clarification -- for which he wrote this early work became obsolete.
Furthermore, Marx was constantly revising his exposition, and he
must have soon realized that the form in which he first presented
his positive views was unfathomable to the working class people he
most wanted to understand them. ⁶

Like The German Ideology, but even more so, the 1844 Manuscripts
is an exercise in self-clarification. In much less space it manages to
cover much more ground. While The German Ideology is essentially
an historical and philosophical work, one cannot classify the 1844
Manuscripts, despite the label that has been attached to it, in the
same way. History, philosophy, economics, psychology, anthro-
pology, ethics, religion and sociology crisscross each other in an
amazingly complex pattern as Marx's intellect ranges across the
whole terrain of what he knows. In this work, Marx provided him-
self with the brave outlines of a new system, but he was surely
aware that this first statement of his views would convince no one
and that few would even comprehend what he was saying.

In explaining why Marx did not publish The German Ideology,
I have also accounted in part for why Marx did not present his
conception of human nature in a more ordered fashion. Human
nature was an important topic when he wanted to put his own house
in order, but he hesitated to give it the same prominence when his
purpose was to explain his views and to convince others. Proletarian
class consciousness could be better affected by emphasizing environ-
mental factors which are open to direct kinds of evidence and which
can be developed in discussion. Whereas talk about human nature, as
Marx recognized, is too often a means of putting an end to discussion.

Moreover, and this is probably as important, in the years im-
mediately following 1844 Marx was engaged in a series of political
and ideological disputes with a number of petty bourgeois and
socialist thinkers whose favorite expressions were 'human nature',
'humanity' and 'man in general'. In combating the 'True Socialists',
Stirner, Feuerbach, Krieg and others, Marx was driven to distinguish
his own theories by the relative absence of terms which were their
main stock in trade and to formulate the thoughts they contained in
another manner.

Yet, despite the fact that anthropology and psychology cease to be

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