Mistaking Marx

By Ruth Thrush

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1

Karl Marx, Paul North and Paul Reitter, Princeton University Press, September 2024

In Paris, 1965, Louis Althusser addressed his students at the École Normale Supérieure: ‘Of course, we have all read, and all do read, Capital.’ This lecture was one of a series that went on to become Reading Capital, lectures that — just three years before May ’68 — took place in a student body given topeace protests, labour disputes, strikes and boycotts. For these readers of Capital, life on the streets was a life that grasped the tidal forces of political action and historical change. Protest was understood as a markedly political form of art: la poésie, their placards would read, est dans la rue. Althusser went on: we read Capital ‘every day, transparently, in the dramas and dreams of our history, in its disputes and conflicts, in the defeats and victories of the workers’ movement which is our only hope and our destiny’. For Althusser and his students, ‘reading’ Marx was as much about everyday life as it was about time spent in the library. It was a way of confronting a world taut with contradiction, in work, in pleasure, in consciousness and unconsciousness. To read Capital was to live as an engaged, political, and politicised subject, both immersed and active in the psychic and material drama of capitalist life.

But, Althusser insists, ‘some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter’. For Paul North and Paul Reitter, the translator and editor of Princeton University Press’s new edition of the first volume of Capital, there is no time like the present. Promoted with the phrase ‘Marx for the twenty-first century’, North and Reitter offer a version of Capital that invites us to think about how we might read Marx today. After all, reading Capital is no small task; almost every editor of the text has admitted this fact, as indeed did Marx himself. He was concerned that his ‘method of analysis’ made ‘the first chapters rather arduous’. Reitter’s introduction sets us off on a similar tone, making us aware that ‘To read Capital well, you need to train your thoughts in new acrobatics’; reading Capital is a process of ‘thinking each thing twice’. And North hopes for ‘readers who are ready to think for themselves’, generously asking those ‘who don’t have German to trust me in a way that Marx’s original readers weren’t asked to trust him, which, I realise, is no small thing.’

Capital, then, demands a certain kind of mental, thoughtful labour from its readers. For North and Reitter, however, the labour of reading is anything but central to the text; in fact, it is treated as something of an obstacle. Ease is the governing principle here: North’s preface claims that the translation aims to make the text as ‘legible’ as possible, as he commits to ‘steer towards natural prose’ in an effort to avoid ‘indiscriminate foreignising’ that might obscure ‘important statements about agency and the relations between people and things under capitalism’. But whether the difficulty of Marx’s prose stands in the way of grasping the vital

sense of the text, I am not so sure. Certainly Marx did not see it that way: writing to his French editor, he wrote that ‘those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of [Capital’s] steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits’. The labour of reading, for Marx, is a necessary part of the text’s project, the only available route towards the ‘truth’ at the heart of the text.

And Marx certainly makes his readers work. This is the Marx who writes seemingly never-ending sentences, rich with allusions to classical economics at one turn and Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays the next. The Marx whose analysis rests in words of literary value; the word ‘ungeheure’ (monstrous), for instance, appears in Capital’s very first sentence to describe the vast mass of commodities that make up capitalist societies, a word that has a specifically poetic resonance. Think, for instance, of Schiller’s ‘Das Lied von der Glocke’, where he writes of the ‘ungeheuren Brand’, or the infamous first sentence of Kafka’s Verwandlung, where Gregor Samsa wakes up from terrible dreams to find himself a ‘ungeheuren Ungeziefe’. So too is it the Marx who makes extensive and extreme use of the intricacies of the German language, his philosophy bearing fruit in unusual words like ‘vergegenständlicht’, the word he uses to describe how abstract human labour manifests in commodities in the process of production. Translated by North as ‘objectified’, the word in German is much more suggestive. The verb is in part formed by the adjective ‘gegenständlich’, meaning objective. The prefix ‘ver-’, however, is used variously to indicate error, damage, change, addition, or harm. Marx’s strange and particular handling of his linguistic material does not obstruct the sense of his argument. Considering just one word brings us closer to the text’s ‘important statements’. Yes, Marx is interested in how labour is objectified in the commodity, but harder work produces more arresting conclusions: the commodity both takes on and alters human labour, simultaneously preserving and distorting its form. Getting your head round these contradictions is exactly what Capital wants you to do. It is almost a category error to think that naturalising Marx’s prose is a move towards clarification; Capital works to denaturalise our understanding of how systems work — systems that include production and language. Marx’s philosophy thus takes place not only in what he writes, but in how we read him: in the rewarding work of grappling with and being attentive to his allusions, contradictions, playfulness, and style.

North’s translation misses this labour of reading with which the text comes alive. In his translation, for instance, ‘ungeheure’ becomes the more empirical ‘enormous’, What’s more, it is a kind of pleasure produced by the work of reading and interpreting, the text coming to model the creative potential of labour of which Marx writes, the sort that we might ‘enjoy’ as ‘the free play’ of our ‘physical and mental powers’. This claim is at the very heart of Capital: that labour, at the same time that it is disfigured through capitalist organisations of production, is a distinctly human and humanising activity. Labour is the central to the entirety of Marx’s analysis, since — as Marx makes clear from the very beginning — it is labour that is the source of value (‘How should the value of [the commodity’s] value be measured?’, he asks, ‘By the amount of “value-creating substance it contains: labor’, he answers).

North’s prose not only smooths out the generative labour of reading, but so too does it cause an evaporation of Marx’s handling of labour that comes to light through the nuance and texture of his sentences. In the famous ‘parable of the bee’ passage, for example, Marx claims that humans are different from animals because of the way they labour, specifically, the kind of labour where the worker ‘doesn’t simply shape natural materials into a new form; he also realises a goal in doing so’. The parable is lucid, but it loses the way in which Marx’s prose makes us attentive to precisely who labour belongs to, and what its effect might be on such a subject. Where Marx writes that the worker realises ‘seinen Zweck’ in his labour [my italics], using the pronoun to refer specifically to ‘his [ie: the worker’s] goal’, North, opts for the indefinite ‘a goal’, losing the intimate connection between man, work, and purpose that Marx constructs.

Marx makes a similar emphasis in the passage that precedes this parable, in which he writes that ‘Wir unterstellen die Arbeit in einer Form, worin sie dem Menschen ausschließlich angehört’. The most telling phrase here is perhaps the idea that labour (‘Arbeit’) has certain forms that exclusively belong (‘ausschließlich angehört’) to humans (die ‘Menschen’). This focus on the way in which labour might allow humans to transcend their animal condition through the labour that is theirs and theirs alone is again an unfortunate cost to North’s ease of phrasing. North translates this sentence as follows: ‘Here we are presupposing a form of labor that human beings alone are capable of.’ In the passive voice, the act of reading, and labour more generally, becomes not an active constituent of the human condition, but one of many actions that humans might perform.

North’s sentences are always sharp and svelte, but too smooth to retain the grain of Marx’s argument. In a section where Marx explores the alienation of the worker from their work, North’s passive voice accords the text a certain glossiness, obscuring the way in which Marx’s critique functions at the level of style, grammar, and syntax. On the other side of ‘the accumulation of wealth’, we find ‘the class whose own product is produced as capital’, North writes. Compare to Marx’s original: ‘[die] Klasse, die ihr eignes Produkt als Kapital produziert’. The oppressed class are robbed of their product in North’s translation; where Marx uses the active voice to stress that it is the class who produce their own product as capital, North presents their product of labour as a floating entity, without a clear grammatical relation to the people who work to produce it. North loses a sense of the fundamental contradiction of the capitalist system that functions at the level of labour: the irony is that the worker herself produces that which is both hers and at the same time the output of a system whose logic functions at an abstract level both beyond her and at her expense. Although Marx’s syntax is tricky, and contradictory, it is so out of necessity.

Marx’s object — be it labour, value, money, production, the working day, wages, accumulation, or capital itself — is never stable. His science is not one that demands static objective conditions, but seeks to find objectivity in the living, moving, labouring world. His style is one that manages not only to represent this contradiction, but to realise it in the agile work of reading and making sense of his text. To translate such a motile book is no small task; indeed, translation is itself a form of reading and a form of difficult work. But the traces of this labour are hard to find in North’s clean prose, stylistically still and syntactically distilled. This ironing out of texture, contradiction, strangeness, tension has philosophical implications, too, losing sight of Marx’s dialectical emphasis on work and workers.

Alienation, immiseration, contradiction, and a desire and need for a rigorous philosophy of the humanising aspects of life: are these not the very sites of contact between us and Marx, persistently manifesting as present anxieties, alive and active in contemporary life? Capital’s central concern — capitalism’s demand that labour is extracted from the bodies and minds of the human worker — still holds and excites. Despite its elisions of Marx’s trickiness, North’s translation is certainly worth the climb up Capital’s steep paths. But, although reading this Capital may well be less arduous, its luminous heights are dampened by the translation’s evasions of labour. We must read into the difficult, if highly rewarding, work of interpreting Marx’s style. It is no easy thing to read a life that is at once ever-changing and ever-present.

RUTH THRUSH almost rhymes.

Art by Louis Rush