Karl Marx: A Biography

(^268) KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
to start from simple theoretical concepts like value and labour and then to
proceed from them to the more complex but observable entities such as
population or classes. The reverse was the characteristic approach of the
seventeenth century; but eighteenth-century thinkers had followed 'the
method of advancing from the abstract to the concrete' - which was
'manifesdy the scientifically correct method'.^10
Marx then took money and labour as examples of the simple, abstract
concepts with which he wished to start his analysis. He claimed that both
these only attained their full complexity in bourgeois society; and thus
only someone thinking in the context of bourgeois society could hope
fully to understand pre-capitalist economics, just as 'the anatomy of the
human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape'.^11 Marx continued: 'It
would thus be impracticable and wrong to arrange the economic categor-
ies in the order in which they were the determining factors in the course
of history. Their order of sequence is rather determined by the relations
which they bear to one another in modern bourgeois society.'^12 He then
oudined in five sections the provisional plan for an extensive work on
Economics, and concluded with a fascinating discussion of an apparent
difficulty in the materialist approach to history: why was Greek art so
much appreciated in the nineteenth century when the socio-economic
background which produced it was so different? Marx produced no direct
answer. The manuscript breaks off by simply posing the following ques-
tion: 'Why should the childhood of human society, where it has obtained
its most beautiful development, not exert an eternal charm as an age that
will never return?'^15
The plan of the proposed book was oudined at the end of the Intro-
duction:

1. The general abstract characterisations that can more or less be applied
   to all types of society.


2. The categories that constitute the internal structure of bourgeois
   society and which serve as a basis for the fundamental classes. Capital,
   wage-labour, landed property. Their relationship to each other. Town
   and country. The three large social classes. The exchange between
   them. Circulation. Credit (private).


3. Synthesis of bourgeois society in the shape of the state. The state
   considered in itself. 'Unproductive' classes. Taxes. Public debt. Public
   credit. Population. Colonies. Emigration.


4. The international relations of production. International division of
   labour. International exchange. Exports and imports. Exchange rates.


5. The world market and crises.^14