Dark Age Marxism

A talk on Hegel's methodological approach in the Science of Logic; and why "the one true method" of metaphysics must be identical with its content.30 mins talk. 1 hour discussion.

A talk about formal logic and Hegel's critique of it. We begin with Aristotle's syllogistic and its dominance throughout the medieval period; then discuss the transition to modern logic in the late 19th century, specifically Frege's development of predicate logic, which is now canonical. The transition was not just a technical improvement but a fundamental shift in how we understand th...

Guest speaker Nikolaos Chatzarakis, Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, joins the Oxford Communist Correspondence Society to explore the structural evolution of capitalism. Nikos examines the dynamic relationship between the "Law of Accumulation" and the "Falling Rate of Profit," arguing that these economic forces are the primary engines behind the maj...

We dive into the centuries-old controversy of economic value: is it determined by the objective difficulty of bringing goods to market or by the subjective preferences of consumers? The discussion frames this conflict using Adam Smith’s famous water-diamond paradox. We explore the 1870s marginal revolution, where economists like Menger, Jevons, and Walras developed subjective theories based on the...

A wide-ranging conversation among participants in the econophysics Discord server, featuring Ian Wright, Alex Creiner and Leone. The discussion primarily centers on Wright's provocative idea of "capital as a real god," a concept suggesting that capital functions as an emergent control system with its own primitive intentionality, goals, and representations, quasi-independent of human...

“A god abides with us still. And if we wish to see its face we need merely reach into our own pockets.” Sequel to “Marx on Capital as a Real God” that expands on Marx’s comparison of money with Christ. I discuss Christ’s real presence, demon summoning, our collective dark enchantment, and how capitalism reproduces a great sacrificial exchange between a people and its god.

“The essence of money is … the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanized; the relation itself between things, man’s ope...

This talk examines the significance of the theory of computation for the perennial philosophical problem of the identity of thought and being. I give an accessible overview of the history and main results of computability theory, and then discuss the Church-Turing thesis and its generalizations. I then consider our epistemic states in possible worlds where we are, or are not, computationally equiv...

Can materialism explain human consciousness? Not according to an influential argument in the philosophy of mind (the “hard problem of consciousness”). In this talk, I (i) sketch a materialist theory of consciousness, (ii) explain an idealist rejection of the possibility of any such theory, (iii) discuss the philosophical flaws of this rejection, and (iv) explain, in materialist terms, why idealism...

Joshua Dávila’s 2023 book, “Blockchain Radicals: how capitalism ruined crypto and how to fix it” is an important and visionary, yet grounded, book on how blockchains, used correctly, are a tremendous gift to anti-capitalist organizing. Anyone wanting to build working class unity, across time and space, should read it. In this talk and discussion we review some of the embryonic examples of anti-cap...

This is a recording of a talk given on 4th November 2022 in Oxford. I discuss the spooky relationship between Victorian spirit summoning and the “phantom-like objectivity” of value. This is a ghost story, and like all good ghost stories, it’s true. Talk (40 mins) "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a ver...

A 30 mins talk on the history and significance of spirit possession, and why the modern commercial subject is also possessed. Talk given in Oxford on 11 May 2023. Erratum: the first recorded case of spirit possession was from ~4000 BC in Ancient Egypt.

Remarks on the missing theory of semantic reference in economic theory.

Being, Nothing and Becoming in the structure of the primes. Part 2 of 2.

Being, Nothing, and Becoming interpreted in terms of the simplest possible feedback equations. Part 1 of 2.

A popular objection to Marx’s labor theory of value is that human labor alone doesn’t create profits: labor must be mixed with capital and land to produce useful output; and, anyway, machines can replicate many tasks that humans perform — there’s nothing special about human labor. Take a human taxi driver. Replace them with a robot taxi driver (some future version of self-driving cars). There’s no...

At the top of the pyramid is a baleful eye, Capital — a real God, the demiurge of the world — that controls every aspect of our lives. Marx scaled the pyramid and gazed into the depths of the horror. Human cognition against alien cognition. Rationality against irrationality. Did Marx retain his sanity, or did he lose it?

A 40 minutes introduction on the genesis of Marx’s transformation problem.

Short talk that summarises the 1930’s book “The Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution”, followed by brief critical remarks. Useful, I hope, if you’d like to get a high-level summary of its main propositions.

This is a recording of a talk given on 9th June 2022 in Oxford. I discuss the two sides of Newton: the enchanted medieval Christian — believer in occult spirits that move the universe — and the disenchanted early modern scientist — believer in mechanisms, laws and the experimental method. I discuss Newton’s Arianism and his speculations that a Cosmic Christ maintained the laws of nature both in th...

In 1874 the mathematician Georg Cantor published a paper that claimed to prove the existence of an infinite hierarchy of infinities, each more vast than the infinity before it, stretching out forever like some vast alien landscape. Cantor had achieved the seemingly impossible feat of counting beyond infinity. If true, this is astonishing intellectual achievement. However, the existence of higher i...

Start-ups reproduce capitalism by creating new ventures that split people into an owning class (who lay claim on the firm’s residual income) and a working class (who don’t own the firm, and get paid a rental price for their labor). This social relationship is exploitative, in the very precise sense that the owning class – after a tipping point when their initial capital advances (plus any risk pre...

An overview of a dynamic, stochastic, agent-based macroeconomic model that replicates many of the empirical distributions of capitalist economies, and also demonstrates that the ultimate drivers of economic inequality are markets, the wage system and exploitation. 30 talk followed by 15 minutes response to points raised by attendees (not recorded). Accompanying paper: "The social architecture...

This talk, presented to the Oxford Communist Corresponding Society on Jan 26th 2024, examines the relationship between Zeno’s ancient argument of the paradox of the arrow, which seems to demonstrates that motion is logically impossible, and the mathematical calculus, our most successful formal theory of change and motion. I argue that the calculus, when properly interpreted, does indeed solve Zeno...

An exercise in open philosophy: towards an analytic definition of god and gods. I propose a definition of an egregore and then apply it to different cases. We discover, among other mundane facts, that Lovecraft’s Yog-Sothoth really is a god in virtue of the Typhonian Order’s occult practices. ~1 hour of talk followed by ~30 mins discussion.