Karl Marx at Margate (1866)
Originally published by the Journal of the History of Ideas blog.
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On September 17, 2024, Princeton University Press published a new translation of Volume 1 of Karl Marx’s Capital. Contributing editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas blog Zac Endter and Jonas Knatz spoke with Paul Reitter, the translator, and Paul North, the editor of the new translation. Paul Reitter is Professor of German at the Ohio State University and publishes on German-Jewish culture and the history of higher education. Paul North is professor of German at Yale University, where he writes on Critical Theory, literature, and intellectual European history.
Zac Endter and Jonas Knatz: In the foreword to Ben Fowkes’s 1976 translation of Capital Volume 1, the Belgian economist Ernst Mandel provided a vivid description of the context that demanded a reengagement with Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Rejecting all Keynesian promises of ever-lasting prosperity and refuting all the diagnoses of the working class’s integration into the capitalist system, Mandel announced that “capitalism’s heyday is over” (12). The examples Mandel used to illustrate the “sharpening contradiction of the system [that] were as inevitable as its impetuous growth” place Fowkes’s translation firmly in the context of the students and workers’ protests of the 1960s: the protests against the war in Vietnam, the strikes in Western Europe, and the rejection of bourgeois values among the young generations. A retranslation of Marx was, for Mandel, seemingly the best way to tip a teetering economic system over the edge. In contrast, your introductions to the new translation make rather muted references to contemporary politics. What sparked your interest in retranslating Marx?
Paul Reitter: Mandel was writing at a curious time in the history of Marx’s reception. Yes, there were anti-war protests and strikes in Western Europe, and no doubt Mandel himself believed that capitalism was teetering on the edge of collapse, but how big and robust was the readership that would have agreed with him? The postwar capitalist order in the West had survived the unrest of the 1960s, and in its responses to the energy and inflation crises of the mid-1970s, you can see harbingers of a neoliberal turn. Furthermore, I would not call that moment a particularly rich one for Marx studies in the Anglophone world. I think it is telling that there are hardly any early discussions of Fowkes’s translation—it says something about the status of translation, but probably more about where Capital stood. So even though, at the time, a third of the world’s population lived in societies that called themselves Marxist, Mandel felt a need to make a bold case for the book’s relevance, which is what he is doing with the political contextualization you describe. Since the financial collapse of 2008, the discussion of Marx’s relevance has been so widespread and energetic that we did not feel the same need. And, keep in mind, Mandel was an economist, and economists are in the business of predicting; that is not something we have done, at least not publicly—we are Germanists, after all. But we are Germanists with an orientation toward critical theory and intellectual history, and, of course, we think that our interest in undertaking this project was influenced by political factors, including ones we are not so aware of. On the level of conscious motivation, the growing discontent with and suspicion of basic axioms about “the market” were certainly sources of excitement. It felt like the right time to produce a new edition of what we think is still the most comprehensive and powerful critique of market fundamentalism.
ZE/JK: Your translation marks the first time that the second German edition (1872) of Capital’s first volume, the last one edited and approved by Marx himself, has been rendered into English. The previous two English translations were based on the third (1883) and fourth (1890) German editions, respectively. In the appendix, you list changes made between each edition, counting among these the French translation of Capital on which Marx worked from 1872 through 1875, as well as an afterword by William Clare Roberts on “The French Reconstruction of Capital.” Why did you choose to translate the second edition and why is the French translation from 1872–1875 so important to you?
PR: There is actually another English translation, Eden and Cedar Paul’s, which appeared in 1928 and uses the fourth German edition as its source text. The Pauls wanted mainly to surpass the Moore-Aveling edition with respect to readability, a goal that did not sit too well with David Riazanov, who was a leading figure in Marx studies at the time. He wrote a very negative review from which the Pauls’ translation never recovered: their edition has long been out of print. Now, to answer your question, we do not regard the 1883 and 1890 editions of Capital as impure Engels-ized versions of the text, but we also do not see the changes Engels made as essential. For that reason, and because there was not an English translation based on the 1872 edition, we decided to go with the 1872 edition—why not give English-language readers access to the crucial text that they had lacked? We hope someone translates the first edition (1867) one of these days, at least for comparison. Only the first chapter of that edition has been rendered into English, even though it plays a crucial role in some very influential readings of the next, including the so-called “new reading” of Capital (which you mention below).
The first French translation is this tantalizing thing for us. Marx put a lot of himself into revising Joseph Roy’s translation and indicated that in some places, he revised the text itself as he revised the translation. Witness his claim that the French edition, the last edition of Capital whose publication he oversaw, had its own “scientific value,” and also his lists of passages that should be translated from the French for future editions, including German ones. But Marx also suggested that the French edition has simplifying tendencies, and for various reasons, his lists of French passages to be translated for future editions are hard to act on. As committed as he was to carrying out Marx’s directions, Engels left out many items on Marx’s lists from the third and fourth editions. Furthermore, of the passages that scholars single out as examples of places where the French edition exhibits something like an independent scientific value, very few are on Marx’s lists. And with some of the crucial passages, it is not clear whether Marx was revising, i.e., expressing how his thought had evolved since the publication of the second German edition, or translating freely, as he tended to do. It is also not clear whether these passages come from Marx or Roy since we do not have the manuscript of the translation by Roy that Marx revised. You can see why someone in our position would find the first Le Capital deeply intriguing.
ZE/JK: Fowkes’s translation was already the third—thank you for the correction—attempt to translate the first volume of Capital. The first attempt was by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling in 1887. Even though Fowkes acknowledged that Friedrich Engels’s substantial help in editing this first translation made it an “authoritative presentation of Marx’s thought in English,” he considered a new English edition in 1976 warranted: the English used in the 1887 translation had become outmoded and research on Marx had progressed to such a degree that readers were ready to stomach more complex translations of Marx’s philosophical concepts and literary maneuvers. In your introductions, you cite similar reasons for your retranslation, emphasizing the importance of Marx’s use of language and neologisms in defamiliarizing the reader with capitalism’s seemingly banal and quotidian processes. Where did you find Fowkes’s translation wanting, and which aspects of Marx’s language did you want to emphasize in your translation?
PR: As we stress in our front matter, we respect Fowkes’s translation. In fact, at the risk of sounding a little glib, you could say that we respect it because it is respectful. Some translators go pretty far in the direction of saying what they want to say, never mind what is in the source text. Fowkes clearly took his responsibility to the source text seriously. In other words, reading his translation, you have the sense that it is trying to convey what is in the German text. And the approach he takes has some real advantages. What is his approach? There is a lot of formal equivalence in his translation. When there is an English word that looks like, or lines up etymologically with, the word Marx uses, Fowkes tends to select it. So, if Marx has “vegetieren,” Fowkes will have “vegetate,” and if Marx has “Hintergrund,” Fowkes will have “background” (“hinter” means “back” or “behind,” and “Grund” means “ground,” among other things). Similarly, Fowkes translates most nouns with nouns while preserving Marx’s sentence structure (i.e., the order of the clauses) as much as he can. This strategy allows you to experience aspects of the source text that are not as apparent in the Moore-Aveling translation or mine.
But, of course, Fowkes’s strategy has its downsides, too. The English word that most closely resembles the word Marx employs, or that lines up best with his word etymologically, often is not the best semantic match. And if one of your goals is to preserve the “vivid” character of the language of the source text, to use Fowkes’s own term, strict noun-to-noun translation is probably not the best way to go. Abstract nouns sit more heavily in English than in German, so the language of your translation will not move in a way that generally corresponds to the way Marx’s German does, and Marx’s abrupt and often very funny changes of register will work less well—they will tend to feel lurchy rather than refreshing or mischievous. On the other hand, Fowkes borrows a lot more from Moore-Aveling than he lets on (in his translator’s preface), and, as a result, there are moments of quite free translation in his rendering and some issues regarding stylistic integration.
The priorities of the new translation include (broadly) matching the stylistic mobility of Marx’s prose and preserving his humor (both things have multiple functions for his critique), while also rendering Marx’s concepts in a consistently careful and thoughtful way. For example, if you look at how the other translations translate Marx’s term “sachlich,” which he employs as a conceptual category, you will see that their preferred renderings, “material” and “physical,” sometimes do not make logical sense; such as when Fowkes has Marx speaking, in the fetish character section of the first chapter, of how the equality among instances of human labor takes on the “physical form” of labor products’ equal “Werthgegenständlichkeit.” Since “Werthgegenständlichkeit” is something purely social, it is hard to see how its form would be physical.
ZE/JK: You place your interest in Marx’s literary style within the context of a broader “philological turn” in the reading of Capital that gained prominence and vitality in the 1990s. You also point to the gradual publication of the second Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, the new German critical editions of Marx and Engels’s work, as one clear inciting factor. The doublings and reciprocal actions of the capitalist system require a language that allows for their identification as such rather than their flattening or “solution” within the text itself. This also seems to challenge the common (mis)understanding of Capital as an open call for a communist revolution. In her foreword to your new translation, Wendy Brown suggests that Capital’s practical revolutionary promise is merely the negative of the dynamic capitalist totality that it describes: “an overcoming of what has been pulled apart, of a massified productive force organized as dispersed human powerlessness, of the reifications and fetishisms of capitalism along with its salient social features: exploitation, alienation, living to work rather than working to live, and ubiquitous domination by a machinery under no one’s control.” And you emphasize that “nowhere really does Marx condemn the capital system or call for revolution.” How does your new translation change our understanding of how capitalism can be overcome? And what other common misunderstandings of Capital can your translation help rectify?
PR: The claim that Marx does not call for revolution in Capital is a factual statement, and it holds up: he does not expressly call for revolution there. Capital is not the Communist Manifesto, to state the obvious. Whether the book can be read as a call for revolution is, of course, another matter, and we have no problem with that reading. It is a book that treats the large-scale destruction of humans and nature as inevitable consequences of the capital system, so it hardly seems like a stretch to say that its messages include the following one: you are doomed if the capital regime does not collapse under the weight of its contradictions, or you do not find a way to abolish the regime and replace it with one where production serves people rather than the other way around. Whether the book sees such a revolution as likely is another matter still. Aside from a few famous passages at the end, it has little to say about how the regime of capital might end, even though one of the longest chapters in the book deals with battles over labor reform. The call of Capital is a call to try to understand how the regime of capital works, to try to understand the full complexity and disorienting weirdness of one of its basic processes. Would we help readers prepare themselves for that if we told them that the book is basically a call for revolution?
As for rectifying misunderstandings, we think it makes more sense to speak in terms of misimpressions of Marx. There are many renderings in Moore-Aveling’s and Fowkes’s edition of Capital that we would characterize as misleading, but, unlike Wolfgang Fritz Haug—and now we are looking toward your next question—we have not tried to see whether they have thrown this or that person’s argument off course. What we can say is that if you know Marx only through Fowkes, you probably have misimpressions of how Marx thinks, sounds, and develops concepts in Capital—“probably” because some readers of translations are able to identify where a translation is off even though they cannot read the language of the source text. Brecht was apparently able to do that. According to one highly regarded expert, his “translations” of Chinese poetry were more accurate than the translations on which they were based, and they were based on previous translations because Brecht knew no Chinese.
ZE/JK: In 2017, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, a coeditor of the Historical Critical Dictionary of Marxism, argued that a new critical English translation of Capital was urgently needed. For Haug, such a text would not only distinguish Engels’s independent interventions in the third and fourth editions of Capital but would also help to clarify a “theoretical muddiness” introduced into Anglophone debates by imprecise translations. Using David Harvey’s widely read Companion to Marx’s Capital as an example, Haug shows how Engels’s and later Fowkes’s decisions to translate the distinct German adjectives sachlich, dinglich, stofflich, and materiell as simply “material” led Harvey to misconstrue the concept of value developed in Capital’s opening chapters. “An initially tiny inexactitude” of translation, Haug writes, “escalates with increasing distance into chaos; and the consequences that result from this seemingly tiny inattentiveness inflate into veritable errors” (67). This seems to echo some of the critiques that your introductions level against prior translations: “If you are not very interested in the intricacies of the value-form, or if the sections of the book where Marx invents a language to express them do not seem to be where the revolutionary potential lies, those sections will not be primary places of investment.” Like Haug, and in contrast to the readers you criticize, you place great emphasis on the concept of “value,” calling it the “main operator in the logic immanent in capital’s societal relations” (li). What explains your interest in the first chapters of Capital, and to what extent can this be read as a response to the discussions sparked by the (predominantly Germanophone) “New Marx Reading”?
PR: Although we agree with the claim that “sachlich” is not translated very effectively in the previous English editions (we say a bit as to why above), we are not convinced by Haug’s article. Admittedly, his premises about translation predispose us to find fault with his claims. Here he displays what might be called translation maladjustment. Yes, he wants a new English translation, and he plays up the importance of English in global discussions of Marx. But he does not seem willing to accept the terms of translation, which are that you have to change the words, and when you do that, the meanings change: associations are lost, new ones are introduced, etc. The translation and the source text can only ever be two different texts. That does not mean you should shrug your shoulders and say, “Well, what do you expect, it’s a translation?” whenever a translation appears to misrepresent what is in the source text. You can and should assess a translation in terms of its precision, rigor, thoughtfulness, and so on. However, to call, as Haug does, for a translation that “neutralizes any shifts of meaning” caused by previous translations, well, that is to cross a line and set up an impossible standard. It is hostile to translation. Rather than going around policing people who rely on translations and the translations they rely on, Haug should examine how different translations have encouraged different imaginative readings of Capital. The result would likely be more interesting than his rather forced critique of Harvey, which really has more to do with Harvey’s theoretical commitments than with Fowkes’s translation of “sachlich.” Haug might have gotten farther if he had focused on Fowkes’s translation of “Gegenständlichkeit,” but we are not really interested in fighting his battle for him. One last point: he should not refer to the Moore-Aveling translation as the Aveling edition. Moore did most of the translating.
As for the question of value, we recognize that there are a lot of ways to read Capital, and we certainly do not think that to qualify as a serious reader of the text, you have to put value at the center of things. But it should be uncontroversial to say that the book puts value at the center of things. On the level of explicit intention, it is an attempt to understand how the capital system works and why/how that system has eluded comprehension. All of this turns on a series of arguments about value under capitalism: what it is, how it is formed, how it gets expressed, how it becomes capital, the social consequences of all of this, etc. From this perspective, it makes sense to put a great deal of thought and energy into translating Marx’s value concepts and vocabulary, which he develops in the book’s early chapters.
ZE/JK: One striking decision in your translation was to render “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” as “original” rather than “primitive” accumulation. Already by the time of his translation of Capital, Fowkes felt compelled by the frequency of the usage of the English term “primitive accumulation” in theoretical debates to retain it and note its incorrectness. Was it a general policy of yours in translating this book to approach the translation of terminology anew, always opting for the greatest precision, or did you weigh these decisions against precedents of English-language translation and discussion case by case?
Paul North: It may seem like a striking decision to change “primitive” to “original,” but, in fact, most commentaries on the text and any classroom lesson worth its salt already add, when talking about that section of the book, that “primitive” is quite misleading and then cite the German. A bad translation is a good opportunity for a discussion; it gives you the right to introduce the topic of translation tactics and to ask what Marx actually wanted to say. But we should not get carried away with one word. No one word can carry a meaning; that is a false, lexical view of language that ignores the fact that meaning emerges from reading through, across larger units, synthesizing words, phrases, and passages into relays of sense that gets built along the way. That being said, “primitive” is so misleading that it can damage the passage of understanding; and, further, since this edition wants to be read by people who have not been schooled in the debates, it is time to change the word to something less misleading.
Primitive is misleading lexically. It denotes something basic, naive, undeveloped. There was nothing naïve or basic about the bloody dispossession of agricultural peasants. Nor was it undeveloped in a stadial sense of that term—its development was exactly what was needed to move from feudal dependency relations to capitalistic relations of extortion. In fact, “original” accumulation used the most advanced tools of the day—sovereign power, the lure of wages, and the wiles of jurisprudence—to fleece people out of their mode of production. It is well-known that what Marx described as ursprünglich was “not-yet-capitalistic” or “not-fully-capitalistic,” even when operating within a capital system. Now, “original” is misleading as well, but it is conceptually misleading, not lexically, and its misleading quality is given to it by the political economists who used the term. “Original accumulation” began as a geological term describing how sediments first layer up before heat or pressure rework them. So, when it comes to the origins of the capital system, even “original” is a misnomer. The term makes it sound like this accumulation just happened, that it was not violent theft. And misnomers are what this book is about: the misnomers of previous theorists. Without the word “original,” you cannot follow the critique of political economy going on there.
That said, we did hash out between us the translations of key concepts, especially where we were changing the received version in English. For example, German “Korn” is now translated as “wheat,” despite having been translated, rather mistakenly, as “corn” in previous translations. There would have been no reason to change this if it did not matter to the argument. Korn in German means “grain” for use in making staples, like bread. It is a raw material for a qualitatively different and economically crucial product. So, corn is not only a cultural mistake, since there would not have been much if any corn in Germany or England in those years, but it is also the wrong type of food, not an industrial staple in the way wheat would be. Wheat being the world’s staple then, as now, we went with that one. That is to say, it was certainly our tactic to approach each translation situation anew, but then only to translate it differently than the received version if the situation warranted it. I would not say the aim was precision. Rather it was to preserve the moment in the argument, so that other important moments could be built upon it and make as much sense as possible. Marx is a luminous thinker and, after writing several drafts at thousands of pages, he did achieve something rarely achieved; most terms add sense to the argument, and there is very little filler or offhand vocabulary. Thus, the critique of political economy needs the “so-called original accumulation” that the economists roguishly call “original” and thereby cover up the legal violence attending it—from readers and perhaps also from themselves. And the new kind of value-thinking needs wheat, not corn, to keep the consistency of the commodities given as examples. The commodities Marx uses as examples for his arguments should be those that play a pivotal role in the world economy.
ZE/JK: When people speak of Marx’s Capital, they usually refer to Volume 1, yet it was only one part of what was initially a six- and, later, four-volume project. As you argue in the introduction, Volume 1 does not make up a complete analysis of capitalism: “The capital system was a beast, an organism whose operations you could not understand if organs were missing; if you dedicated a volume to describing its skin, you also needed volumes on its feet, lungs, and brain”(xlii). Do you have any plans to retranslate Capital’s second and third volumes, and how would you compare the challenges of translating those volumes to those involved in this project?
PN: Since you ask, yes, we are starting work on Volume 2 now. This will require some more adventurous, and definitely more studious, decision-making, since there are many manuscripts, and it would not make sense to simply go with Engels’s version. So far, our plan is to spend the year reading and studying the manuscripts for Volume 2, so we can approach Engels’s editing job with critical intel. Volume 3 is easier in one way, since there is only one manuscript. It is much harder in another, since it is unfinished in big ways, and Engels did much more reconstruction in his edition. We will have to make stronger decisions about how to treat the material. We will ask ourselves: What constitutes a critical reading edition of Volume 3 today? Whether, after that, we will move on to not the planned fourth volume but part of one of the drafts of the 1860s, Theories of Surplus Value, is another question.
Both of the later volumes are fascinating, though in different ways than Volume 1. If the first volume is at once an economics, a critique, a social theory, and a nineteenth-century novel, the later volumes are nearly bereft of the novelistic delights of speaking commodities and allegories about dancing tables and vampires. In their place, however, you find the most rigorous analysis of the exchange system, in Volume 2, and the diremptions of space and time that it gives rise to. And in Volume 3, you find the all-important standpoint of capital as a whole and an attempt to describe it. You get to watch the transfer of value between industries and sectors in order to make the profit rate equal among them. Look out for our Volume 2 in a few years.