Capital
By
Karl Marx
Translated by Paul Reitter
M. P. Ross 9-10-24
“Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both…
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Thus begins and concludes Robert Frost’s well-known poem. What is Frost trying to say? It should not be too difficult figure out. He is, after all, writing in plain English. Yet each year the poem is assigned reading for students who will attempt to answer that question and come up with a more or less satisfactory explanation.
Perhaps poetry is not a fair example. By its nature poetry is dense language, intended to say more than its words might communicate in common usage; nuanced language, not readily yielding its meaning, especially in our contemporary culture where nuance appears all but lost. Poetry is not alone. Novels, cinema, music are all accompanied by their companions of critics and reviewers. What then of works of philosophy and theory, science and the law, presenting concepts not easily grasped, even after repeated readings, to be discussed and disputed well into later printings and editions; works that are challenging to readers in their native languages, let alone to those with an undergraduate level proficiency or read in translation?
Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, in any edition or translation, is a notoriously difficult read. Not so daunting as Hegel’s Geist, though Hegel’s name seldom comes up in everyday discourse, whereas it is difficult to avoid some mention of Marx in one reference or another in the media. Of those who throw about Marx, his –ism, and its progeny, how likely is it that many have actually read him? How many fewer yet understand what they have read? It is commonly, and correctly, expressed that those claiming to have understood Marx on the first reading are mistaken. We need all the help we can get. Courses, secondary literature, online videos, and, certainly for the English reading world, a well-crafted translation are all appreciated.
Fellow travelers, being known for the company you keep can be a good thing. Princeton University Press is one of the very top publishers of political science books. With this new English translation of Capital, volume I, one can expect, and be justified in that expectation, that they would risk neither resources nor reputation on what is likely to become the new standard edition. The best critical review might be found within this edition itself, in the Forward by Wendy Brown, the Editor’s Introduction by co-editor Paul North, and the Translator’s Preface by translator and co-editor Paul Reitter.
This review is aimed especially at the audience of undergraduate students who will be seriously reading Marx for the first time. With a heavy load of required reading, it is tempting to gloss over introductions and prefaces and get right to the text. Avoid this mistake. You are strongly encouraged to carefully read all of Wood, North, and Reitter. In fact, it would be helpful to read them before beginning the first chapter and after reading a few chapters. It will provide a context for Capital, its author, and the translation.
Translation is its own area of literature. We read the translator as much as the original author. As history is told from the perspective of a historian, a translation comes to us in the voice of the translator, who seeks to meet one or more goals in rendering the text in a different language. These include accurately communicating the meaning of the original text, perhaps in the clearest language understandable to the contemporary reader, perhaps at the expense of losing the literary style of the original. The translation may strive to faithfully preserve the original word for word retaining the grammar and syntax, as well. This would put the reader of a work like Capital in the position of a native speaker of modern German reading Das Kapital—in need of a good translation. It begs the question whether there can be a definitive translation, or is it a moving target, dependent on the requirements of the reader. That is either the same reader seeking different things from a work, or new readers accustomed to the language of a different day.
Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past is an estimable literary achievement in its own right. It borrows its title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, appealingly echoing to the early 20th century British ear the title of the work it translates, Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu, which would seem as lovely still directly translated as In Search of Lost Time. Reading the two, alternating passages of Scott Moncrieff with the original Proust, presents a challenge and yields a reward not unlike reading Marx. It is scarcely easier to read in English than in French. In the French, Proust makes over-generous use of verb tenses seldom heard on the French street. Both offer long, involved single sentence narratives covering more than a page. The story is the same. We encounter the same characters. But our sense of them is slightly different, as with the same event covered by two historians.
Interestingly enough, it is Roy’s Le Capital, the French translation, which offers the easiest reading out of all the German and English editions. Moreover, it is as much as a version as an edition. Marx was thoroughly involved, adding revisions to his original work, as well as acting both as editor and co-translator. As others have noted, this raises questions as to Marx’s opinion of the French reader, but we will set that aside and come away with the notion of translation as revised text by a new editor, if not an entirely new or standalone work. William Clare Roberts’s essay on the French translation at the conclusion of the book, found just after the Acknowledgements, is likewise recommended reading, along with the introductory pieces by Wood, North, and Reitter. The Marx scholar’s comments offer insights on how Capital is both clarified and obscured in the French.
Curiously, the credit for Robert’s contribution displays an obvious error in an otherwise successful effort. The title page lists Roberts as the author of the Afterword. The Contents correctly places the Afterword just prior to Acknowledgements, with Roberts’s essay following. The Afterword is clearly Marx’s own to the second edition of Das Kapital, which Reitter uses as the basis for this translation. It is not found in the other English editions. Lost in translation?
Capital. Marx tells us the subject of his multi-volume magnum opus straight off in the title. What is capital and how is it, as new value, created? Physiocrats would tell us that land is the source of value, and mercantilists would say trade. Adam Smith and David Ricardo located the source of value in human labor. Building on Smith and Ricardo, Marx asserts that value is created not just by human labor, but by the surplus value of labor, that is, in the difference between the labor necessary to earn enough to meet the worker’s needs and the gross value realized by the capitalist. This review focuses on the translation of Marx rather than his economic theories, so let us just add that in one aspect labor represents a commodity, like other commodities of raw or finished goods.
In this role, then, what shape does labor take? Marx minces no words, it is: eine bloße Gallerte unterschiedsloser menschlicher Arbeit. There, now, he could not be clearer. Consulting that font of all knowledge, the internet, Google Translate tells us this means, “a mere jelly of indiscriminate human labour.” In the French translation, Marx and Roy are uncharacteristically restrained: “Chacun d’eux ressemble complètement à l’autre.” Each of them entirely resembles the other. Moore and Aveling, in the first English translation, edited by Engels, demonstrate proper British reserve, giving us: “a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour…” From Moore and Aveling, we go some one hundred years to Fowkes: “they are merely congealed qualities of homogeneous human labour…”
We are fortunate with Marx. He gets to the point early and unmistakably in Capital. A thorough reading of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and the best we can come up with is that spirit, or Geist, translates to the actuality of the ethical substance.
Reitter has achieved no mean trick. His Capital strikes a satisfying balance between translation’s objectives, to faithfully communicate the content of the text, preserve the original’s style and language, and end up with a readable work. His translation reads: “a gelatinous blob of undifferentiated human labor.” Note, too, the visual play on the German word for mere, bloße, pronounced “blosse” which looks like the word Reiter employs, blob.
Again we must note the dynamic nature of Capital. Even as each translation is its own work, it is more so for Capital, which was the product on ongoing revision, editing, and translation that lasted beyond Marx’s life to be carried on by Engels. Reitter’s new translation continues the life of Capital, creating something new while faithfully delivering an accurate text.
Among its key themes is the example of Marx’s coat to demonstrate die Wertform oder der Tauschwert; the value-form or exchange-value, in both Reitter and Fowkes, the slightly simpler form of value or exchange-value in Moore/Aveling, and simpler yet in Roy, forme de la valeur. Establishing an exchange-value equivalence between commodities of two different use-values, Marx tells us that 1 Rock = 20 Ellen Leinwand, 1 coat = 20 yards of linen. That is the translation of all three English editions. In French it becomes 1 habit = 20 mètres de toile.
Moore/Aveling and Roy are approved translations, by Marx, Engels, or both. The French, again, expresses Marx’s concepts in a relatively straightforward matter, with 1 garment equaling 20 meters of fabric. Where it becomes interesting is Marx’s choice of the word Rock. English readers are told this is a coat, and we know that this translation is just fine by Marx and Engels. However, why Rock and not Mantle? We do not know.
Among translations, the King James Version of the Holy Bible is widely lauded for its intrinsic literary merit. If getting Marx right is important to our understanding of history, how much more so for what is read by many as the revealed Word of God! The translators relied on both earlier translations as well as the original Hebrew and Koine Greek. For the Old Testament, they had a reliable translation of the Hebrew to refer to, the Septuagint, the translation by the committee of Seventy.
Appropriately, the King James starts off, “In the beginning…” And, as with Capital, relying on an approved source, the Bible in English takes directly from that Septuagint, which reads, Εn ἀρχῇ. However, we do not get further than one word in the original Hebrew before questions about the Greek translation arise.
Without getting into Semitic consonantal roots, let us say that the Hebrew word, spelled in Latin letters, bereshith, raises questions, though not until we get to the suffix, -ith. Be resh is pretty clearly in or at the head, the start of things. But ancient texts are like poetry, and more so; very dense language that had to do heavy lifting if it was to be committed to history, especially in hard copy. History has largely taken the Seventy’s word for it, and most of us can do no better. But, “in the beginning” requires further digging to get to the bottom of whether the origin of the universe was creatio ex materia/ ex nihilo nihil fit or creatio ex nihilo, or/alternately for those who took introductory astrophysics, Steady-State vs. The Big Bang.
Understanding ein Rock to mean a coat will not create any problems for us, even as this coat fulfills such an important role in a major work of enduring historical significance. By a coat, however, Marx is not intending what we might first interpret as a suit jacket. It is an overcoat. Perhaps Rock is related to the English frock, or frock coat, in German Gehrock?
No mere garment, for Marx, this Rock was indeed his rock, his foundation, his source of strength. It would not be overstatement to call it his salvation. In 19th century Europe one’s clothes were an outward declaration of social class. Proper attire was necessary to function in society. Marx wrote Capital in the Reading Room of the British Library. In the days before the internet delivered the entire world to your phone, university research libraries offered writers both access to archived material and a quiet place to work. The Reading Room, however, was available only to registered users. Further, a ticket alone would not secure entrance. One had to present as a proper gentleman—and that required being dressed like one.
Marx grew up in very comfortable circumstances, the son of a lawyer. His wife Jenny—von Westphalen–was a member of the lower nobility. He exercised the privilege of his class through his work and writings on behalf of the proletariat. By 1849, as the California Gold Rush got underway, his own claim played out and he had to leave the continent, seeking refuge in England. By then his economic circumstances had much changed. Marx and family were poor, and they lived the life of the poor.
Here we come back to the Rock. It was much more than just an item of clothing. Even as it was a uniform displaying social rank, it was a store of value—the collateral for obtaining a loan. The working poor were caught in a vicious cycle. Making barely enough to sustain themselves, they resorted to ongoing debt to meet their expenses, with their clothing and household items going in and out of pawn to pay for rent and food. Life for the poor was expensive, paying for items many times over. The reader is recommended to Peter Stallybrass’s essay, “Marx’s Coat.” He describes the practice of pawning work clothes to get Sunday clothes out of pawn to go to church, then pawning the Sunday clothes again to get the work clothes out of pawn to go to work again on Monday. And those clothes were typically of much lower quality, made of inferior materials than a proper, gentleman’s coat.
These were the circumstances of Marx’s life as he wrote Capital. In his introduction, North describes an angry Marx, whose earlier subjective anger evolved into an objective anger as he works through his Capital project. We might think of Plato’s change in tone from the Republic to the Laws, with a more mature, less demanding Plato. Marx, still angry, and understandable so, as much as he wrote in abstractions, the life of the proletariat for him was a concrete reality. Yet, the Marx we get in Capital is no longer the youthful revolutionary, but rather a devout theorist seeking a way through layers of abstraction towards a sublime understanding.
The much maligned and misunderstood Marx, himself, at a certain level of abstraction, is a Hegelian world-historical individual. At other levels of abstraction he is a philosopher, a theorist, and a revolutionary, different shapes and capacities of the same physical individual. Ian Shapiro says of the Capital Marx that he was a fairly conventional 19th century economist, following in the path of Smith and Ricardo. Connecting Capital to communist revolutionary thought is like finding the purported pornography in Joyce’s Ulysses, it would be a rare accomplishment by a determined searcher of some erudition.
Marx, as he is commonly understood, is a symbol or icon containing whatever content his bearer needs him to carry, the actual Marx, in any of his abstractions, long since buried. In the language of our present day, he is a meta-abstraction folded into layers and layers of meta-abstractions of history and texts. Reitter’s new translation, as translations tend to be, is a meta-abstraction of Marx’s thought, as was each edition, revision, and translation. Marx’s own existence was a meta-abstraction—a member of the bourgeoisie married to an aristocrat, working to liberate the proletariat, himself then living the life of the working class, dying poor. However only the physical Marx was buried. His reworked abstraction appropriated for communist revolutions that were themselves poor abstractions of any intentions Marx had for the progress of society or history.
When we speak of abstraction, what is often helpful and more often ignored are the necessary distinctions of levels of abstraction or, for the glass is half full contingent, degrees of specificity. What is true at one level of abstraction may still be true but of less significance at another. Concepts of value neither begin nor end with Marx. Value abstracted at any one level focuses in on a necessary, though incomplete, aspect of the greater concept of value. Marx recognized that an abstraction of value based in human labor did not fully answer how capital is created. His atomized approach to his work led him to focus down to a lower level of abstraction/higher level of specificity to discover that foundational concept of Marxism, the theory of surplus value. While Marx agreed with Smith and Ricardo that value is created by human labor, he determined that abstraction insufficient. New value is created by the difference between the socially necessary labor time and total labor expressed in the gross proceeds received by the capitalist.
Hyperbole, exaggeration, but at its level of abstraction true enough to make a relevant point: Marxists will use the surplus value of labor theory to explain everything from the economies of South American countries to the Infield Fly Rule. We must read Marx. He is essential to our understanding of today’s world. You don’t get from Napoleon to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global economic rise of China without Marx. You also cannot get from there to here with Marx as your only guide.
Beware the Folly of the Pure Model. Failure to employ the appropriate level of abstraction, a subset of pure model reasoning, leads to faulty understanding. Doctrinaire adherence to a pure model has been at the root of catastrophe; history is replete with examples. The results can be monstrous. Misapply a reading of Marx, what could go wrong? The nightmare of the Soviet Union?
We need to turn back to Aristotle every now and then. While a whole model thinker if ever there was one, even with Aristotle we must be selective. Aristotelian cosmology would not be of much help to the space program. Just when you think you would be bumping your head against the hard firmament, you find yourself hurtling towards the next solar system. For political theory, where Aristotle is of immense value is in the concept of the mixed regime, an early caution against the Folly of the Pure Model.
Students of Aristotle would have been aware that their instructor had a side gig as a drafter of constitutions. In his day, states neither had homemade constitutions nor bought them off the rack, they were custom fit by a master tailor. The Rock of State, if you will. Reading the lecture notes from his course on government, the Politics, students learn of the three types of rule in their proper and corrupt forms. The rule of one, monarchy/tyranny; of several, aristocracy/oligarchy; and of many, democracy/anarchy. Most importantly, they learn the concept of mixed regimes. A check against the weaknesses of a pure model that is poorly understood and applied, the mixed regime, always with the proviso that it must be properly designed and maintained, offers the best structure foe creating an effective government.
Francis Fukuyama was onto something. Taken at the appropriate level of abstraction, he makes a good case that western liberal democracy fulfills Hegel’s search for the End of History. Its key features of transparency, rule of law equally applied, and an account of the general will admit a nuance and flexibility much more reliable than demonstrated with a pure model regime. A system that is both open to improvement and change while adhering to core principles. For Marx, capitalism was a necessary, if flawed, stage. The Marx that we got at Engel’s last revision kept to a path where socialism would naturally supersede capitalism, and would itself in time be necessarily replaced by communism. We do know that Capital was a project of ongoing revision. What we do not know is how it would have evolved had Marx lived another ten or twenty years.
We have the man, the –ism, and we have human nature—all the makings of a secular religion. With them, we get true believers, heretics, warring sects, and perhaps authoritarian rule. Not necessarily, but not incidentally, either. Remember, the three forms of rule have their proper and corrupt forms. All this from the surplus value of labor? Human nature plays a big role. And Marx demonstrably did not fully factor in the scope of human nature. The features of which are to gloss over the text, interpret to serve one’s own purposes, and reshape into a contrary form, the opposite of that created by their deity.
It would be helpful to read the text. It will not explain everything, not even about capitalism. Just as Marx uncovered shortcomings in Smith and Ricardo, economic theory will do a dialectic loop around and past Marx. Marx recognized the necessity and potential of capitalism in both its proper and corrupt forms. It was capable of generating the surpluses that would lay the foundation for socialism, and it was equally capable of destroying the society of the workers who built it. Understanding how we got from there to here requires reading and comprehending Marx.
The Reitter translation of Capital will likely be the English speaking world’s access text to Marx for at least the next fifty years, as the Fowkes was before it. As it seems to over time, the world has changed since then. There were monumental changes between Moore/Aveling and Fowkes—the Great European War, Parts I and II, and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. One lesser but significant change, which has gone largely uncommented on, is that when Fowkes came out there were still Marxists. That is, of some number and cultural significance. In the 1970s it was still common to find commentary from a Marxist perspective in the major periodicals. The most frequent invocation of Marx’s name and –ism in the United States today is by the far right, painting as far left radicals those who would be solidly centrist in Canada or Europe.
In Chapter 25, The Modern Theory of Colonization, the topic of capital in the colonies—the United States and Australia—enters the discussion, raising the matter of fresh land and the in-migration of people and how Marx’s theory accounts for them. The U.S. is the fortunate beneficiary of continuing in-migration. New people = new labor = new capital = a growing economy. We are out of new land, however. What we do have, globally, is ever innovating technology, something not fully accounted for by the labor theory of value as the source of new capital. New technologies are the new lands of the future. Likewise, the concept of socially necessary labor time in our current context begs recalculation. When Marx wrote Capital, as the story of his coat attests, this amounted to bare subsistence wages, and adjusted for a host of changes in technology and societal norms, one fulltime job can fail to provide a sufficient living wage today—a glaring externality capitalism fobs off on society.
Think about that last point for a moment. North suggests that Marx is angry. Reading Reitter, we get a much more nuanced impression of Marx than simple anger. Marx appears as a whole person with an enlarged personality–irascible, engaged, passionate. Deep into his project and deep in poverty, the material of existence all about him, given the nature of his work, his conclusions seem a likely result. Pervasive poverty in the midst of abundant national wealth. At the right level of abstraction, systematic exploitation of the worker seems convincingly evident.
What to make of this? We will give Marx the last word. From the Afterword, in fact. “Even the lucky dogs of the new Holy German-Prussian Empire will get a lesson in dialectics.”