Professional Documents
Culture Documents
(1) - Introduction
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know best) “beginning from the population, its distribution, etc.”, and the
sequence of the different chapters, etc.
2. Describe how you might write the same book for the local tourist board.
How would it differ?
3. Describe how you write this book in the form of a treatise on local history.
4. Describe how you might the same book as a sociologist, beginning with a
definition of what kind of city this is, and then successively elaboating on this
idea.
5. Describe how you have come to know this same city in your own life.
Which book would you have been best able to write as a youngster? and
which book would require the best knowledge of this city? Which book would
give a visitor the best understanding of this city
6. What does Marx mean by “Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy
of the ape”?
7. “The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in
which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the
mind. But this is by no means the process by which the concrete itself comes
into being” What is, by constrast then, the way in which the concrete comes
into existence?
8. In reference to money Marx says “To that extent the path of abstract
thought, rising from the simple to the combined, would correspond to the real
historical process”. What did Marx mean here?
9. What does Marx mean by: “The simplest abstraction, then, which modern
economics places at the head of its discussions, and which expresses an
immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society, nevertheless
achieves practical truth as an abstraction only as a category of the most
modern society”?
10. Eventually, when Marx wrote Capital, he started not with these general
categories - production, consumption, distribution, etc., but with the
commodity relation. Why?