Karl Marx: A Biography

9

280 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

explorers have been few and even they have only penetrated the periphery.

However, some things stand out at first glance.

Firstly, there is in both thought and style a continuity with the 1844

Manuscripts most noticeable in the influence of Hegel on both writings.

The concepts of alienation, objectification, appropriation, man's dialectical

relationship to nature and his generic or social nature all recur in the

Grundrisse. Early in these 1858 manuscripts Marx offered the following

comments on the economic ideas of his day, comments entirely remi-

niscent of his remarks on the 'reification' of money in 1844 : 'The econo-

mists themselves say that men accord to the object (money) a trust that

they would not accord to each other as persons.... Money can only

possess a social property because individuals have alienated their own

social relationships by embodying them in a thing.'^19 Or later, and more

generally:

But if capital appears as the product of labour, the product of labour

also appears as capital - no more as a simple product, not as exchange-

able goods, but as capital; objectified labour becomes mastery, has com-

mand over living labour. It appears equally to be the result of labour,

that its product appears as alien property, an independent mode of

existence opposed to living labour, an equally autonomous value; that

the product of labour, objectified labour, has acquired its own soul from

living labour and has established itself opposite living labour as an alien

force. Considered from the standpoint of labour, labour thus appears to

be active in the production process in such a way that it seems to reject

its realisation in objective contradictions as alien reality, and that it puts

itself in the position of an unsubstantial labour capacity endowed only

with needs against this reality which is estranged from it and which

belongs, not to it, but to others; that it establishes its own reality not

as an entity of its own, but merely as an entity for others, and thus

also as a mere entity of others, or other entity, against itself.^20

In this respect, the most striking passage of the Grundrisse is the draft
plan for Marx's projected 'Economics' which is couched in language that
might have come straight out of Hegel's Logic.^21
Yet, there is also a striking difference. In 1844 Marx had read some
classical economists but had not yet integrated this knowledge into his
critique of Hegel. As a result, the '184 4 Manuscripts' (otherwise known
as the 'Paris Manuscripts') fall into two separate halves as illustrated by
the tide given them by their first editors: the 'Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts'. By 1857-5 8 Marx had assimilated both Ricardo and Hegel
(there are, interestingly, no references to Feuerbach in the Grundrisse),
and he was in a position to make his own synthesis. In Lassalle's words,
he was 'a Hegel turned economist, a Ricardo turned socialist'.^22 The