Young Marx

The controversy arose with the posthumous publication of the works that Marx wrote before 1845[2] — particularly the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844[1] — which had been unavailable to earlier generations of Marxists.

[12] 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.

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.

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.

[16] 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.

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.

[19] Herbert Marcuse argued that the Manuscripts demonstrated the philosophical foundations of Marxism, putting "the entire theory of 'scientific socialism' on a new footing".

[25] 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".

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.

"[40] 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.

[39] Mandel argues that in the mature Marx, alienation manifests in various forms: economic, political, and technical, culminating under capitalist 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.

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 (for example by Vladimir Lenin)[44] as derived from three sources: English political economy; French utopian socialism, republicanism and radicalism; and German philosophy.

Louis Althusser, who was a champion of this young–mature dichotomy in his criticisms of Marxist humanism (Praxis School, John Lewis and the like) and existential Marxism, claimed in the 1960s that The German Ideology (written in 1845), in which Marx criticized Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and other Young Hegelians, marked the break with this young Marx.

Furthermore, the Trotskyist Ernest Mandel in his The Place of Marxism in History (1986) also broke Marx's intellectual development into several different stages.

Althusser presented, in his For Marx (1965), a number of other opinions:[45] For Jahn, for example, although they 'still' contain 'a whole series of abstract elements' the 1844 Manuscripts mark 'the birth of scientific socialism'.

Or if he stubbornly insists on his age, let him admit the sins of his maturity, let him recognize that he sacrificed philosophy to economics, ethics to science, man to history.

Let him consent to this or refuse it, his truth, everything that will survive him, everything which helps the men that we are to live and think, is contained in these few Early Works.

So these good critics leave us with but a single choice: we must admit that Capital (and 'mature Marxism' in general) is either an expression of the Young Marx's philosophy, or its betrayal.

[50] Marx should not be read in a teleological perspective, which would be a return to Hegel's idealist philosophy of history, thus he writes: From the Hegelian viewpoint, Early Works are as inevitable and as impossible as the singular object displayed by Jarry: "the skull of the child Voltaire".

[52] Kołakowski further notes that while Marx does not use the term "alienation", the description of commodity fetishism found in the first chapter of Capital is the same as in his earlier works, as is the analogy with religion which he owes to Feuerbach.

Others contended that Althusser's "epistemological break" between The Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and The German Ideology (1845), in which some new concepts are forged, is a bit too abrupt, although almost no one contests the radical shifts.

Though Althusser steadfastly held onto the claim of its existence, he later asserted that the turning point's occurrence around 1845 was not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism and Hegelianism were to be found in Capital.

He went so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and some notes[55] on a book by Adolph Wagner were fully free from humanist ideology.

Furthermore, other important shifts in Marx's thought have been highlighted (e.g. Étienne Balibar), in particular following the failure of the 1848 revolutions, in particular in France with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's December 2, 1851 coup d'état and then after the crush of the 1871 Paris Commune.