It goes without saying that much ink has already been spilled on Karl Marx’s famously unfinished magnum opus known as Capital. In spite of its incompleteness, however, many cite Marx’s critique of political economy as one of the most influential books in world history. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a book which has been read with half as much dedication and scrupulousness as Capital – after all, entire revolutions and socialist development projects have hinged on the insights it contains regarding the dialectical motions of history and capital(ism), and the central role of the working and oppressed masses in the struggIe for human emancipation. Nonetheless, the final edited volume of Marcello Musto’s trilogy on the making of Capital sheds some new light on the development of Marx’s own thinking through a nuanced, multipronged analysis of “an almost unknown version of Capital: the French translation, published between 1872 and 1875, to which Marx participated directly” (i). In fact, this 1872–1875 French translation – henceforth referred to as Le Capital to distinguish it from the more popular French translation of the fourth German edition published in 1983 – was the last version of Capital that Marx personally oversaw and this, a number of contribu- tors contend, endows it with a special significance insofar as it is seen as Marx’s authorial “last word” on the matters therein. The unfin- ished nature of Capital as a whole, however, complicates this position, as without all of the improvements Marx intended, Musto argues that “neither the French edition of 1872–75 nor the [fourth] German edition of 1881 can be considered the definitive version that [he] would have liked it to be” (4). In all likelihood, no version would have ever been considered “definitive” for Marx because he continued to study and sharpen his dialectical worldview until the very end. This points to the fact that what we call Marxism is not some set-in-stone doctrine, but rather a living science whose methodology is continuously undergoing development as it is applied and adapted to various historical contexts and material conditions.
Evidently, however, the renewed scholarly focus on Le Capital is perhaps not entirely unjustified. Musto’s introduction quotes a letter from Engels which substantiates the assertion that Marx had to “more or less to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning” after he received the rough translations from the underperforming French translator, Joseph Roy (3). In the process of making these revisions, Marx also took it upon himself to modify and expand certain sections. According to Musto, these mostly concerned the section on the process of capital accumulation, but also “some specific points such as the distinction between ‘concentration’ and ‘centralization’ of capital” (4). At the same time, Marx also wanted Le Capital to serve as a lodestar to the fiery French working class which he had always thought to be as ideologically misguided as they were extraordinarily motivated. This led to the new translation originally being published in a series of instalments with the hopes that this would give the proletarian audience more ample time to read and digest what even Marx characterized as fairly “arduous reading” in the early chapters on commodities and money (3).
This redoubled focus on the working class is particularly emphasized in David Norman Smith’s contribution to Part I of the collection centered on the theoretical value of Le Capital. His essay underscores the subtle additions and points of clarification that Marx offers in his revised translation on the relationship between the falling rate of profit and what Smith calls the “falling rate of employment” under capitalism (23). Here, the attention largely falls on the sections of Le Capital concerning the general law of capitalist accumulation which Smith reconstructs in great detail, often utilizing passages which cannot be found in any other standard edition of Capital vol. I. Some of these additions are particularly illuminating – such as Marx’s superb metaphor regarding le changement des saisons [the changing of the seasons] in his description of the “mute pressure [sourde pression] of economic relations on the working class” – but many do not have as much impact (27). For this reason, one might not be fully convinced that they reveal a totally unknown side of Marx or his theories. Moreover, particularly astute readers of the fourth German edition or either of the popular English translations based on it will recognize that Engels had already started to incorporate many of these revisions beginning with the third German edition first published in 1883 (85).
The essays from Kevin B. Anderson and Jean-Numa Ducange both speak to the value of Le Capital for understanding colonialism and the historical trajectory of societies beyond Western Europe. For his part, Anderson continues to develop the argument, now decades in the making, that Le Capital marked a sharp turning point for Marx away from Engels and the unilinear conception of history they had suppo- sedly exhibited in texts like the Manifesto and The German Ideology, toward a multilinear conception which more readily incorporated the struggles of the colonized, the enslaved, and the peasant masses on the peripheries of capital’s fortified heartland. [1] These revisions and modifications, alongside Marx’s long unpublished ethnographic manuscripts and his now well-known letters to Russian narodniks like Vera Zasulich, are therefore considered by many, Anderson included, to be vital in apprehending a version of Marx that largely manages to break free from the ideological confines of Eurocentrism and orientalism – a feat which Engels ostensibly never quite managed. Ducange’s essay serves as a useful foil to this perhaps overly “Marxological” approach that attempts to drive a wedge between Marx and the “post-Marx” Marxism of his closest friend and collaborator (211). This, Ducange claims, is part and parcel of the Marxological tradition’s attempt to distance Marx (and themselves one might add) from the revolutionary socialist movements that have laid claim to his name and legacy. Akin to the assertions made by figures like Walter Rodney,[2] Ducange argues quite convincingly that:
Indeed, in the twentieth century, most of the Third World leaders who looked to Marx for arguments in support of the fight against colonial domination largely drew on his best-known and yet ‘European-centred’ texts, such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Analyses that tend to systematically coun- terpose Capital, Volume I to the ‘unilinearism’ of the Manifesto of the Communist Party also seem dubious. This is again the problem of Marxology and the tra- dition it represents, which sees Marxism, taken as a whole, as merely a distort- ing ideology. This is, in fact, to underestimate its power to mobilise in the name of Marx. From this point of view, the Manifesto of the Communist Party has cer- tainly contributed much more to ‘de-Orientalising’ Marxism than the passages on colonisation in the French edition of Capital, even though they are more sig- nificant in substance. (68)
Likewise, he notes that the plethora of edited volumes issued by firms such as Progress and International Publishers – as well as by independent political organizations like the Danish Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds [Communist Working Group or KAK] – which contain anthologized excerpts from Marx and Engels’ anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writings have long made clear Marx’s “change of orientation,” thereby filling in the gap which the Marxological tra- dition has attempted to create and bridge by other more philologi- cal means (68).[3]
Terrell Carver’s contribution picks up the pen in defense of Engels as a lifelong political activist and editor of Marx’s unfinished works. “Taking an Engels-centric and career-long view,” he claims, casts his editorial decisions relating to the fourth German edition in an entirely new light (86). As he outlines in great detail, the recorded working relationship between the two men points to the likely reality that, without Engels’ years of nagging encouragement, neither Le Capital nor any of the subsequent editions would have ever seen the light of day even if Marx spent the majority of his life perfecting them (84, 99). However, as Carver asserts, this is not to say that Engels’ influence on Marx and his posthumously published works should go unquestioned, but rather that a deeper understanding of Engels’ own life and activism in addition to his relationship with Marx can aid greatly in our understanding of Le Capital as both a theoretical and political intervention in line with Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
The remainder of the volume is dedicated more specifically to the making of Le Capital throughout its international process of translation and publication; as well as to the dissemination and reception of the work inside and outside of metropolitan France. Here, Guillaume Fondu’s essay is especially noteworthy insofar as it elucidates the profound influence of the previously mentioned Russian narodniks on Marx’s shift, expressed in Le Capital and else- where, away from Eurocentrism (in the form of Western European universalism) and toward the multilinear conception of history described by Anderson and others. Fondu evidences that this shift occurred concomitantly as Marx shed some of the more idealist remnants of Hegelian logic in Le Capital and approached a more resolutely scientific and historicized interpretation of capitalism’s development across time and space. In other words, this development coincided with a conceptual and analytical shift away from a category like “pure” capitalism in favor of analyzing what Marx termed “‘société bourgeoise actuelle’” meaning “current” or “actual bourgeois society” i.e. really existing capitalism (121). Additionally, Fondu is the first contributor to the collection to adequately empha- size the fact that in spite of some of its conceptual advantages, Marx also recognized that Le Capital compared unfavorably even to the second German edition precisely because of his overzealous evacuation of certain elements of the Hegelian language of dialectics, once again forcing us to take heed of Musto’s earlier warning that Le Capital is far from the definitive version of Marx’s magnum opus. Ultimately, it seems that the most reasonable conclusion one can draw from Le Capital and all the subsequent work on it can be found in a separately published article by William Outhwaite and Kenneth Smith: namely, “there is no one ‘definitive’ version of Capital but rather, as [Thomas] Kuczynski has shown, it is necessary to take all of the slightly different ver- sions together to arrive at Marx’s overall general argument” (209). And so it seems that familiar readers will not be confronted with an unknown version of Marx, regardless of whether or not Le Capital can be considered the unknown version of Capital, but this is a worthwhile volume nonetheless for all those interested in the finer details of Capital’s publication history and the development of Marx’s thinking.
[1] See for instance, Anderson (1983), (1997) and (2010).
[2] See for instance, Rodney’s essay “Marxism as a Third World Ideology” republished in Decolonial Marxism (2022)
[3] For example, the KAK published an edited collection On Colonies, Industrial Monopoly and Working Class Movement in 1972; Moscow’s Foreign Language Publishing House published Marx and Engels’ writings On Colonialism in 1960; International Publishers published the pair’s work on Ireland and the Irish Question in 1972; and Lawrence and Wisehart published Marx on China in 1951.
References
Anderson, Kevin. Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non- Western Societies. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010.
Anderson, Kevin. “On the MEGA and the French Edition of Capital, Vol. I: An Appreciation and a Critique.” In Beiträge zur Marx-Engels-Forschung, Neue Folge 1997, edited by Rolf Hecker, Richard Sperl, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf, 131–136. Berlin: Argument Verlag, 1997.
Anderson, Kevin. “The ‘Unknown’ Marx’s Capital, Volume I: The French Edition of 1872-75, 100 Years Later.” Review of Radical Political Economics 15, no. 4 (1983): 71–80.
Marx, Karl. Marx on China 1853–1860: Articles from the New York Daily Tribune. London: Lawrence and Wisehart, 1951.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1972.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On Colonialism. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On Colonies, Industrial Monopoly and Working Class Movement: Extract from Articles and Letters, 1847–1894. Copenhagen: Futura : [Eksp., 1972.
Outhwaite, William, and Kenneth Smith. “Karl Marx, Le Capital.” Review of Radical Political Economics 52, no. 2 (June 2020): 208–221. https://doi. org/10.1177/0486613419850887.
Rodney, Walter. Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution. London New York: Verso, 2022.
Marcello
Musto
