manuscripts omit them; for example,
S. Landshut (op. cit.), pp. 225-316 and Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept
of Man (New York, 1961), pp. 90-196.
19. H.J. Lieber and P. Furth. Karl Marx: Fruhe Schriften
(op. cit.), p.510, fn. 12.
20. T.B. Bottomore in his introduction states (Marx xvii): "On
page XXII of the manuscript. however, Marx began to write on a different
subject, ignoring the division of the pages into three columns;
this portion of the manuscript was given the title 'Alienated labour'
by the editors of the .MEGA."
In the first line of the quotation I have changed Bottomore's XII--an
obvious misprint--to xxii. Cf. Struik (op. cit.). p. 229 and Marx-Engels
Werke: Erganzungband, Part 1 (Berlin, 1973), p.674, note 113
(which is the source for both Bottomore and Struik).
21. Cf.: Marx's comments on "Method of Political Economy."
in the Introduction to the Grundrisse. and his distinction in Capital.
Vol.1 (op. cit.), p. 19, between the method of inquiry and the method
of presentation: "Of course the method of presentation must
differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate
the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development,
to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done
can the actual movement be adequately described."
22. My explanation [See Chapter IV of the dissertation] is based
on my own study of Hegel's method in The Phenomenology of Mind
(op. cit.) and The Philosophy of Right (trans. T.M. Knox
[New York, 1967]), and on Marx's method in his 1843 Critique
of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (ed. J. O'MaIley [Cambridge,
1971]) and in his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
(op. cit.) where he examines not only the Wealth of Nations
but also Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel's own account
of the dialectical method in The Logic of Hegel (trans. from
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences by Wm. Wallace
[London, 1874]) is highly thought-provoking and mind-expanding,
but it is presented at such a level of abstraction that it is not
very clear how one sets about applying it. This too, is a problem
with most of the secondary literature on the dialectical method
of Hegel and Marx. Nevertheless, it is worth reading Herbert Marcuse's
Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory
(Boston, 1960), especially chapters 3-5, and the first chapter of
Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971)
to get some idea of the philosophical premises underpinning the
dialectical method, and of the conceptual vocabulary of this method.
23. For Hegel. the major representative of the 'Level of Understanding'
was Immanuel Kant (see Habermas op. cit. pp.7-24), but he also meant
he whole tradition of positivist science, including the science
of political economy. See his Philosophy of Right (Op. cit.).
pp. l26-7. "Political economy ... is one of the sciences which
have arisen out of the conditions of the modern world. Its development
affords the interesting spectacle (as in Smith, Say, and Ricardo)
of thought working upon the endless mass of details which confront
it at the outset and extracting therefrom the simple principle of
the thing, the Understanding effective in the thing and directing
it."
24. My use of s/he, her/his, etc.. in this essay is intended to
avoid the fallacy of misrepresenting the human species as an undifferentiated
male entity. I shall also use s/he in this essay to refer to members
of the working class, since a large part of the workforce in Marx's
time, and already in Smith's time, were women. I have been less
conscientious about the capital and land-owning classes, since the
members of these classes who exercised the rights of the ownership
of the means of production were rarely female.
25. Hegel, Science of Logic (trans. A.V. Miller [London,
1969)), pp.830, 840. "Concrete" (from the Latin concresco)
literally means "grown together," in opposition to "abstract"
(abstraho), "drawn apart."
26. Cf. Hegel's critique of conventional logic, ibid., p.52: "~..
determinations are accepted in their unmoved fixity and are brought
only into an external relation with each other.... Consequently
everything rests on an external difference, on mere comparison and
becomes a completely analytical procedure and mechanical [begrifflos]
calculation." See also Hegel, Science of Logic (op. cit. ),
pp. 834-5, where he criticizes the "Level of Understanding"
as a mode of thinking "in which the contradictories are held
asunder in juxtaposition and temporal succession and so come before
consciousness without reciprocal contact" (emphasis Hegel's).
The dialectic, in contrast (The Logic of Hegel. op. cit., pp.126,
129), "is . . . the life and soul of scientific progress, the
dynamic which alone gives an immanent connexion and necessity to
the subject-matter of science. . . . [It] apprehends the unity of
the categories in their opposition. It marks or seizes the affirmation,
which is latent in their disintegration and transition-state."
27. In his Philosophy of History (New York, 1956), pp. 5~5,
Hegel defines the principle of Development as 1) "a real capacity
for change, and that for the better -- an impulse of perfectibility":
and 2) "a latent germ of being -- a capacity or potentiality
striving to realize itself." The important implication of the
second point is that development is not the result of external changes,
but the unfolding of "an internal unchangeable principle; a
simple essence -- whose existence, i.e., as a germ, is primarily
simple -- but which subsequently develops a variety of parts, that
become involved with other objects. and consequently live through
a continuous process of changes." Aristotle was the first to
insist that every existent object must be understood as a double
being: 1) what it actually is and 2) what it is potentially; and
that the analysis of the changeability of objects must start from
this premise. See Aristotelis .Metaphysica (Oxford, 1960),
pp. 242-252. Cf. also Mao Tse-tung's observation that no matter
how long you apply heat to a stone, you will never produce a chicken,
because stones, unlike eggs (though they do look alike) have no
potential to produce chickens.
28. Cf. The Logic of Hegel (op. cit. ), p.128: "We are
aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible and ultimate,
is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we
mean by that Dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly
other than what it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate
or natural being. and to turn suddenly into its opposite. . . All
things. we say, that is, the finite world as such, meet their doom;
and in saying so, we have a perception that Dialectic is the universal
and irresistible power, before which nothing can stay, however secure
and stable it may deem itself."
29. Nowhere in Smith's very extensive index to his five volumes,
initially compiled by Smith himself, and supplemented by later editors,
is there any entry for "private property" or "ownership."
Margaret Fay
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The Hypertext Manuscripts of Karl Marx, Paris 1844
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