It is a widespread view that Marx did not apply dialectics to nature, and that Engels’s writings on this subject are a distortion of his outlook. This paper examines Marx’s discussion of elliptical motion and some other physical phenomena, and shows that he did indeed find contradictions and oppositions in nature, and thus recognised a dialectics of nature. In addition to analysing relevant passages in Marx’s texts, his study of the physics and mathematics of elliptical motion is reviewed and compared (...) with Hegel’s position. Marx’s conception of how dialectical contradictions are resolved is reviewed in order to interpret his claim that the contradiction in elliptical motion is ‘solved’ but not ‘overcome’ by that motion. Textual evidence is presented that Marx regarded ‘real contradictions’ as resolved only by ‘development’, a process in which the conflict between the opposing sides of the contradiction becomes more intense. The consequences of this interpretation for Marx’s analysis of elliptical motion are explored, and some alternative interpretations are discussed. (shrink)

Four women have been conventionally framed as wives and/or mistresses and/or sexual partners in the biographical reception of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as heterosexual men. These women were Jenny Marx, Helene Demuth, Mary Burns, and Lydia Burns. How exactly they appear in the few contemporary texts and rare images that survive is less interesting than the determination of subsequent biographers of the two “great men” to make these women fit a familiar genre, namely intellectual biography. An analysis of Marx–Engels (...) biographies shows how this masculinized genre enforces an incuriosity that makes gendered political partnerships unthinkable and therefore invisible. By contrast, a positive interest in these women, which rethinks what a gendered political partnership is or could be, results in a significantly different view of the two men. As historical figures, they shift from being individualized or paired‐with‐each‐other “great thinkers” to communist/socialist activists working in and through everyday spaces and material practices. Their pamphlets, articles, and books thus appear more as immediate political interventions and less as timeless theorizing or as the raw material for such intellectualizing reconstructions. (shrink)

Liberals and Marxists alike have had a stake in making Marx non?liberal in theory and anti?liberal in practice. My re?reading of his work and life emphasizes the considerable overlaps and continuity between his views and activities and the liberalism of his day and ours. Marx?s critique of liberalism thus becomes subtler and less easily dismissed by liberals, who would do well to confront the violence and class struggle inherent in the success of the liberal project, rather than to erase this (...) in favour of an idealized doctrine and sanitized history. I identify an irony in that Marx politicized reason and reasonableness long before anti?foundational ?post?Marxists? developed their ?political? critique of traditional Marxist conceptions of truth and science. (shrink)