New translation of Das Kapital (2024)

Book Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital. Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. By Karl Marx. Translated by Paul Reitter. (Princeton University Press. £24.50.)

The fruit of five years’ work, Paul Reitter’s new translation of Das Kapital was published last month. It lives up to its claim to be a translation into colloquial (American) English, especially as regards the descriptive and historical parts. It really does read like something written this century as opposed to the now rather clunky original 1887 translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under Engels’s direction.

However, there are some words that cannot be said to be colloquial, in particular valorization, metabolize and subsumption which don’t appear in the 1887 translation and, in the case of the first two, could not have done. They first appeared in the 1976 Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes. Reitter has added a fourth — thingly. The 1887 version translates them as, respectively, ‘production of surplus value’, ‘material change (or circulation)’, and ‘subjection’. These are clearly more colloquial. As to thingly, this was translated as ‘material’, but most people will probably read it as ‘thingy’, which won’t be too wide of the mark.

Reitter has taken great care and there can be no doubt that his translations here are an accurate literal translation of the native German words, but, as with all translations, the question is who is the translation for. At one time Capital was read and studied in the working class movement. Now, unfortunately, it is read mainly by academics in the field of Marx studies. For them, such words present no problem and interpreting their meaning provides ample room for learned disputations, and, for those whose first language is English, puts them in a position to follow the arguments by those whose first language is German. Fair enough, but they don’t make it easier for ordinary working-class militants who want to understand how capitalism works and how they are exploited.

Metabolism is now acceptable and perhaps subsumption too but not valorization. It hardly existed in 1887 and is now used, in economics, to mean the same as ‘monetarization,’ making money out of something. Of course this is what capital is used for too but so are many other things that have nothing to do with workers being used to produce surplus value for capitalists (and all to do with putting a price on everything). The word ‘valorization’ blunts, even obscures, that what’s involved is the exploitation of workers.

For example, in Reitter’s (and Fowkes’s) translation, the title of the chapter which introduces the concept of surplus value is ‘The Labor Process and the Valorization Process’. In the 1887 translation it’s ‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value’. Further, even of itself, ‘valorization’ doesn’t bring out in a clear and immediately comprehensible way what Marx was getting at. The 1887 translation defines capital as ‘self-expanding value’, which conveys the idea of capitalist production as a spontaneous process of producing surplus value. For Reitter, it is ‘self-valorizing value’. Thus, Reitter’s ‘capital’s life process is nothing but its own movement as self-valorizing value’ (p. 280) compares unfavourably, in terms of easier understanding, with 1887’s ‘the life-process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself’ (end of the chapter on ‘The Rate and the Mass of Surplus-Value’).

This is not to dismiss the usefulness of Reitter’s work. Not at all. You just need to read ‘expansion of value’ every time the words ‘valorization’ or ‘valorize’ occur. His translation reads well and is accompanied by 50 pages of very useful end-notes to explain his choice of words as well as Marx’s citations (in Latin, Greek, French and Italian) and references to now obscure persons. It will stand the test of time and can be recommended for those who want to read in modern English Marx’s own exposition of his abstract-labour theory of value and his description, from a working-class point of view, of how the working class in England came into being, its working and living conditions in and up to the 1860s, and struggles to limit the working day.

It is unfortunate that the publishers haven’t let readers simply read Marx in his own words. Instead they have chosen to introduce the new translation with both a 15-page Foreword and a 30-page Editor’s Introduction, both claiming to set out what Marx meant. Both are decidedly unhelpful and undermine the rest of the book. The Preface is mainly gibberish by someone who dismisses as ‘fantasy’ what she calls ‘a perfectly rational, controlled and transparent communist political economy on the far side of a capitalist epoch’; according to her, Capital is a work of philosophy, a ‘deep ontological and epistemological critique of capitalism’. The Editor, too, sees Marx as basically a philosopher and opines that in Capital ‘nowhere really does Marx condemn the capital system or call for revolution’. But, then, both of them are philosophers who only want to interpret the world.

Reitter’s translation is of the 2nd German edition (1873), the 1887 translation is of the 3rd German edition (1883) while Fowkes’s was of the 4th German edition (1890). So now all three German re-editions are available in English. Not that there is any significant difference between them. One inconvenience, though, is that the chapter numbers in Reitter’s translation don’t always correspond to those in the other two which readers in English of Marx have become used to.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

The April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a review of Ben Fowkes' translation of Capital by the same reviewer.

Karl Marx (1991)

Book Review from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital, Volume 1. By Karl Marx, translated by Ben Fowkes. Penguin Classic. £10.99.

Penguins have just republished this modern translation that they first brought out in 1976 and which has since become the standard modern one to quote from. Ernest Mandcl, the Trotskyist leader, who even today still thinks that Marx’s theory of capitalism does not apply to Russia was of course a most unsuitable choice to write a 70-page introduction, even if he does provide some interesting historical material on the background to Marx’s major work.

A new translation of Marx's "Capital" (1980)

Book Review from the April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1976 Penguin published a new translation of Volume I of Marx’s Capital. In his preface the translator, Ben Fowkes, gives two reasons why he feels a new translation was necessary. First, that the English language has changed since the first English edition, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under the supervision of Engels, was published in 1887. Secondly that, with the increased knowledge of Marx’s ideas since 1887, there is no longer any need to shield the reader from some of the more difficult passages which Marx left out, for instance, in the French edition. These, says Fowkes, can be restored despite their difficulty.

On the first point Fowkes is undoubtedly right. Today, nearly a hundred years later, the Moore-Aveling translation has become, due to changes in English usage, a bit stilted. The reader’s concentration on the particular point Marx is trying to make is made more difficult by having at the same time to transform certain old-fashioned phrases into their modern equivalents. But the ideas expressed by Marx in Capital ought to be available in as readable a form as possible since they provide a clear explanation of how the working class are exploited under capitalism and of how capitalism can only work to their detriment. Every class-conscious worker should have a go at reading Capital and may be pleasantly surprised to find that the economic theory alternates with historical accounts of the past sufferings and struggles of the working class in Britain. And the ideas expressed in Capital are of course also the basis of the economic analyses made in the columns of this journal.

Judged by this standard of making Capital easier to read, Fowkes’ translation by and large succeeds. To give an example of the sort of changes made, we can mention that the words productiveness and labourer have been replaced, in accordance with modern usage, by productivity and worker. In addition. Capital’s subtitle is translated as “A Critique of Political Economy” (instead of as “A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production”), so making it quite clear that Marx was not simply criticising capitalism but also the categories used by economic theory generally.

However, there is one change of Fowkes’ which works in the opposite direction, making understanding more difficult. A key word used by Marx is the verb verwerten and its noun Verwertung. These are everyday German words which mean literally something like “putting to good/profitable/valuable use”. Marx uses them in a special sense, in relation to “value” and “capital”, to mean the use of value or capital in such a way that their size is increased-hence a good or profitable or valuable use. Moore, Aveling and Engels chose to translate Verwertung as “expansion”, “increase” and “augmentation”, so that their English translation speaks of “the expansion of value”, the “self-expansion of capital”, and so on.

Fowkes introduces a new word to translate Marx here: valorisation (and, for the verb, valorise). While not denying that it is sometimes necessary to introduce a new word to refer to a new concept, is it really necessary in this case? Valorisation is not an entirely new word since it does already figure in dictionaries; according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary it means “raise or stabilise the value of (a commodity, etc.) by government action”—hardly what Marx meant! But valorisation, in Fowkes’ sense, is a new word, the working out of whose meaning is only going to make the reading and understanding of Capital more, not less, difficult.

It is also a pity that Penguin did not let Marx speak for himself and considered it necessary to add an 80-page introduction by Ernest Mandel. Certainly, Mandel has a knowledge of some aspects of Marxian economics but, as a Trotskyist, he is quite unqualified to write an introduction to Capital. For instance, he refers to Russia, East Europe, China, North Vietnam, North Korca(!) and Cuba as “societies in which the rule of capital has already been overthrown” (p. 16). Really? Are we supposed to accept, then, that wealth in these countries does not “appear as an immense collection of commodities” as Marx says in the very first line of Capital is the case in “societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails”? Again, Mandel talks of capitalism as being characterised by “production for private profit” (p. 11). So, production for state profit what might be called the self-expansion of state capital—as in Russia, apparently isn’t capitalism! Then, to cap it all, we are told that the working class needs a “revolutionary leadership” (p. 84)—doubtless Mandel and his Trotskyist supporters in the New Left Review who prepared this new translation for Penguin.

If all this is the price we have to pay for not having to buy editions of Capital from state capitalist Russia then it is almost too high.

Adam Buick