Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts: Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Overview

Composed as a series of notes on political economy and philosophy, the manuscripts probe the lived experience of modern workers and the structures that produce their misery. They connect classical economics to a broader humanist vision, arguing that capitalism organizes labor in ways that estrange people from themselves, from others, and from nature. The result is an analysis that ties economic categories to the deformation of human capacities, and sketches a future where social relations are reorganized to restore genuinely human life.

Estranged Labor

The core argument treats wage labor under private property as alienation in four intertwined senses. The worker is alienated from the product, which confronts them as a hostile, independent object; from the act of production, experienced as external compulsion rather than free self-expression; from their species-being, the human capacity to engage in conscious, creative, social activity; and from other people, since competition and property relations pit human against human. Labor becomes a means of mere survival instead of an end in which the worker sees their powers objectified and recognized.

Private Property and Money

Private property is not simply the cause but also the effect of alienated labor. Once labor is estranged, its products accumulate as property in the hands of others, reinforcing the domination of dead labor over living activity. Money intensifies the process by becoming the universal mediator: it turns qualities into quantities, renders human powers commensurable, and appears as the power to obtain any object or gratification. In money, human and social capacities take on an independent, fetishized form that rules their creators.

Human Nature and Species-Being

Against views that reduce humans to self-interest or animal need, the manuscripts portray people as sensuous, practical, and social beings whose essence is realized in free, conscious, cooperative production and richly developed needs. True wealth is not mere accumulation but the unfolding of human powers and relations. Nature is not a mere resource but the body of human life, to be appropriated in a way that recognizes mutual dependence. Alienation mutilates needs into greed and utility into domination, narrowing life to survival and exchange.

Critique of Political Economy and Hegel

Classical economists are praised for analytic clarity yet criticized for treating historically specific relations as natural and eternal. Categories like wage, profit, and rent are read as crystallizations of estrangement that obscure their social genesis. The manuscripts also turn Hegel upside down: rather than Spirit externalizing itself and returning to itself, the starting point is living, sensuous human activity. Philosophy must be grounded in practical life, where reconciliation is achievable only by transforming material relations, not by speculative resolution.

Communism and Emancipation

Communism is presented as the positive transcendence of private property and alienated labor, not merely their negation. A "crude" communism that levels down, treats individuals as interchangeable, or makes women into communal property reproduces dehumanization. The genuine alternative is humanist and naturalist: association based on free, cooperative production; the abolition of the opposition between labor and enjoyment; and the cultivation of expanded, shared capacities. Emancipation is the recovery of the human world as the product and habitat of freely developing individuals.

Significance

The manuscripts knit together economics, anthropology, and critique into a portrait of capitalism as organized estrangement and a vision of society grounded in realized human powers. By linking material relations to the formation of needs, desires, and recognition, they prefigure a standard for judging social orders: whether they enable people to see themselves in their world and one another.