Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1
Edited by Paul Reitter and Paul North
Translated by Paul Reitter
Princeton University Press, 2024
In September, Princeton University Press released a new English translation of the first volume of Capital. The editors, Paul Reitter and Paul North, tell us that the new translation is the product of five years’ labor. In this review, I’d like to ask what I am sure they would regard as an impertinent question. Why do we need a new English translation of the first volume?
They acknowledge that excellent English translations of the first volume are readily available—they have good words to say about the Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes, which they scrupulously compare with other English translations. Why have they bothered?
The editors regard it as of enormous importance to tease out every fine shade of meaning in the book. They discuss Marx’s revisions to the German original, which appear in the last German edition he was able to examine personally, which is the basis of their translation. What exactly does Marx mean by “alienation?” By “fetishism?” By “exploitation”?
It transpires that the editors are much more concerned with these shades of meaning than was Marx himself. In the French translation of the first volume, which they also discuss, Marx presents an account of what is wrong with working for wages that differs completely from his discussion in the German original and in the English translation he approved himself.
As William Clare Roberts explains in his afterword, “The text of Le Capital says that the producers of commodities [i.e., the workers] are driven about in their social interactions by the changing prices of commodities, rather than having the power to themselves direct these price changes.” In other words, the French edition argues that commodity producers are price-takers, not price-makers, and that changes in relative price levels drive the buying, selling, and producing activity of “commodity producers.” That is to say, workers have to shift from one job to another as demand changes. What is so bad about that?
For Marx, this is very bad indeed, because he thinks that businessmen exploit laborers to extract every last bit of “surplus value” from them. To understand what Marx means by “surplus value,” we must grasp what he means by the “value-form.” He claims that for two thousand years, people were unable to understand it but that he has succeeded. The expectant reader eagerly awaits Marx’s explanation of the mystery, but to understand the explanation requires many hours, as Marx’s prose is hardly pellucid: “The value-form, which in its fully developed shape is the money-form, has little content and is actually quite simple. Yet for more than two thousand years, the human mind has failed to comprehend it, while much more complex forms that have much more content have been analyzed with at least some degree of success. Why? A whole body is easier to study than its individual cells.”
In brief, Marx is saying that just as we can see a body by looking at it without special equipment, but seeing the cells that constitute it requires a microscope, so it is easier to understand economic exchange that takes place throughout the economy than to comprehend what goes on in a single act of exchange. I would have thought that the opposite is true, but in any case, the relevance of the biological analogy is not immediately apparent. You will not be surprised that Reitter and North have quite different accounts of what the analogy means, but these details need not detain us.
But what, then, is the value form? So far, we have learned only that understanding it is hard. Here is the answer: “A commodity’s simple value form is contained in its value relations with a different kind of commodity. Commodity A’s value is expressed qualitatively by the circumstance that Commodity B can be directly exchanged for a given quantity of A. In other words, a commodity’s value is expressed independently when it is represented as exchange value. The commodity is both a use value and an exchange value; readers will recall the line which uses today’s terminology. The line is wrong strictly speaking.” I do not think it is worth the reader’s effort for me to explicate this passage, nor to discuss what happens when money is introduced, albeit that Marx deems this of crucial importance.
And now at last to “surplus value.” In Marx’s account, the value of every commodity is the socially necessary labor time required to produce it. This applies to labor, too; the value of labor is the socially necessary time required to produce a laborer (i.e., the number of hours required to produce what he needs to live on). But the worker sells his labor power, in effect himself, to the capitalist. Because the time needed to produce the worker’s subsistence is less than the time his “labor power” is at the businessman’s disposal, the businessman has extra hours that can be used to generate value. Marx thus sees capital and labor as fundamentally antagonistic, engaged in a battle over the length and intensity of the working day. To give him credit, Marx’s depiction of the stages of this struggle is written in clear and intense prose, though its bias must be kept in mind.
Marx mocked economists who did not agree with his account. Readers will find of interest his opinion of the great free-market economist Frédéric Bastiat. As Roberts summarizes it in his afterword, “Vulgar economists cling to ‘mere semblance’ and classical political economy has ‘come close to something of the true state of affairs.’ To Marx, the second is worthy for critique. The first, however, is only worthy of contempt. In the ‘bourgeois’ economists, Marx spies a tendency to reify the system, to treat it as natural and permanent, taking its ability to satisfy human wants as almost divine occurrences.”
It was of course Marx who was mistaken. He failed to grasp that there are laws of human action that apply universally. His understanding of economics was far inferior to that of Nassau Senior, whom he derided as the quintessential “bourgeois” economist.
As far as Marx’s derision of Bastiat is concerned, we should heed the wise words of Mises: “Many economists, among them Adam Smith and Bastiat, believed in God. Hence they admired in the facts they had discovered the providential care of ‘the great Director of Nature.’ Atheist critics blame them for this attitude. However, these critics fail to realize that to sneer at the references to the ‘invisible hand’ does not invalidate the essential teachings of the rationalist and utilitarian social philosophy. One must comprehend that the alternative is this: Either association is a human process because it best serves the aims of the individuals concerned and the individuals themselves have the ability to realize the advantages they derive from their adjustment to life in social cooperation. Or a superior being enjoins upon reluctant men subordination to the law and to the social authorities. It is of minor importance whether one calls this supreme being God, Weltgeist, Destiny, History, Wotan, or Productive Forces and what title one assigns to its apostles, the dictators.”
It is ironic that Marx’s reliance on the labor theory of value became outmoded within his own lifetime. The marginalist revolution of Menger, Jevons, and Walras conclusively showed that workers are not exploited under capitalism; to the contrary, they earn the marginal product of their labor.
Marx’s defenders try to excuse his failure to discuss the marginalist revolution by speaking as if Menger, Jevons, and Walras wrote during the last years of his life, when he could not be expected to keep up with the latest literature. In point of fact, Marx lived until 1883 and retained his capacity for intellectual work until the end of his life. He was an avid reader of the economic literature of his time and in fact discussed Jevons in other connections. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that Marx did not mention the marginalists because he could not answer them.
Suppose, though, that I am wrong about the merits of the labor theory of value. One wonders why, for the most part, those enamored of its merits do not attempt to refine and extend the theory, all the more so as the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk refuted the theory long ago. Instead, though there are exceptions, they try to show that their interpretation is to be found in the text of Capital. Though they do so with great ingenuity, this is not the normal procedure in a scientific discipline. Physicists rarely consult Newton’s Principia or Einstein’s papers on the theory of relativity, nor do biologists offer their work as commentary on Darwin’s Origin of Species.
I shall close with the question posed in the initial paragraph of this review. Why did the translators and editors of this volume devote so much time and effort to yet another English translation? If they wished to explore every detail of Capital, why did they not just issue an account of their discoveries?
