Wednesday, September 19, 2007

The problem of terminology: Why are the terms so abstract? Why so few ‘real world’ examples?

By now it should be safe to say that we all know that the abstract terms that Marx uses doesn’t actually mean what the mean but they actually mean something else. Terminology was a great problem when dealing with this text and a possible reason that most likely explains why he wrote the way he did is because he wrote it a long time ago. He wrote it in 1846 which is about 161 years ago and that was probably the way that people spoke or maybe the terms that he uses were what he had on his mind. It would be difficult to use real world examples because over time things change. But that doesn’t really explain much because that is just a guess. Marx could have made things a lot easier so that everyone could understand it with no problem but he didn’t. He could have used simpler words and context. Who was the target audience that Marx was writing to? The way he wrote things only really educated people could understand it. Another possible conclusion that he used abstract terms is so that people would focus more and think about something in particular. So it is kind of like he is putting emphasize on an idea by using a weird word.

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