Looking for the “real Capital”

Das Kapital, volume 1, was first published in 1867. It took twenty years for the first legitimate English edition to appear. This translation, advertised in the US by New York publisher Julius Bordello as the “only authorized translation by the life-long friends of the author, Samuel Moore, assisted by Edward Aveling, and edited by Frederick Engels,”Footnote ⁵ was based on the third German edition published in 1883. Moore’s English translation came at a time when, as Engels wrote in his “Editor’s Preface,” Capital had already been embraced “on the Continent” as “the Bible of the working class.” Engels’s optimism about “the theories of Marx … exercis[ing] a powerful influence upon the socialist movement” across Europe, and reaching to America,Footnote ⁶ was paralleled by his belief in the beneficial progression of science—and Marx’s work was, as Engels suggested in his preface, just as revolutionary (and initially difficult to comprehend) as, for instance, new developments in chemistry.Footnote ⁷

Moore’s translation has since been reprinted in volume 35 of the collection of Marx and Engels Collected Works and it continues to be cited. First published in 1976 to little fanfare, Ben Fowkes’s translation of volume 1, which is based on the fourth German edition, has subsequently become the standard English-language translation, widely taught, cited, and quoted. It is against Fowkes’s translation that Reitter’s must be judged, not only in its stylistic and lexical choices but also in its selection of edition.

Perhaps the primary (although surely not the only) criterion for choosing which edition of Capital to translate depends on how one evaluates both Engels’s accuracy in reliably grasping all aspects of Marx’s theory and his editorial skills in realizing Marx’s intentions. The second edition was the last one whose printing Marx saw through, although the third edition can still be said, as the MEGA ² editors suggest, “to have been prepared by Marx himself.”Footnote ⁸ If one trusts Engels’s competency, then the third or fourth editions would present themselves as the most compelling originals to translate. The third edition bears the subtitle “augmented” because Engels could draw on the notes Marx prepared based on the French translation. Most of Marx’s intended changes were not incorporated into the second edition, which his publisher was rushing to bring to market, compelling Marx to prioritize merging the first edition’s subchapter on the commodity and its separate appendix on the value-form into one coherent first chapter on “The Commodity.” The fourth edition differs little from the third: Engels made some stylistic changes and added explanatory footnotes and missing bibliographical citations. Compared to the first edition, subsequent editions were driven by concerns for widespread distribution. Marx’s publisher, Otto Meissner, eagerly agreed to make the second edition a billige Volksausgabe, a popular edition that workers could afford. As editor and figurehead of Marxism, Engels embraced playing the indispensable “second fiddle” to Marx’s “splendid … first fiddle”:Footnote ⁹ to spread and promote the theoretical insights they both deemed indispensable for the purpose of correctly understanding—and opposing—capitalism.

In 1968, at the height of international student protests and Third World liberation movements, the publication of the first authoritative set of Marx and Engels’s works in the original language, the East German Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW), was (almost) complete. The MEW featured the fourth edition of Capital—a logical choice for Fowkes’s translation, although he claimed to have restored, in addition, “whole sentences omitted by Engels.”Footnote ¹⁰ Fowkes’s retranslation and “restoration” came on the heels of Martin Nicolaus’s translation of the Grundrisse. Both occurred under the joint auspices of Penguin Books and New Left Books (which later was to become Verso). This collaboration, the “Marx Pelican Library,” also included translations of Marx’s The Political Writings, Early Writings, and volumes 2 and 3 of Capital. With this publication push, an English-language market for Marxist thought was firmly established, both through translations and through the fashioning of “an indigenous Anglo-Marxism.”Footnote ¹¹

Coming in the wake of the discovery of the Grundrisse, interest in which had been fanned by the likes of Eric Hobsbawm, André Gorz, and Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s, Fowkes’s translation was guided by philological as much as political motives: it incorporated, as an appendix, Marx’s unfinished and hitherto untranslated “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” (likely drafted in 1864), also known as the unpublished “sixth chapter.” Unfortunately, it is not included in Reitter’s translation. Marx had originally planned to place it after the chapter on the “Labor and Valorization” process. The fragment’s theoretical reflections on productive and unproductive labor and on formal and real subsumption were of great interest both among activists of the New Left and among “academic ‘Marxologists’,” as Ernest Mandel noted.Footnote ¹² If the Grundrisse provided the New Left with a vision of automation as potentially freeing workers from the toils of necessity, then Capital’s “sixth chapter” served as a reminder that “the social productive forces of labour appear as the productive forces of capital, as intrinsic attributes to capital,”Footnote ¹³ and this false but necessary appearance—which Marx liked to refer to as capital’s “mystification” and “fetishism”—acts as a powerful obstacle to any anticapitalist imagination.

In his magisterial introduction to the Penguin/NLB edition, Mandel emphatically endorsed the scientific soundness of “the Marxist labour theory of value,” Capital’s relevance for the twentieth century, and the applicability of Marx’s “analysis of the laws of motion governing the capitalist mode of production,” even, mutatis mutandis, to noncapitalist commodity production.Footnote ¹⁴ While the radical tradition of Marxist anti-imperialism goes unmentioned in the Princeton edition, Mandel’s globalizing perspective emphasized the systemic character of value-transfers “from the south to the north of our planet.”Footnote ¹⁵ Not only spatially, but temporally too, Mandel presented a comprehensive view of the continued accuracy of Capital: the interplay of tendencies and countervailing tendencies as outlined in theoretical laws such as the correspondence between the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of human misery (see RC, 591) remained valid even in the face of higher standards of living for workers in the global North. Because of capitalism’s inherent contradictoriness, collapse and revolution were real historical possibilities. Yet despite his endorsement of Marxian crisis theories, Mandel warned that the end of capitalism would not render obsolete the dilemma of “socialism or barbarism” described by “Classical Marxists.”Footnote ¹⁶

Mandel’s prominent role in the Penguin/NLB edition suggests that in the mid-1970s, there was still a unity of “Marx” and “Marxism”: Fowkes’s Capital tacitly conjoined philological and revolutionary claims. A half-century later, in the Princeton edition, “Marx” has been separated from “Marxism.” This reflects the realities of our time. Classical Marxists still stressed the similarity between Marx’s economic “laws” and the categories of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. Karl Korsch, in the introduction to his 1932 edition of the first volume, reminded his readers that the “laws of economic motion and development” discovered by Marx were changeable only in their form, but unchangeable in their essence.Footnote ¹⁷ It would be wrong to say that North and Reitter reject such dialectical certainty outright. Presumed “laws of history” are simply not on their agenda, which trades Marx as theorist of historical forces for Marx as writer of a text that deals with such issues, here and there. In the spirit of a pluralistic Marx, Reitter seems to take Mandel’s commitment to “Marx’s theory of value as a completed economic theory” as evidence of Mandel’s missing aesthetic appreciation of how artfully Marx’s language skewers the jargon of political economy. Mandel’s “editorial role in the project,” Reitter surmises, might have “drawn [Fowkes] of out sync with some of his own translation standards.” I concur with Reitter’s insistence on heeding “the translator’s context of production” (RC, lxxiv), but his summary treatment of Fowkes’s approach to Capital would have benefited from less insinuation and more sustained argument (of course, something similar could be said about Fowkes’s belittling remarks about the first English translation edited by Engels; perhaps such attitudes betray the retranslator’s anxiety of influence).

Reitter’s allusion to Mandel’s baleful impact highlights that choice of edition and approach to translation are inextricably intertwined. Fowkes tersely justified his preference for the fourth edition with its higher degree of completeness. Reitter and North, by contrast, explain why they chose the second edition for their retranslation: the third and fourth editions of Capital do not quite pass muster as “the real Capital” (RC, lxxiv), for they no longer bear the imprint of authorial will and instead are the result of Engels’s interpretation of the former. Since they are not “what Marx himself envisioned” (RC, lxxxiii), the editors imply that they are more Marxist and hence less “pure” than the first two editions. Of course, even the most astute “revolutionary philologist” (RC, lxxxiv) cannot divine what Marx envisioned, especially since Marx’s vision kept evolving. Questions of authorial intent are perhaps less relevant than the editors imply, since the sheer size and ambition of the project of Capital exceed the capacity of a single author. What Marx envisioned for Capital could, realistically, only have been achieved by a group of authors. In the absence of such a collective, the unwavering support Marx received from Engels and from his family is the reason why Marx managed to complete and finish the first volume by “himself”—and here the reflexive pronoun needs to be placed in scare quotes, to make visible the indefatigable Engels burning the midnight oil.

As another recent Capital editor, Thomas Kuczynski, observes, there is no version of the completed first volume of Capital that can be considered final.Footnote ¹⁸ Although Marx had drafted volumes 2 and 3 prior to writing volume 1, his continued work on these unfinished drafts also meant that the completed volume represented not final words of wisdom but rather traces of an interminable research process. This was made evident in particular by the ongoing incorporation of new empirical material, a process that contributed to Marx’s active failure to complete volumes 2 and 3. In 1879, he informed his Russian translator, Nicolaj Danielson, that the second volume could not be published until the ongoing “industrial crisis in England reaches its apex.” As Heinrich explains, Marx was observing a new type of crisis: a secular stagnation affecting multiple countries, and this required that any theory of crisis include analyzing the impact of national banks and the state.Footnote ¹⁹

Efforts to make Capital more accessible to working-class readers also played a role in Marx’s attempts to balance theoretical rigor and clarity of exposition. In his afterword to the second edition, Marx approvingly cites a French review of his work that sought to explain his “German-dialectical” Hegelian mode of presentation. In his own words, Marx adds that “with respect to form, the mode of presentation [Darstellungsweise] must of course differ from the mode of investigation [Forschungsweise]” (RC, 709). Marx’s distinction between “presentation” and “research” suggests that the stated aim of Capital—to study the “natural laws of capitalist production” and the “social antagonisms that result from” them (RC, 6)—cannot but yield a theory that is open, porous, and subject to repeated rewriting. For Marx, the first step of the dialectical method, investigation, “should appropriate the material in detail, analyze its various forms of development, and trace their inner connection.” Only after “that work has been done can the real movement be presented in a suitable way.” But, he adds, the dialectical two-step does not appear as such to the reader, who “might think that we are dealing with an a priori construction” (RC, 709). In brief, when reading Capital, readers confront an epistemological challenge similar to all social interactions in the sphere of circulation: the labor process that gave rise to the finished product has become invisible. Marx self-consciously indicates that a theory designed to dispel the fetish character of commodities lends itself to being misunderstood fetishistically.

Even the most judicious editorial search for “the real Capital” to be translated cannot overcome the fact that Capital makes for slow reading because its Darstellungsweise inverts the convention of proceeding from the historical to the theoretical and from the concrete to the abstract. The tendency of much scholarship on Marx to explicate the same portions of Capital seemingly ad nauseam can be understood as responding to a twofold challenge: to reconstruct the process in the product, and to tease out the critique of the capitalist mode of production that Marx articulates through his mode of presentation as much as through his propositions. In choosing to translate the second German edition, Reitter and North embarked on a middle path between the Hegelian thorniness of the first German edition and the greater readability of Joseph Roy’s French translation.

After he wrapped up the second German edition, Marx began advising Roy on the French translation, “from day to day,” as he explained in his “Avis au lecteur,” which led to “discrepancies in style” and “literary imperfections” yet also yielded a work that “has a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with the German language” (RC, 745). Marx implies that the French translation is by no means secondary and can be considered a legitimate version of Capital on par with the German original. Finally, to limit the revisions and “popularizations” Marx proposed for the French translation to arbitrary stylistic choices would be to dismiss the renewed surge of revolutionary possibility Marx experienced after the invigorating, if short-lived, radical experiment of the Paris Commune. Even more so than the second German edition of Capital, the French edition most comprehensively showed Marx’s attempt to produce a work at once accessible and affordable to a mass of working-class readers: for Marx in the early 1870s, “cheap” and “simplified” were virtues, not defects.Footnote ²⁰

The Princeton edition’s rich editorial apparatus includes an afterword about the French translation as well as a section in the appendix that lists “Some Significant Changes in the French Translation.” But the editors did not take Marx’s appreciation of Roy’s translation to its logical conclusion: aided by Marx’s active participation and published in installments from 1872 to 1875, is it not as much the final and “definitive” edition of Capital as the second German edition? The answer to this question hinges ultimately not on philological matters of dating and authorial intervention but rather on a question of interpretation: where is, for Reitter and North, the irreducible core of Capital, rendered more effectively in German than in French? It is not in the portions of the book that arguably are the most directedly instructive for political education and organizing, such as the chapters on the labor and valorization process, on how surplus-value is transformed into capital, on the general law of accumulation, or on primitive/original accumulation (all of which underwent notable changes in the French version, as Reitter and North point out in the appendix), but in the book’s first part, “The Commodity and Money,” which is the most purely conceptual and Hegelian portion of the entire work. Determining the “real Capital” with respect to the book’s beginning enables the editors to circumvent the problem of incompletability: because the theory of the commodity is purely conceptual, it is untinged by changeable and changing empirical conditions. (Reflecting the editors’ orientation towards Marx’s value-form theory, they provide almost as many pages of editorial endnotes for the volume’s first part as for the remaining six parts.)

Centering value-form theory

Reitter and North are both professional Germanists and have stated their indebtedness to the “value-form” reading of Marx that emerged in the wake of the 1960s student movement. Also known as the Neue Marx-Lektüre (the new reading of Marx, hereafter NML), its representatives pursued a rigorously exegetical and originalist approach, the psychology of which can perhaps be explained as compensation for what Theodor W. Adorno in 1969 described as praxis being “blocked.” NML started in the Frankfurt seminars taught by Adorno and Alfred Schmidt, approached Capital as a theory of knowledge, and favored the first edition over the later ones. Although Adorno’s student Hans-Georg Backhaus described the second edition as an “aberrant path” (Fehlentwicklung), even the first edition was deemed as having conceded too much to the demands of readability and therefore needed to be supplemented with Marx’s 1857–8 Grundrisse and his 1858 “Urtext,” of which only a portion has survived. NML proponents argued that Engels’s influential idea, that volume 1 commences with the “historical supposition” of “simple commodity production,”Footnote ²¹ was to blame for a historicizing misreading of Marx’s conceptual (or “logical”) categories as purified theoretical mirror images of the course of history.Footnote ²²

Contra Engels and his “historical materialist view of history,”Footnote ²³ NML adherents viewed Marx’s theory as dialectically “logical” for showing that there cannot be any commodity exchange without automatically equating two objectively different objects, a social act that can only be conceived in the form of money, the universal equivalent. For NML theorists, money is logically implied in all acts of exchange, even if the commodity transaction itself is nonmonetary. A “premonetary” exchange of commodities is logically inconceivable.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, they agreed that in a society mediated by the exchange principle, all social forms attain the duplicity of the commodity’s dual character, and hence all of social reality exists as if under a spell of abstraction. Such puritanically “logical” deduction of capitalist society from the commodity-form pitted NML interpretations against Mandel’s more Engelsian contemporaneous interpretation of Capital as a set of theoretical laws that have been “strikingly confirmed by history.”Footnote ²⁵

The NML’s intervention occurred when academic Marxism was at a peak. But its rise in the university was also a symptom of political defeat: after the street protests of the late 1960s dissipated, energies shifted from large collective action to small study groups. While readings oriented around value-form can be found across a spectrum of anglophone publications, the assertive asceticism of the NML’s reading-group tradition continues to inform current Marx scholarship in the German language. An example of this is the catalog of the sectarian publishing house Ça ira, which in 2022 issued a facsimile reprint of the first edition of Capital, stressing the urgency to return to the original to counter the “popularizations” of Marx’s value-form analysis in later editions. Only such a return would renew “philosophical wonder about the specific objecthood [Gegenständlichkeit] of political economy.”Footnote ²⁶

In a similar vein, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, calling for a new translation of Capital into English, singles out the “trap of matter” that lures all attempts to translate the near synonyms materiell, sachlich, dinglich, and stofflich into English. Depending on context, Fowkes translates all these as “material,” and Haug faults him for a “lack of differentiation that is fatal for materialist thought.”Footnote ²⁷ Haug is asking future Marx translators to make verbal distinctions that the English language does not allow, thus setting a standard that translators cannot but fail to meet, as Reitter notes.Footnote ²⁸ The fraught question of choosing editions, followed by indeterminable questions of how to render Marx’s often peculiar word choices into English, suggests that there cannot and will not be a universally accepted translation of Capital. Moore’s translation reflected the immediate need to have a clear and readable edition available at a time when change was coming fast and the organized left was on the march; Fowkes’s translation was intended to undo Engels’s “watering down” of the text to provide a scholarly, sound, English-language standard translation;Footnote ²⁹ Reitter’s retranslation comes at a time when postcapitalist futures that still seemed likely in the 1970s have been replaced by admiring despair about capitalism’s seemingly endless “world-making and world-destroying capacities,” as Wendy Brown puts it in her preface to the Princeton edition (RC, xvi). While the Pelican Marx edition still made a confident case for a socialist teleology towards a better future, Reitter’s translation arrives at a time when academic Marx scholarship has exchanged philology for the hopes, promises, and disappointments of activist Marxism. In this vein, Reitter’s insistence on having produced a retranslation, intended to “make strangeness” “less familiar,” manages to place Capital in the company of timeless classics as diverse as Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Homeric epics. Because previous translations of these works are already familiar to readers, Reitter muses, retranslators may be more experimental and conversational in their approach without having to worry over “confused readers” or “concerned editors.”Footnote ³⁰

Staging the spectacle of commodities

The first thing readers of the Princeton edition will notice is a reordering of the book’s structure compared to Fowkes’s translation, which followed Roy’s and Moore-Aveling’s organization. These translations all divided the volume into thirty-three chapters. In the German editions, from the second to the fourth, there are only twenty-five chapters, and this is the structure that Reitter replicates in his translation. By contrast, in the first edition, there are only six multi-section chapters and an “easy” and “schoolmasterly” appendix to Chapter 1, duplicating and simplifying Marx’s value-form theory in an effort to accommodate the first chapter’s “sharper dialectic,” which is “difficult to understand.”Footnote ³¹ This made it possible to skip the book’s first thirty-four pages entirely: start with the appendix, then jump to the presentation of the commodity’s “mystical character,” Marx advised.Footnote ³² For the second edition, Marx came up with a more fine-grained and didactic ordering of the work’s distinctive portions, and he created a stand-alone section on the fetish character of commodities that would later become the book’s most widely discussed passage in humanities classrooms.

At the beginning of Capital, Marx explains that for a product to be a commodity, it must not only have concrete use-value for the buyer, but must be exchangeable for another commodity, and the quality or “substance” that makes them exchangeable is “value.” For Marx, value is objectively constituted by concrete labor’s intangible twin, abstract labor. Since the latter is measured by socially necessary labor time, Marx conceives of value as a social substance, and he illustrates this by means of a culinary–industrial metaphor. He suggests, “Now let’s consider what remains of these labor products” once we abstract from them their sensuous, concrete use-dimension. Marx is asking his readers to think something they cannot grasp with their senses. He continues: “Nothing of them is left over except the same ghostly objecthood—a bare gelatinous blob of undifferentiated human labor, of human labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure” (RC, 16). Fowkes translates this as follows: “Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity; they are merely congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.”Footnote ³³ Politely and somewhat evasively, Fowkes translates as “congealed quantities” what Marx calls Gallerte—a blob of semi-stiff, hardened broth (“jelly” or “gelatine” seem to be the closest English equivalents, even though the two words do not share the same etymology).Footnote ³⁴

Marx’s sentence is not metaphorically consistent: “jelly” and “ghostly objecthood” are different ways of thinking about the strangeness of “value-substance”—a metaphor is being mobilized to make sense of a neologism! Marx’s metaphorical inconsistency shows his thinking-in-progress. In the first edition, he still used the neologism Arbeitsgallerte (literally, “workgelatine”) as a synonym for “value-substance.” In a gesture reminiscent of Descartes’s Meditations, when we want to consider that the value of a commodity consists of labor, we confront a “transparently crystallized workgelatine.” And he immediately qualifies: “In reality this crystal is very murky.”Footnote ³⁵ In the first edition, Marx does not use the word gespenstig. When he adds it to the second edition, the contrast between the Gothic and the corporeal is underscored. Fowkes mitigates this contrast, as does Moore, who renders Gallerte as “congelation,” which evokes the irreality of alchemy and hence resonates with their translation of gespenstig as “unreal.”Footnote ³⁶ Reitter’s retranslation conveys a more vivid sense of the weirdness of Marx’s word choices than the previous two translations.

Reitter’s anglicizing of gespenstig as “ghostly” is the most literal of the three translations, and his visceral rendering of Gallerte as “gelatinous blob” captures well that rather than creating a new “scientific” term for the residual substance that is value, Marx picks a word that evokes the grossness of the production process of cooking animal bones into a consumable substance that can be used as a thickening agent. In short, “gelatinous blob” evokes metaphorically that the same substance or substratum (in this metaphor, the proteins and peptides that compose gelatine) can appear in different objective forms. Such evocative use of metaphor is distinct from the coining of wholly new terms. Because Marx wants to convey that production for the sake of valorization generates capitalistic phenomena sui generis, he uses the compound noun Wertgegenständlichkeit to signify a type of confoundingly immaterial but real objectivity that results from the “division of the labor product into a useful thing and a value-thing” (RC, 50).Footnote ³⁷ “Value-objecthood,” as Reitter translates it, reflects the practical activity of commodity exchange: a bottle of gin and a thermometer are exchangeable because they share the same “gelatinous” quality; that is, “value-objecthood.” This objecthood exists only as that which two commodities have in common.

Moreover, the social practices that constitute value-objecthood are immediately forgotten once the practice attains form. To use another of Marx’s “Hegelianese” neologisms, the value-form is not only an “appearance-form;”Footnote ³⁸ it is also, we may add, a “concealment-form.”Footnote ³⁹ For the commodity to appear as a value-thing, its social genesis must vanish. Marx rephrases the philosophical problem of genesis and validity in the related terms of empiricism and metaphysics, insisting that the object’s nonempirical dimension is the riddle that political economy has failed to resolve: “Not even an atom of natural material goes into [the commodities’] value-objecthood,” Marx notes, and then challenges his readers to go and look themselves for a commodity’s “substance”: “However one might twist and turn an individual commodity, as a value-thing, it remains ungraspable” (RC, 25).

There is a tension between Reitter’s retranslational commitment to defamiliarization and his insistence on rendering Marx in “natural prose” (RC, lxxvi). The latter includes using verbs that heighten the mobility of Marx’s syntax (see RC, lxxi) but also instances of “strong translations”; that is, of reader-friendly near glosses (RC, lxxix) that contradict Brown’s over-praise that Reitter’s translation is “exceptionally faithful” (RC, xxx). Such appraisal rings true most strongly in Reitter’s treatment of Marx’s “value” compound nouns. Unlike Fowkes, moreover, Reitter does not try to make Marx’s prose sound more graceful. For instance, Reitter’s “atom of natural material” translates Marx’s Atom Naturstoff, but Fowkes’s “atom of matter” is smoother than both Marx’s German and Reitter’s translation of it. Yet Fowkes’s choices can also be less pithy than Reitter’s. Instead of opting for a literal rendering of Wertgegenständlichkeit, he turns the noun into a possessive phrase, “objectivity of commodities and value.” Semantically, this translation shifts Marx’s sentence from a contrast between sensuous and nonsensuous objecthood to a contrast between objectivity and its logically implied counterpart, subjectivity. Here and elsewhere, there is a tendency in Fowkes’s translation to restate what he thinks Marx is saying in language that sounds both more commonsensical and more high-minded.

Keston Sutherland, whom Reitter cites approvingly, has cautioned not to read Capital as pure theory. Marx’s intention in Capital is to show the moral and cognitive shortfalls not only of classical political economy and its vulgar derivatives but also of the false bourgeois certainty that things are just as they appear to the contemplative observer. When Marx calls the commodity a sinnlich-übersinnliches Ding, he reminds his readers that commodities are not what we sense and think they are. Reitter replicates Marx’s oxymoron literally as “sensuous supersensuous thing,” while Fowkes opts for circumscription—“a thing which transcends sensuousness”—and Moore curtly translates as “something transcendent.” Using the dignified-sounding “transcendent” misses the satirical thrust of Marx’s critique, which takes aim at the self-serving pieties of the bourgeoisie and their attribution of higher motives to their morally indefensible practices of plunder and exploitation. This satirical thrust comes to a head, as Sutherland proposes, in Marx’s deployment of the term “fetishism,” which he adopts from the self-congratulatory discourse of European Enlightenment ethnography.Footnote ⁴⁰ If the commodity, the sardonic embodiment of “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham” (RC, 149), cannot be had “without a fetishism … inseparable from commodity production” (RC, 49), then a society mediated by market relations is much less enlightened than it believes itself to be.

Bourgeois pieties are also artfully pierced in Marx’s self-translated citations from British factory inspection reports. These reports not only provided Marx with crucial empirical material for his writings on industrial working conditions, but also gave him the opportunity to attribute some of his own “objective anger” (RC, xxxi–xxxvii) to the inspectors. For instance, when he adds to the source text the phrase tugendhaft-zärtlichen (virtuous-tender) to characterize the parents of children employed in flax spinning factories, this addition conveys sarcastically the outrage he felt when reading the original report (RC, 200 n. 10).Footnote ⁴¹ As Ludovico Silva underscored in Marx’s Literary Style from 1971, recently translated into English for the first time, Marx’s indignation, expressed tonally as mockery and irony, is developed and articulated through often seemingly pedantic descriptions of the production process or of machines, and it is by turning indignation into the writing of descriptions that theory emerges.Footnote ⁴² Similarly, in his “Editor’s Introduction” to the Princeton edition, Paul North fittingly portrays Marx’s method as “educated anger.”

In Capital, description means both prose and drama: starting with the “economic cell-form” (RC, 6) of the commodity, Marx not only evokes the impersonal laws and forces that put the world of capitalism in motion, but places onstage the personifications of these impersonal forces: capitalists, workers, buyers, sellers—and commodities themselves. As Silva put it, Marx’s “is not a style that is happy to ‘designate’ phenomena; it is instead a style that … performs them, as if the words were suddenly transformed into actors on a stage. In this sense, Marx’s language is the theatre of his dialectic.”Footnote ⁴³

The theater of the commodity continues beyond the first chapter: in Chapter 3, Marx depicts the “simplest form” of the circulation of commodities as, at first, an opposition of money to commodity, then a metamorphosis of money into commodity, and finally a metamorphosis of commodity back into money. This involves not just two but “three dramatis personae:” “A money owner … comes to face a commodity owner”; once money has changed hands, the commodity owner (the seller) now becomes the money owner (the buyer) in the second transaction, “where he encounters a third commodity owner who is acting as a seller” (RC, 85). What does this simplified and dramatized depiction of circulation have to do with the fetish character of commodities? Marx is interested less in instrumental knowledge (of knowing when, how, and what to sell or buy, to or from whom, for how much, and so on), than in the practical limits of agency: how much control can the dramatis personae exert in the spectacle of the market? As the term “dramatis personae” suggests, very little. This becomes clear when Marx asks his readers to leave behind the image of a world of direct exchange for a world where “the circuit formed by every commodity’s series of metamorphoses interlocks inextricably with other commodities’ circuits” and to imagine the totality of the drama of the commodity’s metamorphosis: “This process, taken as a whole, is commodity circulation.” This new totality must destroy what preceded it: “On the one hand, we see here how the exchange of commodities bursts the individual and local limits that go with the direct exchange of products, thereby advancing the metabolization of human labor.” Yet such metabolic exchange of the substance of labor not only increases labor’s productivity; it also leads to new social dependencies that act like forces of nature, a contradiction Marx articulates with the close juxtaposition of “social” and “natural” in the phrase gesellschaftliche Naturzusammenhänge: “On the other hand, a whole network of natural social connections develops through commodity circulation, one that the human actors involved can’t control” (RC, 86). In an endlessly mediated world where every actor depends on another actor ad infinitum, all are dramatis personae in a play of which they know only their own prompts and assigned actions, but never the play as a whole.

Emerging from the backdrop of Marx’s attempt to demonstrate impersonal agency being operative at all levels of society, there is an increasing tendency in Marxist scholarship to interpret the fetish character of capital not only in an epistemological framework, as the NML did, but also in ethical and political terms as a problem of freedom and domination. North and Reitter endorse this scholarly trend by including an essay by William Clare Roberts on the French translation that underscores the unfreedom of “market-dependent producers [that is, wage earners], who must sell in order to buy and buy in order to live” (RC, 722). This unfreedom in the market resembles the worker’s domination in the factory, and it suggests that Marx subscribed to a socially and politically comprehensive concept of freedom that is incompatible with social-democratic attempts to ameliorate the plight of workers by creating better working conditions. In other words, Marx’s imagination of what it means to be free is not exhaustively understood merely by citing his attention to struggles over the length of the working day and the alleviation of human toil through more rational coordination of the work process. Marx’s expanded concept of freedom will be at the center of a sequel to this essay, a review of contemporary scholarship exploring the evolution of Marx’s thought from his early journalism to his late scientific notebooks.