From the formulation of the theory of alienated labor to the establishment of the theory of surplus value, it marked the scientific transformation of Marx’s economic thought. The theory of alienated labor put forward by Marx in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 transcends the alienation theories of Hegel and Feuerbach and profoundly reveals the situation that laborers are increasingly dominated by capital and the products of labor, which occupies an important position in the founding of Marxist political economy. However, the theory of alienated labor had not yet been able to clarify the intrinsic connection between labor and value, and failed to grasp capitalist economic relations in a scientific way in general. From the second half of the 1840s, in the process of critically inheriting Feuerbach’s philosophy and founding historical materialism, Marx’s attitude towards the labor theory of value turned from negation to approval, gradually clarified the object of research in his study of political economy, and began to go deeper into the study of the relationship between capital and wage labor, making a lot of preparations for the establishment of the theory of surplus value at the end of the 1850s. In the Critique of Political Economy( Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858), Marx established the scientific theory of surplus value. The establishment of the theory of surplus value achieved the transcendence of the theory of alienated labor not only in terms of “terminology,” but also in terms of the analysis of the nature of the relationship between capital and wage labor and the roots of their antagonism, in terms of the revelation of the laws of movement of the capitalist mode of production, and especially in terms of providing the theoretical armament and struggle strategies for the working class to resist the exploitation of the capitalists and overthrow the capitalist system.

Editor: Zhong Yao、Zheng Yifan

From:Studies on Marxism.2022.No.2.