Young Marx

The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a ''break'' in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.

The debate centers on the reasons for Marx's transition from philosophy to the analysis of modern capitalist society. The controversy arose with the posthumous publication of the works that Marx wrote before 1845 — particularly the ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'' — which had been unavailable to the first generation of Marxist theorists. These writings, first published between 1927 and 1932, provide a philosophical background to the economic, historical and political works that Marx had hitherto been known for. Orthodox Marxism follows a positivist reading that sees Marx as having made a progressive change towards scientific socialism. Marxist humanism, on the other hand, sees continuity between the Hegelian philosophical humanism of the early Marx and the work of the later Marx.

The publication of the "early writings"

The majority of the texts that are classed as belonging to Marx's "early writings" - his writings from the early 1840s - were not published during his lifetime. Some of the most important of these, such as the ''Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right'' and the ''Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844'', were not written for publication. While Marx preserved his study notebooks from this period, he showed little interest in either publishing the unpublished works, or retaining his published works such as '' The Holy Family''. An effort at unearthing Marx's early writings was undertaken by Franz Mehring, who in 1902 published a collection ''Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, und Ferdinand Lassalle'', which contained previously published works of Marx such as ''The Holy Family'' and his articles for the ''Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher''. It was not until 1927 that the early writings began to appear more fully, as part of the ''Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe'' edition. The ''MEGA'' included scholarly versions of the ''Critique'', the ''Manuscripts'' and Marx's '' Notes on James Mill''. However, this project was cancelled shortly after it was begun. Marx's early writings did not become more widely disseminated until many years later, with satisfactory editions of the ''Manuscripts'' appearing in English only in 1956, and in French in 1962.

One reason for the lack of interest from Marx in his earlier writings was their basis in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In his lifetime, Marx was not well-known outside of a small circle until 1867, when the first volume of ''Capital'' was published. By this time, Hegel was seen as long out of date, and no importance was attached to his influence on Marx. Marx was instead viewed as an economist who had set out to prove scientifically the inevitable decline of capitalism. 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. This interest in Darwinism was shared by Friedrich Engels

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