Advances in Humanities Research
Vol. 5, 28 March 2024
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Private Property and Labor: Seed of a New Worldview — A Textual Interpretation based on the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844”
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Abstract
In the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” young Marx addressed a novel issue: whereas traditional political economists regarded private property as an object opposed to the subject, adopting a metaphysical mode of thinking characterized by subject-object opposition, Adam Smith, referred to by Engels as the “Luther” of political economy, for the first time connected private property with the subject, thereby breaking away from its previous characterization as an “objective, external” dimension, implying signs of transcending Feuerbach. However, although Adam Smith and other political economists placed private property within human nature, due to their class limitations, they effectively treated profit-seeking activities as human nature, which is essentially a negation of humanity and diverges from human essence on the level of value. Marx, in critiquing their inherited ideas, not only links labor with private property but also understands labor as genuine, a return to “the essence of humanity,” as free labor rather than alienated labor, thereby laying the groundwork for the establishment of a scientific understanding of practice.
Keywords
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Private Property, Labor, New Worldview
References
1. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2009). Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Vol. 1, pp. 112-114, 168-185, 206). People’s Publishing House.
2. Lüsenbei. (1978). History of Political Economy (Vol. 1, pp. 38, 43, 142). (X. Li, Trans.). Beijing, China: Life · Reading · New Knowledge Joint Publishing Company.
3. Liu, X. (2013). A Reexamination of Marx’s “Paris Manuscripts” (pp. 23, 130). Beijing, China: Renmin University of China Press.
4. Jin, S. (1983). Changes in Marx’s Critique of Classical Political Economy: What Does It Explain? Philosophical Research, (09), 17-23.
5. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (2012). Selected Works of Marx and Engels (Vol. 1, p. 137). People’s Publishing House.
Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- ISBN (Print)
- ISBN (Online)
- Published Date
- 28 March 2024
- Series
- Advances in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7080
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7099
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7080/5/2024042
- Copyright
- 28 March 2024
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited