22 December, 2025
Author: Martin Thomas
A new English translation of Capital volume one, by Paul Reitter, was published in September 2024. At our Workers' Liberty Capital study course, 19-22 December 2025, one of us was using that new translation.
I haven't read the new translation all through, let alone worked systematically through the extras it offers: a foreword by Wendy Brown, an editor's introduction by Paul North, a translator's introduction by Reitter, an afterword by William Clare Roberts, and masses of new footnotes. I surely haven't compared it line-by-line with other translations. But I've scanned it sufficiently to offer a few provisional opinions.
Generally, with our Workers' Liberty Capital study courses, I've advised students to bring whatever translation of Capital they find most ready to hand. Having a variety of translations in the sessions is good. If we get stuck on a difficult passage, we can look at other renderings of it. I bring along copies of Capital in French and German, so that we can also get those renderings.
In some Capital study groups I attended, in the early 1970s, we would sometimes get stuck for hours on single sentences.
For example, in the section on Commodity Fetishism, chapter 1:4, how can we make sense of the two passages, within a page of each other?
"A definite social relation between people, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things".
"The relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".
(Moore-Aveling translation, emended by substituting "people" for their "men" as a rendering of the the German "Menschen", which, as distinct from "Männer", covers all genders).
The presentation of social connections as social relations between things (commodities) is a "fantastic" form? Or "what they really are"?
My answer, after all those hours, would be: both.
But also: better not to get stuck on inevitably dubious attempts to decipher "what Marx really meant" in cryptic passages.
Better to get the basic and clear frame of Marx's argument. Accept that some passages are cryptic, or best read as literary flourishes, or describe a tendency which Marx will later "overwrite" by showing a counter-tendency which overlays it. (Surplus-value is increased by lengthening the working day - chapter 10. Well, not necessarily - chapter 12). Turn to checking out the main line of argument with the realities as we observe them in our workplaces, in our class struggles, and in our observations of economic life. Marx did not write the book so that his meaning would be hidden in a few cryptic sentences here and there, and obscure from the main drift of the text.
Not everything is plain, course. Misunderstandings of Capital, I think, are fairly common, but I can think of none down to bad translations, or insufficient puzzling over obscure passages.
For explain, the idea is common that the critique of exploitation is based on the idea that labour is the substance of value (or even the idea that labour is the source of all wealth, an idea Marx explicitly denounces in Capital).
As far as I can make out, that idea derives mainly from a wish to think that in reading chapter 1 section 1 one has already got the core of Marx's argument, and can then skim or skip all the rest. It does not derive from anything Marx is rendered by any translator as writing in chapter one section one.
Just read further, without thinking that chapter one section one had it all! Read keeping in mind that Marx constructs his theory not by making cut-and-dried definitions and then deducing step by step, but rather by building layer upon layer of tendencies and patterns, each layer modifying the picture painted by previous levels of analysis and also modifying the meaning of the concepts.
As Karl Korsch put it in a 1932 introduction to a printing of Capital, the whole theory shows "the ‘dialectical’ relationship between an initially rather abstract treatment of a given object or nexus, and the subsequent, increasingly concrete, treatment of the self-same phenomenon. This mode of development, which characterises the whole structure of Marx’s Capital, seems to reverse, or to ‘stand on its head’ the order in which given realities are ‘naturally’ regarded by the non-scientific observer".
Korsch's introduction, by the way, reproduced in the widely-circulated 1970 printing of the German fourth edition, is to my mind the best of all the various post-Engels introductions, prefaces, and forewords. Ernest Mandel's introduction to the 1976 Fowkes translation reads poorly today, if only because it concludes by confidently predicting that capitalism cannot possibly last until 2026, but probably better than the Brown-North-Reitter-Roberts compendium. But the first rule for readers should be: go straight for reading Marx, and then his various forewords and afterwords, before you detour in latter-day glosses and "read-this-first" texts. If you want a latter-day gloss, go to the commentary available on the AWL website , which includes a chapter-by-chapter critique of David Harvey's useful but flawed Companion to Marx's Capital).
Read Marx free of glosses, and read it with patience, and in any translation you will see the critique of exploitation is based on:
• the production by free-and-equal markets of stashes of money which become a great and unequal social power in a way that stashes of other commodities generally aren't, and generate a drive to transform money into money-plus (chapter 4)
• the distinction between "labour" and "labour-power" (chapter 6)
• the exceptional character of the exchange between labour-power and money-become-capital (chapters 6 and 7)
• the capitalists are driven and drive to reshape production (chapters 10 to 15).
Nothing much remains to be extracted by new supposed revelation of what Marx "really meant" by this or that individual cryptic or maybe-poorly-translated passage.
Over the years, I really haven't found a substantive question where one translation is downright misleading or incomprehensible, and another brings full understanding. Some passages come out clearer in one translation or another, but all the translations are serviceable.
Such considerations made me sour in advance about a new translation. After checking it out, I remain sour. I have identified no passage where Reitter's translation is outright misleading, but it's not really worth paying £29.15 for this version (the current cut-price on Amazon, cheap for a 857-page hardback) rather than £15 or so for the Penguin version (Fowkes translation), or less if you can find one of the many second-hand copies.
The first German edition of Capital was in 1867. Marx supervised a second German edition in 1872-3. That had major changes. What is now chapter 1 section 3 was transferred then from an appendix, and completely rewritten. In all subsequent editions and translations, the amendments were (to my mind, anyway) small.
Marx worked closely, for years, with the translator on a French translation of the second German edition, and recommended that French version. As far as I know, no-one has ventured to produce a new French translation with the thought that they can better render what Marx "really meant" into French than Marx could himself. Engels produced a third German edition in 1883, based on notes from Marx and amendments seen in the French translation.
The first English translation, by Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling, and Engels, was based on that third German edition. This is not easily available in print these days, but is widely and cheaply accessible in web, e-book, and audiobook formats (because of copyright having expired).
Engels produced a fourth German edition in 1890, making further amendments based on the French text, tidying up the quotations, and adding some explanatory notes. That is, as far as I know, the basis for all versions of Capital in wide circulation in Germany.
A tidied-up version was produced by Karl Kautsky in 1914, but its main difference was that all the quotations were rendered into German rather than being left in the original English, French, etc.
Eden and Cedar Paul, members of the Communist Party, produced a new English translation in 1928. David Ryazanov, a Marxist activist since 1885 and the foremost Marx scholar of the era, was then still able to work in the USSR as long as he kept out of current politics (he would be arrested and internally-exiled in 1931, then killed in 1938). He responded irritably that a new translation was unnecessary. The Pauls replied, reasonably, that they had done it only in order to get more accessible and readable English than Moore-Aveling-Engels, and to work from the fourth rather than third German edition.
The Paul translation was the first version of Capital I read, around 1963-4, in a new printing dated 1962. I suppose must have been widely available then. It is rare today.
In 1976, as part of the great explosion of publishing of Marxist texts which followed the French general strike of May-June 1968, Ben Fowkes produced a new English translation from the fourth German edition. That is the most widely available print version today, published by Penguin.
Fowkes explained his aims (in a translator's preface much shorter and more modest than Reitter's) as modernising some language in line with changed English usage, restoring some sentences cut by Engels for the third and fourth editions in line with Marx's work on the French translation, and doing his best to reflect in English the "vivid language" and "startling and strong images" in Marx's German. Not even Reitter denies that Fowkes did a pretty good job, and I certainly wouldn't. Fowkes's version has the additional merit of including, as an appendix, an "extra" chapter, "Results of the Immediate Production Process", omitted from Marx's "final cut" of Capital volume one only at a very later stage, and largely "lost" until it was published separately in German in 1969 then included by Fowkes with his English translation. The Reitter version does not include that "extra" chapter.
Reitter is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature at Ohio State University, and his co-workers are US academics. As far as I know, they are left-ish, but none is a labour-movement activist in the sense Engels, Aveling, the Pauls, were, or keyed into working-class politics to the degree that Fowkes was (one of his main authored books was on Communism in the Weimar Republic). Wendy Brown (foreword) is the partner of Judith Butler, and as far as I know broadly shares Butler's politics. William Clare Roberts (afterword) tweeted after 7 October 2023 to call for "full economic and military support for Hamas and Hezbollah".
Reitter and his co-workers suggest that with the new translation they want to provide two things:
• a more "philosophical" reading of Marx, in particular with complicated verbal constructions in German copied as nearly as possible into English, rather than flattened out for the other language;
• but also a more colloquial modern style of English.
There is a whole literature about whether German is a uniquely suitable language for philosophy. Hegel thought so: "German has many advantages over other modern languages; some of its words even possess the further peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings so that one cannot fail to recognise a speculative spirit of the language in them: it can delight a thinker to come across such words and to find the union of opposites naively shown in the dictionary as one word with opposite meanings, although this result of speculative thinking is nonsensical to the understanding".
The famous example is the word aufheben, which can mean cancel, abolish, or preserve or keep, or pick up, or lift up, or transcend. It is used everyday, for example for picking up something dropped on the floor, but also in philosophy to signify simultaneously abolishing and preserving. Marx uses it in Capital only in everyday senses. Of course he may have meant to use other German terms in more labile and "philosophical" ways, but Marx's style in Capital is vastly less "German-philosophical" than his early writings, and in his afterword to the second edition he prided himself on having "confined [himself] to the mere critical analysis of actual facts".
The simultaneous drives to be more "philosophical" and "like German", and to be more colloquial, make the Reitter translation read oddly to me. Oddness can make for greater enlightenment, but not in this case, I think.
Colloquial formulations like "aren't" for "are not", "doesn't", "couldn't" etc. sprinkle every page, and other colloquialising makes the language seem blander and more casual. I can't see that changes in English usage make that necessary: after all, plenty of us still read Adam Smith or Ricardo, or, say, the Brontës, and feel no need to bring in an editor to "modernise" their English, certainly not to the extent that Reitter "modernises" (much more than Fowkes). At the same time, laboured verbal constructions slow down the reader. The effect is to assimilate Marx towards modern American academic style.
Reitter labours arguments about Marx using imaginary numbers as analogues in some places, irrational numbers elsewhere, and other translators being inconsistent about their rendering. Knowing a little about mathematics, I have always found the mathematical analogies sprinkled by Marx through Capital inept. Marx was fascinated by mathematics, as many of us are, but not very good at it. Perhaps more to the point, I know no commentary on Capital which adduces one of those mathematical analogies as really illuminating a substantive point of theory. If both analogues are inept, fussing about them is more confusing than helpful.
Another example of laboured wording is Reitter's use of "metabolising" for "Stoffwechsel", where Fowkes has simply "metabolism", which by the 1970s (though not yet in 1887) was the standard dictionary translation.
The prime example, cited by Reitter in his translator's preface, is a passage in chapter 1 section 3. In adapting what had been an appendix in the first edition to become chapter 1 section 3 of the second (and subsequent) editions, Marx introduced the word Wertgegendständlichkeit. Reitter describes it as "neologism", an invented word. Yes, but as Reitter himself notes, in German, making new words by stitching together familiar ones into long compound words is commonplace, much less of a drama than "inventing words" in English. It does not necessarily signify that the writer considers the argument so abstruse that it cannot be made without inventing special new words.
Wert means value. Gegenstand means object or item. The suffix -lich is similar to -ly in English, -keit to -ness, so Gegendständlichkeit is something like object-ly-ness. The dictionaries give objectivity or concreteness as the best English equivalent. My surmise is that Marx uses Wertgegendständlichkeit to mean approximately "value as something which appears an objective property of the commodity".
Reitter renders it as "value-objecthood":
"The value-objecthood of commodities differs from Mistress Quickly in that one knows not where to have it. Not even an atom of natural material goes into their value-objecthood, in striking contrast to their objecthood as physical commodity bodies, which is a crude thing for the senses… Commodities possess value-objecthood only insofar as they are expressions of the same social denominator, human labour, and that their value-objecthood is thus purely social. This point should make the following one clear: the value-objecthood of commodities can appear only in the social relation between commodity and commodity".
"Objecthood"? I didn't know this before looking it up, but the word "objecthood" was coined by the art critic Michael Fried in 1967. A friend who knows about such things tells me that Fried's initiative was influential at the time, but has faded from view in recent decades: most art students today (let alone general readers of Capital) will not know what "objecthood" means. My friend explained to me what Fried's usage meant: she is good at explaining such things, but I still didn't "get" it. The word is esoteric in a way that Marx's compound-word-making wasn't.
Michael Heinrich, a widely-respected German Marxist who is credited as a member of the "editorial board" of Reitter's version, has preferred "value-objectivity" as a translation. That makes more sense to me. In any case, Reitter's version offers no more clarity to me than the older translations, which seek to convey Marx's meaning by less literal renderings.
Thus, for example, Marx himself in the French translation (I render into English literally):
"The reality which the value of the commodity possesses… there is no atom of matter which penetrates into its value… The values of commodities only possess a purely social reality… this social reality can manifest itself only in social transactions".
Fowkes uses formulas like "the objectivity of commodities as values" and "their objective character as values"; Moore-Aveling, formulas like "the reality of the value of commodities". I don't have the Eden and Cedar Paul version to hand.
Reitter complains that all those versions render the same word, Wertgegendständlichkeit, into different French or English within a few lines of another. But I, for one, come away more illuminated from the other renderings than from Reitter's, or even from Heinrich's if Heinrich means (and I'm not sure he does) that the translator should repeat the same term, "value-objectivity", line after line, rather than seeking to convey meaning through a variety of approximations in different contexts where there is no exact English equivalent. I still take Marx's point to be that value appears as an objective trait of commodities, their value-form appears as a "thing", only through the social relations of commodities. Marx makes the point there to prepare us for the idea that gold appears in society as value-as-thing thanks not to natural properties but to historically-evolved social relations.
An argument could be made that rendering unusual words in Marx by odd-looking expressions in English alerts us to the appearance of a crucial concept, and we might miss that if they are rendered by more ordinary words. But in fact Marx uses ordinary words for most of his crucial concepts (value, abstract labour, labour-power, capital, surplus-value...), only using them differently from other writers. I'm not convinced that Wertgegendständlichkeit becomes a crucial concept through Marx choosing to construct a compound noun, and I think turning readers' attention to such wordings may misdirect us.
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