This chapter is devoted to reconstructing Marx’s first critique of political economy in the Manuscripts of 1844 as a sustained critique of contradiction in capitalist social relations. It begins by showing how traditional humanist readings that oppose capitalist relations to a “human essence” mislocate Marx’s project in a dualistic, normative paradigm and overlook the immanent “contradiction of alienated labor with itself”. It then offers a theoretical-biographical excursus on the Young Hegelian and reformist milieu, in order to clarify how Marx’s debates with contemporaries reshape the question of how contradictions in modern society ought to be diagnosed and criticised. Against attempts to extract from the early texts substantive models of the good life or principles of justice, the chapter argues that Marx comes to repudiate grounding critique in normative theory and instead conceives critique as the task of making social contradictions explicit. It also develops a typology of four senses of “contradiction” in Marx’s writings and reconstructs the “contradiction of alienated labor with itself” in terms of its explanation, genesis, and necessity as a peculiar logic of capitalist social relations of production. Finally, the chapter articulates an implicit negative conception of normativity in the first critique of political economy and shows how Marx’s diagnosis of contradiction undercuts anthropological attempts to provide an external normative standpoint for criticising capitalism.