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Marx completed his philosophy doctorate in 1841, regarded by teachers and peers as one of the most brilliant of the “Young Hegelians.” His project: to extend G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of the dialectic, a philosophy of tension and movement in reality and ideas of that reality.²⁶⁰ For his radical political views, Marx had been forced to leave Germany for Paris in the spring of 1844.²⁶¹ There he started to read the writings of economists, principally Adam Smith.^§AS2.3.2a He also had his first extended meeting with Friedrich Engels,^§AS1.1.3c who had recently written a book on the shocking conditions of life of the working class in industrial England.²⁶²

Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts are yet another of those elusively fragmentary texts that have led bewitching afterlives. Seventy-six pages of handwritten notes, the Manuscripts were first published in German in 1932, and English in 1959. More than a century after they had been written, commentators seized upon them to see Marx afresh: Marx the humanist philosopher rather than Marx the political economist; Marx the philosophical follower of Hegel rather than Marx the social scientist who had unequivocally superseded him; Marx the would-be critic of actually-existing socialism rather than the Marx cast retrospectively as its apologist.²⁶³

In the published versions, four fragmentary manuscripts are presented, one after the other – a linear text. But like Walter Benjamin’s convolutes,^§MS0b the secret to their meaning lies much more in the form of their construction than the text laid out on a page. This is what Margaret Fay concluded after she went to see them for the first time. The Social Democratic Party of Germany had sold the manuscripts to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1938. Banned by the Nazis when they came to power, the party was then in exile and needed the money.

Because of their fragile condition, Margaret Fay was able only to view photocopies when she visited the Institute, but today we can see full colour digital images of the pages, made in 2015.²⁶⁴ Fay noticed that Marx had written across the page, turned to landscape orientation, which he had divided into three columns, and later, as the manuscript progressed, just two. He had hand-sewn the pages so the binding was at the top of the page (the long edge) rather than the side.

Fay came to the conclusion that the Manuscripts were no linear work of writing, as the published versions would lead the reader to think. They were a complex, multidimensional text. They needed to be read multimodally, as image as well as text, horizontally as well as vertically. The sections of text laid out in the columns were juxtaposed, and when seen this way, a series of horizontal connections and contrasts sprang into view. She provided folding instructions to show how the pages should be reconstructed and read, multidimensionally.²⁶⁵ Gary Tedman later turned her instructions into a Flash animation, and created a hypertext version of the Manuscripts in English.²⁶⁶

Fay’s reinterpretation of the meaning of the Manuscripts is as follows. Marx started the core text of the manuscripts in three columns, headed with Smith’s elemental categories of economic life: “Wages of Labor,” “Profit of Capital,” and “Rent of Land.” At first, he was just taking notes, but after a while he started to add thoughts of his own. Juxtaposing the three categories across the columns, he began to see tensions in Smith, contradictions even. After a number of pages, he changes to a two-column format, merging land and capital under the head “Profit of Capital,” leaving the other head, “Wages of Labor.”

Working his way through Smith, Marx created a more fundamental, overarching category for land and capital, “private property.” So, concludes Fay, Marx’s theory of private property and alienated labor arises from his systematic reading of Smith, not Hegel.²⁶⁷

As his notes in the Manuscripts come to an end, Marx begins to draw his own conclusions:

Finally, the distinction between the capitalist and landlord, between the agricultural worker and the industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers … The worker can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world …, [but with private ownership of capital and land,] the sensuous world becomes less and less an object beginning to his labour; … the worker becomes a slave to his object … [T]he more values he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker; … the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave to nature … [I]t also produces him as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. [It] mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind … [T]herefore it tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity … [It] estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside of him, his human essence.²⁶⁸

It may well be that Smith’s three categories have now been transformed into two, but Marx’s conclusions about the baleful effects of modern work are not so different from Smith’s.

Marx signed a contract with a German publisher in 1844 for a book to be entitled ‘‘A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy,” which he never delivered. But he kept coming back to these notes in all of his later works. The fruits of these labors in 1844 did not reach the reading public until the publication of Capital in 1867.

Smith is the hero of pro-market economics. Margaret Fay shows that Marx amends Smith, though in some respects, barely at all. From Smith, Marx takes the distinction between use and exchange value, and the idea that all economic value is a product of human labour, not money or precious metals as the mercantilist economists before him had thought. Marx also concurred with Smith’s view that growing inequality would need to be policed by the state; either that, or what Smith considered to be the context-induced stupidity of workers would be needed to keep them in their place.

To the extent that both Smith and Marx analyze market societies, and in such similar terms, their different conclusions are inconsequential – Smith that market societies are primordial and for better or for worse, unavoidably enduring; Marx that they are historical and changeable.

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²⁵⁹ Margaret Fay, 1980, “The 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx: A Critical Commentary and Interpretation,” Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley; Margaret Fay, Johannes Hengstenberg, and Barbara Stuckey, 1983, “The Influence of Adam Smith on Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” Science and Society 47(2):129–51.

²⁶⁰ G.F.W. Hegel, 1807 [1977], Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

²⁶¹ Marcello Musto, 2009, “Marx in Paris: Manuscripts and Notebooks of 1844,” Science and Society 73(3):386–402.

²⁶² Friedrich Engels, 1845 [1973], The Condition of the Working Class in England: From Personal Observation and Authentic Sources, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

²⁶³ Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, 1965 [2016], Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, translated by B. Brewster and D. Fernbach, London: Verso; György Márkus, 1966 [2014], Marxism and Anthropology: The Concept of “Human Essence” in the Philosophy of Marx, Sydney: Modem-Verlag; Herbert Marcuse, 1941 [1960], Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston, MA: Beacon Press; Mihailo Marković, 1974b, The Contemporary Marx: Essays on Humanist Communism, Nottingham, UK: Spokesman Books; Lucio Colletti, 1969 [1973], Marxism and Hegel, London: Verso; Jean Hyppolite, 1955 [1969], Studies on Marx and Hegel, translated by J. O’Neill, New York: Basic Books.

²⁶⁴ https://search.socialhistory.org/Record/ARCH00860

²⁶⁵ Margaret Fay, 1980, “The 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx: A Critical Commentary and Interpretation,” Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 368–71.

²⁶⁶ Gary Tedman, 2004, “Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts as a Work of Art: A Hypertextual Reinterpretation,” Rethinking Marxism 16(4):427–41; http://gary.tedman.pagesperso-orange.fr/navigate.htm

²⁶⁷ Margaret Fay, 1980, “The 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx: A Critical Commentary and Interpretation,” Ph.D., Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 7, 26; Margaret Fay, Johannes Hengstenberg, and Barbara Stuckey, 1983, “The Influence of Adam Smith on Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” Science and Society 47(2):129–51, p. 145.

²⁶⁸ Karl Marx, 1844 [1975], “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” pp. 279–400 in Marx: Early Writing, edited by Q. Hoare, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, pp. 322, 325, 336, 329.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 271–274. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Margaret Fay Unfolds Karl Marx to Rediscover Adam Smith §AS2.3.2b