On the sidelines: New translation of Marx’s “Capital”: The Masterpiece

The disaster has a system! Economic crises are dragging entire societies into the abyss, life itself is becoming an object of speculation, poverty is getting worse, the rich are getting richer, then there is the climate catastrophe… in recent years it has dawned on even conservative feature pages and bourgeois science that this social misery has a connection : Capitalism! Its analysis is therefore as relevant and urgent as ever, if not as never before.

Appropriately, Heart of the Beast now presents a new English translation of what the editors say is “the most accurate and devastating analysis of the system in which capital dominates social relations.” Karl Marx’s “Capital” is the first new translation in 50 years and the first ever of the second German edition from 1872. The Germanists Paul Reitter and Paul North chose this edition of the first volume because Marx himself had authorized it – in contrast to all later editions edited by Friedrich Engels.

In addition to these originality considerations, the motivation for the new translation is its political explosiveness. In the mainstream, people still think of capitalism as an economic system of free trade and the pursuit of profit. With Marx, however, we recognize “political economy as the special form in which we build entire worlds through our unique cooperative powers,” writes Wendy Brown in her foreword to the new edition about the “enduring influence of Marx’s masterpiece.”

This current relevance of “Capital” for over 150 years testifies to the difficulty of thinking about our social relationships as a whole. “Marx knew that this unprecedented order (…) was not easy to see or understand,” writes Brown. But he saw her and understood her. Despite all the appreciation for this masterpiece, the crucial question is also overlooked in this round of “Capital” reading: How did Marx do it? This is not just a methodological question. How could he escape these forces that “permeate and transform every physical and psychic cell of earthly life,” as Brown writes?

This new translation of “Das Kapital” cannot be read as a text of enlightenment either. Strictly speaking, the very fact that the effects of capital on social organization are broken down as “capitalism” is something that contradicts Marx. His performance was rather an analysis of reality no ideology is. He recognized that the thoughts we think about society – whether as economists or philosophers – are subject to the same conditions of production as the general production of goods. Thinking about itself must reflect this connection. In “Capital” this self-criticism, which rises to the level of the social whole, is present in an implemented form. A lesson that Marxism still has to learn today.

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