The Brooklyn Rail

I have read Marx’s Capital, in particular the first volume, quite a few times, in different translations and also in German (though not, as Adolphe Menjou is said to have assured the House Un-American Activities Committee he had, “in the original Russian”). On each occasion I have newly noticed some idea or way of putting things that provoked fresh understanding. Reading Paul Reitter’s new translation of Volume I provided this pleasure once again. Marx was so brilliant, and he worked and reworked his “critique of political economy” for so many years before letting it go into the world, that his book is inexhaustibly full of insights for anyone interested in interpreting and changing the social world we live in. So I’m grateful to this publication for providing one more occasion to ride Marx’s train of thought. I imagine—hope, at any rate—that Reitter enjoyed the years spent with the text. And as with Homer and Proust, if someone wants to do the work, the world is surely better off with yet another version of a truly great piece of writing.

Apart from this, it’s hard to tell whom Reitter and Paul North, the fellow Germanist who collaborated with him on the volume, had in mind as readers. Marx scholars will naturally read the text in German. A table comparing different editions and an appendix by William Clare Roberts exploring the French translation Marx oversaw seemingly aim to satisfy Marxological curiosity, but the bulk of the editorial apparatus—introduction and notes—seems aimed at beginners: there is no serious grappling with controversial issues of interpretation and theory. There is no discussion, for instance, of the relation of Marx’s work to “Marxism” as doctrine or movement. There is mention of the German “new Marx reading” of the late sixties, but little explanation of what made it new or of the disputes to which it has given rise. The gulf between Marx’s critique and the thought-world of contemporary economics is acknowledged, but no arguments advanced for why a student might put her energies into Capital rather than the econ textbook of the moment. North begins his introduction with a reference to “Marx’s anger” at capitalism as the spur to his life’s scientific labors, but he has nothing to say about how reading Capital would be of help to a person motivated today by anti-capitalist fury. There is a lot of talk about Marx’s method and style of thought, but none about its particular relevance to political or scientific questions with which a present-day hater of capitalism might be concerned. Curiously, only one of the six names listed as members of an Editorial Board—whose contribution to the translation is unclear—is primarily a Marx specialist. (Similarly, the wildly enthusiastic reviews the book has received do not reflect specialized knowledge.) Despite the warmth of feeling communicated by the translator’s and editor’s contributions, Marx’s work is presented as something for distanced appreciation, like the Bible as literature.

The translator and editor occasionally show themselves to be confused or inexpert in Marxian matters. For instance, when Marx invokes “the patriarchal rural industry of a peasant family” in contrast with capitalist commodity production, an editorial note identifies this as “the European family” in which “women perform unpaid labor within the home while men work outside the home … for wages.” But that is the working-class family under capitalism, not the peasant structure Marx is talking about. The confusion is compounded when the note has Marx see women’s entry into the paid labor force as “making them de facto members of the proletariat,” when actually Capital classifies the whole family supported by a wage as proletarian, part of the argument that wages are paid for labor-power, not for the labor of the actually employed worker.

An opportunity to bring Marx’s theoretical acumen to bear on the contemporary economy is missed in the notes on Marx’s theory of money. According to one note, “Marx appears to be a ‘metallist’,” holding that money must be an actual commodity like gold. This view, shared by many Marx specialists, would seem to limit the validity of Marx’s monetary theory to the period before 1971, when world money was decisively cut free from its connection with precious metal. On the other hand, Marx seems far ahead of his time in explaining why money need not be a commodity, since it is its role in circulation and not its physical substance that allows it to represent commodity values. This is why, he stresses, it is in credit money—like today’s Federal Reserve Notes, the basis of the worldwide money system—that “money … takes on its own peculiar form of existence …” Clarification of Marx’s centrally important ideas on money would involve explaining that money must be a commodity in the early stage of Marx’s argument because there are no banks at this stage, hence no credit-money; in addition, this assumption makes it easier for Marx to demolish the quantity theory of money, the dominant theory in the nineteenth century (as well as today; one editorial note in this volume seems to adhere to it!). This is therefore a matter with respect to which a note could have opened up windows both on controversies among Marxists and economic issues—and theories—of the present day.

Another opportunity missed lies in the long, confused, and confusing note that purports to explain Marx’s conception of “contradiction,” contrasting it with Hegel’s use of the term. The note flounders around in unclarified terminology instead of considering the actual bit of Marx’s text to which it is attached. Here Marx gives as an example of a “contradiction” Kepler’s resolution of centripetal and centrifugal forces in celestial mechanics. He thus accomplishes a remarkable de-mystification of the concept of “contradiction,” connecting it to conceptual procedures in the natural sciences that he took as models for his own theorizing. Reflection on this example would go far to clarify Marx’s relation to Hegel and the nature of his dialectics.

To take one more example, while the decision to translate the expression traditionally rendered as “primitive accumulation” as “original accumulation” is a good one, the editorial note suggests a misunderstanding of the significance of the description in Chapter 24 of the dispossession of the European labor force from land and other means of production in the early centuries of capitalism. “Obviously,” a note explains—in conformity with many current views—“‘'original’ forms of accumulation still occur, in ongoing events of colonization and imperialism …” No one could deny that people are still being driven from their land and robbed of the ability to produce for themselves, but Marx has something other than this in mind. Two chapters earlier he follows up his explanation of the origin of surplus value in unpaid labor by explaining the accumulation of capital—the growth of capitalist property—as the use of already-produced surplus value to produce more by again employing workers and purchasing machinery and raw materials. In time, he shows, the money originally invested by the capitalist is replaced by the monetary equivalent of the surplus labor performed by his employees. At this point the classical ideological justification for capitalist property, represented theoretically by the labor theory of value, has been reversed. Property was supposed to be based on the individual’s labor, but now it derives from someone else’s labor. “The exchange of equivalents,” which assured the capitalist’s just title to the output from the labor and materials he purchased with his money, “has been turned around in such a way that there is now only the semblance of exchange.” Originally, however, “the capitalist production process … transforms only a money owner’s sum of value into capital;” this sum “is a precondition of that process …” But if the analysis of the accumulation process reveals that capital is formed from unpaid labor, the history of the “original accumulation” shows that the money with which the whole process began was itself derived from violent theft. Capitalist private property, supposedly linking value to individual effort, is shown to be a total fraud.

The translation itself has elements to recommend it over earlier attempts. For example, as Reitter insists, the translation of Marx’s neologism “Werthding” as “value-thing” brings out the idea of the commodity as an embodiment of value better than “object of value,” as Ben Fowkes renders it in the Penguin version. On the other hand, “thingly” (for “sachlich”) is un-English. There is also the matter of tone: Reitter’s Marx is more casual-conversational than the original, with repeated “Let’s say …” instead of “Let us say…” or “If we suppose …” Describing Balance of Trade as the “mantra” of the Mercantilists I find gratingly anachronistic. The same holds for the decision to translate “Korn” as “wheat.” A note would have saved any reader the misunderstanding of this as “maize”; “corn” was the nineteenth-century English word, and Capital spends time on the Corn Laws.

But such issues, it seems to me, matter little. The translation is good enough to convey Marx’s meanings. Fowkes’s translation in the Penguin edition has also allowed many readers to understand Marx’s ideas, as for that matter has the version prepared under Russian supervision for the Marx-Engels Collected Works. Marx has been misunderstood by native speakers of his language since Das Kapital was first published, and English-speaking readers can get the ideas from any of the existing versions. (The Penguin edition has the advantage of including the illuminating “Sixth Chapter” of Capital, unpublished in Marx’s lifetime.) The reader has to do the work. The chief significance of this new version of Marx’s book lies in that its very existence suggests that capitalism’s current dire state is leading people to look for ways to understand this system beyond those normally on offer from media and academia. Reading Capital is certainly neither necessary nor sufficient for finding effective ways to oppose present-day society, but it remains, as Marx hoped, an aid for anyone who wants to understand their systemic enemy.