ABSTRACT
In the introductory chapter to his Grundrisse (1857: Ch. 1), Marx struggles with the difficulty of picking a theoretical starting point. The choice of categories, he points out, is complicated by considerations of abstraction and specificity, as well by questions of historical progression. The capitalist order, like any other social order, enfolds its preceding histories. Each of its categories, Marx observes, embodies not only contemporaneous relations with other categories, but also deep lineages to a past from which it emerged and which it negates.
