“The poor people of the world gather together!” (1920) | Unknown artist, Azerbaijan Press Center / CC BY-SA 4.0
In the fall of 2024, Princeton University Press published a new English translation of the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital. The edition’s afterword was written by William Clare Roberts, an associate professor of political science at McGill University and author of Marx’s Inferno: A Political Theory of Capital (Princeton, 2016). He sat down with Gant Roberson to discuss the significance of Marx’s own “unfussy” approach to translation.
Gant Roberson: Your afterword, “The French Reconstruction of Capital,” is included in the first new English translation of Marx’s Capital in half a century. What is the political value of a new translation at this moment in time?
William Clare Roberts: There are probably two big benefits. One, any new translation spurs scholarship and readers. The second thing is that it is the first new translation in 50 years, more or less. Therefore it’s the first new translation since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, the MEGA II project. The end of the Cold War produced this lull in Marx scholarship because it lost its biggest patron.
Everybody remarked in 2008 that, “Oh, Marx is back.” And it is true that some of the questions about capitalism are back on the table in a major way. It’s also true that a lot of people went to graduate school, because job prospects looked really bad in 2008, so there was a massive upsurge in left-leaning, socialist-leaning, para-academic publications. And that’s the sort of intellectual, para-intellectual precariat that gives rise to intellectual production on the left. I think it’s time for there to be a new edition because scholarship has moved on and there’s a readership for it.
Roberson: You’re primarily writing about the time at which there was another new translation, the French translation that Marx had quite a bit of direct hand in producing. You mention Marx being an “unfussy” translator. I’m curious if you could talk a bit about how his translation in the French edition both introduces complexity into our understanding of Capital, but also more specifically what his approach to translation might say about his politics.
Roberts: We don’t have a very fine-grained documentary trail to follow in this regard. We have a few letters that Marx wrote around the translation, but we don’t have his working manuscript. The French translation is not fussy in the sense that it’s not that attentive to some of the things that a modern scholarly translator would be really attentive to. A modern translator might be concerned that Marx’s choice of German vocabulary would track certain conceptual distinctions in Marx, and they might want to preserve those conceptual distinctions by preserving a sort of one-to-one relationship between German words and French words so as to keep the distinctions the same. Marx just doesn’t seem to care about that sort of thing.
It seems like he is concerned with attaining a certain effect; he wants to make a German book read like a French book and he wants the French edition of Capital to read like a French book, for a French audience. There’s this exchange of letters with the publisher of the French translation that I quote at the beginning of my afterword. And the gist of it is that Marx is like: “Look, I don’t proceed the way that the French writers do. French writers start with big abstractions. They start with principles and then they proceed from their principles to lay out their thoughts about a particular matter. I proceed from the object that I’m studying, capital, the capitalist mode of production, how it works, and only very slowly do my principles reveal themselves because they’re not guiding my research.” He thinks that he has a tough sell with French readers and he’s not doing this sort of really rigorous scholarly treatment of his own book, but rather he’s trying to have a particular political effect with his book. And I think that’s just not how an academic translator approaches their task.
Roberson: The French translation was written between 1872 and 1875, after the rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871, and also the International Workingmen’s Association. How does that context influence Marx’s project?
Roberts: Before the Paris Commune, Marx’s efforts and energies were very heavily invested in the International Workingmen’s Association, which meant a real attention to the developments in the British labor movement and socialist movement in the 1860s. He saw a strategy around the impact that an organized workers’ movement can have on capitalist industry and on the capitalist state. By pressing on wages and reducing the length of the working day, he thinks that the workers’ movement can spur further industrialization improvements in the mechanization of the production process, increasing productivity, etcetera. And he thinks that this is a strategy for basically concentrating capital on the one hand, and on the other hand, swelling the ranks of the organized workers movement so that you’re going to produce a context in which you can have an appropriation of highly developed, highly industrialized, highly centralized capital by an organized, unionized, militant working class.
Marx thought the Paris Commune was a strategic blunder. He didn’t think that the French working class was in a good position to have this fight. And once the Commune was set up, he was critical of many aspects of how they were running things. But when the Paris Commune was crushed, he nonetheless rushed to the defense of the Commune. And that’s partly because he did appreciate something about what the Commune was doing. He thought that there was a possibility that was relevant to all of those parts of the world that didn’t look at all like Britain. Most places were not nearly as industrialized as Britain, they weren’t nearly as proletarianized as Britain. They looked a lot more like France, where you had pockets of proletarianization, but in the context of a largely peasant working class. Marx saw the Commune as a promising failure and he really wanted to try to learn from that failure and to address the French edition of Capital to a French working class that had also gone through that failure and was in a position maybe now to learn from that failure itself.
There is a passage in the preface to the second German edition where he’s saying: “Look, all of my examples are coming from England, but don’t think that that means this is irrelevant to Germany. England is the picture of your own future.” In the French edition, he says instead that any country that is following England on the industrial ladder is going to have to climb this one way. France might be able to find a way to socialism not via the exact path that Britain is following. There might be other options available.
Roberson: One of the complexities you raise in your afterword is that there’s sometimes a false equivalency made between what are conceptually distinct categories, of fetishism, ideology, and alienation. You prefer to emphasize the “discontinuities and disjunctions” between these albeit interrelated concepts.
Roberts: One thing I really focus on in the afterword is this passage from Chapter 1 on the fetish character of the commodity. In the German, there’s an ambiguity that gets cleared up in the French. The ambiguity is in the famous line that, in a commercial economy where the production process is mediated by a process of market exchange of commodities, producers, rather than being in charge of their system of production, are instead controlled by it. But what the precise object of “it” is in the text is ambiguous.
In most English discussions of Marx, it is treated as if that passage says that producers are controlled by the things they produce. In the French, Marx clears up the ambiguity and says: “No, producers are controlled by the movement of the things they produce.” This makes a huge difference because if you think about producers being controlled by the things they produce, it becomes very easy to assimilate everything that Marx is saying about fetishism to things that he says in the 1844 manuscripts about the alienation of labor and the relationship between the workers in a capitalist factory and the dead labor that confronts them in the form of that factory. And it can make it seem as if Marx’s analysis is constantly hitting the same note: that we produce things and those things get away from our control and instead control us. And that makes it seem as if fundamentally Marx is a philosopher of alienation, reiterating this analysis of alienation in the face of every phenomenon.
The French translation really pushes against that. Marx’s analysis of the market and the factory are not just two instances of the same analysis. It means something different to say that we are being herded about or jerked about by the movements of the prices of our commodities than to say that we confront the product of our own labor as an alien power over us. I think it’s important to emphasize the discontinuity between those claims because it forces us then to sharpen our thinking about, well, which one is appropriate to which context? And that forces us to analyze the different contexts, not just to sort of press a cookie cutter analysis onto each new context that confronts us. That’s what conjuncturalism is about, confronting the world anew and saying how should we analyze this situation without presuming that this new situation is just going to be understood by imposing the same analysis on it again?
Roberson: This also has to do with the difference between appearance and reality, which is something that Marx emphasizes, and something that you write about in the afterword—how wages and the wage relation appear as something different than they really are. I’m curious if you want to elaborate on the importance of that process for Marx and in your own estimation.
Roberts: Marx thinks that the exchange of commodities is a practice; there’s a social practice involved. And in this practice we treat two separate things as an equivalent to one another, and hence exchangeable. We say that they are of the same value and because they’re of the same value, we are able to exchange them against one another in a fair way, such that both exchange partners leave the exchange feeling not cheated and also not like they’ve given somebody a gift or something like that, right? There’s a particular logic to this social practice of exchange, so the wage contract has the form of an exchange. It looks like an exchange, but rather than exchanging two goods against one another that are equivalent, the wage contract gives a good—the wage—against the use of the wage workers’ body in production for a certain period of time. And that’s the key, Marx thinks, to how the capitalist economy works. That’s how capitalist exploitation works. But because it takes place under the cover of the wage contract, which seems to be an exchange that has the same outward shape as an exchange, Marx thinks that we spontaneously apply to wage labor the normative notions that emerge from exchange.
In general, how do you evaluate whether or not an exchange is right? Well, you evaluate whether or not it’s fair, and whether or not it’s fair means the two things exchanged are really of equivalent value. But when you use those normative criteria to evaluate the wage contract, what you end up with then is this question of, well, are both parties getting an equal amount out of the wage contract? And the way that that gets expressed is, is the employer getting a fair day’s labor? And is the employee getting a fair day’s wages? Marx says that when you do that, you miss the entire dynamics of the system. You miss that what the employer gets is not a certain amount of labor, but the right to govern labor for a certain amount of time and to get as much labor as possible out of the worker in that time as they can. That’s the secret to the developmental increases in productivity in the capitalist mode of production, which is the entire secret to the technological progressive aspect of the capitalist mode of production. I think this is something that is at the basis of liberalism. Most liberalisms are acting as if all of our social relations are or ought to be exchanges, that they all ought to be voluntary givings and takings that leave everybody better off because everybody ends up with what they want and gets rid of what they don’t want, right?
A series of fair exchanges is the liberal social ontology, a concept explicitly advocated by Destutt de Tracy, who coined the word ideology. In his Elements of Ideology, de Tracy says: “All society is exchange.” That’s what Marx is talking about when he talks about ideology. He read de Tracy right before he and Engels wrote The German Ideology and compared him to Feuerbach and Bauer and Sterner. That’s what makes them the “German ideologists.” There’s something about this effort to reduce social relations to one type of social relation and to see everything through that mode that is central to Marx’s diagnosis of ideology. And that’s what he’s pointing to in that section on wages in Capital.
There’s an immense amount of work that could be done there and I hope that pointing to it is a spur to other people to do some of that work.
