Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts Of 1844

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1. claudiawernerJun 2019
   Also worth reading are Marx's critiques of Basiat and Say in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Marx is even critical of him in the Grundrisse where he contrasts Bastait and Carey, in which he derides both as bourgeois political economists. Far from seeing what is "not seen", they are obsessed with price and external appearances:

   >Bastiat, by contrast, presents fantasy history, his abstractions sometimes in the form of arguments, another time in the form of supposed events, which however have never and nowhere happened, just as a theologian treats sin sometimes as the law of human existence, then at other times as the story of the fall from grace. Hence both are equally unhistorical and anti-historical. But the unhistoric moment in Carey is the contemporary historic principle of North America, while the unhistoric element in Bastiat is a mere reminiscence of the French eighteenth-century manner of generalizing.

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2. cmrdporcupineFeb 2019
   Marx's "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" and "11th Theses on Feuerbach", Spinoza's "Ethics", and Adorno's "Negative Dialectic."
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3. almostgotcaughtOct 2025
   whenever people complain about someone being "merely happy with getting something to work and get it out the door before clocking out" i wonder to myself if i'm dealing with someone that has The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism on their nightstand, or has never read Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, or simply does not understand the significance of these two essays.

   like ... you expect people to actually be committed to "the value of a hard day's work" for its own sake? when owners aren't committed to value of a hard day's worker? and you think that your position is the respectable/wise one? lol

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4. RNCTXOct 2021
   I don't think he'd be surprised at America either.

   He wrote about America at some length, and accurately pointed out that America's ties to Europe would only last as long as there was free land west of the original colonies to take and give to its growing population, after which America would develop a factory working proletariat just as Europe had after the decline of feudalism, and then be far less welcoming of European immigrants as it sought to preserve the wealth the existing residents had built for themselves. In that respect his theory was proven true. Capital, not any sort of continental or feudal allegiance or concern for the future, would be the driving ideology.

   "Money, then, appears as this distorting power both against the individual and against the bonds of society, etc., which claim to be entities in themselves. It transforms fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, master into servant, idiocy into intelligence, and intelligence into idiocy.

   Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and confuses all things, it is the general confounding and confusing of all things – the world upside-down – the confounding and confusing of all natural and human qualities.

   "

   -- Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, "The Power of Money"

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5. jhuniFeb 2013
   Proletarians suffer from the four kinds of alienation Marx referred to in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1) alienation from products (2) alienation from the act of production (3) alienation from ones own life (4) alienation from fellow laborers. The forms of alienations the bourgeoisie have to go through are not nearly as acute as the alienation of the proletariat.

   Perhaps the most important aspect of being as rich as a bourgeoisie is that you have a secure existence. You don't have to worry about finding a job, paying for health care, paying child support, paying rent on time so that you don't have to join the masses of homeless people living in the cold, or any of the other things ordinary people have to worry about. Having a secure existence is a major stress reliever and it makes your life better no question.

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