Nick Perzacki’s Reviews > The Marx-Engels Reader > Status Update

Estranged Labour is one of my favorite early Marx writings - it’s fascinating to read the groundwork for what he’d develop into Capital but in such distinctly philosophical terms.

“Though private property appears to be the source, the cause of alienated labour, it is really its consequence, just as the gods in the beginning are not the cause but the effect of man’s intellectual confusion”

Intro to Critique of Hegel sets up why 1840s German society is absolutely cooked in practical life compared to the rest of modernizing Europe despite having maintained pace with its theory, and why the only real possibility of emancipation in Germany is through the proletariat, defined by artificially produced poverty, whose development is actively dissolving said cooked social order.

Started the 1844 manuscripts

Onto the intro to his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right… and I never feel like more of a big dumb dumb than when Marx is talking about Hegel.

Some might read On the Jewish Question as anti-Semitic; it seemed more to me to use the contemporary anti-Semitic framework to demonstrate the contradictions present in society. If Judaism is greed, and greed is anti-Christian/anti-social, then how has it become the basis of civil society? If the goal is the emancipation from greed/money, it’s not just Jewish people but all of society which must emancipate itself.

The rights of man vs the rights of the citizen; “political life declares itself to be only a means, whose end is the life of civil society”, but in practice “the right to liberty ceases to be a right as soon as it comes into conflict with political life”

“The perfected Christian state is… the democratic state”, as it’s “succeeded in expressing in a human & secular form, in its political reality, the human basis of which Christianity is the transcendental expression”; “owing to a deficiency in the general nature of the state, [it] counts religion as one of its prerequisites,” so “the imperfection even of perfected politics is revealed in religion”

Currently on On the Jewish Question:
“It is by no means sufficient to ask: who should emancipate? who should be emancipated? The critic should ask a third question: what kind of emancipation is involved?”
The US has the fullest political emancipation, yet religion is alive and well - “the existence of religion is not at all opposed to the perfection of the state”

Early Marx is so funny because he’ll just be spitting straight facts on stuff that won’t even really be clear to the rest of the socialist world for years.