Websites on Marxist Mathematical Workss

[heiss93]

Links to Marxist Mathematical Works:
http://trotsky.org/archive/marx/works/1881/mathematical-manuscripts/index.htm
http://www.adventures-in-dialectics.org/Adventures-In-Dialectics/CalculusOfDialectics/CalculusOfDialectics-v2_0.htm
http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1881/mathematical-manuscripts/review.htm
http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/dialectics-mathematics.htm (http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/works/dialectics-mathematics.htm)
http://www.dialectical-physics.org/b01en.htm
http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:H6F_a-a0VgMJ:www.maths.lth.se/matematiklth/personal/mario/talks/madrid-e.pdf+marx+mathematical+manuscripts+pdf&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[Iowa656]

Thanks for them. I did not know Marx was a mathematician. It was an interesting read.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Marx wasn't very good at advanced mathematics, I'm afraid -- he certainly was an amateur, and he failed to keep up-to-date with important developments after (and including) Cauchy's work. Indeed, he relied on books written at or near the end of the previous century.

His attempt to make the calculus consistent with 'dialectics' is lamentably poor, and in no way superior to French mathematicians at the turn of the 19th century (and in many ways much inferior).

On that, see here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2007.htm

Engels, alas, was far worse:

http://marxists.anu.edu.au/history/etol/writers/heijen/works/math.htm

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heiss, thanks for those links, but I have seen them before; Docchi, for example, makes all the usual mistakes, having uncritically appropriated the sub-Aristotelian 'logic' he found in Hegel (albeit, spun around 180 degrees, so that it is 'the right way up' -- if that is possible).

And Andy Blunden should know better, but he has done likewise.

The last link looks the most interesting, but there are too few details to be able to tell if there is anything new in there.

[Hit The North]

Hey, Rosa
His attempt to make the calculus consistent with 'dialectics' is lamentably poor, and in no way superior to French mathematicians at the turn of the 19th century (and in many ways much inferior).

If Marx had dumped the dialectic as you claim, why would he spend time trying to make the calculus consistent with it?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


If Marx had dumped the dialectic as you claim, why would he spend time trying to make the calculus consistent with it?

I think he was still 'coquetting' with these notions. This can be seen from the fact that he chose not to publish these notes.

[Hit The North]

Still coquetting in 1881?

Then Marx was a master coquetter!

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Still coquetting in 1881?

Then Marx was a master coquetter!

Well, if he did so in all editions of Das Kapital, a published work, he is hardly likely to resile from that in unpublished notebooks.

Perhaps you think he always believed that Tremaux, for instance, was a great theorist because he said so in a few letters -- and that we too should recognise that no-mark's genius because of Marx's recommendation?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1866/letters/66_08_07.htm

Not everything in Marx's unpublished writings is gospel you know.

Some ideas he played around with, some he 'coquetted' with, some he simply got wrong.

Even so, his published writings clearly take precedence over notebooks, letters and notes to the milkman.

[Hit The North]

Rosa:
Well, if he did so in all editions of Das Kapital, a published work, he is hardly likely to resile from that in unpublished notebooks.

So you think coquetting - that is, non-seriously employing - the jargon of the dialectic became characteristic of Marx's method in the last few decades of his life?


Not everything in Marx's unpublished writings is gospel you know. Never said it was. I asked why, if he said goodbye to the dialectic in 1867, as you allege, he was still coquetting with it in 1881?

Perhaps you think he had little better to do with his time, than to work on reconciling the calculus with a dialectic he didn't even believe in?

Seems a bit obsessive-compulsive, not to mention futile. Don't you think?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


So you think coquetting - that is, non-seriously employing - the jargon of the dialectic became characteristic of Marx's method in the last few decades of his life?

Well, that's what he says in Das Kapital.


I asked why, if he said goodbye to the dialectic in 1867, as you allege, he was still coquetting with it in 1881?

He perhaps enjoyed taking the piss out of it for as long as I have -- what am I? His psychiatrist?


Perhaps you think he had little better to do with his time, than to work on reconciling the calculus with a dialectic he didn't even believe in?

It was serious problem in mathematics that Marx was trying to get to grips with (he seems not to have known it had been solved by Weierstrass, circa 1860), just as in Das Kapital he was trying to understand capitalism, a far more important problem

If he 'coquetted' with Hegel's jargon in the latter, why not the former?


Seems a bit obsessive-compulsive, not to mention futile. Don't you think?

Would you say the same of Das Kapital?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Weierstrass

[Hit The North]

Would you say the same of Das Kapital?

No, but then I don't agree with your thesis on Capital. Moreover, the mathematical manuscripts indicate that, contrary to your thesis, Marx continued to take the dialectic seriously.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


No, but then I don't agree with your thesis on Capital. Moreover, the mathematical manuscripts indicate that, contrary to your thesis, Marx continued to take the dialectic seriously.

This suggests you either believe that he 'coquetted' with Hegelian jargon in his most important published work, but took it seriously in notebooks, or that he 'coquetted' with it in neither.

The second option is inconsistent with what he himself tells us; the first makes Marx look like an idiot.

[Hit The North]

On the contrary I take Marx at his word, that he "coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him" [Hegel]. You interpret this as meaning he abandoned the dialectical method he adapted from Hegel, I do not.

It is your depiction of Marx as a thinker who abandoned the dialectic sometime prior to writing Capital, but then over a decade later is still pursuing proofs to its end, in, as you yourself called it, "attempt[ing] to make the calculus consistent with 'dialectics'", which makes Marx out to look like an idiot.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


On the contrary I take Marx at his word, that he "coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him" [Hegel]. You interpret this as meaning he abandoned the dialectical method he adapted from Hegel, I do not.

Once more, we need not speculate, for in the Preface to Das Kapital, Marx added a summary of what he considered to be the 'dialectic method', and 'his method', in which there is no trace of Hegel.

In that case, his 'dialectic' method bears no resemblance to the one you have uncritically swallowed, but more closely resembles the classical form of the dialectic.


It is your depiction of Marx as a thinker who abandoned the dialectic sometime prior to writing Capital, but then over a decade later is still pursuing proofs to its end, in, as you yourself called it, "attempt[ing] to make the calculus consistent with 'dialectics'", which makes Marx out to look like an idiot.

Indeed, he was attempting to make the calculus consistent with this classical 'dialectic method', in which there is no trace of Hegel. [I personally don't think it can be made consistent with the classical 'dialectic method', but that is a different story.]

And any Hegelian jargon used --, well, we already know he was merely 'coquetting' with it, since he told us.

You keep ignoring what he himself, not me, said.

[Hit The North]

Classical dialectic method?

What's that?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Classical dialectic method?

What's that?

You have been told several times. If you can't be bothered to read my replies on previous occasions, I do not see why I should indulge your self-inflicted ignorance yet again.

[Hit The North]

I was asking so that other readers of this thread could be provide with a succinct definition of what you mean. If you can't be bothered, just say so.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


I was asking so that other readers of this thread could be provide with a succinct definition of what you mean. If you can't be bothered, just say so.

What's the point if you couldn't be bothered to read the last explanation? Who's going to waste time on you?