Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

This essay begins midsentence on its 40th page, and the first 39 pages have never been found. Capital is the reason that human beings have become alienated from themselves, as they have become capital assets: “[T]he worker produces capital-capital produces him” (121). Capital is alien to the natural aspects of human existence, but because workers are now no different than capital, they become alienated from themselves. Political economy has reduced human beings to the status of a worker, whose only purpose is to keep themselves alive and in suitable condition to work. Wages are a function of what is necessary for the owner to maximize profits. Marx provides the example of English factory owners who saw that workers were receiving public assistance and deducted that exact amount from their wages. Capitalism treats people like commodities and trains them to think of themselves in the same way by dehumanizing them through work. The more miserable the workers, the better off the capitalists.

Marx then turns to private property, considered as both labor and capital. As labor, private property drives workers “into the absolute void” (122) where they essentially cease to function as human beings. As capital, it dissolves all meaningful connections between human beings by measuring value by labor. All forms of economic activity, whether based on land or industry, movable or fixed assets, are being fed into the system of capital, stretching the contradiction between labor and capital to the breaking point.

As industry and urban life have become more powerful in modern society, the industrialist represents themself as modern, efficient, and progressive, helping to nudge society toward a brighter future, depicting their rural opposites as idle, backward overseers wielding arbitrary rule over sullen, ignorant serfs. At the same time, the rural landowner sees themself as the last vestige of a romantic past that is quickly losing ground to rapacious capitalists who have reduced their workers to penury. According to Marx, they are both right, and their mutual accusations confirm that class struggle is ubiquitous. There is one respect in which the industrialist describes themself honestly: They did break the historical ties between worker and land. They transformed the world and shattered old hierarchies in the process, introducing new ideas of culture and civilization that are rapidly spreading throughout the globe, which is itself experiencing an unprecedented degree of interconnection. The transition from agriculture to industry does represent an advance in productivity, but instead of offering a superior quality of life, it comes closer to revealing the true nature of the modern economy. It strips away the romantic myths of agricultural life and reveals the landowner to be a capitalist in training who is limited only because they are working with material that cannot be exploited as thoroughly. The fluidity of capital perfects what the feudal landowner had been trying to do all along and replaces the myth of idyllic country life with a new myth of a relentless drive toward a future in which everyone will be better off, even as it adds every day to the stock of human misery. The essay ends with a sketch of ideas that Marx already covered regarding the opposition of labor and capital and the contradictory nature of capitalism.