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bit of tumblr meta-discourse but as a clarifying note: in broad strokes i want to demonstrate the success of something analogous to the project we can read out of marx, that of finding something likely objectionable about money & market’s social judgments even in the terrain of ideal theory (and thus abstracting even from distributional issues, on which liberal egalitarians generally take positions more radical than those of marxists). that’s not because distributional concerns are less important, it’s because they are analytically addressable through liberal egalitarianism, whereas our project requires that we abandon markets & liberal ideals. though i’m not concerned with interpretative accuracy i don’t think this is properly original—i think the task is one part translation and one part shoring up extant arguments.
like marx i think even if you make this point non-normatively, it will have first blush normative salience to most readers. part of why i think domination is a sneakily wrong thesis is because domination is a thick concept in a slippery kind of way. to claim something is domination is never analytical but also (explicitly, in the anglo-american domination revival) to issue a normative claim. i want to be slightly more careful than that. (mh has a comparable reservation about domination, too)
well at this point i think i have the answer to my question which is that people desire communism for different reasons and that would explain the disparity between lenin and myself. i've spent a lot of time following cordelia and i don't get the impression her and i want it for the same reasons either, to respond to your redirect to her book. but there are some scholars who get at what i like about it. "communists" might ultimately be a more diverse group than implied by the single label
yeah exactly, communism has always been internally contested, especially when you consider that lenin didn't even have access to a lot of marx's unpublished work (almost all of it came out after his death) so when it comes to trying to figure out why there's mismatch between 20th century marxists and what someone such as yourself might like about the young marx, sometimes the answer is simply that they'd never even encountered the young marx before and so never would've had any reason to think through the problems in that way. for that reason, i don't hold the benefit of hindsight or textual access against anyone really. i just take what i think is useful and move on.
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we are the granddaughters of the hindess and hirsts you couldn't burn etc
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we are mere minutes away from february vibes consuming us whole
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Which moral philosophers do you find most personally sympathetic? (As in, whose intuitions are most alike to yours?)
in terms of intuitions it’s gotta be the version of shakyamuni buddha who lives in my head. unfortunately in terms of style i get very turn of the century british moral philosopher with it at times
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wen book
see prev answer (soon ish, done this yr, but not out as soon as some shorter papers)
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I have a question for Evan if that's okay...
I really liked his Twitter post ranking the chapters of Difference and Repetition (there should be chapter rankings like his of every book imo). I was wondering if he had a favorite book about Deleuze or a favorite secondary work on D&R.
Thank you Cordelia, I can't wait for your book.
i asked him & he said 'dan smith's essays obviously'. pretty much what i would've guessed... i'm not a deleuze-knower personally but my favourite deleuzy work i've read recently would be sleights of reason (shout-out jolene for recommending it)
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How open are you about your communism with friends, family, randos, coworkers I don't want people thinking I'm trying to "recruit" them but like yknow
The more the merrier idk I'm trying hard not to embarrass the revolutionary subject
what a good q! i think i am always open about my commitments and what they pragmatically imply, i.e. i don’t lie about what i believe is right and wrong, but i don’t volunteer many of the specific historical-ideological tags of communism etc unless people ask me point blank questions about them. and in part this is because my commitment to these terms really is fairly weak except insofar as they serve me in talking to people who already find themselves communists. if someone asks me if i’m a marxist there’s not really a better answer than ‘not really’ or ‘not exactly’. so ironically i think a good number of my friends and family, certainly the close ones, know that i have it out for markets and money and the like and, amusingly, a significantly smaller number would identify me as a marxist or communist if asked
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now how do i shut off asks
so sorry everyone thinks you are a moralist who thinks capitalism is awesome because i am such a contrarian lol. take this ask as an admission of my guilt for the positions ur anons are dragging u for…
read it and weep fellas ..
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reread this like four times to try to figure out where i sit. most of what i have to say on it is probably under review rn. but as for what my stuff does do, i think you all will hopefully find it helpful on the normativity piece (why communism is answered), brisk on the marxology piece (as on the ramifications for political economy), quiet on the political practice piece. by this all i mean is: i do identify something i think you can’t reform out of without reforming yourself out of markets and money and so on, and i do attribute it to marx. yes it flattens marx; no it isn’t automatically the most salient moral complaint we can raise (i think global distributional concerns are probably more pressing, and reasons why global distributional concerns should press you into communism seem largely contingent & pragmatic, whatever marxists might tell you); and finally achieving it politically is not something i specify, because i don’t know how to write a book on that whose writing as a political act is helpful rather than self-defeating (similarly as overstuffed as it is, history is largely absent, save in the form of conceptual genealogy). as for edwad’s point, attributing it to marx may well be largely spurious, and i will admit that you don’t need marx to get there (so, even if there is a case you could claim he originates it, you could rephrase the whole thing in a purely non marxian idiom, and i attempt to do so). but, i’m not sure there are any such salient points that really require one guy or another. is any of this a problem for marx? well in one sense no, i don’t think i actually work on marx, but my route to offering the normative arguments here & clearing up some of the concepts is in direct opposition to him.
you can't just say something like exploitation is bad without an account of what that is and its normative dimensions. you might think this is all just like, useless theoretical posturing, but the problem is that most of these kinds of critiques can be potentially reformed away or bottom out at some point depending on their framing. which means your problem with the system might not actually have anything to do with the system at all, it might just be a maldistribution of wealth/power or a misrecognition of domination etc which competent social democracy or free markets could fix. this is the kinda stuff that marx is trying to carefully work through so that he doesn't fall into any of these traps because he wants to actually make a specific case about/against capitalism itself. if he fails on that front, that's kinda important as an actual political problem
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no shade, but genuinely curious - if you don't know how to justify or even identify what you dislike about capitalism, what gives You the conviction to keep pressing on with those dislikes?
not sure why this would be shade, this is part of the challenge that *i* am trying to raise because the underlying point of our podcast (as i retrospectively understand it anyway) is to grapple with these exact questions. so these are things i've been thinking about for years (against my will, at cordelia's urging). i think my recent thoughts on the CoPE has shaken the account i've been comfortable with up to now, but it hasn't totally up-ended it. regardless, my point in bringing it up here and on twitter is to sorta think through *this* specific problem of the CoPE out loud with other people, but what i'm finding is basically a lot of kneejerk responses which are either comfortably dogmatic or dismissive anti-intellectualism (because trying to understand the system is detached from the struggle, apparently).
my point is that there are political implications depending on how this shakes out, but it's hard to even say what they are before getting to the bottom of it. so my immediate concerns are with that. the fact that i have to shift gears and explain that being a meaningful anti-capitalist involves an ability to actually make claims about the system is unfortunate, but that isn't because i think we can make a case against the system before understanding it, it's precisely that im pushing back against people trying to do that very thing and im trying to show that you have to put in some other work first, namely trying to understand the system. if you don't understand the system, then you don't even know what you're specifically against (or for!)
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Marx and Mathematics
“Engels knew nothing, Marx at least knew a little bit”
The historian of science Annette Vogt explains how and why the founders of scientific socialism engaged with mathematics
Interview by Nelli Tügel:
originally published in German in ak 688, 13 December 2022
In order to better understand capitalism, Karl Marx taught himself parts of algebra and calculus. Nevertheless, he was not a mathematical genius. The historian of science and mathematician Annette Vogt explains why the editorial history of Marx’s mathematical manuscripts resembles a detective novel, and how he used math to deal with personal crises.
Professor Vogt, is it true that Karl Marx made numerous mathematical errors in Capital?
Annette Vogt: That’s true, there are all kinds of calculation errors. But that’s human. And Marx was also just a human being.
Only a few people know that Marx left behind mathematical manuscripts numbering almost 1000 pages. Why did he engage with mathematics at all?
One reason was that he wanted to predict economic crises; in the case of the first one, he was rather euphoric that capitalism was now collapsing. He then asked himself: are they regular, for example every five or ten years or – as is actually the case – irregular. Marx was friends with the chemist Carl Schorlemmer, who told him that it might be possible with the aid of calculus – more specifically, with differential calculus – to calculate when the next crisis would come. When Marx attended Gymnasium in Germany, differential and integral calculus were not yet part of the curriculum, that was first the case after 1900. So he had no knowledge of it and did what a scientist does…
Pick up a book first?
Exactly. He went to the library and sought out books that he could learn it from. However, as the Dutch-American historian of mathematics Dirk Struik, who was one of the first to write about the manuscripts, accurately put it: for studying capitalism, Marx was in the right country, England; for studying mathematics, he was in the wrong one. He wasn’t familiar with the newest mathematical literature on calculus, because it was all from continental Europe and was not yet available in England. So he studied the textbooks that were available to him. The mathematical manuscripts consisted largely of excerpts that he created on the basis of his readings, and his notes on them. That’s how Marx taught himself differential calculus.
Were there further reasons for his engagement with mathematics?
Yes. A further reason was – and I understand it quite well, as a mathematician – that it helped him through personal crises. We know this from letters to Engels: when one of his children died young, he did arithmetic in order to distract himself. That might sound incredible to people who are afraid of mathematics, but of course this way of keeping busy can help somebody not to grieve all the time.
What other areas of mathematics did Marx devote himself to?
He also did a little bit of algebra. Algebra consists of equations, from the most simple 2+2=4 to abstract equations up to those – think of the Pythagorean theorem – that can be illustrated geometrically.
That simply had to do with the fact that there are equations in economics.
So his interest was largely pragmatic?
There are two interpretations regarding Marx and mathematics. One – the hagiographic one, making him into a pillar saint – is that Marx was such a universal genius, that he was also a mathematical genius. That’s simply wrong. The other one is: he was a scientist, and as such, he appropriated knowledge that he needed via self-study. He also wrote geological excerpt notebooks – but luckily, it never occurs to a geologist to claim that Marx was a great geologist. (laughs)
With regard to the editorial history of the excerpt notebooks, the hagiographical element plays a role, however: those who wanted to publish the mathematical manuscripts were disappointed by their content.
Because they didn’t find in them the genius they were hoping for?
Exactly. However, his notes are nonetheless significant, simply because they show us the areas he was concerned with, and because they help us to understand and reconstruct his thought. However, Marx can be a role model for everyone who is afraid of math: there’s no reason for that, anyone can learn it.
In your entry on the manuscripts in the Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus, you write: “his notes on the history of ‘infintesimal calculus’, that is, of differential and integral calculus, have a charm of their own.” What did he write?
He studied textbooks – for example those of the French mathematicians Lagrange or Cauchy – and attempted to understand what the crux of differential calculus is. One can actually see this quite nicely when looking at its historical development and asking why which thing was done at what time. For example that it started with physics, because people wanted to calculate the speed of something. Well, that’s exactly what Marx did, he chose a historical approach, and asked: why does Lagrange take this step, why does he examine that function, why didn’t somebody else do that – these notes are simply interesting for historians of mathematics. He did that completely correctly, he understood the core of the matter.
What do you know about the period of time in which he concerned himself with that?
There were three phases in which notes were made, each in the British Museum Library. Using the borrowing slips, it was exactly reconstructed when he read which books there, that’s how we know he wasn’t familiar with the most modern literature. He knew French, that helped him to read Lagrange and Cauchy in the original.
To what extend did his concern with mathematics have an influence on Engels’ work?
While Engels was writing Dialectics of Nature, Marx – we know this from letters – had told him a bit about the history of mathematics. I suspect that Engels for that reason also therefore thought that Marx was a talented mathematician, since Engels didn’t know anything about math and Marx at least knew a little bit. Thanks are due to Engels for the fact that the mathematical manuscripts were preserved after Marx’s death. He considered them important. Marx never intended to publish them; they were working material.
Even today, the manuscripts are – despite Engels’ intention – only partially published. Why?
After the victory of the October Revolution, the Marx-Engels-Institut was founded in Moscow, later the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Institut, and charged with the task of publishing a Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the MEGA I. The father of this edition was David Borisovich Ryazanov, who later became, along with many other members of the Institut, a victim of Stalin’s persecution. The project of the MEGA I was interrupted. After 1945, the MEGA II began publication, later the project of MEGA III was begun with the participation of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the International Institute of Social History Amsterdam, and collaborators from Moscow. It is not yet completed, and within the framework of MEGA III, the mathematical manuscripts are also supposed to be published completely.
However, there is a volume with part of the manuscripts: in 1968 a special edition was published, which until today is the basis for all engagement with the manuscripts, including the English and French translations and the – strongly abridged – German edition.
Who was responsible for this edition?
It goes back to work by the mathematician and specialist for logic, Sofia Yanovskaya, and Konstantin Rybnikov, who was a professor of history of mathematics at Lomosonov University in Moscow. However, they “forgot to mention” – in scare quotes – the work of Ernst Kolman, a Czech-Soviet Comintern functionary who lectured and published articles on the mathematical manuscripts at international conferences from 1932 on. In 1968, he distanced himself from Soviet leadership due to the Prague Spring, that’s why he isn’t named in Yanovskaya and Rybnikov’s edition. When I first dealt with this in the 1980s and noticed it, I thought: that’s really unfair.
And it is!
Yes. But here’s the exciting part. I then found out: Kolman himself had deliberately covered up who had been the person commissioned by Riazanov in the 1920s to prepare the mathematical manuscripts for publication in the MEGA I: the mathematician and political author Emil Julius Gumbel. Gumbel was a co-founder of the modern statistics of extreme values, which are used to calculate extreme events, such as the Corona pandemic. Gumble had basically finished editing the manuscripts, at the end of the 1920s he read the galley proofs, but the publication never happened: work on the MEGA fell victim to the repression under Stalin. Gumbel was later driven from Germany by the Nazis; he worked in Paris and Lyon, and later in American exile.
You see, in a certain way it’s tragic: over the decades, almost a hundred years, a few people have already worked on the editing of these mathematical manuscripts, and many sad stories are involved. If I were a writer of crime novels, I’d write a book about it and call it “The Curse of the Manuscripts.”
Annette Vogt has a degree in mathematics and a doctorate in the history of mathematics. From 1994 to 2018, she was a research scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Since 1997 she has taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin, and since 2014 she has been an honorary professor of the economics faculty of the HU. Among other things, she is co-author of a traveling exhibition on the life and work of Emil J. Gumbels.
Nelli Tügel is an editor at ak.
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Don’t have a question, just wanna wish you some happy holidays. Good cheer and all that
thank u friend :) happy holidays to u too!! hope u all are staying warm (or cold if ur in the southern hemisphere). send me an ask if u want a christmas card! more posts to come... and some writing coming out soon...
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name a book you read that felt like it changed your view of the world at the time and then later you realised was absolute garbage
what a fun question!! huh... i don't know if any moved all the way down to being absolute garbage, but there are a couple i find much more annoying than i used to. i think the top two candidates are hume's enquiry & postone's tlsd. both remain solid books in ways (well, really more so enquiry), but i've become more and more annoyed by both in a sort of narcissism-of-small-differences way as i've gotten more comfortable both with epistemology/metaphysics & with marxian political theory. hume's academicism & naturalism; postone's unreflexive normativity, slipshod marx, ungeared treadmill...
(though if u rlly want to ether me i'll freely admit i read the god delusion in primary school bc an older british boy i thought was cute told me how epic it was & loaned it to me... i don't remember being altogether uncritical of it, but i'm pretty sure it made me more strident than usual for like six months to a year.)
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what do you get from hume and what do you think communists can get from hume
I think the headscarf is quite chic personally
well as you might infer hume was very formative in my intellectual development, & i still recommend him insofar as he’s a wonderful writer! i think he motivates epistemology/metaphysics brilliantly, he takes you in the right direction re scepticism (particularly towards causation), & you can also straightforwardly draft him into the sort of expressivist-ish position i’ve sketched on here before.
that said, as for what communists can get from hume? i’m not sure that he is the most sophisticated exponent of any of his positions. which is ultimately a good thing! he thought and wrote in a way that made him easy to take up. but it also means hume studies (phenomenal journal btw) today is going to be more historical than philosophical. i also have some bones to pick with him on apraxia, naturalism & bayle’s dictionary. he’s an academic, i’m a pyrrhonist; he’s a vague conservative; i’m communist. maybe what this means is that hume is best as a stepping-stone on the road towards getting comfortable talking with people doing philosophy again. he certainly was for me! as well as, ofc, great style inspo.
it’s not directly pertinent, but my personal story with hume is a little too funny not to share. i was 13 the first time i cracked the first critique. it felt a little like hitting my head against the wall… i had something like fifty pages of marginal notes on the first ten pages, and was really going in more or less blind. i’m most of the way through the second preface, & i get to kant saying ‘hume was pretty close, but his argument leads us to believe metaphysics is just delusion’. i was like, thank god, i should just go read this hume guy instead. so i put the book down, check out hume’s enquiry, read it satisfiedly, & don’t touch kant again for like four or five years.
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