[Marxism] Preface to the first edition of Capital

[Ed George]

[Let me try that again before I give up on computers altogether ...]

What you have to bear in mind here is that Marx makes this comment while
warning the reader of the potential difficulty of his book.

The ‘difficulty’ of science that he refers to is not the
difficulty of investigation (though this too will be difficult for its
own reasons) but that of exposition. How Marx saw the difference between
the two is illustrated by his comment in the Afterward to the Second
German Edition of capital (just before he made his celebrated remark
about Hegel’s dialectic ‘standing on its head’):

‘Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from
that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail,
to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner
connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be
adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the
subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear
as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.’

Why this difference between investigation and exposition? In the
beginning of the Grundrisse Marx makes a similar comment, but, this
time, with more explanatory content:

‘It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete,
[…] thus to begin, in economics, with, e.g., the population
[…]. However, on closer examination this proves false. The
population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of
which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am
not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour,
capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of
labour, prices, etc. For example, capital is nothing without wage
labour, without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with
the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I
would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards
ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever
thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations.