“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 operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself.”

K. Marx, Comments on James Mill, 1844.

The question I address is whether Marx’s “real God” is metaphor or science.

Talk presented at the Communist University 2020, organised by the CPGB (UK).

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 equivalent to nature, and therefore under what circumstances we might break through the Turing barrier. The main argument is that deciding our computational equivalence to nature is transcendentally undecidable, and therefore will we never halt on this decision problem. In consequence, the identity of thought and being is a purely “scholastic matter” (Marx’s 2nd thesis on Feuerbach) and we have no rational reason to suppose that any persistent unintelligibility in nature cannot, one day, yield its secrets.

We cannot know we know; and we cannot know we cannot know.

First 43 mins: main talk. 43 mins to 1 hour 17 mins: discussion by participants. Last 16 mins: my response.

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 is nonetheless attractive to many people. I close by pointing out that the “hard problem of consciousness” unconsciously frames subjectivity in terms of a bourgeois owner of private property, and therefore is the hard problem of justifying social inequality in disguise.

35 minutes talk, 40 mins discussion, 10 minutes response.

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-capitalist initiatives that use the blockchain.

30 mins talk followed by 1 hour of discussion.

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 very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labor. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was."

Marx, Capital, Volume 1, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”

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.