Young Marx
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's intellectual development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
The debate centers on the reasons for Marx's transition from philosophy to the analysis of modern capitalist society. The controversy arose with the posthumous publication of the works that Marx wrote before 1845 — particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — which had been unavailable to earlier generations of Marxists. First published between 1927 and 1932, these writings provide a philosophical background to the economic, historical and political works that Marx had hitherto been known for.
Orthodox Marxism follows a positivist reading that sees Marx as having made a progressive change towards scientific socialism. Marxist humanism, on the other hand, sees continuity between the Hegelian philosophical humanism of the early Marx and the work of the later Marx.
The publication of the "early writings"
The majority of the texts that are classed as belonging to Marx's "early writings" - his writings from the early 1840s - were not published during his lifetime. Some of the most important of these, such as the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, were not written for publication. While Marx preserved his study notebooks from this period, he showed little interest in either publishing the unpublished works, or retaining his published works such as The Holy Family.An effort at unearthing Marx's early writings was undertaken by Franz Mehring, who in 1902 published a collection Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle, which contained previously published works of Marx such as The Holy Family and his articles for the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. It was not until 1927 that the early writings began to appear more fully, as part of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe edition. The MEGA included scholarly versions of the Critique, the Manuscripts and Marx's Notes on James Mill. However, this project was cancelled shortly after it was begun. Marx's early writings did not become more widely disseminated until many years later, with satisfactory editions of the Manuscripts appearing in English only in 1956, and in French in 1962.
One reason for the lack of interest from Marx in his earlier writings was their basis in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his lifetime, Marx was not well-known outside of a small circle until 1867, when the first volume of Capital was published. By this time, Hegel was seen as long out of date, and no importance was attached to his influence on Marx. Marx was instead viewed as an economist who had set out to prove scientifically the inevitable decline of capitalism.
The intellectual development of the Marxists of the Second International such as Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov, Eduard Bernstein and Heinrich Cunow took place in a cultural climate dominated by Darwinism. This interest in Darwinism was shared by Friedrich Engels. In the later years of Marx's life and shortly after Marx's death, Engels published a number of philosophical works: Anti-Duhring, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. These writings were seen to provide a general philosophical theory that was absent in Marx himself. It was primarily through these later works of Engels that the first generation of Marxists were attracted to Marxism. For them, Marxism was an objective and scientific doctrine of the laws of social development - a "scientific socialism" free from any ethical or metaphysical elements.
The factors contributing to a delay of interest in the young Marx were not merely intellectual, but also political. The publication of Marx's early writings arrived against a backdrop of Marxism being increasingly identified with the Soviet Union and an "orthodox" interpretation of Marxist theory that had been codified by the Third International. This version of Marxism struggled to reconcile Marx’s early works with its own ideological framework. The editor of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, David Ryazanov, was forced into internal exile within the Soviet Union, before being executed in the great purges in 1938. Soviet Marxism dismissed Marx's early writings as a theoretical dead end. A conspicuous example of this is the decision by the East German Institute of Marxism-Leninism to exclude the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from its Marx-Engels Werke and publish them in a separate volume.
In other quarters, the early writings were welcomed precisely because they appeared to cast doubt on the authority of Soviet Marxism. Prior to their discovery, the groundwork for an understanding of their importance had been laid by two books published in 1923 - Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy and György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness. Korsch and Lukács emphasized the Hegelian element to Marx, seeming to criticize official Marxism from the more open and critical position of the young Marx.
In 1932, an alternative volume of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts edited by Siegfried Landshut and J-P Mayer appeared. Landshut and Mayer claimed that the Manuscripts revealed the previously hidden thread that ran throughout Marx’s entire output, allowing his later work to be understood properly for the first time. Herbert Marcuse argued that the Manuscripts demonstrated the philosophical foundations of Marxism, putting "the entire theory of 'scientific socialism' on a new footing". Similarly, in the Manuscripts Marshall Berman believed he had discovered "something special": "Marx, but not communism".
The debate over Marx's intellectual continuity
The Young Marx is usually still considered part of humanist "bourgeois" philosophy, which Marx later criticized along with German idealism. Marx viewed social relations as taking precedence over individual consciousness - a product of ideology according to him. Marxist humanists stressed the humanistic philosophical foundations of Marx's thought by focusing on the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In this work, Marx expounds his theory of alienation, which echoes many of the themes of Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.The theory prominent in the Manuscripts is a "return to species-being" - a normative, anthropological theory. Some commentators suggest that the later Marx abandons this idea in favour of a structural description. Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lewis Feuer hold that the change in mode of exposition in Marx's magnum opus Capital corresponds to a change in his ideas. An extreme representative of this position is the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who argues that the young Marx can not be read while presupposing "fully-developed Marxism". Althusser thus poses the question of how one may conceive the transformation of Marx's thought without adopting an idealist perspective. Althusser wishes to avoid a teleological view, which holds that Marx's early writings express the contents of the Mature Marx's theory in a nascent state using Feuerbachian language. For Althusser, this would mark a return to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's spiritual dialectics.
Jean-Yves Calvez, Robert C. Tucker, David McLellan, Iring Fetscher, Shlomo Avineri, István Mészáros and Leszek Kołakowski deny there is any break between the Young Marx and the Old Marx. Siegfried Landshut, J-P Mayer, Heinrich Popitz, and Erich Fromm hold that the theory of the early Marx is richer than the more intellectually restricted theory of the later Marx. Commentators such as Benedetto Croce, Karl Löwith and Sidney Hook argue that the later Marx abandons Hegelianism completely, a view disparaged by György Lukács, Iring Fetscher, Robert C. Tucker and Shlomo Avineri.
Ernest Mandel distinguishes three different positions with respect to the controversy:
Mandel views all of these as erroneous. The first school fails to recognize the significant evolution in Marx's thinking. The second school romanticizes the young Marx and misrepresents the mature Marx's focus on socio-economic analysis. The third school ignores the fact that Marx continued to employ the concept of alienation in his mature works like the Grundrisse.
Mandel's view is that Marx's concept of alienation evolved from a philosophical and anthropological to an historical understanding. Initially, Marx viewed alienation through a philosophical lens influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach, focusing on the estrangement of "species being." Through his critique of political economy, Marx transitioned to an historical conception, grounding alienation in specific social relations, particularly the division of labor and commodity production.
Mandel argues that in the mature Marx, alienation manifests in various forms: economic, political, and technical, culminating under capitalist production. For the mature Marx, alienation is no longer rooted in human nature, but in specific historical conditions, particularly commodity production and private ownership of the means of production. The possibility of overcoming alienation lies in the abolition of these conditions and the establishment of a society based on collective control of production.
Étienne Balibar argues that Marx's works cannot be divided into "economic works", "philosophical works" and "historical works". Marx's philosophy is inextricably linked to his critique of political economy and to his historical interventions in the workers' movement, such as the 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The problematic is also related to Marx's rupture with university and its teachings concerning German idealism and his encounter with the proletariat, leading him to write along with Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto a year before the Revolutions of 1848. Marxism's philosophical roots were commonly explained as derived from three sources: English political economy; French utopian socialism, republicanism and radicalism; and German philosophy.