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It is only against the backdrop of this assumption that we can understand why Marx - in the Preface - compiles a list, which seems to have no internal links. Marx lists Asiatic society (a geographical category), ancient society (an historical category) and feudal society (a structural category) as progressive epochs of economic social formation. It lies outside the purview of this essay to trace Marx's dialectical development of the economic categories of bourgeois society 'beginning from its own presuppositions' to the point at which 'current conditions of production' prove to be 'self-sublating'.

One of the strategies of avoidance in this pretended search for pleasure lies in the mental activity which in the permanent posing of these questions tries to escape from the threat. '61 - again emphasised by Marx with three marginal lines. But who is to say where these questions end, which questions are related, and which are not related, and if the discussion of the related questions does not create still more related questions? The 'declination' expands' and spreads itself over all and sundry, and in this process, thinking becomes an existing contradiction: the various subjects are only the material for the unreachable infinity of continuous thinking itself.

One might say that the touchstone of any economic theory is whether or not it manages to constitute or even to construe this original form as a real, valid unity. Dialectical exposition understands itself as the theoretical comprehension of a process of abstraction which determines the real actions of human beings, and which cannot be reduced to the conceptual achievements of the subjects concerned. This has important consequences for the relation between concept and reality. Marx's explicit reflections on epistemology are as sparse as his comments on the dialectical metryod.