From the Jacobin: The language of Karl Marx’s Capital, which was originally published in 1867, has shaped the political imagination of socialism’s proponents as well as its critics. From the opening discussion of the commodity, in which Marx declares that capitalists are “in love with money” only to add, in ironic Shakespeare-laden prose, that the “course of true love never did run smooth,” to the iconic line delivered in the section on “so-called original accumulation,” that in an unspecified future the “expropriators are expropriated,” the language of Capital has become as memorable as its message. Retranslating this well-known language, so complex, so canonical, poses daunting challenges.
The political theorist Wendy Brown spoke to Paul North and Paul Reitter, coeditors and translator of a new edition of Marx’s Capital, the first to appear in fifty years, about the significance of this undertaking. In a wide-ranging discussion, Brown, who wrote the preface to the new edition, discusses Marx’s literary style and the relevance of his analysis for understanding exploitation and inequality today. North and Reitter give insights into the challenges of the work and their hopes for its impact ahead of the publication of their new translation this month.
Wendy Brown: What did the new translation change for your understanding of Capital? Is there a newly translated word or passage that may significantly alter Marx’s theory for English-language readers steeped in the [Ben] Fowkes translation?
Paul Reitter: We certainly think that we’ve come away from the work of translating and editing Capital with a much keener understanding of many of the book’s most important ideas and arguments, by which we mean such things as Marx’s notions of value and commodity fetishism. You’d expect this, of course. Translating entails very, very close reading and thinking at great length about how this or that individual term is being used, and if the process of translating and editing doesn’t leave you with the sense that you’ve truly deepened your knowledge of a text’s form and content, well, you should be surprised (and alarmed).
As for more concrete changes in how we see the book, here are two. First, we had seriously underappreciated the sophistication of Marx’s mimetic techniques: there are places where he pulls off a kind of free indirect imitation, essentially impersonating someone without having that person speak directly — an unusual and, we think, very effective device. Second, we had underappreciated the extent to which Marx makes an effort to locate positive possibilities in developments that in the short run cause a lot of suffering, such as the rapid advance of machinery. According to Marx, this drains the content from labor and throws a lot of people out of work, but it also increasingly necessitates that workers be retrained again and again, allowing them to cultivate an unlikely and fulfilling well-roundedness. This doesn’t justify capitalism, of course — far from it — but it does show a balanced view of it that is not often ascribed to Marx.
Now let’s speak to the big part of this question: How might our edition change the game, the game being reception and use of Marx’s theory, for readers who know Capital through Fowkes’s version of the text? Over the years, there’s been a lot of discussion about how certain renderings, particularly “primitive accumulation” for Marx’s “ursprüngliche Akkumulation” and “material” for his “sachlich,” have led readers astray. We agree that those translations are misleading, and maybe the new ones — we break with tradition and drop “primitive” — will make a difference. But even though we pointed to them first, these cases aren’t the first ones that come to mind.
The formulation “unproductive labor” has elicited a lot of criticism from feminist scholars because Marx applies it to domestic labor, i.e., labor performed mostly by women. Marx does in fact clarify that he’s not setting up a hierarchy when he distinguishes productive labor from unproductive labor, stressing that if you’re carrying out productive labor, in his sense of the term, you shouldn’t celebrate, because what this means is that you’re being exploited. You’re making something owned by some else, and you’re not being paid for some of your labor.
Unproductive labor isn’t compensated, but at least it’s not performed under the command of a capitalist who’s getting rich from the sweat of your brow. As implied, the clarification hasn’t helped much, and one reason why is that the phrase “unproductive labor” is just very insulting, more insulting, we think, than the German original for which it seems to be an exact match: “unproduktive Arbeit.” In other words, if you translate the phrase in the obvious way, rendering “unproduktive” as “unproductive,” you get some amplification, amplification that has gotten in the way, ironically, of productive debate. Which is why in our translation “unproductive Arbeit” is translated as “nonproductive labor.”
We also think that translation issues have narrowed discussions of the fetish section, which tends to get reduced to couple of points: relations among people appear as relations among things, or our own social movement appears as the movement of things, which, rather than controlling, we are controlled by (in the German too it’s not clear whether “which” refers to “movement” or “things”). The broader point, the “secret” that Marx teases in the section’s heading, gets less attention than it should, and this may be so because Fowkes’s translation obscures the crucial opposition in Marx’s formulation of it: the social characteristics of labor appearing as the objective characteristics of labor products.
More here.
