Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Marx put forth not only a way of thinking about the world but also a specific political and economic program, namely the abolition of private property, as the solution to the problems of modern capitalism. Disagreements over exactly how and when humanity might achieve this condition had been ongoing since Marx first wrote. Marx joined the International Workingmen’s Association (now known as the First International), viewing it as the vehicle for a worldwide workers’ movement, only to have it split between people who called themselves Marxists and favored a dictatorship of the proletariat and anarchists who wanted to dissolve all forms of government above the trade union.

Debates over the legacy of Marxism were at the peak of their intensity during the publication of the Paris Manuscripts in Moscow in 1932. Lenin’s death in 1924 left the Soviet Bolsheviks without a leader, so prominent party members looked to Marx’s writings to validate their claims to leadership. By 1932, Stalin had emerged as the frontrunner, and the publication of the Paris Manuscripts that year signified one of the last major challenges to Stalin’s power. The initial editor, David Ryazanov, was trying to avoid conflict among the Bolsheviks by holding up Marx (along with his frequent collaborator Friedrich Engels) as the true authority, while Stalin was starting to represent himself as an intellectual figure on par with, if not superior to, Marx and Engels. The Paris Manuscripts deplore the impact of industrialization on laborers, who no longer had a meaningful connection to the fruit of their work, yet Stalin was advancing a program of crash industrialization, forcing peasants off their land to work in factories. Although Stalin could hardly ban the work of Marx, he limited the circulation of these manuscripts, and Ryazanov became one of the many thousands to meet their end in the “Great Terror” of 1937-1938, as Stalin purged the ranks of the Communist Party and nearly every institution of the Soviet government.

Stalin’s death in 1953 allowed the Paris Manuscripts to reenter mainstream Marxist discourse in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The volume became the centerpiece in a discussion of whether Marx’s writings should be divided into a “Young Marx,” the philosopher of the Paris Manuscripts concerned with the impact of capitalism on the human soul, and the “Old” or “Mature Marx” of later works like Capital that are more focused on economic policy and the proper implementation of socialism. The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 so thoroughly discredited its brand of communism that even the communist parties still in power have little to say about world revolution or a classless society. Yet in a time when capitalism is in crisis due to the shocks of automation, globalization, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, rooted in a radical vision of human freedom and dignity, offer a powerful critique of capitalism.