The Challenges of Translating Marx’s Capital

One of the least controversial things you can say about the first volume of Capital, Karl Marx’s sprawling, neologizing, polymathic masterpiece, is that it poses significant translation challenges. Over the years, some of the challenges have gotten much more attention than others. We should expect this to be so. Capital is at bottom a work of social and economic theory. It makes arguments, and it therefore stands to reason that when critics discuss the existing translations, they focus on translation decisions that directly affect how Marx’s arguments will be — or have been — read.

Seven years ago, an essay-cum-manifesto by the philosopher Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “On the Need for a New English Translation of Marx’s Capital,” dealt exclusively with this issue. Its sole concern was to show how individual word choices in two major English translations — Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling’s (1887) and Ben Fowkes’s (1976) — have led to “shifts of meaning,” or interpretations that move away from the meaning of the German text.

Haug’s predecessors in this include Friedrich Engels, which may seem odd, given how much Engels valued the brilliance of Marx’s style. But in the essay “How Not to Translate Marx” (1885), where he responds to some excerpts from Capital that a British socialist had translated and published, Engels says little about the difficulty of bringing the “concision and vigor” of Marx’s prose into another language. When he goes through the excerpts, Engels addresses only lapses that could cause people to misunderstand the theoretical content of Marx’s work, such as imprecise translations of the terms “labor-time” and “magnitude of value.”

During the five or so years I spent translating Capital into English, I devoted a great deal of time to the task of re-rendering Marx’s conceptual vocabulary. Some of his key terms are built from words that lack good matches in English, and I kept trying…