Last fall, Princeton University Press published a new edition of Capital to nearly universal praise. In Open Letters Review, David Murphy calls it “marvelous.” In the New York Times, James Miller enthuses that
no previous English version of “Capital” has featured such an erudite critical apparatus or such an exacting translation. It’s a remarkable achievement that forces readers to attend to the philosophical subtleties of Marx’s argument.
Even many of the reviews that manage to hold back from calling it “marvelous” or “a remarkable achievement” generally convey the sense that of course this one will, and probably should, replace the previously-standard Penguin edition. And the reputation of the new edition is doubtless helped by some of the heaviest hitters in contemporary Marxology, like Michael Heinrich and Kohei Saito, having been included in the “editorial collective.” Scholars who had a chance to add their feedback while the translation was in process are less likely to reject the results. And the general Marx-reading (or Marx-curious) public is understandably excited by the simple fact of the first new translation in half a century.
I’ve spent much of the last few years teaching Capital classes, in-person and online, and reading and thinking about different interpretations of the book. I am, for better or worse, thoroughly invested in project of getting new readers invested in diving into Marx’s text. And my view is that if this really does replace the 1976 Ben Fowkes translation (used in the Penguin edition) as the “standard” English-language Capital, Marx’s English readers would be vastly worse off.
That probably sounds harsh, and even slightly absurd. Who cares this much whether one translation of a tome about economics from the 1860s is a bit better than another?
The reason I care is that I really do want as many people as possible to read Capital and get everything they can out of the experience. One hundred and fifty-eight years after the original edition was published, it remains the most insightful book ever written about the economic order that shapes all of our lives. It’s both intellectually exhilarating and a totally unique literary masterpiece. And it bothers me that, buried under all the buzz and critical praise, we’re now getting a starkly inferior product.
Translations of any book are generally judged by both their fidelity to the source material and their quality as literature in the language into which the book is being translated. (Sometimes, of course, these imperatives can come into conflict, but a good translation should get reasonably high marks in both categories.) Editions of translated texts are judged primarily by the quality of the translation, and to a lesser extent by the other material, like introductions, afterwards, and footnotes.
My extremely negative judgment of the Princeton edition is based on three points. First, the extra material isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Second, this translation does a worse job than the Fowkes of capturing Marx’s intentions for the text. Finally, on a sentence-by-sentence level, much of the writing is just awful.
The introduction to the Penguin edition was written by Ernest Mandel. The introduction to the Princeton edition was written by Wendy Brown.I don’t always agree with Mandel, but he’s a serious Marxist thinker. Brown is an interesting and often insightful theorist, and Marxism is somewhere in the mix of her influences. But, she’s just not as focused on Marx as Mandel is, and it shows.
The translators’ notes are certainly far more extensive here than anything in the Penguin edition. And there’s a sense in which the sheer extent of them is an accomplishment.
But…sometimes less is more.
Take n. ii, right at the outset of Ch. 1:
Throughout, the German word “unmittelbar” is translated with the idiomatic American English “direct” or “directly.” It should be kept in mind that Marx refers here to one-half of a pair of modes crucial to Hegel’s philosophy, “unmittelbar” and “mittelbar,” “immediate” or “unmediated” and “mediate” or “mediated.” “Unmittelbar” refers to the unmediated, first-blush, unreflected, simple appearance of something, which later on in the analysis always turns out to be made up of a much more complex relation. An unmediated appearance is revealed to depend altogether for its character on another thing and so is in fact mediated by that thing. Money is the unmediated, direct appearance of value, but of course, as we learn, what allows money to represent value is that it is in constant communication with workers, production, commodities, exchange, circulation, imperialism, and so on. In short, the unmediated form of something temporarily disguises that thing’s position in a multiform process, in a process of processes, in a global system, regardless how well, or how violently, it works.
This is all inspired by Marx saying a commodity has a use-value in that it “directly” or “indirectly” meets some sort of need. (Directly, he clarifies, "as a means of subsistence or enjoyment” or indirectly, “as a means of producing something else.”)
Do we really need Hegel, imperialism, processes made out of other processes, and the rest to understand the contrast between “directly” and “indirectly”? Do we really? Does this 169-word paragraph add literally anything to anyone’s understanding of the thought Marx is expressing when he says that the use-value of a commodity can be either be directly useful (to someone personally consuming it) or indirectly useful (to someone using it to make something else)? Is there anything in that contrast, as Marx himself draws it, that actually cries out for further explication?
The endnote isn’t even over. We have 269 words left. If you’re really curious about the various German words being translated into English as either “object” or “thing,” or you’re dying to know North and Ritter’s thoughts about how Marx might have understood the difference between “subsistence” and “enjoyment” in the phrase “means of subsistence or enjoyment,” you should check out that second paragraph.
I’ll pass.
Then there’s this:
When Marx observes in 1.3 that commodities have both concrete useful qualities and economic values, we get n. xxviii, which is longer than a lot of articles I’ve written for Jacobin. The first few lines are (I think?) intended as an explanation of what Marx means by “value.”
Value is a teletechnology that allows one thing to be exchanged for a qualitatively different thing at a distance of time and space, without significant loss. In the Capital project, value is the main object of study.Although a technology, it isn’t purely or even primarily physical, even if it often counts on physical “bearers” like commodities or coins or concrete labor. Value is as much an idea as a thing, as much a phantasm in the mind as a practical commitment by everyone involved, as much a general feature of the system as an individual quasi-immaterial substance actually existing and realized in a purchase, sale, or trade.
Reader, can you boil that down to an actual definition? Like, a sentence that starts with, “‘Value’ means…”?Follow-up question if your answer is “yes”:Are you lying to me?
And then, of course, there’s the translation itself.
It’s less accurate than the Fowkes in the sense that it doesn’t capture as much of Marx’s own vision of the book. This is so for the simple and straightforward reason that Ritter and North translate the second German edition. That means that they leave out numerous changes that Marx himself personally signed off on for the French edition (finalized during his lifetime with his active participation and final-edits approval) and which he explicitly asked Engels to carry over to subsequent German editions. So, for example, in one of the edition’s most annoying oddities (at least for any reader trying to follow along in a class or study group where other people are using other editions), the chapter order is off, since Marx changed it starting with the French edition.
Ritter and North throw in a four-page “On the Choice of Edition” note. The crux of their argument there comes in the second sentence:
The second edition of 1872 was the last authorized text of volume 1 published in the original German, in the sense that it is the last one that Marx revised himself and approved for publication.
But, why does it matter that it’s the last one published in the original German that Marx approved for publication? Even if you don’t trust Engels—and to lay my own cards on the table, I trust the judgments of Marx’s lifelong best friend and close intellectual collaborator a lot more than I trust the judgment of most twenty-first century Marxologists—the French edition exists.1 Why not just translate that?
They write:
Marx’s work on the Capital project is like a river that flows for twenty years and more, a river of research, plans, drafts, and revisions, not to mention complete restarts and rewritings. Any section lifted out of this flow is at once fascinating and false. You can’t step into the same river twice, and in Marx’s case, not even once.
Let’s just pause to ask:Why “not even once” for Marx? What does it mean to say you can’t step in even once “in Marx’s case”? Taken seriously, this sounds like it means that you can’t sit down and read an individual draft and understand what it means. I’m pretty sure they don’t think that, but…what do they mean?
They go on:
Revision was his continuous practice. With each set of revisions, earlier thoughts, even if they remain intact, look different in light of new conceptualizations as well as new material on government policy and laws, worker organizing, and technological change that he was constantly gathering. That is to say, anyone who claims a particular pile of pages in this ongoing flow is the definitive version is misleading you or has been misled.
If so, it sounds like all choices are equally good or equally bad. Presumably, though, they didn’t put all the different editions on a dart board to decide which one to translate. They had reasons to make the specific decision they made. And all this belaboring of the point that no decision could be completely perfect is completely irrelevant to justifying their particular decision.
At this point, there’s a long paragraph talking about all the other stuff Marx wrote during those years (the Grundrisse, for example) in which he works out arguments that eventually made into Capital. But, that’s irrelevant to the question of which edition of Capital to translate.
Next, they start talking about all the notes for revision he made after the first edition, which were then “concretized” in the second edition. If that were the end of the story, translating the second edition would make sense. But, they acknowledge, he just kept making notes for further revisions.
This last point would seem to strongly suggest that it would have been better to translate either the French edition (which, again, Marx signed off on every detail of) or else the later German editions, in which Engels both carried over many of these changes from the French (as requested by Marx) and executed various further changes which Marx also requested.On the option of the French edition, Ritter and North argue that
the text is a kind of philological black box. Since the manuscript that Marx reworked has been lost, it is for the most part impossible to know where Marx revised the formulations he was given or replaced them with his own renderings from the German—and where he merely signed off on the translator Joseph Roy’s efforts. We also don’t have the German source text that Roy and Marx used when they produced their French translation, although it is likely that Roy (and Marx) started working with the first edition and at some point switched to the second, once it appeared. It is therefore mostly impossible to know where the French translation renders the first edition, the published version of the second German edition, or a text revised beyond that.
But…why does that matter?We know that Marx went back and forth with Roy very extensively until everything was exactly to his liking, and he signed off on it all. Given that, what does it matter whether Marx himself came up with the idea for a change or Joseph Roy suggested it and Marx said “oh, yeah, good idea”? Why does it matter what they were working with to produce the French edition if they both approved the French result?
Things get even more confusing when they shrug off the many notes Marx gave Engels for further revision on the grounds that, first, we can’t be certain of what Marx would have thought about how Engels implemented these requests, and second, that “the fundaments” of Marx’s arguments in Capital “don’t change fundamentally” due to the changes Marx requested later. The first point is trivially true, but it’s weak sauce. (And, again, if you for whatever reason don’t trust Engels’s execution of Marx’s revision-requests for the later German editions, the French edition exists.) And pretty clearly, the point about the “fundaments” cuts equally well in all directions.
As much as the choice of edition seems perverse to me, and many of the scholarly extras leave me cold, by far my biggest complaint as a reader of Capital is about the line-by-line translation choices.Let’s start right at the beginning of Ch. 1.Fowkes renders the opening lines of the second paragraph as:
The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference.
The Princeton edition turns this into:
A commodity is, first of all, an external object—a thing whose properties satisfy human wants or needs of whatever kind. The nature of these wants and needs—whether they come from our belly or our imagination—doesn’t matter here.
Just…why?
It’s not like, in the Fowkes, we’re somehow confused about the fact that Marx is using “needs” in a broad enough way to include subjective “wants.” That becomes beautifully clear when he says it doesn’t matter whether the “needs” arise “from the stomach, or the imagination.”
There’s absolutely no nuance of meaning that’s captured here that you lose in the Fowkes. None. But the quality of the writing has taken a nosedive.
Similarly, two paragraphs later, in the Fowkes we have:
The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.
In the Princeton, the lovely crisp “does not dangle in mid-air” of the Fowkes is pointlessly changed to the vastly uglier “doesn’t hover above us in the air” like an undergrad trying to cover over pre-ChatGPT plagiarism by changing a bunch of random words and phrases into synonyms.In between those two examples, we have Fowkes translating Marx as saying that discovering the “manifold uses” of different objects “is the work of history.” The Princeton translation makes that “is a historical act.” There’s no sense in which someone would have a different understanding of the idea Marx is expressing depending on whether they read “is the work of history” or “is a historical act.” But the rhythm of the sentence has become noticeably worse.
One of Marx’s most memorable flourishes in Ch. 7, in the Fowkes translation, is:
The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether it is happening under the slave-owner’s brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus undertakes it in tilling his couple of acres, or a savage, when he lays low a wild beast with a stone.
Here’s what the Princeton translation does to that line:
But how wheat tastes doesn’t tell us who grew it, and looking at the labor process in this way tells us just as little about the actual conditions in which it is carried out: whether it runs its course under the slave overseer’s brutal whip or the capitalist’s watchful eye, whether it is Cincinnatus who completes a labor process by tilling his couple of jugera or a savage who does that by slaying wild beasts with a stone.
There is, I’m sorry, no excuse for that.
Karl Marx was one of the greatest non-fiction literary stylists who ever lived. He doesn’t deserve to have his writing given to us in a form that mindlessly insists on attention to details that don’t matter (if Marx used a relatively informal German word, an equally informal English word must be used, if Marx used a German neologism, an English neologism must be used, and so on) and doesn’t convey any of the greatness of his writing.
More importantly, Capital is worth reading for its core insights but it sits unread on far too many bookshelves. Readers with the stamina to get through the often-obscure initial chapters deserve an edition that will get them excited about what they’re reading and propel them to the end of the book.
On both counts, the Princeton edition is a massive step backwards.
Thanks for reading Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis! This post is public so feel free to share it.
William Clare Roberts, to his credit, has more or less made (the last part) of this point, and made it very well.
From Philosophy for the People w/Ben Burgis via this RSS feed
You must log in or # to comment.