KARL MARX

92 KARL MARX! A BIOGRAPHY
intended to do a history of the Convention; 'he always wants to write on
what he has read last, yet continues to read incessantly, making fresh
excerpts'. 117 If Marx wrote anything substantial on Hegel's politics or the
Convention, it has not survived. During July and August, however, Marx
had a period of peace and quiet that he put to good use. On i May their
first child was born - a girl, called Jenny after her mother. The baby was
very sickly and Jenny took her away to Trier for two months to show her
to the family there and obtain the advice of her old doctor. While his wife
and baby were away Marx made voluminous notes on classical economics,
communism and Hegel. Known as the 'Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts' or '1844 Manuscripts', these documents (when fully published
in 1932) were hailed by some as his most important single piece
of work. Four of the manuscripts which were to form the basis of this
critique of political economy have survived, though in an incomplete
form. The first - twenty-seven pages long - consists largely of excerpts
from classical economists on wages, profit and rent, followed by Marx's
own reflections on alienated labour. The second is a four-page fragment
on the relationship of capital to labour. The third is forty-five pages long
and comprises a discussion on private property, labour and communism;
a critique of Hegel's dialectic; a section on production and the division
of labour; and a short section on money. The fourth manuscript, four
pages long, is a summary of the final chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology.
The manuscripts as a whole were the first of a series of drafts for a
major work, part of which, much revised, appeared in 1867 as Capital. In
a preface sketched out for this work Marx explained why he could not
fulfil the promise (made in the Deutsch-Franzosische Jarhbiicher) to publish
a critique of Hegel's philosophy of law:
While I was working on the manuscript for publication it became clear
that it was quite inappropriate to mix criticism directed purely against
speculation with that of other and different matters, and that this
mixture was an obstacle to the development of my line of thought and
to its intelligibility. Moreover, the condensation of such rich and varied
subjects into a single work would have permitted only a very aphorisitic
treatment; and furthermore such an aphorisitic presentation would have
created the appearance of an arbitrary systematization. 118
He therefore proposed to deal with the various subjects - among them
law, morals, politics - in separate 'booklets', beginning with political
economy and ending with a general treatise showing the interrelationship
between the subjects, and criticising the speculative treatment of the
material. In this project for a lifetime's work, Marx never got beyond
the first stage: Capital and its predecessors.