Indifference was the world’s first reaction to Karl Marx’s magnum opus. In 1867, when the first volume of “Capital” was published in German, it was greeted with such silence that the author’s best friend and patron, Friedrich Engels, submitted pseudonymous reviews, most of them combative, to the leading German newspapers, in a futile effort to drum up publicity.
“Capital” had been decades in the making, with Marx producing countless notes, drafts and mathematical equations he couldn’t make work to clinch an argument that capitalism would self-destruct, after creating the basis for something better. As the biographer Francis Wheen relates, Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was embittered by the public’s mute response to the book’s publication. “If the workers had an inkling of the sacrifices that were necessary for this work, which was written only for them and for their sakes,” she complained to a friend, “they would perhaps show a little more interest.”
Frustrated, Marx asked Engels, in one of the German reviews he wrote, to summarize “Capital” simply, using language that Marx helpfully supplied: It showed how “present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form,” and it revealed in human civilization “the same gradual process of evolution that Darwin has demonstrated in natural history,” thus confirming the “doctrine of progress.”
It’s a sign of our times that the editor and translator of an eagerly anticipated new English edition of the book — the first major translation in half a century — largely ignore both Darwin and the idea of progress in their copious notes.
Still, 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.
“‘Capital’ is weird,” the editor Paul North writes in his introduction to the new edition (Princeton University Press, 857 pp., $39.95). The book’s translator, Paul Reitter, concurs, explaining how he has chosen to highlight what he calls every “programmatically weird moment in the text.” In “Capital,” Marx deploys neologisms that sound strange even in German, Reitter argues, with the goal of reflecting the way “capitalism makes the relations between people and things, and the relations among people, extremely unnatural and incompatible with human flourishing.”
For example, the novel German term Werthding — literally “value-thing” — suggests how useful physical objects have nonphysical aspects: They represent (in Marx’s words) “gelatinous blobs of undifferentiated human labor” that help define their worth and enable them to be exchanged. Emphasizing the weirdness of the language underlines the idea that capitalism inevitably produces alienation between factory workers and the thing they’ve helped make, as Marx writes elsewhere, “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Born in 1818 in what is now southwestern Germany, Marx was trained as a philosopher and employed as a journalist before striking up a friendship with Engels in the 1840s and joining a roiling bohemian underground of unruly writers and professional insurrectionists. Together Marx and Engels wrote “The Communist Manifesto” and lived through the European revolutions of 1848, only to see their hopes for radical change deferred if not dashed. By then, Marx, in part under the influence of Engels, had already begun what became a lifelong study of political economy and the shameful conditions created for workers by the rise of industrial capitalism.
Marx had exacting standards: He was too scrupulous to finish “Capital” — Engels published subsequent volumes based on Marx’s notebooks — and he wanted the difficult opening pages of the first volume to force readers to think for themselves. “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits,” he wrote in the preface to the first French translation. Fortunately, the body of the text, which makes judicious use of British government reports detailing the wretched lives of its working classes, is easier to follow, and more literary in its ambitions. It’s partly a simple horror story of unjustifiable human suffering at the hands of a faceless monster more fearsome than Hobbes’s Leviathan — the shadowy system of capital, in Marx’s view, was more soul-sucking than any of the laws imposed by sovereign rulers.
The first English translation of “Capital” was supervised by Engels and appeared in 1887, four years after Marx’s death. By then, “Capital” had belatedly reached a large and rapidly growing audience, thanks to Marx’s notoriety as an activist and a leader in the International Workingmen’s Association; his pitiless defense of the bloody Paris Commune of 1871 as one model of what a proletariat revolt against capital might look like; and the subsequent rise of socialist political parties and militant trade unions. “The bible of the working class,” Engels proudly called it.
Once consecrated, “Capital” was easy to treat as an evidence-based lodestar for ongoing direct action. This was certainly how the translator Ben Fowkes and the Belgian economist Ernest Mandel approached the second major English edition, a Penguin paperback published in 1976 after the Russian Revolution of 1917; the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949; the student uprisings of 1968; and in the wake of pitched struggles for radical self-determination in former colonies like Algeria, Vietnam and Nicaragua.
“It is most unlikely,” Mandel wrote, “that capitalism will survive another half-century of the crises (military, political, social, monetary, cultural) which have occurred uninterruptedly since 1914. It is most probable, moreover, that ‘Capital’ and what it stands for — namely a scientific analysis of bourgeois society which represents the proletariat’s class consciousness at its highest level — will in the end prove to have made a decisive contribution to capitalism’s replacement by a classless society of associated producers.”
Five decades later, with capitalism still firmly intact, the American political theorist Wendy Brown briskly lays aside such hopes in the preface of the new Princeton translation, calling them a “fantasy.” She also worries that if the workers of the world were ever to use freely what Marx called “the free gift of nature” in order to create more abundance for human beings, they might trigger an “ecological catastrophe,” something that she says the author of “Capital” only considers in passing. Brown suggests that the main contemporary value of Marx’s text is as a “critical theory” that reveals the system of capital as “a philosophical object.” In other words, it might not be the best guide for political practice.
Certainly, “Capital” is a cerebral read and the dangers of the world Marx lived in are not all the same as ours. Still, it’s a bit weird (if that’s the right word) that the scholars working on this new English edition of Marx’s most revered text should downplay Marx’s own deepest hopes, not just for a future classless society, but also for an ongoing process of upheaval that results, yes, in suffering, but also in ongoing technological and moral progress.
For if capital is just “extremely unnatural and incompatible with human flourishing,” and inexorably leading toward the destruction of the planet, what’s the point? Marx couldn’t predict the future, and neither can we. But, as he once put it, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
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