Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

A set of notebooks written by the young Marx in Paris in 1844 and first published in full in 1932, when they changed how many readers understood him. They begin with excerpts and commentary on wages, profit and rent, drawn from Adam Smith and other economists. The best-known section, on estranged labour, argues that under capitalism workers are alienated in four ways: from the product of their labour, from the activity of labouring, from their 'species-being', the free and creative life that makes them human, and from other people. Private property is presented as the result of alienated labour rather than its cause. Later sections distinguish a crude communism of envy from communism as the positive overcoming of private property, analyse the power of money with help from Shakespeare and Goethe, and close with a critique of Hegel's dialectic and his Phenomenology of Spirit.

It is the main source for Marx's theory of alienation, which speaks to anyone who has felt their work to be meaningless, and it shows the humanist philosophy behind his later economics.