In the first lecture, Prof. Venktesh Athreya talks about Marx's approach to the  study of society, which starts with the society as a whole. According to  Marx, man's fundamental activity is production, which does not exist in  isolation, but is essentially social production. As historical  development occurs, production relations change to keep up with change,  leading to contradictions with the existing production forces. The  Marxist approach thus emphasises that every society is transitory and  focuses on the use of historically specific analytical categories in the  study of societies. Reading material for this lecture can be downloaded from https://drive.google.com/open?id=12_P4w2_dYfAC2Yv7jCh_KqS19okzDsz2