The translators and co-editors of our newly published edition of Marx’s Capital speak to Wendy Brown Jacobin magazine about the text’s current relevance:
The translators and co-editors of our newly published edition of Marx’s Capital speak to Wendy Brown Jacobin magazine about the text’s current relevance:
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09.13.2024
Theory Books
Retranslating Marx’s Capital
An interview with
Paul Reitter Paul North
The translators and coeditors of a new edition of Karl Marx’s Capital spoke to the political theorist Wendy Brown about the significance of their undertaking and what this historic text has to offer in the 21st century.
Karl Marx in 1875. (Wikimedia Commons)
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Interview by
Wendy Brown
The language of Karl Marx’s Capital, which was originally published in 1867, has shaped the political imagination of socialism’s proponents as well as its critics. From the opening discussion of the commodity, in which Marx declares that capitalists are “in love with money” only to add, in ironic Shakespeare-laden prose, that the “course of true love never did run smooth,” to the iconic line delivered in the section on “so-called original accumulation,” that in an unspecified future the “expropriators are expropriated,” the language of Capital has become as memorable as its message. Retranslating this well-known language, so complex, so canonical, poses daunting challenges.
The political theorist Wendy Brown spoke to Paul North and Paul Reitter, coeditors and translator of a new edition of Marx’s Capital, the first to appear in fifty years, about the significance of this undertaking. In a wide-ranging discussion, Brown, who wrote the preface to the new edition, discusses Marx’s literary style and the relevance of his analysis for understanding exploitation and inequality today. North and Reitter give insights into the challenges of the work and their hopes for its impact ahead of the publication of their new translation this month.
Wendy Brown
What did the new translation change for your understanding of Capital? Is there a newly translated word or passage that may significantly alter Marx’s theory for English-language readers steeped in the [Ben] Fowkes translation?
Paul Reitter
We certainly think that we’ve come away from the work of translating and editing Capital with a much keener understanding of many of the book’s most important ideas and arguments, by which we mean such things as Marx’s notions of value and commodity fetishism. You’d expect this, of course. Translating entails very, very close reading and thinking at great length about how this or that individual term is being used, and if the process of translating and editing doesn’t leave you with the sense that you’ve truly deepened your knowledge of a text’s form and content, well, you should be surprised (and alarmed).
As for more concrete changes in how we see the book, here are two. First, we had seriously underappreciated the sophistication of Marx’s mimetic techniques: there are places where he pulls off a kind of free indirect imitation, essentially impersonating someone without having that person speak directly — an unusual and, we think, very effective device. Second, we had underappreciated the extent to which Marx makes an effort to locate positive possibilities in developments that in the short run cause a lot of suffering, such as the rapid advance of machinery. According to Marx, this drains the content from labor and throws a lot of people out of work, but it also increasingly necessitates that workers be retrained again and again, allowing them to cultivate an unlikely and fulfilling well-roundedness. This doesn’t justify capitalism, of course — far from it — but it does show a balanced view of it that is not often ascribed to Marx.
Now let’s speak to the big part of this question: How might our edition change the game, the game being reception and use of Marx’s theory, for readers who know Capital through Fowkes’s version of the text? Over the years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how certain renderings, particularly “primitive accumulation” for Marx’s “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” and “material” for his “sachlich,” have led readers astray. We agree that those translations are misleading, and maybe the new ones — we break with tradition and drop “primitive” — will make a difference. But even though we pointed to them first, these cases aren’t the first ones that come to mind.
The formulation “unproductive labor” has elicited a lot of criticism from feminist scholars because Marx applies it to domestic labor, i.e., labor performed mostly by women. Marx does in fact clarify that he’s not setting up a hierarchy when he distinguishes productive labor from unproductive labor, stressing that if you’re carrying out productive labor, in his sense of the term, you shouldn’t celebrate, because what this means is that you’re being exploited. You’re making something owned by some else, and you’re not being paid for some of your labor.
Unproductive labor isn’t compensated, but at least it’s not performed under the command of a capitalist who’s getting rich from the sweat of your brow. As implied, the clarification hasn’t helped much, and one reason why is that the phrase “unproductive labor” is just very insulting, more insulting, we think, than the German original for which it seems to be an exact match: “unproduktive Arbeit.” In other words, if you translate the phrase in the obvious way, rendering “unproduktive” as “unproductive,” you get some amplification, amplification that has gotten in the way, ironically, of productive debate. Which is why in our translation “unproductive Arbeit” is translated as “nonproductive labor.”
We also think that translation issues have narrowed discussions of the fetish section, which tends to get reduced to couple of points: relations among people appear as relations among things, or our own social movement appears as the movement of things, which, rather than controlling, we are controlled by (in the German too it’s not clear whether “which” refers to “movement” or “things”). The broader point, the “secret” that Marx teases in the section’s heading, gets less attention than it should, and this may be so because Fowkes’s translation obscures the crucial opposition in Marx’s formulation of it: the social characteristics of labor appearing as the objective characteristics of labor products.
Marx says very clearly that his object is capitalist production, not just the English version of it.
The key change here is that in the new edition the term “Gegenständlichkeit” is rendered as “objecthood,” rather than as “objectivity.” When readers understand that Marx is interested in the “objecthood” of value, in how value, despite being a nonphysical thing, behaves like a physical object, they’ll be less likely to understand the phrase “objective characteristics” as meaning something like “characteristics that objectively exist,” whereby they don’t really contrast with “social characteristics,” since social characteristic objectively exist, too.
Wendy Brown
What’s the riskiest move in the work you did, either in your intro, Paul North, or in the translation of Marx’s text?
Paul North
“Risky” is a great adjective for this project. It hits right at the wager that a retranslation of a dire text makes. This isn’t just a well-loved book. For those who need it, Capital is a historically desperate book, an epochal book, and a book that addresses the sincere wish for relief from suffering and an alternative to wasted lives. Because of the direness of the book, because of, in short, exactly the capitalistic excesses that the book describes — which it describes theoretically for the first time — people count on it to say what they desperately need to say, according to their social position and historical situation.
This is as true of worker groups who read it as it is of scholars and even of the mainstream economists who pooh-pooh Capital. To make the book what you need it to be — this is most true of revolutionaries, and maybe it is only excusable when they do it. A highly disciplined reading, you could call it dogmatic, makes sense when you need to marshal a disparate nation to revolt. So when we took on the task of retranslating, which has in fact been called for by many disciplined readers I would add, we knew there would be complaints and even at times disbelief about our choices. We also knew there would be awe and learning, when people who have read it many times in the previous translation found something unexpected there. To do the project is to risk people’s textual commitments and political dreams. But it is time to do that, in view of better commitments and — to be honest — better dreams.
The riskiest move in both the introduction and the translation is, I think, to see critique as more than dialectics. Reitter has given English readers a stylistically mobile prose on behalf of Marx’s incredible stylistic mobility in German. Dialectics, or Marx’s version of it that isn’t always sure about how it itself works, does happen in the book, especially in the first chapter. Running alongside the dialectical parts and often running ahead of them to do other work are modes like polemic, irony, personification, analogy, ventriloquism, reportage.
There are enough styles and voices here to keep from losing the “programmatically weird moments,” as Reitter puts it in the translator’s preface. As translator, he hears more of these styles than previous translators have. I think I can say that. And this is not a good in itself. Not all translations need to be stylistically playful in order to be faithful. But it is a requirement for Marx’s book, because these other styles are other modes of critique. Nailing the author’s style may have an aesthetic value in belles lettres, whereas here, in a dire book, it has a critical value. Each of Marx’s styles is an attempt to do what critique does, in a different way.
When the narrator is ironic, you witness a contradiction without having to resolve it. You dwell in it for a while, experience it. When Marx ventriloquizes the commodity, in the liveliest, most colloquial speaking voice, when he makes the commodity speak, he performs the personification, within quotation marks, that the capital system performs within the market. The great advance of volume I (the second German edition, translated here for the first time) over the other volumes (which were written earlier and never revised by Marx) is that Marx draws all the styles in his quiver — and shoots.
For those who need it, Capital is a historically desperate book, an epochal book, and a book that addresses the sincere wish for relief from suffering and an alternative to wasted lives.
In order to critique a system too wily and too enormous to capture — and frankly too mysterious for anyone to know exactly what kind of weapon would work against it — Marx indeed tried out all the styles he had been practicing for a quarter century in speeches on barricades, caustic letters to friends, manifestos heard around the world, private sets of philosophical theses, ironic and allegorical treatises, as well as, at times, speaking a Hegelian tongue. In the end, there is no difference if capital’s excesses and abuses are exposed because you out-dialecticize it or because you ridicule its apologists and make them look like fools. Any style is a good style that carries the critique forward.
Wendy Brown
While working on the translation, did you find yourselves thinking about how Marx might have rethought certain moves were he theorizing capitalism today?
Paul Reitter
Marx says very clearly that his object is capitalist production, not just the English version of it. He uses circumstances in England to exemplify “the theory being developed” in Capital only because England has been the classic site of capitalist production “up to the present day.” So of course, one wonders what material he would rely on to illustrate his theories now, a century and a half later, and one also wonders whether he would still single out one country as the place where we can see how capitalist production works. Then there’s his heavy, heavy emphasis on the physical bodies of commodities, or what he calls “Waarenkörper” — would he still point up the double nature of the commodity by speaking of it as being at once a physical thing and a nonphysical “value-thing”?
Given that at least in the world’s core economies we more and more deal with nonphysical bodyless or virtual commodities, what would happen to his vocabulary? It is clear, I should add, that Marx does not think of commodities as only physical, but his metaphoric demands the physical, at least as an example, to oppose to the nonphysical, which in the beginning of the book is value. One wonders as well about what sort of medium he would choose to present his message. Books have held up pretty well, it turns out. But we shouldn’t assume that Marx would go the same route, given his obvious interest in reaching a large audience and also in presenting information in dynamic, unusual, and multivocal ways. Maybe we’d have Capital on Substack?
The basic moves, to expose surplus value as the main source of profit, to point out the inversion of social relations in a market society, to describe the fetish as the dispositional correlative of inverted social relations — all this would stay the same. Obviously too, there would need to be a volume dedicated to social reproduction, one dedicated to racialization as a tool of capital but also as one of its founding gestures, a volume on the state as not only a mere support for capitalists — although as time is telling, although states may not have been just this in the nineteenth century, there is much evidence that they are becoming that more and more.
And we would like Marx, once resurrected, to do thorough research into crises, given all that has happened since 1883. A note: a lot of the work to revise and expand on Capital has been done by its most brilliant readers, from Rosa Luxemburg to Michael Heinrich, including so many other names it would fill many volumes, but not to be forgotten are these: [W. E. B] Du Bois, [Isaak Illich] Rubin, [Raya] Dunayevskaya, [Moishe] Postone. And speaking of carrying on the project, not to be forgotten as well is the labor on this book and on his other writings by his brilliant family, his wife, Jenny, and two of his daughters, Eleanor and Laura, who were editors, conversation partners, copyists, and translators.
Wendy Brown
Let’s talk about the labor theory of value and your reading of it. [Jean] Baudrillard famously offered a sympathetic critique that focused on Marx’s absorption with factory-based industry, [which] mirrored his own age in making factory labor all-important. More recently, there have been critiques ranging from Marx’s occlusion of the value of “nature” to the rise of the service sector, the information/communication economy, robotics and artificial intelligence, and, of course, big finance. The labor theory of value is at the heart of the answer to Marx’s question, “Where does profit come from?” Do you guys think it holds up? Does it matter if it doesn’t?
Paul North
Before asking what the labor theory of value is for now, if anything, a first question is: What do we talk about when we talk about the “labor theory of value,” and did Marx actually talk about it? And then finally, why was it there in his theory — what was it meant to do? I hear quotation marks implied in your question, as though the phrase were an artifact of a specific interpretive history — Baudrillard being one of many who grabbed that phrase up, and then came the abbreviation, as though it were a monogram: LTV. Some interpreters of Capital have been grabby and reductive in this way. They want a simple product. Who wouldn’t, confronted with such a complex book? Yet if you put these interpreters together on a factory floor and ask them to construct a “labor theory of value” they will likely come up with very different products. That is, we shouldn’t forget that theory is a productive activity too, and it uses different technologies.
What tech was being employed when Marx, and before him [David] Ricardo, and before him [Adam] Smith, produced a product called “labor theory of value”? Right away there is an important difference. Smith and Ricardo, although they recognized some of the problems that arose when focusing solely on labor inputs, nonetheless argued that labor was the difference that made the difference. For all intents and purposes, it was the sole determinant of value, and thus of price, and thus of profit. Further, labor for them meant the physical activity of producing a physical product.
If there ever was a labor theory of value in Marx, it was a critical one. He decided — I don’t know when exactly, but in the 1850s for sure — that the whole entire capital system had to be mapped, that the truth of the capital system was not in any one act, such as labor, but actually in the whole and only explainable from the whole. Sometimes grabby interpreters focus too much on production, that is, too much on volume I. When you get to volumes II and III, it becomes obvious that the whole precedes even labor; competition among firms as well as flows of capital between economic sectors are crucial ingredients in profit per se, and they are forces determining the amount and rate of profit any sector, industry, or firm ends up with.
The main part of volume I asks what value is. But what is labor? Marx’s main criticism of classical political economy’s concept of value in fact changed the meaning of “labor” in societies where capital dominates. This is worth remembering. Over the last fifty years or so there has been a renaissance in understanding Marx’s Capital project. Because of the philological rigor of the second MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe) edition in Germany, genealogical work by the group around Enrique Dussel in Mexico in the 1980s, and disparate scholars working on “value” since the 1970s, we have a much better sense of what Marx did with and to Smith and Ricardo. Their LTVs, what neo-Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson called in a famous 1971 article “the undiluted labor theory of value,” has little to do with Marx.
Find a Capital reading group — or found a Capital reading group — and get going.
The renaissance in understanding the Capital project shows Marx move sharply away from the artificial, primitivist scene of “undiluted” labor. Marx’s theory of value in fact focuses on “diluted” labor. What changed in market societies was that abstract, not concrete, labor ruled. The idea that concrete labor makes value must derive ultimately from mysticism, where spirit gets transferred from worker to object, being materialized in an object as its “value.” In the 1840s, Marx still thought this way. With the critique of political economy, though, Marx rejected this mysticism: it was the lie of the system, the necessary lie that he called “fetish.” It didn’t make any difference if you traded fetishism of the commodity for fetishism of the primitive scene of labor. Workers won’t start the revolution. Only the proletariat can do that. Workers use their skills to make objects for use, but the proletariat makes value, regardless what products they physically make.
The pressures that value, as an abstraction, puts on workers forms the proletariat. Value is an abstraction of their individual private labor caused by the homogenizing demands of exchange. Abstract labor presses individual skilled workers, with muscles and minds, into a homogenous proletariat oppressed by an impersonal ideal that uses their muscles and minds for its purposes and then discards them and their bearers as soon as it can. Diane Elson, the economist, social thinker, and gender scholar, called this in a 1979 essay “The Value Theory of Labour,” a reinterpretation that chases grabby interpreters away. Labor is at the behest of value. This Marx considered one of his main breakthroughs. Since value still rules labor in manufacturing, which makes up nearly 30 percent of the global GDP, this theory is still needed. Moreover, there is a strong argument to be made that it doesn’t change fundamentally when the product is a “service.” A service, such as the slightly insane service called “business solutions” (insane because the content is not specified, and particularly profitable exactly because of this), is a commodity subject to the same forces as a physical (or nonphysical) product.
Whether financial services, health services, technological services, or education, a service that is produced for exchange is a commodity also. Workers providing “business solutions,” from the consultants on the extreme high side of the pay scale to those at the other end, the janitors who empty the trash bins in consultants’ cubicles, are ruled by the law of value. Their labors must produce value for the consultancy, and in order to do so, the value of their work is compared to the value of all other service workers. The same is true for finance, which places bets on future flows of production and services. Finance is ruled by future value, surplus value that will be extracted from those flows for investors. The real benefit of the value theory of labor, this theoretical product of Marx’s, recovered a hundred years later by Elson and others, is that it gives the vast majority of the world’s population a solid, technical reason for the immense degradation of life.
Wendy Brown
Should everyone read Capital? Still? Now?
Paul Reitter
Yes, of course: everyone should read Capital. If you want an expansive and truly compelling answer to this question, turn to the foreword Wendy Brown contributed to our volume. Here I’ll give some compact points. On reading Capital now: the fate of the planet depends on whether we can curb capital, and the book remains the most brilliant and comprehensive critique of the capitalist system and market fundamentalism. On reading Capital still: read the book because of its historical importance — if you want to understand the development of economic thinking or the critical conversation about capitalism, there’s no way around Capital. Read it because it’s in its way a great, great read — yes, difficult and technical at times, but also witty and moving and powerful. Some formulations will take your breath away. Find a Capital reading group — or found a Capital reading group — and get going. Student groups, worker groups, artists, movements, and yes, even economists have been doing so for 150 years.
Wendy Brown
Many nonscholars of Marx think Marx’s critique concerns the distribution of wealth, that is, inequality. Is Capital available to this reading or does it cure readers of it?
Paul North
David Ricardo wrote a book in 1817 whose stated objective was to discover “the laws that regulate the distribution of the produce of the earth.” Fifty years later, Marx argued that distribution of wealth is on one hand a superficial effect of a much deeper process and on the other hand a deceptive appearance that takes us away from confronting that deeper process. Market societies don’t have wealth; they have capital. And the capital in them is unequally distributed, for sure. Only capitalists have it; workers by and large don’t, or don’t have much. (According to the economics blog the Motley Fool, the top 10 percent in the United States owns 87 percent of stocks. The global situation is much starker, of course.)
The term “wealth” implies something that sits there, waiting to be distributed, an inert pile. It also implies that social actors have the agency in the equation. You or I can get wealth, and if we get it, we can do what we want with it. By implication, we also believe, when confronted with “wealth,” that the reasons for its unequal distribution are also in the hands of social agents, and the obstacles to redistribution are psychological or moral, to wit: interest or greed. Marx disagrees. He would even say, I think, that “distribution” is much too neutral a term. It is formalistic, as though we were looking down from a mile up on a field strewn with rocks. Many economic terms were adopted from the physical sciences, according to economists’ dream of becoming as rigorous as they take the physical sciences to be.
Take the distribution of sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic rocks in the earth. In geology, if you look at their distribution, you are looking, as if from above, at an inert picture, a freeze-frame. In contrast, Marx would say “distribution” is the result of a process whose aim was not “distribution” per se. The process as a whole, the capital system, aims to reproduce itself over and over again, and to expand. Distribution is an important indicator of the way it reproduces and expands, but if you just move the rocks around, you haven’t touched the forces that put them there. Over millions of years the rocks go back where they were.
The capital system works its Sisyphean magic much more quickly. Its forces — production and reproduction, competition, crisis — keep capital distributing the surplus to the capitalists, by iron necessity. That is because capital is not inert — it depends on a combination of violations: extraction of resources to their exhaustion while returning contamination to the earth; expropriation of land, resources, populations, and lives once external to the system; extortion of labor from laborers; exploitation of labor to produce unrecompensed surplus value. All these “exes” keep on keeping on because the forces force it to.
We will have to fight not inequality but the four ‘exes’ — exploitation, extortion, extraction, expropriation — and we can only win finally, Marx thought, by changing systems.
Forced by competition you don’t “distribute wealth”; rather, you claw as much surplus from labor as you can, as many resources from “less developed” economies as you can, as much market share from other capitalists as you can. As a capitalist, you don’t do this because you are greedy; you do it because you have no choice. The system demands it. If we want a different distribution, we will have to fight not inequality but the four “exes” — exploitation, extortion, extraction, expropriation — and we can only win finally, Marx thought, by changing systems.
Wendy Brown
Since it’s a new edition of Capital that we’re talking about, we should talk about the labor process. How did your collaborative labor work?
Paul North
I got a call from Princeton University Press asking if I really meant the positive endorsement I sent in for a truly crazy translation proposal: finally someone was going to sit and do an English translation of volume I of Capital, from the ground up. It had to be conceptually rigorous and take into account the major rereadings and discoveries of the past 150 years, I had said. It had to get over itself, if you know what I mean; Marx was not a “Marxist,” as he reportedly said to his son-in-law Paul Lafargue. That is, he didn’t write either a set of true, fixed ideas for posterity or a set of rules for revolution. The book is searching, funny, and difficult also no doubt, full of dialectical machinations and rhetorical blasts.
In short, it had to be the right translator. In a sense, if you took what Paul Reitter translated previously and put it together, you already got close to Marx. He had done an excellent version of Salomon Maimon’s autobiography, Maimon who Immanuel Kant thought understood his dense and important Critique of Pure Reason better than anyone, despite his being a Jew from the sticks (my remark, not Kant’s). Reitter also translated [Friedrich] Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, two scrupulous writers of unscrupulous thoughts.
But still I wasn’t sure it was possible to render into English Marx’s work in multiple voices and styles while hitting all the wounds and scars of the capital system. It would take devotion, yes, a deep understanding of the text as well, and an excellent ear. Despite worrying, I jumped in. We started to work together, which meant Reitter translated hours a day and sent me pages, which I read, checked against the German, and responded where needed.
Through an insane amount of work, he found a Marx in English that spoke in many of those styles, a voice that was much more direct and spoke to readers. The danger for this book with all its complexity is that it speak past readers, a danger Marx keenly recognized for his own German original. I tried to keep us honest about the conceptual vocabulary — we argued, with humor and deference, over meanings and renderings — over five years. Reitter produced reams of flexible prose that varied with the book, the voice generally direct and matter of fact, where warranted wound up in dialectical knots, always moving along to the next demonstration, the next argument, and often funny.
Ours was a picture of cooperation, in Marx’s sense — a division of labor, where we learned to depend on each other. We both wrote endnotes and now it is hard to tell who wrote which. Most of all, as the project went along we were each convinced, again, but in a different and more personal way, how important Marx’s analysis still is for bringing before the eyes of those who suffer it capital’s excesses and lies.
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Contributors
Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University.
Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation.
Wendy Brown is the UPS Foundation Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
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