Introduction

These manuscripts are notes written in Paris by the twenty-six-year-old Marx. Never published in his lifetime, they first appeared in full in 1932, caused a sensation and changed the understanding of Marx. Here for the first time he joins the critique of political economy with philosophy and sets out his famous theory of 'alienated labour': under capitalism the product the worker makes does not belong to him but confronts him as an alien power; his labour is not his free activity of life but a mere means of subsistence; he is thus alienated from his species-being and from other men. In his work the worker 'does not affirm himself but denies himself'. From this Marx imagines a society in which human beings can develop fully and realise their essence freely. The manuscripts also include a critique of Hegel's dialectic. They are the key to Marx's humanism.