Paul Reitter and Paul North on Karl Marx’s Capital

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

What was going on in Marx’s life during the composition of Capital?

PR: When he wrote Capital (vol. 1), Marx was forty-nine, or in the late stages of midlife by the standards of the day. He’d been living in London with his family for nearly twenty years. During most of that time, his financial situation was a disaster: creditors pounding on the door, family dinners consisting solely of potatoes, Marx holing up in his cluttered and chaotic apartment because he’d pawned his winter coats etc. His main sources of income were the money he got for his New York Tribune articles and handouts from Friedrich Engels. Such was his distress that at one point he tried to get a job as a railroad clerk, which obviously would have made it difficult for him to pursue writing projects whose world-historical importance he never doubted.?

But when Marx’s mother died in 1863, he inherited a pretty substantial amount of wealth (his attempts to get advances on it from her had ruined their relationship). The following year, he joined the International Working Men’s Association as its corresponding secretary, something that seems to have energized him and prompted him to think about the possibility of trade unionism, rather than revolution, as a path to a communist future. There were health crises—Marx had a long list of physical ailments, which may have included an autoimmune disease and definitely included weeping carbuncles that forced him to stand while he wrote parts of Capital. And there were other distractions, if that’s the right term, such as feuds, a great passion of Marx’s. However, this was a relatively good moment in Marx’s life for getting work done, and he took full advantage of it. He’d spent years in the reading room of the British Museum studying political economy and government reports. And he had produced some important outlines and economic publications in the late 1850s. But it was in the mid-late 1860s that he had his most fruitful moment. In a span of about three years (1864-1867), he wrote the large manuscript on which vol. 3 of Capital, is based, vol. 1 of Capital (1867), and then also one of the main manuscripts on which vol. 2 is based (1868-1870).?

Capital (vol. 1) reads like a work that was written under such circumstances. The goal of producing a “critique of political economy” went all the way back to the mid 1840s. So you have many years of thinking and study, years of rethinking as economic circumstances changed dramatically, moments of blockage, frustration, and desperation, and, finally, an opening during which Marx produced the manuscript in a relatively short amount of time: Around 300,000 words in less than a year. The writing is precise—when talking about Marx’s prose, Engels like to say that he weighed his words on a gold scale (that is, a sensitive instrument). But there’s an energy and propulsive movement to the text: you have the sense that the book came pouring out of him, as it more or less did. Alas, it wasn’t that way with our edition of it.?

What sort of reception greeted this book when it was first published in 1867?

PR: Engels wrote nine reviews of Capital, eight of which were published. Now that’s a friend! By the way, Paul North has promised to outdo Engels and claims that he’s going to write eleven reviews of Paul Reitter’s next book—you have to win by two in this game.

Marx addressed the book’s the reception in the postscript to the second edition, clearly conveying his disappointment: beyond Engels’s contributions, there wasn’t all-too much discussion of Capital. Here Marx mostly engages with Russian responses, citing one at great length (the quote runs to about two and a half pages). The censors in Russia had decided that the book was too theoretical to find much of an audience and pose a political threat. But it probably wasn’t the theoretical component that got in the book’s way with respect to finding readers in Germany. The problem there was that classical political economy, one of Marx’s primary objects of critique in Capital, was not widely read or appreciated. And if you weren’t really aware of the importance of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc., it would have been hard to understand the importance of Marx’s project. By the time Capital appeared in English (this happened in 1886/1887), the sun had set on classical political economy’s golden moment. So you could say that the book initially appeared a little too early in Germany and a little too late in Great Britain. But it was hardly a flat-out failure. More than 1,000 copies of the first edition were sold. A second edition—the text we used as our source text—was published in 1872.

What about present-day readers in the UK and elsewhere. What challenges will they face??

PR:?Of course we hope that the book connects with readers from all different walks of life and with readers in very different life phases, from teen activists to curious retirees. To a large extent, the challenges readers have to contend with will depend on what they bring to our edition of Capital. Someone who has spent a lot of time reading the Fowkes edition will know the book well but will likely experience a disorienting, or maybe uncanny, mix of the familiar and unfamiliar. It can be quite hard to get used to a new version of an author, even if you find the new version appealing. With someone who’s never read Marx, this issue won’t apply, but the first-time reader will have to read their way into Marx’s mode of presentation, which for most people isn’t easy. Marx is very committed to a process of conceptual “unfolding” that entails abstracting from what hasn’t yet been unfolded out of what he’s analyzing. He moves from use-value to exchange-value, from exchange-value to value, and so on. Hence Marx will say things like “at this point in our analysis, wages don’t yet exist.” It’s an uncommon way of proceeding, and few readers find themselves feeling at home in it right away. Plus some of Marx’s concepts, like value, are in certain respects difficult to grasp—where exactly is capitalist value formed? But the logical steps are mostly made quite clear—you don’t need to have read Hegel in order to follow Marx’s arguments in Capital. And amid the abstraction, there’s a great deal of directness and concreteness. First-time readers, and also readers accustomed to Fowkes’s edition, will be pleasantly surprised by this. In our edition, those features of Marx’s prose don’t have to do with an attempt to give readers a 21st-century Marx. They have to do, rather, with an attempt to preserve prominent features of Marx’s writing that get obscured a bit in the previous English editions.?

Beyond the mental exercise, why read Capital?today?

PN:?Capital is still the best can-opener for the sealed container that is the capital system, the best telephoto lens for viewing the market society we live in as if from a distance. Usually, capitalism is smashed up to our face like a beloved and we can’t make out its features well at all. Capital is glasses for our myopia. It pushes our beloved back and shows us its monstrous features. Moreover, its features, such as, to give one example, wages, have been so thoroughly mischaracterized that we don’t recognize them as they actually are, even when we have them in our hand. Wages are not equal pay for equal work; they have inequality built into them. So, if you want to know why, even though the world is getting richer, your fortunes are staying the same or more likely sinking, why, even when you have a fairly good standard of living, a large part of your lifestyle—house, car, consumer goods, education, travel—is financed on debt that you will be repaying until your death and beyond, and why, when a system-wide crisis hits, the middle and lower classes are on the hook to pay for it, through taxes, lost savings, and lost assets, this is the book that tells you.

The core of Marx’s analysis is still right on the money today. This “core” applies as much to the global economy now as it did to the internationalizing economy in the mid-19th-century. Volume 1, translated in this edition, brings to light what Marx called the “hidden place of production” (148). Production is a harrowing place. It is where extortion, exploitation, expropriation, and extraction happen. It isn’t all negative: amidst the harrowing of workers, something blossoms too—a new spirit of cooperation (see Chapter 11). Workers smooshed together in the factory and reduced to doing less-skilled partial-jobs learn how to operate as a mass, each doing their independent thing, with a shared purpose. This is useful for a new kind of organizing, Marx suggests.?

But the core of the capital system as Marx sees it in 1872 is, roughly speaking, negative. They can be summed up in four “ex-es.” Owners of capital hold back the means of production and only allow workers to use them to produce products if and when workers agree to owners’ demands. This is the first “ex,” extortion. Workers must work the hours required, at the location required, to make the products demanded, at the wages set by the owners. Now, owners don’t have complete freedom to set wages, but wages, Marx shows, always hover around the minimum it costs to maintain workers’ lives. Workers may push back and gain a wage raise to cover their real cost of living, but the needs of owners to make a profit and compete with other owners always push wages down to around the minimum. The second “ex” is exploitation. Owners hold back the means of production and effectively lend it to workers who actually have the skills to use it, whereas owners do not. Beyond this, Marx also describes a technical matter that exists only under capital. Because owners purchase hours of labor or pieces of labor at a fixed rate, the amount of labor they actually extract (the third “ex”) from laborers is not predicted in the wage, and the only way an owner can survive is by extracting more than what they have actually paid for. Why is this? Because worker efforts have to pay for worker lives plus raw materials, overhead, contingencies like bad markets or natural events or market fluctuations from year to year, and also the owners’ lives. That’s right, Marx discovers what he calls “surplus-value”—the main topic of Volume 1—and shows how it comes from extra unpaid labor put in by workers that in fact supports owners, workers, and everyone. This obviously applied in industrial factories, during the first gilded age in the 19th century, and it applies just as much now to global industrial labor, now farmed out to the far east and other economically peripheral economies. And it also applies to the multitude of service jobs in US America and elsewhere, in the so-called central economies. Anywhere that the owner gets fat while workers get by, and particularly where an owner builds capital and workers build none, live from paycheck to paycheck, not to mention paying part of their living on credit, these three ex-es are still at work.?

The fourth ex is no less in evidence today on a global scale. You can read about it at length in the final two chapters of the book, 24 and 25. Marx calls it there “so-called original accumulation,” poking fun at the political economists who used this innocent sounding moniker, original, to talk about throwing peasants off their lands, moving vast populations from the country to the city, leaving them no choice but to become wage slaves. Expropriation means taking what previously belonged to someone else and giving it to capitalists, without even the pretense of earning it. This happens with minerals in Africa and at many other sites in the world today, where the wealthy of a country sell rights to global corporations and virtually give away resources with little benefit for the citizens of the land. This also happens with natural resources that no one has a legal claim to directly, like space, or air and water, when corporations claim them and remove them from common use by the people of the earth. For capital, there is no nature and no commons. Anything can be extracted and expropriated, and they are, often with the help of governments.

In addition to the effects of these “ex-es” on workers, squeezing more labor out of them and sending it to the owners, who are often in far-away countries, it clearly has an effect on the earth, extracting resources without reserve and returning waste and pollution. A strong environmental thinking is currently being established on the basis of Marx’s perspective on capital’s abuses against nature. In this book you will learn why commodities have such a magical hold over us, why we believe we are earning what we deserve even when we are not, why capitalists are as much pawns of the system as workers, how much blood was spilled in the centuries leading up to the industrial revolution to move people out of feudalism and into capitalism, how worker pressures really do improve conditions but then how capitalists always find new ways to press more out of the same, as well as how the earth is taken in and spit out. You will learn why crises necessarily happen and who pays for them. You will learn what money really is and why technology has to constantly update and render previous technologies obsolete, and why capitalism has to grow and spread, overcoming all its limits and devouring its outside.

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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 (Princeton). Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation.