Guerrilla History - New Translation of Marx's Capital, Vol. 1 w/ Paul North & Paul Reitter

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we bring on the translator/editors of the new translation of Capital Vol. 1 by Karl Marx.  We discuss, in addition to other things, the reasons why it was decided that this new translation was needed, the political background to making that decision, why the 2nd German Edition was used for making the translation from, why these introductions were used, whether there will be translations of the subsequent volumes of Capital and if a paperback edition will come out, and more!  An enlightening discussion, lots of food for thought, and plenty of room for constructive dialogue and critique - let us know what you think of the conversation!  Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation. Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University. His translations include The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You don't remember Den Bamboo? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. And welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussain, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada.

Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, Henry. It's wonderful to be with you. Absolutely. As always, it's a pleasure seeing you. And we have two terrific guests with us. today about a really fascinating new translation of a work that I'm sure the listeners have heard about because we have talked about this book dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of times over the course of this show, but we haven't talked about this new translation on the show yet. But before I introduce the two individuals that we are interviewing today about this new translation, I would like to remind you listeners that you can help support the show

and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually, as well as collectively, by following us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. Again, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Pod. So the book that we're going to be talking about today is Capital by Carl Marx. Now, listeners may be wondering, who are we going to be interviewing? Because Carl Marks has been dead for quite some time. If you miss the news, listeners, there is a brand new translation, the first in about 50 years, that is coming out from Princeton University Press right about now. And we have the

two editors, the translator and editor of this new edition with us. We have Paul Reiter, who's a professor of Germanic languages and literatures and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University. And we have Paul North, who is Maurice Nattinson, Professor of German at Yale University. Hello, Paul and Paul. It's a pleasure to have you both on the show to talk about this really interesting work that you undertook. Happy to be here. Yes, thrilled to be here.

Thank you so much. Adnan, I'll turn it over to you to open the conversation today. Well, sure. I mean, I guess, you know, this is a book that's familiar to people in our audience, but they've read a different translation, and they might be looking forward to checking out your new translation. But I'm wondering, you know, what motivated you to undertake this new translation? I mean, there could be a lot of reasons for it, but I think also the fact that it's coming out now certainly does coincide with a period in the last decade or so where

there's been renewed interest, broadly speaking, in society and culture on the left with engaging with Marx, you know, Paul Harvey's series reading. capital, you know, I wouldn't call them sensations, you know, on YouTube, but there's a real constituency out there that has been wanting to engage with Marx's thought. So I'm wondering, you know, why you wanted to undertake this translation in that context. And perhaps, you know, down the line, we can talk a little bit more, too, about what you might have done in your introduction and framing to talk about the relevance of Marx. you know, for today's criticizers or critiquers, rather, of capitalism.

So let me just turn it over to you to tell us what was your thinking in undertaking this project. Well, there were a couple of levels of motivation, and I think I'll start out talking about the micro level of very immediate circumstances and impressions. and then maybe turn it over to Paul to talk more about micro factors, what was going on in the world, which certainly influenced us a lot, motivated us a lot, what kind of readers of Marx would we be if we couldn't contextualize our own intellectual activities in those terms. But on the, I actually started thinking about translating capital years before I thought seriously about translating capital. I taught capital. I've been teaching capital for, 20 years plus and I've been used, I used initially the Faust translation, also the original

more Aveling translation, which is still very widely anthologized, and it's also the translation in the Marx Angles Complete works in English. And so it still gets a lot of play. And frankly, I thought that those translations didn't preserve a number of things that were important to me. Whatever you think of the value form and what Marx does with the concept of value, if you're committed to reading the book carefully, then and to having students reading the book carefully, then you want them to be able to follow the development of Marx's concepts. Obviously, it's a central part of the book. It's very important to him. Some readers think that you can just kind of excise all that and still get a lot out of the book, and perhaps that's

something we would want to talk about down the road in this interview. But there, for example, it seemed that the existing translations were in some ways for all their merits, because I think they do things well, just basically deficient, imprecise in translating the concepts that Marx develops around value. And over the years, I got into translating to addition work to some extent. It had to do with the way the promotion process works at American universities where, you know, you have to go off on your own and do these single-authored projects. And then once you're finished with that, if you want to do collaborative addition work,

you can. And pretty soon after getting tenure, I really embraced collaborative addition work. It became a big part of my career. And I did a number of translation projects. Capital is definitely not a starter translation project. And at a certain point, I felt ready to try, not because I don't think anybody can really be qualified to do a translation edition of this incredibly polymathic and diverse work, but I felt ready to try. And so I called up my friend Paul North and I said, Paul, let's do this. And now I'm turning it over to him.

oh gosh that was a phone call i thought who could do this you know the book is um is not just big it's not just complicated it has multiple discourses in it philosophical revolutionary sociological nascent sociology really the birth of that kind of discourse literary lots of jokes so you're like well what person could do this but also it has such a history of of interpretations that you're walking into a minefield. On the other hand, what could be more important, given the way capitalism has progressed since Marx's day, given that even though people have noticed some things that Marx noticed, like Pickety noticed that growth stagnates, they don't have the analysis of the source of this

in the capital relation, the relation of domination between capitalists and workers, of, you know, there's always the reason until capitalism is over to keep rereading this book. And the reasons for translating it at this moment really were that some currents of scholarship, which are very strong, like value theory, came really after the last translation. And some editorial work, including the German critical edition of the second German edition, was finished after the last translation. And so we went in really thinking of the book as a new kind of thing for a new era that needed to read, in technical detail, how value moves. Well, I want to hop in here, and I'm going to ask a two-part question, mostly because we have

a lot of things to talk about, and actually we have relatively limited time today. So I'm going to try to cram in as much as I can. Here's the two parts that I want to ask in terms of opening this. So, as you mentioned, you'd been teaching this for 20 years, and there is this context in terms of thinking about the existing translations, but also there's a political context in terms of the moment at which this translation took place and the moment in which this new translation is coming out. So if you can talk a little bit about how the political moment that we find ourselves in played in not only to the idea that you should take upon this translation project, because certainly there was. was some of that, but then also how you orient the utility of this translation in the political moment in which it's coming out. So this is one part of it. The second part of it is also when you decided to make this translation project, you settled on using the second German edition. And now readers of the book, this new edition, there is an entire preface devoted to why this

edition of the book was used. So when you read this edition of capital, you'll see written this explanation. But I think that also for the listeners of the show who won't be picking up the book right away, it might be interesting to note that it is the second German edition, not the third or fourth German editions, which have been translated previously, not the French edition, which has been utilized quite extensively, but the second German edition. So not only how did the political moment play into the decision to take on this project, but then also when you decided to take on this project, why was it the second German edition that you decided would be the addition that you utilize for creating the new English translation?

Paul, maybe I'll take the first question. You take the second question? Sure. So on politics, I mean, you say a political moment, but for Marx, as you well know, this is a political and an economic moment. And politics, for him actually come after economics. This is the great discovery in capital, really, which is a change from earlier texts like the manifesto, for example, in which you might think of getting rid of property laws. And that would change to a communist political system. But in fact, he discovers that it's the economics of capital that drives property laws and governments to support capital. You know, the real situation is the rise of neoliberalism.

It's spread across the world and its takeover of politics, I would say, the influence that billionaires have on politics and also that neoliberal ideology has on supporting that whole mechanism where even a semi-democratic social state like the U.S. becomes perverted very far towards supporting the interests only of the highest.

capitalists, not even of the middle capitalists, but the very highest capitalists. This is a time in which we need to reread this book, and we need to understand how value works even more technically now because of the multiple levels of concealment and illusion that go on within this ideology. I'll just add that it seemed that there is a lot of openness, relatively speaking, around Marx. This has been a big part of discussions of Marx in scholarly circles, how since the fall of the wall and the opening up of archives and the, I suppose, political changes in Eastern Europe, which fostered a certain kind of image of Marx in some way, to an extent quite literally, with the giant granite sculptures of Marx, suggesting a certain sort of definitive NIST, people embracing the in-progress character of Marx's work and discovering just how in-progress it was by going through archives and realizing how much he left in draft,

how much he revised his ideas as he was going. And it was exciting then to contribute to that project of this ongoing project of revisiting Marx in this spirit. But then at the same time, there seemed to be a lot of openness around Marx, thinking about Marx, particularly among younger intellectuals who, you know, didn't grow up during the Cold War with Cold War stereotypes about Marx. And that was exciting to, that was a source of excitement and motivation as well. And then, of course, you know, there's Trumpism and illiberalism and other things happening that made the book feel as urgently relevant as ever. So that's just to add a little bit to this conversation

about the political context. As for the second edition, Paul puts it very nicely in one of the prefaces, he says, that it's not authoritative, but it's authorized. So there is no definitive edition to work from here. You can make a case for working from the third edition. You can make a case for working from the fourth edition. I hope somebody translates the first edition into English at some point.

For some important scholars, actually of Marx's value in the theory, the first edition has a crucial sort of significance. We chose the second edition because it was the last German edition that Marx himself oversaw. And I do think that there is some messiness in the third and fourth editions around the revision, some insertions by Engels. We were the last people to go around, you know, bashing angles. We think he did some heroic stuff in his editorial efforts. But I also think that some of the things that he did as an editor in the third and the fourth editions, you know, are not necessarily great. I can tell when it's angles writing and not marks. Can I jump in and say one thing?

Yes, so listeners know, it's like, you know, the DNA among humans. 99.999% of the second edition and the third and fourth editions are the same. The big change comes between the first edition and the second edition, where value theory is clarified and added in extensive parts to chapter one. So for those philologists who want to get nerdy on it, that's what happens. The real contenders for basic versions of this are the first edition, the second edition, and the French translation. And the French translation is a bit of a black box because, as writer has pointed out many

times, it's very hard to tell what were intentional conceptual changes on Marx's part, what were changes in order to popularize the work and make it acceptable. And he thought this was make it readable to people who are not educated in political economy. He thought the French milieu was very important for this because it had this revolutionary history and the people were much more tuned into the possibilities of revolution. There was the popularizing impulse. And then there's just what it means to write in French, which is totally different than to write in German or any other language.

It has its own linguistic demands on how you form a sentence and how the rhetoric works. And so we include what we think are the most important differences, conceptual advances, if you want to put it that way, from the French edition in an appendix, but that really deserves to be translated into English as well, with the proviso that if you translate the French translation into English, you're in a linguistic babel-like situation, which it's hard to tell what's important and what is a fact of language. Yeah, you're translating a French translation of a German source

text into English, and that's an interesting project. I hope somebody does that too. I imagine they will. As Paul mentioned, we are a little skeptical of the idea that the French edition is really the one that will solve all your problems, which you can see floated in Marx's studies because it is the last edition of capital, not the last German edition of capital, but the last edition of capital whose publication Marx personally oversaw. And he says in the preface that it has its own scientific value. But there are lots of difficulties here. And I don't necessarily want to get into them in detail because we have limited time and, you know, you would know better what your listeners would be up for. But if you want specifics, I'm very happy to give you

specifics. Well, I mean, I think I might ask for some specifics later, you know, if Henry doesn't about like how your new translation enables certain kinds of readings that you had a real stake in. I mean, that's definitely worth, you know, underscoring. But, you know, I, you know, was just so as a medieval historian, you know, the problem of editions from manuscripts, this is just to me very fascinating. So I don't want to like dive too much into it because I would enjoy the minutia. But I think the overall interesting point here seems to be is that there are multiple texts of capital that could be doing different kind of work that represent different stages and audiences for Marx's thinking about, um,

you know, capitalism and how to communicate this, and that he himself was revising his work a lot. So just as we have many different readings of capital, he himself had different writings of capital, and you're making a contribution on one that you make the case for, is, you know, constitutive of a kind of characteristics of his thought in representing his original language understanding at the like kind of last moment that he does it. in German. So that's, you know, that's important. And maybe there will be other, you know, kind of archaeologies of, but what seems like is not on offer in some ways because of the big difference between the first edition and the second edition and then subsequently, you know,

how much to credit Engels's comments and revisions and so on, is that it's very difficult to have something like a critical edition, you know, of capital that incorporates the the different components, and it would become pretty messy with notes of what had been excised. And so I'm kind of interested, though, at least in that, like, was your philosophy going into this not to kind of come up with the authoritative critical edition, but an enabling account of capital, you know, that would open up some readings and restore certain aspects of appreciation of Marxist thought in English that was lacking because of the available translations and, you know, what the decision-making there might have been.

That was beautifully said. Do you want to work on a Marx edition? Oh. You're invited. But my German is not as good as it would need to be. Well, you're a medievalist. You probably can do all the languages. I will say a couple of things.

And Paul has a lot to say about what this translation opens up. But we thought of this as what we called a critical. reading edition. We wanted, we have two audiences in mind. One were English only scholars who had missed things because they didn't have access to German. And we wanted to give them a more precise sense of the conceptual development, also the rhetoric, right, because this is a book that does its critique in multiple registers, sometimes all at once. Part of it is dialectical. Part of it is the development of a set of categories. Part of it is just ridiculing political economists. Sometimes he yells at people. Sometimes he imitates the way a capitalist would think about

something. There are jokes, right? And all of that is actually, these are legitimate forms of critique. And certainly Marx and Engels used those in the 19th century freely whenever they felt the need to. Because to take capital down, who cares how you actually do it, so long as it comes down. And that, so one audience were scholars who would use this for their work in productive ways, but don't have access to German. So we wanted to give them access to some of that. And the other was, you know, like a 20-year-old U.S. American reader who had come to it for the first time. But that said with a proviso that the English language readers are global readers, and there are many sites in which someone might take this up for the first time. That required,

it to be both conceptually rigorous, get at some of the concepts that were covered up in other translations, but not because of the lacks of the translators, but because it seems to have taken 150 years to understand this project fully, which I think they're getting close to now. And to make it in a form in which someone coming to it for the first time, who might be the revolutionary we're hoping for, can read it without studying Hegel first. that has the directness of Marx's actual text. And I have to praise writer, which I like to do, for being able to balance both the conceptual rigor

and this amazingly accessible direct speech that is actually in the German. And it comes through in the English, I think, for the first time. Yeah. I just want a quick follow-up on the point you made about critique. And one thing that you did in Paul North, in your introduction was kind of historicize in some ways, the kind of intellectual meaning and practice of critique in Marx's kind of political and intellectual circles. And, you know,

what that does, this is maybe an example of, you know, understanding how Marx envisioned the project of what he was doing in multiple kind of ways, all the resonances of that. But maybe it would be helpful for people, you know, to understand a little bit about why that's different from the way we might think in contemporary ordinary language of critique, you know, and what, you know, what's at stake for Marx in doing a critique of political economy that, you know, you did a little bit of work there to help frame that. So maybe you might want to share that and why that's important to recognize and realize. Thanks for that question. It helps to get at that thinking of the difference between, let's say, the revolutionary Marx and

the critical Marx. Marx never gave up his revolutionary activities. When they called him from the French commune, he went out and gave a speech right on the barricades. They were always organizing, he and Engels both. But at a certain point, because of the way capitalism was developing, became this kind of juggernaut. And because of the disappointments, which he analyzed in several post-mortems of actual revolutionary attempts in Europe, at a certain point he decided he needed to say in very, very precise analytical terms how capitalism worked. So if there was going to be a revolutionary to come and take it down, to use very vulgar kind of course terms, they would know where to do it. So the critical project of capital is a little bit to the

side of the revolutionary projects, which he kept doing. It's very different in tone than the manifesto, which a lot of people will have read. There are two manifesto-like pages, page 691, and the new translation is the manifesto-like page, in which the expropriators are expropriated. But the rest of the book actually shows how intransigent and intractable capital is and how it, no matter what types of reforms people try to enact to make life a little better for workers, it comes back and finds other ways to push them and to push them down. So critique in this book means to put aside some of the illusions about the goods of capital and to show how incredibly intractable it is and how it works to preserve itself at every term. I say to students often

And it's quite a pessimistic book, but it's pessimistic because capital is very wily and getting deeper and deeper entrenched all the time. So in a sense, what critique means for Marx here is to confront this very difficult-to-move system. Marx is definitely not telling you to be fatalistic about capitalism, and in fact he expressly debunks attempts, ideological attempts, Malthus, for example, to make readers think, workers think that, well, you know, there's really nothing that can be done. This is just the way it has to be. There will always be 90% poor people and 10% wealthy people. And I just want to add one quick thing to your question about our editorial

decisions. Another thing that we wanted to do, so you can see we had kind of a diverse agenda. And Paul put the goals of the translation itself very, very well. Thank you, Paul. We had some philological aims, too. We wanted to make things as transparent as we could. And the previous English editions, there's a lot that of citational practice or a lot of Marxist citational moves that we find interesting get a bit obscured. the existing previous English translations, Moravling and Fowx,

they don't tell you, for example, when an English source text couldn't be located and they're giving you a back translation of Marx's German translation of this source text. Marx was a very freewheeling translator as a translator. Of course, I'm interested in Marx as a translator. And it can be very hard to say what he's doing sometimes in his translations of English source material, and there are a lot of translations of English source material. It's a book that quotes and quotes and quotes, which is interesting for a number of reasons. But I'll give you an example of a situation that causes the editor to, you know, think a little bit,

and it's not easy to resolve this question. So there's a case of a factory inspectors report. That's a lot of what marks cites, 19th century English factory inspectors reports, where the report in the English original version says the smell was almost unbearable. And if you were to back translate into English, Marx's German translation of that line, you would get the smell was unbearable. So what is Marx doing there? Is he, did he just leave something out and make a mistake? That's possible.

Sometimes he went kind of fast and made mistakes. Is he engaging in amplifying translation? It's clear that he does that sometimes. He kind of pushes the evidence a little bit so that the condition, even worse than the factory inspectors make them out to be? Or is he being a thoughtful creative translator, as he often was, and thinking, well, this is kind of English understatement that doesn't translate so well into German.

So the best thing to do here, the best translation move is just to leave out this word, which is something he wouldn't shy away from doing. It's very hard to say. So in cases where these kinds of things seem meaningful, we, We tell the reader what's going on and we put a lot of time and effort, energy into this. And you know, we think that scholars, and there are a lot of scholars, very serious scholars of Marx, readers of Marx, who don't have German or German is not good enough so that they can just kind of go, you know, go it alone with the German text.

We think that there are a lot of people who will be interested in this kind of thing and who will profit from this. If I can keep going for just one more minute, Paul and I, our background, intellectual background, is in some ways quite different from the backgrounds of the previous English translators and editors. And one thing that we have that they don't is a long period of engagement with German-Jewish intellectual culture and literature. and Marx's citational techniques, for me, resonate in some ways with certain tendencies in German Jewish intellectual culture. And so perhaps for that reason, among others, we hear things in his citational practices

that the previous translators didn't hear. And for that reason, they didn't pay quite as much attention to them. as much of themselves into rendering this sort of stuff, the way he'd been trillic-wise as capitalists and political economists and workers, these kinds of things. They didn't put as much of themselves into that, as well as going through the citations as we did. You have a quick example of something that you heard, you heard, as it were, you know, by with this familiarity. And does it kind of color or have, you know, kind of something material to contribute to some of the controversial passages.

Sometimes people like to identify about and debate and discuss about Marx's discussion of Jews, or is it in other places? Yeah. Oh, did you want to Glemen? Because I've been talking. Well, you know, the Jewish question, to use that hackneyed phrase, it's interesting with Marx. And the position of a Jew and German-speaking lands at that time.

time, which is different than the global position of Jews now in some places, but at that time is to have been a colonized people, to have been liberated, to have been given hope by Napoleonic reforms for some sort of liberal version of equality and freedom, and then to have that taken away by Prussia. And this is the story of Marx's childhood. His father converted them to Catholicism, no, to Protestant. to Protestantism in a Catholic city. And, you know, Jews like any other dominated people at the time use the stereotypes and work against the stereotypes and accept them and are in a complicated relationship to their

own position in the dominant society. So you can see all of that in Marx. He does have, you know, very negative comments about Jews and stereotypical comments about Jews. Oftentimes he's using those as a trope. You know, a good example of the way he will do this in a twisted way is the idea of the fetish, which is obviously an absurd European category for a whole host of different African traditions. And Marx says, well, you know, the only real fetishists we have here are people in Europe. So he will take those tropes and turn them back on themselves.

Paul, do you want to add anything to the Jewish issue? Sure. So, you know, Marx famously says some very disparaging things about Jews and has been accused of Jewish self-hatred. And there's this question about to what extent did he consider himself a Jew. I think there's only one statement where he acknowledges that he has some Jewish heritage writing to his uncle in law. Leon Phillips, he says he talks about our common Jewish stock. And he often writes about Jews, very much treating them as, you know, something that he's not a part of. On the other hand, he was made to feel his Jewishness, not infrequently.

Okunin and other people he feuded with, taunted him about this. And he was writing at a time when there was a network of stereotypes developing in Germany, and elsewhere, but particularly in Germany about Jewish intelligence, about its journalistic nature, about how it lacked the capacity for the deepest originality, but had special affinity for citation. And I think that Marx, this is not an argument that I'm prepared to make in an academic monograph at this point, but it's something that I felt while doing the translation, and it's something that I may try to develop.

I think that Marx at times, you know, with his truculent nature, is leading into these stereotypes. And it is the case that there are some very complicated and sophisticated moments of imitation where Marx is using free indirect speech to imitate the capitalist or to evoke the capitalist perspective and engage the capitalist in dialogue. I'm thinking in particular of a moment that comes at the end of Chapter 5 in our edition where the capitalist has invested in producing yarn and hasn't managed to create surplus value and is wondering what's going on.

There's this extended multi-page imitation of this kind, which you really don't see otherwise. In 19th century German prose, you kind of have to wait until Kafka to get something analogous. And so I see this happening on the level a complicated play of identification happening, which probably was going on behind Marx's back on the level of form. And that's what I'm talking about when I perceive this connection that the other translators might not have perceived and I see the energy that went into it and I wanted to try to match it effectively. Right, right. Well, maybe it's good to get you to tell us, like, if you were to make the case, since we've had some sense of things that you're contributing to the translation,

but maybe the central case for the new translation would be that it enables new readings and understandings of marks that the previous translation either gave a misimpression or didn't pick up on. And so I'm wondering if you would, if you're to make the case, you know, what's your best couple of examples of where your translation really worked to bring to light some kind of understanding or interpretation to Marx to an English reader that might not have been, you know, there that's material to really understanding Marx. So what would you, what would you say about why we should go read this? Because if you're like me and only read it in English, and it would be so labored to go try and read it in German,

but thankfully you've helped me understand something. What would it be? Paul's, do you want to start here? Paul is more forceful in talking about this. I'm shy. I can speak a little for this great translator. I'll just give like something to hold on to a small example, which seems to be exciting to people. That is a bear gelatinous blob. This is, if you take this as a book about value, less about, as a book about, you know, workers in their plate, although there are big chapters about it. But the chapter on the working day, which is 100-some-odd pages long. And I do think contributing,

giving the text back its directness and liveliness, it is part of the revolutionary project of this book that people read it. So even where there are not conceptual, clear, obvious conceptual differences between this and previous translations, that it's readable and it draws you in is very important. But the bear gelatinous blob, which comes up in chapter one, what Ryder manages to do in this translation is bring the vocabulary around this very strange thing value into its strangest form. And it is strange for Marx. He says, you know, we're living under the tyranny of value.

What is this thing? It's not under the tyranny of a lord who demands a certain amount of your crop per year. You can complain about that. You can go talk to them. You can negotiate with them, but you cannot negotiate with value. It is a structure that you live in. So what's the structure? First of all, what is the thing?

The thing is a bear gelatinous blob. And Marx's term is galerter, which probably doesn't exist anymore. or even in German, exists as a word, but it was in the 19th century a kind of food you would feed animals that was the melted down scraps of everything you didn't use for other things. It was like suet. And it became a kind of gelatinous,

absolutely disgusting thing for humans. And so one of the critical reactions to exposing the bare gelatinous blob is to turn people's stomachs about value. That's just one example. The Berger-Latness blob is the physical form of value. It has that kind of quality of melting down everyone's labor time, and taking away all the particularities,

and then forcing everyone to swallow it, let's say. Another moment there is to restore the very direct German phrase, Zinnlich, ubersynlich, which is easily translated as sensual, super-sensual. which writer returns to the translation. The previous translation, it was called transcendent, I believe. And that takes away the strange mixed nature of value that you can sense it, but it has a super sensual kind of metaphysical side to it,

which is that you can't really, even if you're holding a commodity, say a hammer, you're not holding physically the value. It's there. You feel its presence because you preserve the value of it as you preserve that hammer to sell it on to someone else. So it has a strange sort of ontological status and values, the truth of value that Marx is working to get at here is much more accessible in this translation.

Well, thank you, Paul, for saying all those nice things. It is... He was hell to work with, but he did a good job. Liveable, very difficult person. It is, in answering this question, easiest to talk about particular terminological choices because you can demonstrate

difference much more easily than you can when you're talking about a difference in tone, movement, these kinds of things.

And so we tend to talk about this stuff and it does matter a lot. I spent a lot of time. We spent a lot of time thinking about individual terminological choices and trying to

make this neologistic language around value clearer and more precise. The More Aveling translation, they do some interesting things here. Both Falks and More Aveling, they lose quite a bit of the neologizing that Marx does around value. Falks follows More Aveling a lot more than he lets on in his preface where he actually kind of slams them and dismisses them. why did they get rid of Marx's neologisms and sometimes translate a very unusual German terms? Well, I mean, neologisms obviously start out as unusual terms, but they don't necessarily sound strange.

So new terms that are unusual for being new, but then also that sound very strange, like, Werthe-gegenstendichke, more Eveling, will translate this term as value, just as an everyday term. And so the reader then really loses access to something important. And, you know, it also, frankly, is confusing. It makes it clearly from the context, Mark is talking about something other than just value. And yet, you know, you're not getting the extra direction because they've taken this interesting, arresting, unusual, meologistic term and made it into an everyday term. And so Phelps sometimes follows them in doing that. And as a first translation, they were very concerned, I think, with making sure that the text wasn't too strange for readers who weren't coming to it with the motivation that readers of a classic have.

And so, on the one hand, they make Marx's conceptual terminology less strange and therefore the value arguments about value, what it is, how it's expressed through value form, that becomes more difficult to follow. Then on the other hand, they try, and this is a little paradoxical, they try, I think, to make Marx sound more natural by introducing elevated scholarly terms that aren't natural in everyday conversation. So the paradox here is that Marx uses a lot of what we would consider natural language, very conversational language, rough, colloquial terms. And in this particular context, the context of scholarly German 19th century writing, that doesn't sound so natural. And so to adjust for that, to make Marx sound more natural to these first-time readers, more Aveling, they make some terms fancier than they are in German. They match everyday German terms with fancy terms. You know, sometimes it's not very obtrusive. Sometimes it is very imptrusive.

So they go in two different directions. But with both measures, they're trying to make Marx sound, I think, more natural to German, excuse me, to English readers. And so on the one hand, then the conceptual vocabulary becomes a bit flatter. The neologisms get lost. And then the other hand, this directness that Marx has gets lost a bit too when they use recondite words. And again, Phelps follows them quite a bit here. the most striking example is in the passage that Paul mentioned earlier where capital sounds comes closest to the revolutionary rhythms, the dialectical march of the communist manifesto, which

ends with the expropriators, are expropriated. Just before that, Marx talks about how the processes of socialization and concentration of labor become incompatible with more monopolistic capitalism with their capitalists. And the German word is just Heller, which is a very everyday word that means shell, but in both the More Aeveling translation and the Foux translation, which is obviously following the More Aebling translation here, it's they become incompat, they're no longer compatible with their capitalist and you know, remember you're rolling along with this revolutionary rhythm and then capitalist integument. The integument bursts. You know, it really kills the buzz as far as I'm concerned.

So there are some strange choices around when to make Marx sound more like you would expect a scholarly German writer of the mid-late 19th century to sound. Yeah, a lot of what each of you is talking about are interesting things that you discuss in your respective introductions. So I know when we had this discussion about the Jewish question and Marx, the background in which Marx was brought up Jewish family that converted to Protestantism in a Catholic area and how that potentially played into some of his thought. Paul North, I believe that was in your introduction. And then talking about these neologisms, very interesting. And you

give quite a few examples, Paul Reiter, in your introduction. So before I ask this question, which I'm just going to preface it by saying I'm being intentionally provocative with this question. I just also want to let the listeners know that we are not analyzing capital in this conversation. There is plenty of capital companions that you can go and read, listen to, watch. And of course, you can pick up this new translation for yourself from Princeton University Press. But I really want to focus on these introductions here because this is what is, you know, new and unique to this translation that is new and unique compared to any other translation of capital that is already existing. So now,

Like I said, here is the somewhat provocative question, intentionally so, just because I want to see how you respond to it. As you had mentioned in each of your questions or each of your responses in previous questions, this was a revolutionary project, right? It's an analytical project, but it's a revolutionary project with the intention of providing material for revolutionary movements. The book itself, capital itself, is a very many points, very dense. critical, analytical, theorizing book. And many people take it to be simply that critical,

analytical theorizing for the sake of doing so, whereas many other individuals, I think, and you quite rightly point out, take it as a revolutionary project. You have to produce that theory and that analysis in order to fuel revolutionary movements. Now, here's the provocative bit. the introductions to this book are all relatively critical, analytical, and theoretical. There are points in each of the introductions, of course, where the focus is on revolutionary movements, but each of the introductions, in large part, is pretty heavy, especially the first introduction, is pretty heavy in terms of, you know, this analysis and theorizing about what capital means rather than how to utilize it in a revolutionary project.

So I'm curious as to the choice of these introductions and the way in which you conceptualized what the introduction should be tackling and why there is this particular focus on the more analytical and theoretical side of things within these introductions, rather than shifting the focus towards how to utilize it within revolutionary movements

and revolutionary potential in the current political moment. So, again, I'm being a little bit needlessly provocative here with how I'm framing this question, but I'm curious as to how you'll respond to it. I don't think it's needlessly provocative or provocative. I think it's right on target. But I do think it's a question that Marx had and that drove the analytical project. It was, how do we attack this thing? where do we stand, who is the right group, when will it happen under what conditions,

and the conditions are really what he's moving towards in the project. So how these books, there are three volumes, and there was a planned fourth, and this, as the Latin American Marxist scholar, Enrique Dussel says, is probably 172nd of the whole capital project with all its drafts. How does this actually relate to a revolutionary project? And I think also myself, it calls into question whether revolution is the way through. It's hard to imagine where that would happen. And capital has developed in such a way that the workers have been divided because of offshoring

and geographical movement in such a way that what Marx saw from the center of Europe at that time when he was writing it, still may be a potential for workers to unite is even more hard to imagine now. So this is not to say that reform is the way through necessarily, but the books call into question what type of action you would want to take, and they call it into question in the most radical way, so that if you come to understand capital fully through the analysis, you have to ask yourself, what can we do? Without resting on pre-existing revolutionary traditions, which I think Marx was coming to the point of thinking, at least in Europe at the time, were not going to be effective against capital. So I take a very strong stance

on that myself, that the way to ask the question, what should we do, is to understand the system thoroughly. I think that's where Marx was when he got there. And so this is a project of understanding and inviting people to the hard project of thinking through all the deceptions, all the mechanisms of capital so that they can come to the point and say, what should we do? You know, I'm going to follow up here and be even more provocative then, just because you thought that I wasn't provocative enough before. So, you know, when we're looking at, again, within the way that these introductions are framed, and I do appreciate the way that you answer this in terms of how do we think about the potentiality of revolution given the stage at capitalism

that we see in developed countries. And I will underscore, particularly in settler colonial countries, because even if we're looking at a revolution of the workers, they're still on colonized land, right? You know, that's another question entirely. But when we are thinking about the system, the system within these developed capitalist settler colonial, primarily nations, today, the development is far beyond what was being analyzed

at the time of the writing of capital, but also it's much more global. The way in which the capitalist system has really developed as a world system both makes it in some ways much stronger, but then also makes it so that we do see probably the most likely avenues to pursue potential revolutionary action. And this is something that even was being developed at the time of Lenin, thinking about this weakest link theory. The weakest link in the imperialist chain is where the revolutionary potential is most likely to happen and where we should be focused. our efforts at fomenting revolution, and then once you break that weak link within the capitalist imperialist chain, you disrupt the entire chain, which then produces revolutionary potentialities elsewhere. So thinking about, you know, these theories are going back well over

a hundred years at this point. But in the introductions, again, you know, you're talking about what is the revolutionary potentiality within the developed countries. There's not so much discussion about how capitalism in today's world is very much a globalized system, a world system of capitalism far more than it was at the writing of capital. And so that when we're thinking about revolutionary potential, the impetus for us to think about revolutionary potential within the particularly exploited locales of the world and the colonized world, neo-colonial world, semi-colonial world, et cetera, et cetera, these are particularly important to think about understanding, again, this analysis that Marx gives of the

machinations of capitalism, but understanding that we have moved to a different stage that has different ways in which we would need to disrupt it. So again, now that's great. I agree completely with you. So I know that you agree with that, which is why the provocative point is Why is this not focused on within these introductions? Why is there not so much on the global dimension of capitalism within these introductions when framing this project? Well, I'll give you two answers. One, I think you won't like, and the other I'm sure you won't like. The first one is, and Paul can step in here too.

You know, we are Germanists, and I work mainly in philosophy and critical theory. That doesn't mean that those other things are not important. And I don't read kind of Marxist sociology or Marxist political theory, but neither of us is qualified to really make those kind of claims. I'm not sure who is, but someone who does works on world systems theory or in the aftermath of world system theory would be able to say those things. What we're presenting here is a text whose arguments and rhetoric and philological bona fides we have gone through with our expertise.

We did, there is a preface by Wendy Brown which talks about the global reach of capital. Not so much revolutionary potential there. The other side of it is I have to say there is a tendency for people to think, we think that this book capital is important. I also think volume two and volume three are important that we're getting to work on those now.

They do paint a picture. of capital as being even more entrenched, but also they show some of those exposed links that you talk about, especially in the circulation volume. That's volume two. That could be very useful to someone. But there is a tendency among Marxists to think that capital is the book from which everything has to start, including revolution. And there's many people, Lenin is a great revolutionary thinker. There's many revolutionary thinkers in former colonies, lots of great thinking of Marx and taking it elsewhere. But I don't think those kind of thoughts are in this book for the most part. They're not there. So this is a book that would be the basis. David Harvey said to

us recently, this translation is a great new basis for those kind of thinking. But it isn't really in this book. Well, that's good news that one of my questions to end on is what do we have to look forward to. Are you too exhausted by the rigors of doing volume one that you're not going to move on to two and three? So that's great news to hear that your own fervor and spirit and energy will carry on to contribute to new readings and new translations of volumes two and three. I think that's very exciting and we'll look forward to those. And I have to also thank you for finding ways to help us think about the contemporary relevance of Capital. You're going back to this text, but it's a new translation in light of like a lot of scholarship and new linguistic appreciation

that the audience and the purpose of a translation now in English may be very different from when it was first done. That's valuable, but it also gives us a chance, you know, an invitation to go back and read Capital again. For many of us, it's, you know, we've read it a few times, but now there's a new interest to go back and re-read and rethink. And so I think that's quite generative and quite wholesome. So I'm very appreciative of that. Henry, I don't know if you have any other questions. Oh, just, I mean, I can try to be provocative with one closing question. Sure. We might end up cutting this depending on how it goes. But so as somebody, I wanted to just make sure to thank you for this work, and I'm looking forward to the rest of it and that it was very pleasurable to be thinking with you about your translation today. And so thanks for taking the time. Yeah. And I absolutely echo a non-sentiment. I want to thank you for the hard work that went into this translation. And I think that it's a terrific resource and one that people definitely should be checking out. I am being provocative for the sake of being provocative rather than saying that, you know, this is a

is something that people should be avoiding or anything like that. We brought you on the show for a reason. We appreciate this work and think it's a terrific resource. But I like to be provocative sometimes. So here's the other provocative question that I have, which is as somebody who works as a volunteer, because we're all volunteers, for a radical independent press. It's always interesting when we see these revolutionary books like Capital come out from mainstream major. academic publishers. And so I'm curious as to at what stage it became clear that this was going to come out from a large academic publisher rather than, you know, maybe more of either a mass publisher, rather than a hardcore academic publisher like Princeton University Press, which

this book is coming out from, is. Or by reaching out to an independent radical publisher, not saying that you, you know, you should have come to ISCRA books. Of course, that would have been fun. But, you know, it is an interesting question as to the venue at which this is published and the justifications for going through an academic publisher, recognizing that you both are academics, of course, rather than one of these other potential venues for the publication of this monumental work. It is a little bit of Deformation Professionale, but I will say that we tried after we had agree, you know, I'll just say, Paul knows better about this than I, so I'll let him talk,

but I'll say just two things. Like any crazy project, it started as a small idea and grew and took over our lives for six years. And the commitment to Princeton was just part of our usual thinking about things early on. About halfway through, we really tried to bring Verso in and share, this with Verso in a way. We pushed very, very hard for that, and Princeton was absolutely against it to the point of being, you know, like worse than the vulgar bourgeois economists. We can throw them under the bus a little bit here because it really was awful. But you're right, it's a concern. We also fought tooth and nail with the press to have a paperback come out first. There will be a cheap paperback, a very affordable paperback in a size that people can carry around, because

because the argument is, of course, this is a book for everybody, and certainly for workers, whatever form that takes, colonialized or free, quote-unquote, free wage workers. Hald, do you want to add to this? Yeah, so we recognize, of course, that there's a bit of dissonance there, Capital, and then Princeton University Press, what seems more remote from the spirit of Marx than Princeton University. Well, as it happened, I had a relationship, a years-long relationship with an editor at Princeton, a person I really admired and trusted. And so that was the main reason why we went to Princeton initially. And then things being what they are in the work world, she wound up taking another position within the press.

And so we worked with somebody else. and that it didn't work out as we had imagined. As Paul said, we did try very hard to bring in Berso at a certain point, and that also didn't work out. So what you see is not necessarily doesn't necessarily give you good insight into how this whole thing worked. You see, okay, these are two academics at major research. institutions who went to publish this thing at a press attached to a very wealthy major

research institution with a history of, you know, elitism, whatever, on the, you know, in Pitts and New Jersey, I get it, but that suggests one sort of process. The actual process was quite different. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to hear that, you know, that was a concern for you as well, because as I said, there is that dissonance there. when you see that and you have to think what was the reason for that. And I see where you're coming from. You know, as you mentioned, not ideal, but as various theorists have put forth, we operate under the conditions in which we find ourselves rather than the conditions which we would

like to be in. And this is very much one of those situations it sounds like to me. Unfortunately, Adnan had to go and we should probably close out this conversation, although I have a lot more that I could say, perhaps we'll have the opportunity to speak again on this project or certainly when your next projects are coming out. It would be wonderful to continue conversing with you. I found this to be a really generative conversation. And as I mentioned in my previous question, this is really a terrific resource. And I'm incredibly happy to hear that it's going to be coming out in paperback at an affordable cost.

That was one of the big concerns for me as well. So listeners, as you hear this, note that that paperback is coming along the way and also that they, the Pauls, are working on Capitals, Volume 2 and Volume 3, which I'm certainly looking forward to myself. So, again, listeners, our guests were, we fought very hard to get an audiobook version of this through, and there is an audiobook version, and we think it's great. We're really impressed by the work that the narrator did. and it expands access because the print is a bit small and, you know, it's a challenge for

readers who are dealing with different kinds of disabilities to just, you know, read the hardcover text. And so I know that they're software researchers that they can use, but we're glad that there's an audiobook with a really fine narrator who brings the text to life in very interesting ways. And while I'm speaking, just let me say one last thing. And that is, you know, we really appreciate your provocations, your interest in the project, but also your provocations. As Marx says at the end of his preface to the first edition, you know, we welcome all critique that issues from or all objections, whatever exactly he says, that issue from systematic critique. As for the other stuff, you know, let people talk and go your own way.

So we know that, you know, your challenges are made in a very productive spirit and you're a very thoughtful reader of the text. And, you know, you don't have to, if we come on again, you don't have to preface them by saying that, you know, you're being provocative. You can just shoot away and we'll enjoy hearing what you have to say and we'll respond as, you know, as intelligently and effectively as we can. Oh, happy to hear it. My co-workers at work would be mortified that somebody's giving me the opportunity to just fire from the hip at will because they know, I'm talking about my day job, of course. They know that I'm willing to do that any time. So somebody giving me the green light to do so is very, very dangerous ground. But I will certainly take that opportunity the next time that we have the opportunity to have a conversation.

And I have to say that I'm also quite pleased to hear about the audiobook. As somebody who runs a podcast, I know I hear about. lot from our listeners that the audio medium is something that's accessible to them, particularly listeners with disabilities, which I do hear from as well, where reading some of the text that we discuss, even though we're not doing an audiobook version, as you understand from this conversation, we are more sometimes analyzing the text, but then also having these conversations in terms of relating the text to the world that we find ourselves in due to various disabilities. They find this to be what is accessible to them and also just other people for

time reasons or whatever, this is an accessible format. So the fact that that was made, and then also from the perspective of somebody who has read some audiobooks, I can only imagine how much labor went into this project, because the audiobooks that I have recorded are nowhere near as long or dense as this one, and they were still pretty hellish to make. And so I have sympathy for the audio book reader for this project, but I am happy that that was undertaken. So, again, listeners, our guests were Paul Reiter, who's a professor of Germanic languages and literatures, and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University, and Paul North, Maurice Nattinson Professor of German at Yale University.

And we've been talking about the brand new translation of Volume 1 of Capital out now from Princeton University Press. Paul, and Paul, it was a pleasure having you on. Is there anywhere that you would like to direct their listeners to find more of your work or keep up to date with any of the projects that you're taking on? Read Capital. That's all I can say. Yes, read Capital.

I think that that's a probably good advice regardless. So on that note, then, listeners, I will read out my co-host, Adnan, who unfortunately had to leave a few minutes ago. go to go travel to do a lecture. You can find him on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And you should check out his other podcast, The Mudgellis, M-A-J-L-I-S, which is on the Middle East, Islamic world, Muslim diasporas. Just don't pick the Radio Free Central Asia Mudgellis because, you know, why listen to Radio Free

CIA. Listen to the one hosted by MSG-G-P-U, Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Projects Projects Project at Queens University, which is the other podcast that Adnan hosts. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck-1995, H-U-C-K-1-9-95. I will mention that you should also check out Iskrabooks.org, since I've mentioned Iskra a couple times in this conversation. I might as well plug the website for our publishing company. So again, Iskrabbooks.org.

And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I do individually and collectively by following guerrilla history on Twitter at Gorilla underscore pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-L-A-U-R-I-L-A-U-R-I-L-A-H-R-I-L-A-HISR. And until next time, listeners, Solidarity. You know what I'm going to do. Thank you.