Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1

By Karl Marx, translated by Paul Reitter

Princeton University Press, 2024

David Murphy

The new, marvelous, more conversational, and sometimes anachronistically modern-feeling translation of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 by Paul Reitter out from Princeton University Press is based, for the first time in English, on the second German edition of volume 1 – the last Marx himself approved. Reitter notes in his preface:

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. Revision was his continuous practice. . .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.

Adding, “we don’t claim that the second edition is authoritative, just that it is, at a minimum, authorized.”

The most recent, popular, and widely cited edition of volume 1 is the Penguin Classics edition with Ben Fowke’s translation from 1976 based on the fourth German edition of volume 1. While this was very much an improvement - especially in sheer readability - over the Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling translation (imbued with its own authority by virtue of Fredrick Engel’s involvement), and Fowkes will still serve a reader well, Reitter’s work here admirably compresses, smooths, and clarifies.

Take an example from the famously difficult first chapter on the Commodity in which Marx stresses that value derives not from anything physical but from the “social substance” of labor within the commodity.

Fowkes gives the passage in this way:

The objectivity of commodities as values differs from Dame Quickly in the sense that 'a man knows not where to have it'. Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However, let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social.

Reitter, and in fewer words, puts back the neologism (Werthgegenständlichkeit translated as “value-objecthood”) Fowkes works around which avoids semantics around the word objectivity and emphasizes the nonmaterial or metaphysical nature of value:

The value-objecthood of commodities differs from Mistress Quickly in that one knows not where to have it. Not even an atom of natural material goes into their value-objecthood, in striking contrast to their objecthood as physical commodity bodies, which is a crude thing for the senses. However one might twist and turn an individual commodity, as a value-thing, it remains ungraspable. But we need to remind ourselves that commodities possess value-objecthood only insofar as they are expressions of the same social denominator, human labor, and that their value-objecthood is thus purely social.

Reitter’s preface and generous notes are a double feast for those interested in the art of translation generally and, more narrowly, in understanding that how Marx is rendered can press and shift the contours of his thought.

When comparing the critical material here to the 1976 edition we see some interesting shifts. In that edition we have a lengthy idiosyncratic introduction from Ernest Mandel. Mandel’s introduction is insufferably long (he was insufferable and dogmatic at any length. But if, for some unholy reason, one wants more, in 1968 he published the two volume Marxist Economic Theory), colored by his own Trotskyism (to the consternation of many Marxists), unable to admit Marx saw anything wrongly (critics seem to have only ever misread Marx), and falls into what can only be called eschatology:

An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy.

This appeared just before the birth of analytical Marxism (“Non-BS Marxism”) in 1978 with G.A. Cohen’s  Karl Marx’s Theory of History. A Defence. In analytical Marxism dialectics were rejected in favor of formal logic, it turned a skeptical eye toward many of Marx’s important claims, and advanced schemes for socialist design in markets.

After years of reaction we have this new edition of Capital which is contemporary in that its accompanying material asserts – perhaps reasserts - the importance of critical theory in Marx. As Wendy Brown, who is totally dazzled by Marx, writes in her tiring introduction:

Do these and other developments, as well as capital’s proven ability to remake itself in relation to various regimes, technologies, political demands, and opportunities render Marx’s great work anachronistic? If, for example, the “labor theory of value” no longer explains the production of all wealth, or the crisis of the planet today rivals human misery and injustice as an indictment of capitalism, should we still read the book? This question returns once more to the importance of understanding Capital as a critical theory of political economy and capitalist political economy itself as a philosophical object revealed by critical theory.

As you can see, while this repositioning of Marx might have something to it, it leaves the impression (as much post-analytical Marxist writings do) that we are stuffing away technical problems behind the larger project. Stuffing further, she appears to equivocate about post-capitalism: “leaving aside the fantasy of a perfectly rational, controlled, and transparent communist political economy on the far side of a capitalist epoch. . .” Is it a fantasy or simply far, far away? What would Marx think of that? He was largely silent on the matter, yet here he writes: “The form of the social life process. . .will not shed its foggy shroud of mystery until it becomes the product of freely associated people, consciously planned and controlled by them. But for this to happen, a society must attain a certain material basis or multiple material conditions of existence, which will arise spontaneously from a long and painful history of development.” It might be fantasy, but he certainly did not think so.

Let us judge broadly: Wendy Brown’s foreword is not very useful, does not make one eager to read the thing itself, and tries too hard to drag his ghost into our time. The introduction, translation, and critical notes, by Paul North and Paul Reitter simply make this the edition to have. They will please translation aficionados, please (or at least interest) Marx pedants, and the introduction even with its own angle, shall we say, is genuinely helpful and interesting. If one believed such a statement was even coherent, they could say this is Marx for the 21st century.

And for Marx himself, some would argue Joseph Schumpeter was going easy when he wrote that “even in Marx’s most scientific work, his analysis was distorted not only by the influence of practical purposes, not only by the influence of passionate value judgements, but also by ideological delusion.”

Marx’s belief in a revolutionary movement that would overthrow capitalism never came true, his economic program in its essentials amounts to a latticework of fallacious reasoning built with tools outdated by scientific progress in his own time, and at his funeral he was surrounded by a mere dozen or so people while outside the restless system he disdained continued the Great Enrichment of ordinary people. We might have left Karl Marx in the 19th century where he belongs.

Still, he persists, stubborn as he was, and to understand Marx one cannot limit themselves to Capital, Volume 1. So the continuation of this into a project covering Marx’s other volumes by this team would not be entirely unwelcome.

David Murphy holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Minnesota.