Retranslating Marx’s Capital

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.