Recent content on Constructive Criticism

 
 
 
 
 
 
 Here is one possibility, the one taken up by this haggadah: our Jewishness can be a
particular, concrete, socially embodied expression of the idea of abolishing social class
which, for convenience, we call communism. 
 From the 2026 Red Haggadah 
 
 This Pesach, I wrote a new haggadah that I thought would be more adequate to the…

 An important principle in the philosophy of dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality. 
 That is, a system which undergoes a significant enough “quantitative change” which eventually experience a “qualitative change”, with the appearance of a discrete or discontinuous state change even though the actual process was continuous. 
 The classic…
Just wanted to write up some solutions to problems in hyperbolic geometry as practice.
Here is one. 
 Proposition. An isometry of the upper half-space model whose only fixed point is $\infty$ has the form $(x, t) \mapsto (Ax + b, t)$ for some $A \in O(n-1), b \in \mathbb{R}^{n-1}$. More generally, any isometry with a single fixed point on the boundary fixes each horosphere setwise, and…
I am a lazy artist. For example, for a recent piece, I wanted a curvy set of train tracks, like this: 
 
 
 
 
 
 But I wanted to be able to see what the whole curve would look like without having to paintstakingly draw each of the little tracks. 
 So, I wrote a little application which would let me draw a stroke on my iPad, and automatically draw a set of train tracks…
I believe techniques from math and science are able to help us produce stronger organizations (if the educational and political barriers can be worked through). 
 If this is true, we should probably be able to come up with at least one concrete example today. Here is a very modest example. 
 A good system for alerting or mobilizing people is a call tree. The person instigating the alert…

 This is a piece I made recently titled In Transit . 
 It depicts paths, which each transition from random motion to a regular spiral motion as the letters along the path grow. 
 It is a generative piece,
meaning it comes from the execution of a computer program I wrote. You can
play with that program here to create similar images. 
Drag to pan, scroll to zoom. 
 I…
Mao wrote 
 
 The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics… The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development. Contradictoriness within…
Recently I have been doing some math again. Mostly exercises for a class I’m auditing on combinatorial limits. 
 One thing I forgot about math is how most of the time spent doing math is spent feeling very frustrated: why can’t I get this problem? I’m an idiot. Come on, get it! Etc. 
 All the while, your brain is working through the problem somewhere on the boundary…
$$\newcommand{\Set}[1]{\\{ #1 \\}}$$ 
 In his book Logics of Worlds , Badiou gives a formal mathematical definition of a “world”, but does not construct a single concrete example. In this note, I give a concrete example in which the objects of the world are materially-embedded stochastic processes (i.e., stateful processes unfolding over time in the universe). 
 This construction has the…
A few more prints I’ve done recently.
Here are some Risograph prints I made in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Apologies for the photos being a bit dim. 
 
 
 
 Posters for a Seeing Red talk.
 
 
 
 
 
 A map to the afterparty.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 For a friend's wedding.
 
 
 
 
 
…
Here is a short piece of music I wrote this afternoon. It ends a bit early but I had to get going. Enjoy .
Happy New Year! 
 There is a well-known cellular-automaton based method for generating images that look
like caves. 
 Each cell is either “empty” or a “wall”.
The rule is: if the immediate 9x9 grid centered on a cell has 5 or more walls, that cell
should be a wall in the next step. Otherwise, it should be empty. 
 If you initialize the grid randomly…

 Tarkovsky’s “Sacrifice” is an incredible film. The film successfully captures a shred of the absolute: the truth of the unending process of living and dying.
A central image of the film – a dead tree over the ocean – captures the idea: the flow of the unitary reality interrupted by the crystallized individual form which necessarily mediates experience of…

 These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 31rd, 2024. You can find an accompanying handout here . 
 
 Today we’re going to be talking about hyperbolic geometry. 
 But before we talk about that, first we have to talk about geometry. Ordinary geometry takes place on an infinite flat plane, like the whiteboard. We call this thing the Euclidean…

 These are my notes from a class at the Berkeley Math Circle on October 23rd, 2024. You can find an accompanying handout here . 
 
 Today we’ll be talking about spies and secret messages and the question of what it is possible to know. 
 A quote from the Soviet mathematician VI Arnold: 
 
 All mathematics is divided into three parts: cryptography (paid for by…
I renamed the blog again. Now it’s called “Reason in Revolt”, which is
a lyric from an English version of the Internationale.
It’s available at reasoninrevolt.net .
All the old URLs still work.
Tonight I went to the Acquired podcast live show. Acquired’s tagline is “Every company has a story: Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.” 
 
 The show opened with a shticky video feed showing the two hosts, Ben and David, backstage. Ben had forgotten to bring the mp3 of the theme…

 
 
 Laputa, from Gulliver's Travels . Home of the hopelessly rational people who 'If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms.'
 
 
 What is computation?
Most would say it has something to do with the internet, with adding up numbers, with AI…

 In the ant community, each worker performs its
proper functions. There may be a separate caste of soldiers. Certain highly specialized individuals perform
the functions of king and queen. If man were to adopt
this community as a pattern, he would live in a fascist
state, in which ideally each individual is conditioned
from birth for his proper occupation: in which…

 The introduction of the cipher 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps 
 — Grothendieck, in a 1982 letter to Ronald Brown 
 
 Computer science is the study of precisely-specified discrete 1 processes, their capabilities and limits. Such processes are…
There is an intellectual movement called “rationality” which, if one has any connection
to the tech world, is difficult to avoid in the Bay Area. Closely related is “effective
altruism”, which is the rationalist philosophy applied to ethics and the question of what
is to be done. 
 From an intellectual perspective, there is nothing very interesting here. It…
Here are some Risograph prints I made in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Apologies for the photos being a bit dim. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This is a riff on a NIMBY slogan.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 This is a tree in Warsaw.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 For the TANC trip to Cuba.
 
 
 
 
…
Bathing is fun 
 Bathing is already a popular pastime in the bay: from Archimedes Banya to Good Hot to the (sadly gone) Essex tub. 
 It’s a good time and people know it! 
 Bathing provides us with a slice of the good life. At its best it is spiritual, sensual, social, and an immense aesthetic pleasure. 
 
 
 
 
 The sauna I designed and had built for me and my…
This is a list of projects I am seeking collaborators on.
Please get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on any of them. Email or text me if you know how, otherwise leave a comment. 
 
 Proletarian user-run saunas throughout the East Bay 
 Modern mathematical foundations of Marxism. This is a project with 2 main goals: (1) distilling Marxism to its logical essentials to…
There is an interesting paper from earlier this month called
“ Software in the natural world: A computational approach to hierarchical emergence ”
by Rosas, Geiger, Luppi, Seth, Polani, Gastapar, and Mediano. 
 They are attempting to formalize the phenomenon of processes which possess their
own logic, despite being “actually” implemented in terms of a more…
I added a page to the site of books I am reading, have read, or want to read.
If you’re interested in reading or discussing any of them with me please get in touch.

 This past Saturday (May 4th) we held the first event in a new
series called “Seeing Red”. I opened the event with a speech describing
the aim of the series. This speech is reproduced below, unfortunately absent all the
ad-libbed comments and jokes I made in person. 
 
 Seeing Red is a new lecture series for building towards a non-denominational small c…

 This Pesach, I helped organize a Seder for lefty Jews.
For this we wrote a haggadah, which focuses on the actual history of
the Jews with an eye toward understanding the phenomenon of Zionism. 
 You can find the whole haggadah here . 
 Below I have reproduced the short history which appears in the passover story section of the haggadah. 
 
 Where did we come from?…
Please let me know if you are interested in reading or discussing any of these books with me. Bold ones I am currently reading. Italic ones I have read but am still interested in discussing. 
 
 The Entropy of Capitalism (Biel) 
 Brecht on Theatre (Brecht) 
 What is Art? (Tolstoy) 
 The Aesthetic Dimension (Marcuse) 
 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 
 Mute Compulsion…
Dialectical materialism is the philosophical foundation of Marxism, and historical materialism is its scientific foundation. Both concepts are thus very important for communists 1 to understand. Their claims are relatively uncontroversial in isolation, but they have radical implications. 
 Dialectical materialism 
 Let’s start with dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism…
Mondragón is a famous complex of cooperatives, primarily based in the Basque country. It has been widely acclaimed for providing stable employment to tens of thousands, a degree of internal democracy, and maintaining growth better than the national average for decades. 
 Mondragón is, so far, sui generis in the capitalist world. For a communist, the key question in evaluating this odd duck is:…
Poetry flows from the fingertips like threads of silk 
Birds have nests and spiders webs 
And humans friendships. 
But webs too. And nests come to think of it. 
 Looking a little closer we see a big blender of some sort. 
 In goes our friends; 
Dead generations; 
Our parents; 
The leaves in a bright cellophane jumble; 
The raindrops on the gardenside window;…
Soren Mau’s ‘Mute Compulsion’ does an excellent job of calling attention to the ways that our environment – physical, social, technological – mutely compels us to act in certain ways. If a communist social order is to be robust, it must take advantage of that fact, and etch its social relations into the environment. 
 One pillar of any communist social order would…
To start, two quotes: 
 
 Everybody knows that the dice are loaded 
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed 
Everybody knows the war is over 
Everybody knows the good guys lost 
Everybody knows the fight was fixed 
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich 
That’s how it goes 
Everybody knows 
 Everybody knows that the boat is leaking 
Everybody…
Several interesting properties of the human mode of history: 
 
 Humanity has the capacity for surplus labor. I.e., in $N$ hours, a group of humans can act on its environment to procure sufficient material resources to sustain the lives of that group for more than $N$ hours. The surplus labor time is radically unconstrained relative to the non-human environment. Its direction is entirely…

 The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. 
– Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto 
 
 
 Communism is the riddle of history solved. 
– Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 
 
 
 Lying in my bed, I hear the clock tick and think of you 
Caught up in circles 
Confusion is nothing new……

 
 
 The cover
 
 
 Announcing a release of an English translation of Marta Harnecker’s Los conceptos fundamentales del materialismo histórico , or The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism in English. This book has a history as a very important part of the education of Marxists in Latin America. 
 This is a project I’ve been working on for some months for…
For many years this blog was called Parametricity.
I am no longer that interested in type theory, so I am renaming the blog to
reflect its new content, which is mostly Marxism. Still it is just the personal
blog of me (Izzy Meckler).
Most of us are familiar with the potential discomfort of passing a person begging on the street. Some stop and give some money or food, some stop to say they don’t have cash, most try to avoid eye-contact and walk past. 
 Such an experience – being confronted with deep suffering and forced to make a choice of if one will help and how – is bound to leave a psychic mark. For…
My words are not mine and yours are not yours 
And neither were Shakespeare’s so don’t worry 
Echos 
Or reverberations 
My organ receiving/transforming/transmitting 
 Who does that beautiful sound belong to? 
Me? 
Was it the string, or the wooden body of the violin? 
Does it belong to Shostakovich? 
Or to Jay Haide? 
Or mother nature who gave him the wood?…
Mute compulsion is a very nice book. So far I’ve read the first few chapters and found it to have one the most accurate and sophisticated description of Marxism I’ve seen written in a single place. It is an understanding of Marxism that many have come to, but only through reading many works. Here it is all in one place. 
 I have not gotten to the main argument of the book yet, but I’m guessing…
Last month, flying over the Atlantic in the throes of an existential crisis brought on by too strong an edible (which I had taken to try to sleep through the flight), I had the following disturbing self-insight, which while stonerish is also true: 
 Much of the communication for socialist and working class organizing in my context occurs on WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp has an emoji react feature,…

 The following is a translation of an article from Caminos ( A Cuban journal of socio-theological thought ). It was written by José María Vigil, Spanish-Nicaraguan liberation-theologian. 
 
 Seeing: The climate catastrophe is approaching, and its cause is human in origin 
 That we are walking toward a climate catastrophe is, in the context of the current ecological and human…
Housing and the Cuban Revolution 
 “In the first three years of the revolution, 1959-61, all measures were taken to disarticulate the capitalist system at its base.” This is how Zuleica Romay Guerra – Director of Afroamerican Studies at Casa de las Américas – began her explanation of the Cuban housing system. It was the first full day of activities for the brigade to…

 This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race” . 
 
 This post gives an example of the way ethnic groups can serve as particular instantiations of historical roles which occur abstractly. 
 Because I am Jewish, I will take the case of Jewishness and antisemitism. From a certain level of abstraction, we can say Jews are not just Jews in their specificity (with the…

 This is a follow-up to the post “Class and Race” . 
 
 There is a common, overly-simplistic argument sometimes put forward by Marxists that “socialism” will necessarily entail the elimination of racism.
This is sort of true in the sense that eventually a socialist process that ends with the construction of communism (the elimination of all durable…

 This post has two follow-up posts: “Will Socialism End Racism?” and
 “Jewishness Abstractly and Concretely” . 
 
 A friend asked me the others if I believe in the Marxist idea of class above all else. I.e., a class struggle to the exclusion of a women’s struggle, struggle against racism, etc. 
 This is an answer to that question. My disagreement…
Per Marx and Engels , every closed social order is doomed to one of two fates: 
 
 Self-annihilation due to its own internal contradictions. 
 A change from within which changes the mode of production and thus the class structure. 
 
 Change in mode of production is not just something we can decide to do arbitrarily. It is a response of the human organism to changing…
Crisis is endemic to capitalism, but in fact it is endemic to all organisms (i.e., patterns of matter apparently being driven through time by a logic other than that of matter itself). 
 This is a fundamental physical principle. The principle is this: every strict subsystem of the universe (given by a state transition logic) eventually decoheres. Let’s call this the breakdown principle .…
On one level, there is no real separation between humanity and the rest of the natural world. We are animals, we interact with and exchange energy with other species, etc.
Actually, even further, on some level there is no separation between anything at all. Everything is just a local variation in the fields that constitute reality. 
 But on a practical level, we help us draw distinctions…