Dark Age Marxism

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 infinities is, on the face of it, absurd, for one very simple reason: infinity, by definition, is bigger than anything, and therefore there cannot be anything bigger than it. And we cannot practically count up to infinity. So what’s the use of postulating abstract structures that we cannot possibly construct?

Cantor’s reasoning is highly abstract. Can we trust it? And, even if we can, does it matter? Does it make any practical difference to our lives? Are there material consequences? Perhaps Cantor’s higher infinities identify deep, hidden structures that we’ve yet to fully interact with or notice in our empirical stream of experience? Or perhaps Cantor’s higher infinities are like the medieval proofs for the existence of God? We might grant that Cantor’s argument has some kind of logical necessity, but the premises just don’t connect to the reality we actually live in.

In this talk I give my (personal) conclusion on the status of higher infinities. I point out that, surprisingly, Cantor’s theory does entail some empirical predictions. But currently there’s no evidence to support those predictions (and quite a lot of evidence that suggests material reality prevents them).

But reality has a way of surprising us. We shouldn’t dismiss the importance of inductive creative leaps. So the jury is still out. A materialist attitude also includes the cheerful acceptance of ignorance. Sometimes we simply don’t yet know!

Cantor’s ideas raise questions about what rules of logical reasoning we are willing to accept. So they raise very profound and foundational issues about the identity of thought and being.

The fun part: you too will be learn to count beyond infinity (with the help of this handout: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/infinityhandout.pdf). One of the surprising aspects of Cantor’s proof of higher infinities is its elementary nature. With just a small amount of effort, anyone can understand it.

30 minutes talk.

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 premium) are repaid – steal value created by others. Although not recognized as such, this is institutionalized theft, which, if the venture grows and becomes successful, operates on a global scale. But it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk, I briefly explain how worker-owned co-operatives are jointly owned by their working members, and (ideally) shun equity capital (which cedes ownership of the firm to non workers) and instead raise loan capital (which avoids that).

The first 25 minutes are an introductory talk, and the last 15 minutes respond to points raised in the discussion (not recorded).

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 of capitalism", Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 346, Issues 3–4, 2005, Pages 589-620.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378437104010726

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’s paradox by pointing to the necessity to understand reality as not only composed of what is, but also composed what isn’t (i.e. absence or “negativity”), in the sense that motion (and change in general) is driven by “real contradictions”, or causal structures that form closed-loops, such that (i) a component A represents the non-existence of the state of another component B, and (ii) the causal structure of the loop is such that the state of B becomes that which A represents. In other words, the mathematical calculus is remarkably consistent with the Hegelian theory of change.

First 48 mins: main talk. 48 mins to 1 hour 12 mins: discussion by participants. Last 10 mins: my response.

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.

A summary of Marx’s theory of value presented in Part 1 of Capital, with special attention to (i) his use of Aristotelian concepts of power, substance and form, (ii) how our social practices assign new roles and properties to the people and objects recruited to fulfill them, (iii) why abstract labor is not labor abstracted, but the exercise of abstract power, (iv) how the total labor-power of society is continually allocated to perform concrete tasks that satisfy effective demand (the law of value) via unequal exchange of quanta of abstract labor (commodities) for symbolic representations of quanta of abstract labor (money); in other words, how our collective spending determines the spending of our collective time.

30 mins talk, 1 hour audience discussion, 15 mins closing remarks.