Reading Karl Marx’s “Capital” Volume 1, in English has until now verged on the gruelling, more a vocation than a pleasure. For too long, the most ready-to-hand edition has been the Penguin one, all 1141 pages of it, first published in 1976.
Sean Sheehan
Its small print gave it an undeserved density and helped make reading less than edifying. Not so with a new translation by Paul Reitter in prose sharp and refreshingly clear. It demands to be read.
The first volume of “Capital” introduces ideas that we cannot live without, beginning with the commodity and its ‘magical’ properties.
A commodity seems an obvious thing, Marx writes, but is actually “full of metaphysical quibbles and theological quirks”. A piece of wood is transformed when used to make a table: “It doesn’t simply stand before us with its feet on the ground; rather in its relations with all other commodities, it turns upside down and spins bizarre notions out of its blocky head, a performance far more fantastic than if it were to start dancing of its own accord”. There is humour here, an alert wit, in introducing the notion that something like a piece wood is an object of use – it has a use value – that becomes something quite else as a commodity, a product of labour, in a market economy.
As a product of labour, a table can be exchanged for money – it has an exchange value– and a surplus value is created.
This surplus value is possible because the market remunerates the capitalist more than those who make the commodity.
The role that labour plays in the creation of value is effaced and the mystifying effect is summed up in Marx’s famous passage on the fetishism of commodities: “a particular social relation among people… assumes, for these people themselves, the phantasmagoric from of a relation among things!” Capitalism’s drive to increase profits has now reached momentous proportions, arraying “eight billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation” in the words of Wendy Brown in her foreword to Reitter’s translation.
Marx foresaw this as it was happening in the nineteenth century: everything could be commodified and monetized, whatever the cost to people’s lives and the environment. The ‘free’ market disguises this, separating economic and political spheres of power; Marx’s subtitle for “Capital” – Critique of political economy – brings them together where they belong.
Readers of German will appreciate the notes and annotations and the way in which the language’s propensity for abstract nouns have been given a lighter touch in English. The extra material, though, is not just for scholars, and all readers will benefit from commentaries on the text and Paul North’s introduction as the editor. He makes the vital observation that Marx’s motive for uncovering how the regime of capital works was anger, an objective anger: “A state of the soul continuous with the state of the world”.
“Capital volume 1” by Karl Marx, translated by Paul Reitter, is published by Princeton University Press.
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