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Maoist Internationalist Movement

Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx

I am so damnedly held up by mistakes in calculation in the working out of the economic principles that out of despair I intend to master algebra promptly. Arithmetic remains foreign to me. But I am again shooting my way rapidly along the algebraic route. (Karl Marx, quoted in Marx, 1983, p. VIII)

Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx [PDF, 5.10 MB] [multipage TIF, 7.11 MB]

Marx, Karl. (1983). Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx. Clapham, London: New Park Publications Ltd., 1983.

Published 2004 September on MIM's Web site

Preparer's note:

This book contains English translations of some of Karl Marx's German-language writings dealing with mathematics, in particular, differential calculus (http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/differential%20calculus). They were written in 1881, partly published in Russian in 1933, published in German and Russian in 1968, and published again in English in 1983.

Credit is due to the Marxists Internet Archive for apparently being the first to put Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx (Mathematical Manuscripts) on the Internet in some form. The thing is, the version of Mathematical Manuscripts provided by Andy Blunden leaves out footnotes, footnote references, the 1968 Russian-edition preface by S. A. Yanovskaya, the Russian-edition appendices, the Russian-edition notes, letters between Engels and Marx, and additional material included by New Park Publications—in all, more than one hundred pages.

The entire book is provided here in a single, navigable PDF file. [Get Adobe Reader]

The point of this Web page is not to teach people about a certain type of math or its history. The goal of this Web page is to counter the idea that mathematics has no place in revolutionary science. Even after Lenin(2), Stalin and Mao, MIM still comes across people who raise false and subjectivist arguments against MIM's use of statistics. To these critics of MIM, Marxism is simply a set of conclusions and sentiments, and MIM is wrong to apply the Marxist labor theory of value to the study of the real world. If it weren't for these individuals' revisionism and labor-aristocracy demands, we would have to say that they were simply anti-math.

It would be wrong to focus exclusively on statistics. There are faces behind the US$0.30/hr pay rates for children and wimmin making toys in Guangdong, China, while retail cashiers in the united $tates get US$7.50/hr. They are confronted with conditions and relationships that can't be precisely understood in terms of numbers. On the other hand, there is no such thing as the real world without quantity, and math is important for understanding processes that are going on in society. It is not enough to investigate how badly some oppressor-nation, non-exploited workers think they have it (and mistakenly conclude that they are proletarians based on whimsical definitions). We have to understand the different flows that make them parasites.

Although people have proved that rising organic compositions of capital and falling profit rates are associated, that price and value are correlated within countries(3), etc., Marxist economics isn't mainly about predicting what will happen in the short run. Although it certainly has something to say about the bond market, for example, the Marxist labor theory of value isn't meant or used to predict what will happen next week in the bond market. However, mathematical concepts are useful for describing the structure of capitalism, and also for explaining the forms and patterns determined by capitalism and prevailing in the real world. Mathematical Manuscripts shows Marx thinking through some mathematical concepts in order to be able to use them in the first sense, to develop and refine his ideas and theories about political economy. See Matthews(1). And throughout their writings, Marx and Engels frequently refer to, and rely in part on, real-world counts and statistics on prices, trade, strikes, wages, and so on.

Regarding the "additional material" in the back of Mathematical Manuscripts, this writer persynally does not agree with some of the arguments made in the essays added by New Park Publications. But it would be nihilistic to exclude them from the PDF version of Mathematical Manuscripts published here. Right now, this Web pages leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves in the context of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-MIM Thought.

Notes

1. Peter Hans Matthews, 2001 March, "The Dialectics of Differentiation: Marx's Mathematical Manuscripts and their Relation to his Economics," Middlebury, VT, Middlebury College, http://ideas.repec.org/p/mdl/mdlpap/0203.html

2. V. I. Lenin, 1917 January, "Statistics and Sociology," http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/jan/statistics-sociology.htm

3. W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, 2003 February 27, "Correlations between sectoral prices and values not spurious," http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/publications/PAPERS/7324/kliman.pdf