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PORTSIDE CULTURE

KARL MARX CAPITAL: CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, VOLUME 1  
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Meade McCloughan
March 10, 2025
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ A critical assessment of the newest translation of Marx's
masterwork. _

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_Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1_
Karl Marx
Edited and translated by Paul Reitter
Edited by Paul North
Foreword by Wendy Brown
Afterword by William Clare Roberts
Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691190075

The new translation by Paul Reitter of Marx’s most important work
has two main things going for it.

Firstly, it has a direct relationship to a determinate original text
by Marx, the 1872 second German edition. This means that it is very
straightforward to compare the translation with what Marx actually
wrote. This is in striking contrast with what we find with the 1976
Ben Fowkes translation, which is based on a mish-mash of the 1883
third German edition (edited by Engels), the 1872-75 French
translation (which Marx supervised) and the 1890 fourth German edition
(edited by Engels). As is evident to a careful reader of Fowkes’s
version, he does not for the most part directly translate Marx;
instead, he modifies the 1887 English translation by Samuel Moore and
Edward Aveling in the light of the 1890 German text. Moore and
Aveling’s work was supervised by Engels, and he got them to
translate the 1883 German edition but also to use the 1872-75 French
translation to clarify and amend what Engels referred to as the more
‘difficult passages’. Many but by no means all of these changes
were then incorporated in the 1890 German edition. A striking example:
in the third paragraph of chapter one, §1, Fowkes has Marx say:
‘The discovery […] of the manifold uses of things is the work of
history’ (underlining added for emphasis). However, all four German
editions (1867, 1872, 1883 and 1890) give _geschichtliche That_,
namely ‘historical act’. So why does Fowkes have ‘the work of
history’? Well, it is the result of his copying Moore and Aveling.
And they have ‘work of history’ because they are rendering the
French: _une oeuvre de l’histoire_. And why not? Thomas Kuczynski,
in his 2017 _Neue Textausgabe_, changes the German text to follow the
French, and so we read there _ein Werk der Geschichte_! Anyway, this
is all just initially to indicate the difficulties of working out what
it is that Fowkes’ translation is based on, and therefore the
benefit of now having an English text which directly relates to a
stable original.

Secondly, the new translation improves on Fowkes in a number of
respects. One notable instance is the use of ‘gelatinous blob’ for
Marx’s characteriation of value as _eine bloße __Gallerte _of
undifferentiated human labour (a phrase he uses seven times in chapter
one). This is indeed what _Gallerte_ means (Moore and Aveling give
‘a mere congelation’, Fowkes ‘merely congealed quantities’).
However, the editors do not appear to appreciate quite how appropriate
this term is. Gelatin is a translucent, colourless, flavourless food
ingredient, traditionally produced by boiling up animal carcasses. So
it is both the product of a kind of process of abstraction and itself
manifests abstractness (absence of determinate qualities, also its
ability to take on different forms). The editors comment that ‘the
image of “gelatinous blobs” doesn’t neatly cohere with the idea
of “ghostly [objecthood]”’ Marx associates with it (796). But I
think this is mistaken: Marx opts for ‘gelatin’ precisely because
it can suggest the spectral and phantasmagorical. We can see this in
the term ‘ectoplasm’, which was coined later in the nineteenth
century by spiritualists to refer to the ‘ghostly objecthood’
manifested in spiritualist séances: Arthur Conan Doyle defined it as
‘a viscous, gelatinous substance which appeared to differ from every
known form of matter in that it could solidify and be used for
material purposes’.

Some other examples of where the translation is to be commended: it is
good to have _entpuppt_ properly rendered in the opening sentence of
chapter four, §2 (‘Contradictions in the General Formula’):
‘The form of circulation where money emerges from its chrysalis
[_entpuppt_] as capital contradicts all the laws we have explicated up
to now.’ (130, underlining added for emphasis). Fowkes simply has
this as ‘is transformed into’. This is all the better as the
metaphor is then nicely picked up again in the final paragraph of §2,
where Marx refers to the ‘capitalist in larval form
[_Kapitalistenraupe_]’, who ‘both must, and cannot metamorphose
into a butterfly [_Schmetterlingsentfaltung_]’ (140). I also like
the fact that Marx’s exclamation marks are shown in the ‘freedom,
equality, property and Bentham’ passage (149, omitted in the
Moore/Aveling and Fowkes versions). These are just some of the many
places where we find the translator treating Marx’s German text with
subtlety and care.

However, these positive features are outweighed by many deficiencies.

The most problematic feature is the mangling of specific terms. An
especially striking example is the handling of the German word
_Personen_. As we all know, having read Hegel’s _Philosophy of
Right_, the term ‘person’ has the very particular meaning of an
individual with property rights, who relates to others by means of the
things each of them own. It is _not_ equivalent to ‘human being’,
as contemporary usage, especially in North America, might suggest. But
the new translation regularly uses ‘person’ for _Menschen_ and
‘people’ for _Personen_ (as well as ‘person’). This occurs
most disastrously in the very opening paragraph of chapter two, where
Marx introduces the concept of the person: here we find both
mistranslations. So we read: ‘Commodities are things and thus
defenseless against people [_Menschen_]. If they are unwilling to
belong to someone, that person [_er_] can use force – in other
words, simply take them.’ (60) The first sentence correctly uses
‘people’ for _Menschen_. But in the second sentence the translator
supposes that Marx’s use of the pronoun _er_ can be rendered as
‘that person’. But the whole point is that behaving in this way is
_not_ what persons do, because persons relate to each other as
rightful owners of property! This is what Marx goes on to say in the
next sentence: ‘Commodity owners can put things into a relation as
commodities only when they treat one another as people [_Personen_]
whose wills reside in those things, and an owner doesn’t acquire
another’s commodity unless both parties are willing.’ (60) But
again the translation is wrong: it should be ‘persons’ here, not
‘people’! And this flip-flopping of ‘people’ and ‘persons’
for both _Personen_ and _Menschen_ continues throughout. The most
egregious example comes in chapter three, §2, where Marx writes that
the contradictory character of the commodity is manifested in
the _Personificirung_ der Sache und Versachlichung der Personen.
Fowkes gives this as ‘the conversion of things into persons and the
conversion of persons into things’, providing the German in a
footnote. The new translation has ‘the personification of things and
the thingification of people’ (88). This is terrible. Why wreck
Marx’s chiasmus (one of his favourite rhetorical devices)? I suspect
that the translator/editors think that this ‘thingification’ is
meant to be pernicious to us as ‘people’, as human beings,
amounting to ‘reification’ (see lv, lxxvi). But Marx’s
underlying point is that to be a person is _already_ to be
‘thingified’, to be represented in and through property; the term
does not refer to some condition or status that is _negated_ by
commodification. It should be added that Fowkes is by contrast
entirely reliable when it comes to rendering _Personen_.

Another term which is badly handled is _Wissenschaft_, that is,
‘science’, as with the Latin _scientia_. As is well known, the
German word retains the original extension, whereas in English since
the nineteenth century it has narrowed to refer to what are therefore
pleonastically called the natural sciences. All this is fairly easy to
explain and bear in mind. But the new translation makes a real mess of
the term, rendering it as ‘scholarship’, ‘systematic
scholarship’, ‘systematic knowledge’, ‘science’, 
‘science and scholarship’ and at one point ‘science and
systematic scholarship’ (!). An endnote ‘explains’: ‘The word
rendered as “scholarly” is “_wissenschaftlich_.” It can mean
“scientific,” that is, “having to do with natural science,”
and also “systematic,” in the sense of truly rigorous and properly
self-reflective with regard to scholarly method.’ (793) This is not
right: _wissenschaftlich _in Marx’s texts does not mean ‘having to
do with natural science’; for that he uses _naturwissenschaftlich_.
And ‘scholarship’ seems too weak. It would have been so much
easier and neater just to stick to ‘science’. I suspect that the
editors/translator are just uneasy with Marx’s claim to be
_wissenschaftlich_!

Additionally, Marx’s connected use of _veräußern_ and
_entäußern_ (and related nouns) does not come over very clearly in
this translation. The fact that he uses them as a pair is mentioned in
an endnote (813-814), but what the terms mean or how they are
translated is not discussed. In the text itself we find them given as
‘to dispose’ and ‘to divest’ respectively, which is fine (and
in virtue of being relatively consistent, improves on Fowkes’
variable treatment). But we miss both the sense of their common root
and the related fact that _entäußern_ can also be taken as ‘to
externalize’, that is, in an alienating manner. In chapter three,
Marx writes that ‘_Gold_ [_ist_] _in der Hand jedes Waarenbesitzers
die entäußerte Gestalt seiner veräußerten Waare_.’ This is
translated as: ‘In the hands of every other commodity owner, gold is
the shape of a commodity that has been disposed of and thereby
divested of its original shape’. This doesn’t really convey
Marx’s assertion that gold (and therefore money, _Geld_) is the
_externalized_ form of value of each and every commodity.

In addition to these issues with specific terms, there are many other
respects in which the new translation is problematic.

The translator frequently chooses to reorganize Marx’s sentences in
ways which spoil the sense. Two examples, both from chapter four, can
be invoked. The chapter opens with the straightforward statement:
‘_Die Waarencirkulation ist der Ausgangspunkt des Kapitals_.’ Hard
to go wrong, one might think. But the new translation, perhaps
striving to avoid the obvious, gives us: ‘Capital begins with the
circulation of commodities’ (121). This is far too free. For one
thing, Marx’s order re-enacts the very transition _from_ the
circulation of commodities _to_ capital, which the book is at this
moment conceptualizing. And we really should have _Ausgangspunkt_
correctly conveyed: it means ‘starting point’ or ‘springing-off
point’, and as it is used a further eight times in the rest of the
chapter (and translated as ‘starting point’), it should be used
translated in this way here, at the starting point! Had Marx meant to
say what the translator provides, he would have written ‘_Kapital
beginnt mit der Cirkulation von Waaren_’. But he didn’t. (Fowkes,
following Moore and Aveling, correctly translates Marx’s German as
‘The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of
capital’.)

Second example. In a well-known sentence later on in chapter four,
Marx says that ‘_Als bewußter Träger dieser Bewegung wird der
Geldbesitzer Kapitalist_’. Fowkes translates this very cleanly:
‘As the conscious bearer of this movement, the possessor of money
becomes a capitalist’ (modifying Moore and Aveling, using
‘bearer’ instead of their ‘representative’). The new version
however gives the following: ‘The money owner becomes a capitalist
when he acts as the conscious bearer of this movement’. (127). But
why reverse Marx’s order in this way? It changes the force of what
he is saying, not least because of the unwarranted addition of ‘when
he acts’, which suggests a sense of choice on the part of the money
owner (I owe this point to Robin Halpin). Had Marx intended what the
translator provides, he would have written something like ‘_Der
Geldbesitzer wird zum Kapitalisten, wenn er als bewusster Träger
dieser Bewegung auftritt_’. But he didn’t.

Another insistent and annoying feature of the new version is its
reluctance to use nouns to translate nouns. We’ve already seen this
in the opening sentence of chapter four: _Ausgangspunkt_ gets
eliminated in favour of ‘begins’. We repeatedly encounter verbal
formulations being used where the original has substantives. An
example: in the first paragraph of chapter four, §3 (chapter six in
previous English versions), Marx describes labour-power as the
commodity ‘_deren wirklicher Verbrauch also selbst
Vergegenständlichung von Arbeit wäre, daher Werthschöpfung_’.
Four nouns in the original. Fowkes gives us ‘whose actual
consumption is therefore itself an objectification of labour, hence a
creation of value’. The new translation has the following: ‘When
this commodity is actually consumed, labor would be objectified, and
thus value would be created’ (141); ‘this commodity’ just
expands the relative pronoun _deren_, leaving just two nouns in place
of Marx’s four. I find the result unsatisfactorily blurry; we seem
to lose Marx’s focus, as conveyed by his use of substantives.

A further and more minor stylistic point. In an attempt to make Marx
sound more conversational, and contemporary, the translator liberally
sprinkles possessive apostrophes around. The title of volume one
itself becomes ‘Capital’s Process of Production’ (9), for the
German ‘_Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals_’. But the results
just seem too colloquial – not at all _wissenschaftlich_ – and at
times quite clumsy. (Similarly with the other contractions:
‘isn’t’, ‘aren’t’, ‘weren’t’, etc.)

I really should stop, but instances of ungainly and defective
treatment of Marx’s text keep on coming. Another striking example:
at the end of §1 of chapter eight on ‘The Working Day’ (chapter
ten in previous English editions), Marx tells us that ‘_Zwischen
gleichen Rechten entscheidet die Gewalt_’. Short and snappy! Punchy,
even. Fowkes gives us: ‘Between equal rights, force decides’
(here, as so often, just copying Moore and Aveling’s 1887 version,
merely adding the comma). The new translation has the following: ‘In
such situations, whoever has more power will decide which right is
enforced.’ (207) This seems remarkably feeble and flabby, as well as
being actively misleading (there is nothing to support ‘which right
is enforced’, as if it is simply a matter of one over the other).
And the rhythm of Marx’s prose in this paragraph is ruined. To make
matters worse, in the previous sentence, Marx’s _Antinomie_ is given
as ‘theoretical impasse’!

There is one significant place where the translation clearly deviates
from the professed intention to be strictly following the 1872 German
original. At the beginning of chapter four, just after the ‘worst of
architects/best of bees’ passage, we read Marx saying that the
worker can enjoy the labour process ‘as the free play of his
physical and mental powers’ to different degrees (154). But the
German simply says ‘_als Spiel seiner eignen körperlichen und
geistigen Kräfte_’ – there’s no ‘free’ there.
Notwithstanding this, the editors get rather excited about this idea
of ‘free play’, providing an endnote citing Kant and Schiller
(816). But it is just not warranted by the German text. Now, the
editors might think they are justified here given Marx’s subsequent
use of the phrase ‘_freien Spiel der physischen und geistigen
Kräfte_’ (at the beginning of §5 of chapter eight on ‘The
Working Day’, here 235). But this is in the context of his
discussion of ‘disposable [namely, ‘free’] time’, _not_ the
labour process. The 1872 text is therefore telling us that work can be
satisfying and enjoyable, but only to an extent (the ‘play’ of
one’s faculties is always to some degree constrained, thus cannot,
even optimally, be ‘free’); whereas the activities we undertake
outside work do allow for the ‘free play’ of our powers. This
would then be consistent with the famous ‘realm of freedom’
passage from the end of _Capital_ volume 3. (I should add that chapter
four in the 1872-75 French version does have ‘_libre jeu_’; Fowkes
gives ‘free play’ here.)

So far I have been dealing with the translation, but the book contains
much else besides: 86 pages of introductory material and 147 pages of
end material. Let us address the latter first. There is an interesting
discussion by William Clare Roberts of the 1872-75 French version,
plus an appendix further dealing with some of the changes in that
edition. There is also an appendix providing a comparative table of
contents for the 1867, 1872, 1872-75 and 1887 versions (the latter
being the basis for Fowkes). This is helpful as Marx changed the
division of the text into parts and chapters in both the second German
edition (1872) and the French translation (1872-75). The new
translation follows the 1872 arrangement, whereas the English versions
by Moore and Aveling (1887) and Fowkes (1976) follow the French, and
so fall out of sync with the German editions from chapter four onwards
(as indicated above). However, the table of contents provided here
incorrectly lays out the concordance of the chapters which make up
Parts Two and Three in the 1872 edition (732), that is, fails to show
that what is chapter five in 1872 becomes chapter seven in 1872-75,
1887 and 1976, and similarly for the next four chapters. The endnotes
are generally helpful, relying as they do on _MEGA_ scholarship
(lxxiv). There are interesting discussions of points of translation.
But there are also mistakes. One endnote tell us that the Levellers
‘advocated for power transfer to the House of Lords’ (807)! More
worryingly, the endnotes are regularly both prolix and unreliable when
it comes to philosophical matters. An astonishing moment comes in the
endnote appended to the passage in chapter nine where Marx refers to
‘the law Hegel discovered in his Logic’, namely that ‘at a
certain point, purely quantitative changes become qualitative
distinctions’ (278). The editors in their endnote then suppose that
this means that the ‘capital system perverts ontology’ (826). But
this law _is_ ‘ontology’, to use their term, realized, so Marx
tells us, in the ‘natural sciences’! And this failure to
understand what Marx (and Hegel) mean is manifested on many other
occasions.

Just to give one further example. In the ‘Editor’s
Introduction’, we read the following remarkable statement:

Early in his writing life, Marx identified in the labor process an
effect he called “alienation,” insofar as in capitalistic labor, a
product made by one person would be taken away and used to benefit
someone else, not the worker but an owner who did not participate
directly in making the product. Later in _Capital_, Marx identifies
something else in this process, a new critical name for the process
itself, an abstraction that he makes for critical purposes, looking at
the concrete labor process, which he calls “reification.” With
this word he names the way that, in the capital system, processes get
rolled up and congealed in things.  (lv, underlining added for
emphasis)

Let us pass over the inept account of alienation. The term
‘reification’ is standardly used as the English equivalent of
_Verdinglichung_. We are then told that Marx uses this term in
_Capital_. But _Verdinglichung_ – in any form – does _not_ appear
in the text at all! Nor does the translation of _Capital_ which
follows feature the term ‘reification’ in any form. The closest in
the original is the one use of _Versachlichung_ which I discussed
above and which does not fit with what is described here as
‘reification’. Now, an interesting debate can be had about the
extent to which the Lukácsian concept of _Verdinglichung_ is
applicable to _Capital_. But to assert that it is in effect one of the
key categories we already find in the text is completely misleading.
And remember, this isn’t just some random internet commentator; this
is one of the two editors of the very version of _Capital_ we are
about to read, presumably at least partly responsible for the fifty
pages of explanatory endnotes to the text. To put it mildly, this does
not inspire confidence.

So where are we? As emphasized at the outset, this new translation
does have many commendable features. But it also has very serious
defects, both as a translation of and as an edition of _Capital_. As a
result, it cannot be taken to replace Fowkes. But there is, I believe,
due to be a third contender, a translation of Thomas Kuczynski’s
2017 _Neue Textausgabe_ edition coming out at some stage in the
Historical Materialism Book Series. This, one would hope, will be much
more successful than the volume under review here. But Kuczynski’s
edition is highly revisionary – he outdoes Engels in tweaking
Marx’s text in accordance with what he takes to be the author’s
intentions. Two examples: (i) as mentioned at the beginning of this
review, Kuczynski incorporates (that is, translates into German) the
French _une oeuvre de l’histoire_ in chapter one (thereby bringing
his edition into conformity with both Moore/Aveling and Fowkes); (ii)
he deletes the paragraph a couple of pages later on in chapter one
where Marx provides his ‘geometrical’ analogy for the ‘common
element’ shared by all commodities, on the basis that Marx crossed
this out in his own copy of the 1872 edition. All these changes are
detailed in Kuczynski’s massive _Historisch-kritischer Apparat_
volume (944 pages, as opposed to a mere 800 pages for _Das Kapital_
itself). This apparatus volume is only available in electronic form,
but is really essential in order to be able to use this version of
_Das Kapital_ properly.  So will the Historical Materialism
translation include Kuczynski’s apparatus? We wait to find out…

Meade McCloughan is on the organizing group of the Marx and Philosophy
Society and teaches philosophy for the Oxford University Department of
Continuing Education.

* Karl Marx
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