Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

1964 International Publishers edition, edited with an introduction by Dirk J. Struik
Editor	David Riazanov
Author	Karl Marx
Translator	Martin Milligan
Country	Berlin, Germany
Language	German
Genre	Marxist theory, Marxist economics
Published	1932
Published in English	1959 (Moscow: Progress Publishers)

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (German: Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844), also known as the Paris Manuscripts^[1] (Pariser Manuskripte) or as the 1844 Manuscripts,^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[3] 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.