>>Paul Gerdes has a book "Marx Demystifies the Calculus," the English
translation of which was published in the USA. It is also available in
Portuguese.<<
Gerdes is a logician and philosopher whose knowledge of mathematics is either
not much deeper than Marx's was or who, in the interest of justifying Marx's
conception tends to oversimplify and mislead. There are also some historical
inaccuracies. For example, on p. 62 of the English translation of his book,
Gerdes says that "Marx accepted the challenge and won" -- referring to a
contest set by Lagrange in 1784 to clarify the "basic concepts of the
infinitesimal calculus". Marx did not enter this contest.
It would be best to go to the sources. For English readers, there is the
translation from the Russian of C. Aronson & M. Meo of Marx's _The
Mathematical Manuscripts" (London, New Park Publications, Ltd., 1983; the
Russian original was published in 1968 in Moscow by Nauka), edited by
historian and philosopher of mathematics S. A. Yanovskaya. For the serious
historian and philosopher of mathematics wishing to understand and read Marx,
I recommend this, despite the grammatical and syntactical errors of the
translation. This book also contains Yanovskaya's serious "Preface" (also
to be read with some caution due to regrettable flaws in the translators'
knowledge of Russian).
Irving Anellis