Discussion of: Paul Reitter, Trans. 2024. Marx, Karl (1867). “Capital: A Critique of Political Economy”: (EARLY) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDS
All reading is translation. Reading Marx, 150-plus years on, is translation squared. The real question about Paul Reitter’s new Capital is not whether it sounds like 2024. It is whether it is faithful, in George Steiner’s sense of the word, to a dead man writing in 1867…
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2026 :: Time: 3:30-6:00 pm pst :: Location: 220 Stephens Hall (Townsend Center Geballe Room)
RSVP (link: <https://forms.gle/RFRtgkm6t88MMvPY6>) by November 6th! Those who do not RSVP are welcome to attend. RSVPs are collected for catering purposes.
ISF Symposium, November 12th: Marx for the Twenty-first Century
3:15 pm: Arrival
3:30 pm: Paul Reitter, “Translating Marx’ Capital”
4:00 pm: Response by Brad Delong (Berkeley, Economics)
4:15 pm: Response by Rakesh Bhandari (Berkeley, ISF)
4:30 pm: General Discussion
5:30 pm: Reception
DeLong: as prepared for delivery:
In his truly brilliant After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation (1975), George Steiner points out, I think correctly, that not just reading across languages but all reading is best thought of as translation, But there is a difference. In translation across, say, mid-1800s German and early-2000s American English, the issues arise very visibly as clear blocks that we cannot fail to recognize. But those issues are, Steiner claims, I think correctly, also found “at a more covert or conventionally neglected level” every single time any individual one of us tries to understand something said by anyone else.
Thus, at one important level, we can read Paul Reitter’s new translation of Marx’s Capital, vol. 1, as a masterclass in how anyone at all can understand a man now long dead, writing in 1867, living in a very different world. A native German reader opening Das Kapital today is “translating” almost as thoroughly as someone reading it in English. We English-language readers just get to see the translation done in the open, by someone else, in this case Paul Reitter, with choices we can hardly fail to note, examine, and argue about.
Steiner has a four-beat description of what translation is:
First comes “initiative trust”: “an investment of belief… in the meaningfulness, in the ‘seriousness’” of the project: there is something to be understood.
Then comes “aggression”: “The translator invades, extracts, and brings home.”
Then comes “incorporation”: the imported meaning has to be placed in a native language and culture that is “already extant and crowded”.
Finally comes “restitution”: restoring the balance between original and translation that the earlier steps upset.
Paul Reitter is translating Marx from German. He is also translating Marx against Fowkes’s 1976 Penguin translation, against Ernest Mandel’s introduction to that Penguin translation, against the Moore-Aveling translation that Engels supervised on top of which Fowkes built, and against 150 years of Marx’s, Marxological, Marxist, Marxian, Marxoid, Marxisant, and Marx-adjacent thought layered on top. It is an extraordinarily layered and complex exercise.
There is initiative trust: We have a mid-1800s Jewish-heritage German intellectual deeply learned in Classics and Philosophy, with a dissertation on classical-philosophical ideas of atomism and free-will called The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. He then decided, with an academic career blocked by the Prussian state that was then absorbing the liberal Rhineland, to remake himself as a French-style political activist-revolutionary. He then decided to remake himself yet again as an English-style political economist, in the post-Ricardian socialist mode. Is there really much of a there there, in the sense opposed to that of what is falsely supposed to be Gertrude Stein’s judgment of Oakland? Let me postpone that to my end.
Then there is aggression toward the work, which is both necessary but can easily go very wrong. When it does go wrong, Steiner says, “the simile is that of the open-cast mine left an empty scar in the landscape”: despoliation as a mark of the false.Here I find myself thinking of the Fowkes 1976 Penguin translation, slightly of the translation itself but much more so of Ernest Mandel’s 80-page “Introduction”: Marx as the fettered and gagged prisoner of 1970s European Trotskyism. Mandel tells us that Marx, 100 years after his death, is still 100% right and our unfailing guide on every issue if properly interpreted. And Mandel tells us that every interpreter except Mandel is wrong. It informs us in 1975 that capitalism will not survive until 2025.
My example of incorporation: This runs, Steiner says, “from a complete domestication, an at-homeness”, with Steiner’s examples being Luther’s German Bible or North’s Plutarch both completely at home in 1500s German or English, respectively; all the way to the “permanent strangeness and marginality of an artifact such as Nabokov’s ‘English-language’ Eugene Onegin”, by Aleksandr Pushkin, which gives up rhyme and meter and, indeed, poetry, in order to give you a line-by-line lexical documen which then requires three further volumes of commentary so that you can understand why it is a poem.
Here again my foil will be the Fowkes edition. Fowkes aims for an English Capital that is at home in the English language of the last quarter of the 1900s. Reitter rejects that. Why? Because Marx rejected the idea of writing a book at-home in mid-1800s German. Marx ants to fly his freak flag: strangenesses like “value-thing” and “value-objecthood” because Marx meant to make capitalism’s social relations look “extremely unnatural and incompatible with human flourishing.” A Capital that reads as comfortable modern English has profoundly failed at something that Marx in the original was trying very hard to do: be linguistically and hence cognitively very unlike anybody’s home.
And there is more. The smart and earnest and industrious Ben Burgis says he greatly prefers the Fowkes translation to the Reitter because of things like this paragraph. In the Fowkes:
Fowkes: The taste of porridge does not tell us who grew the oats, and the process we have presented does not reveal the conditions under which it takes place, whether it is happening under the slave-owner’s brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus undertakes it in tilling his couple of acres, or a savage, when he lays low a wild beast with a stone…
In the Reitter
Reitter: But how wheat tastes doesn’t tell us who grew it, and looking at the labor process in this way tells us just as little about the actual conditions in which it is carried out: whether it runs its course under the slave overseer’s brutal whip or the capitalist’s watchful eye, whether it is Cincinnatus who completes a labor process by tilling his couple of jugera or a savage who does that by slaying wild beasts with a stone…
And we have Burgis saying:
There is, I’m sorry, no excuse for that…
Burgis’s complaint is, I take it, mostly a complaint about Reitter’s archaism. But the archaism is Marx’s. Marx was deliberately archaistic. That was what he wanted to do, who he wanted to be.
Marx did not just want to name-check Roman Republic-politician Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (cos. suff. -460, dic. -458 & -438). Marx wanted to drop into Latin to show his classical learning on his sleeve as he talks about how L. Quinctius Cincinnatus plows his couple iugera rather than his “couple of acres”. (And Burgis doesn’t care that a iugera is only about half an acre, so Fowkes makes Cincinnatus’s farm look twice as big as it actually was.) To read the original of Marx easily you must remember that, in Latin, “iug” is a yoke, that “iuger” is what beasts in a yoke do—i.e., what two oxen plough in a day, a unit of area, and a small unit of area.
Burgis’s complaint is that Marx was who he was, and that Reitter does not hide that. does not like that Marx was who he was.
On restitution: In one sense, that is what the extensive endnotes by Reitter and Paul North are for. I like them. Others don’t. Let me pick on Ben Burgis again, treating them as a defect, writing “sometimes less is more” even though they are at the back rather than at the bottom of the page, or in front of the page like the 80-page doorstop of the Mandelian “Introduction”.
But restitution has to do more than just explain yourself in the notes. In the text itself a good translator—a good understander—has to somehow “restore the balance of forces, of integral presence, which his appropriative comprehension has disrupted”. One aspect of this is that a faithful translation is what lets you see clearly where Marx goes wrong. The big example, I think, comes from the afterword to the second German edition, Marx confesses there that he “coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to” Hegel. Put me on record as saying that this coquetting is profoundly unhelpful, not just in making the text nearly unreadable but in making the thought muddy. Frustration at a translator for not making that section clear is thus, in my view at least, profoundly misdirected.
Translation that smooths toward the familiar makes the slips harder to see, because it makes Marx sound more like ordinary good sense than he is. The point of translation is to move the intellectual orrery from one language to another while preserving the gears. You keep the gears so you can watch them slip.
We see this again—and here let me pick on someone else—in Peter Gordon’s review of the Reitter translation in the LRB, in which Gordon preacheth the lesson:
Peter Gordon: Hair-Splitting <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting>: ‘Marx… knew that the economy was a human creation and… in his later years… [had a] pluralistic acknowledgment of the many paths from past to future. This shift is evident when we consider the differences between the [1872] French translation of Capital and the [1867] German original…. German… “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.”… French… “The most industrially developed country only shows those that follow it on the industrial ladder the image of their own future”… This seemingly minor amendment… leaves history open to alternative routes that do not all climb the same ladder of Western industrialisation…
But the 1872 French sounds the Predestination Marx leitmotif louder in my ears than does the 1867 German:
The countries are described not just as seeing an image but as actively following in footsteps.
There is a leader, singular, leaving footsteps; as opposed to leaders plural.
Indeed, in Friedrich Engels’s eyes and even more so in his own eyes Marx’s great intellectual achievement was precisely that he had uncovered the laws of how this human creation that was human society must undergo historical and social change. Newton: physics :: Darwin: biology :: Marx: history. The card was played in 1848 it was very clear to them that:
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: Manifesto of the Communist Party <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html>: [While] ‘hitherto… society has been based… on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed…. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable…
Ihr Untergang und der Sieg des Proletariats sind gleich unvermeidlich. The German word translated as “inevitable” is unvermeidlich: un-, not; -lich, making it into an adjective; -vermeid, a verb stem meaning avoid, evade, avert. Or, alternatively translated, Predestined.
Predestination Marx is quite possibly the strongest of the many aspects of Marx that powered itself down through the many ages of Marxism, so much so that Edmund Wilson came to write about Leon Trotsky, could only marvel at Trotsky’s perception of the process by which History-with-a-capital-H wreaked its will:
Edmund Wilson: To the Finland Station <https://archive.org/details/tofinlandstation0000wils>: ‘History, then, with its dialectical Trinity, had chosen Prince Svyatopolk-Mirsky to disillusion the middle class, had propounded revolutionary conclusions which it had compelled Father Gapon to bless, and will cruelly discredit and destroy certain Pharisees and Sadducees of Marxism before it summons the boiling lava of the Judgment. These statements make no sense whatever unless one substitutes for the words history and dialectic of history the words Providence and God.... Of late, in [Trotsky’s] solitude and exile, this History, an austere spirit, has seemed actually to stand behind [Trotsky’s] chair as he writes, encouraging, admonishing, approving, giving him the courage to confound his [Stalinist] accusers, who have never seen History’s face…
Unless your translation achieves the restitutive rebalancing that sees this thread in Marx’s text and Marx’s thought, this part of our path of historical development comes as a complete surprise. And yet it should not. It is not something a proper translation should hide from you.
One important reason to wrestle with difficult books by brilliant past authors is precisely because they are so often and so profoundly wrong, in ways that we can clearly see given our more privileged standpoint later in history than they. Not making it seem as though they stood on the shoulders of as many and as tall giants as we can is a way of making that possible
And now let me return to initiative trust. Why should our students, people who are going to be acting in the world in 2050, read Capital at all? It is not from the standpoint of pure economic theory. From that standpoint he, Paul Samuelson once said, can be regarded as a minor post-Ricardian”—before immediately going on to say that Marx’s greatness lies in his history and his sociology. It is because Capital is a big book by a powerful mind grappling with an enormous social transformation as it was happening. Thus it is a superb example of critical theory and how to do it. The Iliad outlived the concerns of the Bronze Age. Capital has long outlived the industrial-organization and income-distribution problems of the SteamPower mode of production, and will surely outlive us. How? By asking of an ideology, a set of human practices, and the system they empower “is that really what is going on here?”.
Let me pick on Burgis one last time. He, for no good reason I can think of, slags Wendy Brown’s introduction in a drive-by. I quite like Wendy Brown’s introduction here.
My own intellectual foundation is from the Harvard Social Studies concentration ca. 1980: Smith, Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, with a great deal more force-fed on top ,as ring-mastered by Michael Walzer. Its net effect was to prepare me perfectly to understand human affairs, and to maneuver as a bourgeois thinker, in a five-hundred-mile circle centered on Köln on the Rhine in the years around 1905. I would have been so damned effective back then. But the SteamPower gave way to the Second Industrial Revolution’s Applied-Science to the Mass-Production Fordism and into the Globalized Value-Chain mode of production in which I have lived. And what has been enduringly useful—what has been the treasure for all time, in Thoukydides’s sense—has not been what they concluded but the meta-lesson as to how to take the very different society in which one is embedded and to then do their kind of thing.
And Wendy Brown outlines how to read Capital that way very well.
To conclude: a translation that pretends Marx was writing yesterday makes that job impossible. A translation that shows Marx as he was, gears and Latinisms and Hegelian coquetry and Providence and all, lets students measure the distance and do the translating themselves, which is the only way understanding happens.
Paul: thank you very much for your extraordinary patience, judgment, and labor.
References:
Burgis, Ben. 2025. “In Defense of the Fowkes Translation of Marx’s Capital.” Philosophy for the People. November 2. <https://benburgis.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-the-fowkes-translation>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Here, I think, Hegel is important…” Twitter. November 8. <https://x.com/delong/status/1987166256898973832>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “You don’t [see Brown as] much better…” Twitter. November 5. <https://twitter.com/delong/status/1986237624328331698>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Value-Thing, Not Vibes: Defending Reitter’s Translation of Marx (& Brown’s Introduction) Against Troglodyte Loyalists”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. November 7, <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/value-thing-not-vibes-defending-reitters>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “À propos of my “Value Thing, Not Vibes…”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality SubStack Notes. November 5. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-174965977>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Over at the Worst Social-Media Website…”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality SubStack Notes. November 5. <https://substack.com/@delongonsubstack/note/c-174950131>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Yes, Virginia, Predestination Marx Is Not Fake”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. April 16. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/yes-virginia-predestination-marx>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Value-Thing, Not Vibes: Defending Reitter’s Translation of Marx (& Brown’s Introduction) Against Troglodyte Loyalists.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality. November 7. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/value-thing-not-vibes-defending-reitters>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “A Note: Reitter Translates Marx as He Was.” DeLong’s Grasping Reality. November 10. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-note-reitter-translates-marx-as>.
Engels, Friedrich. 1883. “Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx.” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm.
Gordon, Peter E. 2025. “Hair-Splitting.” London Review of Books 47:6 (April 3). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/peter-e.-gordon/hair-splitting.
Goure, Devin. 2025. “My sense is that much…” Twitter. November 5.<https://twitter.com/DevinGoure/status/1986170668988146169>.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 2024. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Paul Reitter, ed. Paul North, fore. Wendy Brown, after. William Clare Roberts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691190075/capital.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Intro. Ernest Mandel. London: Penguin Books. https://archive.org/download/capital-vol.-1-penguin/Capital%20-%20Vol.%201%20Penguin.pdf.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1887. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Samuel Moore & Edward Aveling, ed. Friedrich Engels. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.
Marx, Karl, & Friedrich Engels. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61-images.html>.
Miller, James. 2024. “Karl Marx, Weirder than Ever.” New York Times. September 19. <https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/books/review/capital-volume-one-karl-marx.html>.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/afterbabel00geor>.
Wilson, Edmund. 1940. To the Finland Station. <https://archive.org/details/tofinlandstation0000wils>.