I first encountered Capital in its entirety at the University of Chicago. Studying the text with the late Moishe Postone remains one of the most intellectually and ethically significant experiences of my life. Postone stressed the deep philosophical indebtedness of Marx to Hegel and that the force of the work is rational, the critique structural. I was therefore intrigued by the prospect of a new English translation of the text, co-edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter and published by Princeton University Press in 2024, which promised to bring Capital’s literary and rhetorical qualities to the fore. Is this enterprise compatible with the preservation of philosophical rigor? How would new translation choices affect the ability of new students to communicate with older ones? And what does one learn about Capital but also about the possibility of fresh intellectual, ethical and political insight today after taking on the immense task of retranslating it?
In November, I sat down with Paul North in Irvine, California, to discuss these and other questions. North is a literary scholar and critical theorist who teaches in the German department at Yale. His work on Capital with Reitter is ongoing; Volume Two is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2028.
—Anastasia Berg
●
Anastasia Berg: In your introduction to the volume, you write that Marx’s book belongs in many disciplines. And indeed many disciplines have made claims to Marx. You can find him taught across university departments, in philosophy and political theory and sociology and history and critical theory and literature. Your formal academic focus is in critical theory and German literature, and your co-translator, Paul Reitter, is similarly a scholar of German literature. So I’m wondering why it was that the new phase in Marx translation had to be done by literary scholars or critical theorists: What do you think that you and Paul Reitter brought to the table that was not previously there?
Paul North: I guess the way you frame the question makes it sound like we thought we were the best people on earth to translate the book, and it was time for literary people to get their hands on it. I’m not sure that’s true, and I don’t think that’s exactly what the translation is, but I do think that people trained especially in the German-Jewish tradition, which both of us are, and in the tradition of German idealism, which I am, get access to the way language is used in a way that someone who was simply a Marxist wouldn’t have.
So what can we do? Well, we can look at Marx’s comedy, and we can put it in context, in our minds, with a lot of funny, and critical, German Jews like Salomon Maimon, whom Paul Reitter had translated before. Maimon wrote a hilarious autobiography tinged with all of the political problems of his time at the end of the eighteenth century—when he went to Berlin and had to sleep outside the city because as a Jew he couldn’t get in. When he reminisces about his rabbinic and still country-bumpkin family from the Pale of Settlement it is particularly funny, and poignant. A lot of this is Marx’s background too. He has rabbis going back many generations on his father’s side, and the situation of Jews in Germany was complicated at the time, and it really did inform the way he wrote. As someone a step or two on the outside of Germanic culture, he ventriloquizes a lot of voices. Part of that is because he has an aim to critique different positions in general society, but his perspective on those positions in society is informed by being on the margin, by being a kind of pariah, as Hannah Arendt put it.
His versatility is part of his critical strategy. So in our translation there’s a great sensitivity to shifts in style and prose technique. The other side of that, of course, is that Marx really wrote philosophically a lot of the time, meaning that he was terminologically rigorous. His thinking owes a debt to German idealism, and the Hegelian revolution in language really affects his writing too—not just understanding how dialectic works, but understanding how, for example, describing a certain conceptual scene ends with the condensing of that scene into a short phrase that is a new amalgam of old entities.
What’s important, I think, is less that we were Germanists or philosophically minded than that we were scholars who could take into account all the amazing scholarship that, especially over the past fifty years, has intensely shifted the focus on Volume One from questions of historical materialism to the story of value. A translation is an interpretation, and this one is made to look at the book with fresh eyes.
AB: You describe the ways in which Marx does not fit into any recognizable mold of a disciplinary scholar or a professional, really, of any sort. You say he worked “in a space apart, which may not exist now, a place where revolutionaries met with thinkers, and thinkers gave speeches at worker congresses and on the barricades of nascent revolutions.” What do you think about this space not existing anymore? Do you think that it’s harder to carve that space for oneself today? Is it possible to recover something like it?
PN: Well, it has been recovered. Let’s take the Paris Commune as one example. In 1871, in the middle of Paris, the barricades are up, and to the council of the International Marx gives an address, which became part of his famous text “The Civil War in France.” This is an example that has been repeated over and over and over again in worker reading groups of Capital for the past 150 years, and it was repeated in its own form in Occupy Oakland, where people had study groups and produced a small community and were working both in a social fashion and an intellectual fashion at the same time.
So, it happens. What is unfortunate about the social opening of a space where people are actively talking to each other about the good life and building it is that it tends to happen in times of crisis, and there’s no general movement toward it in society. But it does open. It opens in a classroom. It opens in a family. It opens on the streets, especially in protests. At Yale during the Palestine protests, they built a library in the encampment. They brought an archive of books together, they laid them out, and they talked about them.
AB: I wonder specifically about the possibility of doing the incredibly rigorous, capacious and creative kind of work that Marx did. It does feel like, today, serious thinkers are channeled toward the academy. Do you think Marx would have survived the contemporary academy?
PN: You know, Marx was not very popular in the public sphere in his day. Marx was in a small part of it, and often behind the scenes, writing documents for the International, writing a lot of letters to his friends. So there’s a kind of parallax or historical confusion, if you look back and say there was the possibility for a kind of public intellectual that wouldn’t be possible today. An intellectual like Marx is rare, period. Yes, we have a Marx, we have a Kant, we have a Plato, we have a Laozi, but there’s very few of them who could do that for all sorts of material reasons.
Marx also stood at the confluence of all sorts of traditions. On one hand, he lived at a moment of disappointment in revolutionary possibilities and in the possibilities for social mobility. For a Jew in Germany, he could see, partly due to his own insight, and partly due to the work of his friend Engels, what it looked like for workers. And he could see what the capital system was becoming because he was at an early enough stage to be able to have, in cultural memory, a different way of working and living, but also not too late that it had totally formed. So here you were at a time where you could synthesize all these things while viewing the descent of European society into a kind of hell for 60 or 70 percent of the population. I don’t want to say it was luck, but there is a historically contingent aspect to it.
When we ask whether there could be a Marx today, it could imply that Marx needs to be superseded. But a lot of what Marx said is still accurate: for example, his conclusion that the rate of profit will fall. It’s very hard for people who are in the system now to see it, because the effect has been so normalized. Yet we’re in a phase of capital that is, by all measures, highly capitalized, that is, the wheels are seriously spinning around themselves. So the intellectuals who want to “do what Marx did” are the ones who decide to spend some years reading Marx. We have this great guide—they don’t need to write it again. We’re still in the same epic saga where the analysis takes us.
I didn’t know it at the beginning of our project, but as I went through six years of reading this text carefully, I came to see that the goal is for people to read through this and say, “This is what we’re living in. This is why I can’t get any more out of my labor. This is why I have no capital, or very little. This is why the capital is all drifting to the top. This is why money governs politics. This is why the dollar runs the world.”
AB: As you well know, Marx’s text has had a life of its own in the public sphere. The terms he uses and that many of his readers know from previous translations have become terms of art. They’re canonical: people who have not read Marx at all, let alone read him in the original, use these terms to communicate about ideas that matter a great deal to them. Did you ever worry about producing a Marxist Babel, with new students of Marx learning your version, who are in some small or large ways unable to communicate with older readers?
PN: It’s an important question. When you study a text like Capital you enter a kind of scriptural community with strong interpretive traditions. But you could say this translation comes at an inflection point in that history.
We thought of it as a post-socialist translation, based on critical materials that weren’t available before for—this sounds pessimistic—the thousand-year reign of capital. Many generations will read this book. For the two main previous translations—the one overseen by Engels and carried out by Moore and Aveling, and the one by Fowkes in the Seventies—there was a sense that revolution was at hand, and that a certain angle of the book needed to be brought out. In the Seventies, it was the dialectical angle. In the 1880s it seemed to be something like communicating some of the hard ideas in the language of an educated English reader. So, some things get flattened out. In the Seventies, I think things get over-dialecticized. But if you don’t think the revolution is coming tomorrow, then you can work on the nuances, as Marx himself did, over and over.
I’ll give you an example: the term “primitive accumulation.” It’s widely acknowledged even by people who use that term in their critical writing that it just isn’t right. “Primitive” in English really has the connotation of simple and early, “proto,” not fully developed and even possibly defective. There’s nothing simple or early about original accumulation. It’s a very sophisticated social and political activity. What does original accumulation mean? It is the way sectors of the feudal economy get appropriated for capitalist use. Let’s take agricultural lands. How do you make a peasant agricultural scene into a capitalist agricultural scene? You take the land away from the peasants, by hook or by crook, but really always by state intervention, and sell it to somebody who will then be a capitalist farmer. But Marx doesn’t simply call it original accumulation; he puts that term in quotes because he’s actually quoting the Ricardians who used that term. He doesn’t think there’s anything original about this kind of bloody expropriation. It is a para-capitalist way of taking things, done by force, by blood, by steel and without any recompense. And this is what he wants you to understand about it, that the path to capital is violent. “Primitive” makes it seem like there’s some developmental necessity that leads from an earlier stage to a later stage, and that’s not part of the argument at all.
In fact, you would make a mistake if you thought “primitive” carries the idea of an intrinsic movement in history that goes from an early stage to a late stage, or a simple stage to a complex stage. It’s a misunderstanding that scholars have been correcting for many decades. So you can see how the choice of a translation leads to certain conceptual possibilities that could lead to new political choices. If you imagine there’s a developmental tendency toward capital, you could use that for all sorts of activities that Marx didn’t intend.
AB: Are there other key examples of terms of art that have become closely identified with the Marxist vocabulary that you thought we ought to give up?
PN: Most of them are more or less the same. Take, you know, the main innovation, surplus-value. In German the word is Mehrwert—now, you could call it “more-value,” or “plus-value”—it’s translated as plusvalor in Spanish—but there wasn’t any need to change it, because surplus-value really did convey the distinction. Although—and I could talk about this forever—“surplus” has a kind of illusory sheen to it, as though it popped up out of nowhere. Because, of course, it doesn’t just pop up; it’s pulled out of workers’ bodies and effort.
I would make a distinction between a terminological way of thinking about translation and, let’s say, an argument-oriented way of thinking about translation, or even a rhetorical way of thinking about translation. We preserved the terminological distinctions in their philosophical rigor, because that’s a crucial part of Marx’s innovation over political economy. The terms weren’t used consistently; it wasn’t clear what terms meant or how the concepts fit together, whether “value” was something different than “price” or not. Marx’s great innovation, following Engels’s call, was to clarify the concepts and make better categories. We tried to keep to that rigorously and keep the terms closely tied to the philosophical impulses underlying them.
What’s the aim of reading Capital? Is it to get a few phrases and a few Stichworte, a few slogans? Slogans are useful for doing political action. But the eye-opening part of, especially, Volume One, is that it shows you how everything you take to be about one thing is really about value increasing itself, and all the ways it does this. So you have to follow the argument, and you have to be willing to go into it. And that means being led by a voice that doesn’t lose you. Marx is actually quite good at doing that in German. But because there’s been a kind of scientific obsession in English translations, the arc of the argument hasn’t come through as much. The aim of this translation is more holistic than what I would call terminological or lexical translation, although that’s often the sticking point for reviewers, who might say, “I like this word better,” or “I missed this phrase from the previous translation.” This is fair, but I think the gain in this translation is that people will find their way into the argument. They are led through it and will come out with an understanding of the book.
AB: Are there important ways in which your understanding of Marx has changed over the course of working on this translation?
PN: Yes. When I first started teaching Capital, I was concerned with the way human beings are taken up and manipulated and spit out by the system—a kind of humanism underlying the reading, maybe even an existential approach. People, even structural Marxists, have avoided Capital to some degree, I think, because the impersonality of the system is scary. Marx had something like a humanistic approach early on, and it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and became very influential for Western Marxism, as you know.
But once I got schooled in the systems thinking that Marx thought was the best way to approach this global economic network, I got used to it. It scared me less. And I think it’s better politically and better for thinking about change to understand just how inhuman the system is, how its relays and circuits and positions are determined by its basic drive to accumulate. Marx is absolutely clear that the capitalists don’t have to be greedy and so we have to do a kind of systems analysis. We have to understand how to redo these systems, how to take them over, how to make decisions about them. That would be the aim. So I’ve changed my orientation completely.
AB: After this monumental undertaking, does the world look any more to you like something that collective agency could be brought to bear on now? Are you more or less hopeful about Marxist politics, or about politics in a small-m Marxist sense?
PN: Marx teaches us that groups who are getting the particularly short end of the stick—let’s say workers in the peripheral economies now—can show what collective agency looks like for the rest of us—the people who are relatively well off—by taking steps to better their position. I think that’s still true and still the most viable way out. I wouldn’t say I am hopeful. But I would say that one of the brilliant insights of the book is that being put together under the worst circumstances as a worker puts you together for all circumstances. And the consciousness of indefatigable togetherness is the start of something.
You can see it in worker movements around the world, or in the underground resistance to Trump here in the U.S. People trying to protect what they have in their communities learn interdependent ways of being. That’s an enormous lesson from the book, and it gives me, if not any grand hope, then inspiration, that these things are happening.
Sometimes intellectuals forget that’s where it starts. But intellectuals—Marx is pretty clear about this—can work on behalf of interdependent togetherness as well. Althusser knew that too. The idea is to bring the case of the people who are pushed together in the worst circumstances to the world court, and to argue on their behalf, everywhere you possibly can. Argue it in your classes, argue it in public forums, argue it in your writing.
AB: In Jacobin, Paul Reitter said that everyone should read Capital because “The fate of the planet depends on whether we can curb capital, and the book remains the most brilliant and comprehensive critique of the capitalist system and market fundamentalism.” So granting, for the sake of this conversation, that Marx’s analysis and critique of the movement of capital and its contradictions is just correct, do you think Marx gives us a way to curb that movement, and if so, what is it?
PN: Nobody has an answer to that question. If they say they do, they’re lying.
I think there is a shortcut to an answer to that question. For example, if you’re thinking about climate change, it is carbon swap. It’s a shortcut, because what it does, as you know, is keep the mechanisms of capital going, only ameliorating some of its effects in one area.
AB: Maybe there is no long way to an answer. Maybe we can’t curb it. Maybe only a god could save us now.
PN: If he doesn’t show us a way, Marx does show us that only we can save us. But that means what you get in Capital, across the three volumes, is a picture of the metastatic system that under most threats repeatedly rights itself, and there is no answer—yet—to what you can do to curb it. Because it is, as Marx also shows, too big, too extensive, too installed, I think you need to find ways from within it to transition to socialism. I think that’s the only way, because on its own terms it isn’t curbable.
So I would amend that Jacobin statement to say that the only way to evade the worst consequences of capital—where 95 percent of the world’s population falls to the bottom and 5 percent floats to the top, and we continue to put out waste that destroys our environment, and we make the majority of human lives unlivable and the planet unlivable—is to find a way to socialism, but there is no pre-established plan for that, no recipe in this book. What there is is a very clear picture of the places where capital isn’t the beneficent force it claims to be, where capital itself isn’t the path. So that’s the first recognition, and you get this from the book. And second, you learn that by and large it resists normal processes of change. Where change will come from is to be discovered, made. Take war economies, for example. Some would say they’re a model for a transition from capitalism to socialism. Because a war economy is a command economy that brings together the population. It’s true. War economies are almost socialist. We pitch in together for a common purpose, reduce competition and so on. Whether that’s the answer or something else is the answer, we don’t know. We can imagine a revolutionary general strike or a sector of the world that becomes cooperative in the way it organizes its businesses and then catches on.
One beautiful silence that Marx has here, I would say, is how society will look after capital is overcome. He thinks that’s because the shape of things will come out of the actions of the people who step forward to transform it. So once people understand how rapacious capital is and how it doesn’t lead to the good of all, they will start taking steps to change it, and the new social form will grow out of the ways they learn to work together. And you can’t predict it, since predicting puts an unreasonable limit on what can happen. Maybe none of us thinks that Occupy was the movement to finally succeed in overcoming capital, but it was an attempt. Resistance to capital will emerge from a flourishing of a discourse of resistance and a questioning and even an embodied way of living that is already outside of capital.
AB: You can also argue—depending on how seriously you take the idea that the critique of Capital is immanent, i.e., completely internal to the logic of capitalism—that Capital tries to articulate the logic of capitalism. And if the work is trying to articulate the internal logic of capitalism, it makes sense that beyond pointing to the contradictions and saying there’s something here that’s not sustainable, it cannot point to the mechanism by which we will overcome it.
PN: There are a few insights about the way out of capitalism. One is that cooperation in the industrial factory, where people are taken away from the artisan’s relationship to the work, where they don’t know what the whole work even looks like, actually breeds a new togetherness, where they depend on each other in such a way that out of that might grow a movement. Now that’s a theoretical thought. Whether that’s true or not, or practical or not, I don’t know.
Another thing he says is that economies really do go into balances in which wages go up and the call for goods goes down, especially after a production glut. The call for goods goes down, and working hours go down, and people have more free time and higher wages, so there are moments of respite inside of it.
He also thinks that crises are important. And ultimately, in Volume Three, he’s toying with the idea of a general tendency toward slowing and stagnating growth because of hyper-capitalization, and while the reasoning is flawed, we’ve seen in the core economies stagnating growth now too. So the aim has to be, for people looking to curb capital, to take those as models, to really look for the immanent moments in which the thing is starting to break down or can’t sustain itself.
AB: You’ve been teaching Capital at Yale for many years. Has your students’ reception of Marx changed over the years?
PN: Yes, it used to be a kind of underground thing. People would come to me in my office hours and say, Can you teach us Marx? Some of the editors at certain left-wing journals read Marx with me, but we did private reading groups, and I would teach Marx in other classes, for example in the staple Marx, Nietzsche, Freud class. Now everybody wants to read Capital. And it isn’t just because of the new edition. People are really interested.
It started after the 2008-2009 crisis, I think, but really ramped up over the last five years. Also the cultural memory of McCarthyism, and the cultural memory of different movements of Marxism, has faded. There were purges in the university, as you know, over the twentieth century, and that really inhibited the ability to teach Marx openly, directly and well. The effects of that lasted a long time. Other texts and traditions in political theory took its place. The cycle is swinging back now, for good economic reasons, and because of other moves of history that are hard to calculate.
AB: How many of these Marx-reading students go into finance?
PN: Well, I did present this book at a prestigious law school where there were a hundred baby lawyers in the audience, and one sheepishly raised his hand and said, “You know, most of us will go into mergers and acquisitions. What do you expect us to do with this?”
AB: That’s a good question.
PN: Yeah. I have taught it in prison where someone asked me the question, “Can I start a business with this?” I do think there’s a general education for all of these people that needs to be had, that the capitalism that they think they’re going to make use of, because they just have one lifetime, really hurts a lot of other people. The lawyers at prestigious law schools need to know that. The finance bros need to know that. And a person who just wants to be an entrepreneur and eke out a living needs to know that it’s always at the cost of someone else’s suffering on the other side of the world. And so we read Capital.
AB: Surely we don’t need Capital to tell us that the iPhone materials are extracted by child slaves in Africa—and then other slaves in Asia assemble it.
PN: We need Capital to tell us that that’s not an anomaly.
Art credit: State Publisher of the USSR, Karl Marx, 1925. Collection of the New York Public Library General Research Division.
I first encountered Capital in its entirety at the University of Chicago. Studying the text with the late Moishe Postone remains one of the most intellectually and ethically significant experiences of my life. Postone stressed the deep philosophical indebtedness of Marx to Hegel and that the force of the work is rational, the critique structural. I was therefore intrigued by the prospect of a new English translation of the text, co-edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter and published by Princeton University Press in 2024, which promised to bring Capital’s literary and rhetorical qualities to the fore. Is this enterprise compatible with the preservation of philosophical rigor? How would new translation choices affect the ability of new students to communicate with older ones? And what does one learn about Capital but also about the possibility of fresh intellectual, ethical and political insight today after taking on the immense task of retranslating it?
In November, I sat down with Paul North in Irvine, California, to discuss these and other questions. North is a literary scholar and critical theorist who teaches in the German department at Yale. His work on Capital with Reitter is ongoing; Volume Two is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2028.
—Anastasia Berg
●
Anastasia Berg: In your introduction to the volume, you write that Marx’s book belongs in many disciplines. And indeed many disciplines have made claims to Marx. You can find him taught across university departments, in philosophy and political theory and sociology and history and critical theory and literature. Your formal academic focus is in critical theory and German literature, and your co-translator, Paul Reitter, is similarly a scholar of German literature. So I’m wondering why it was that the new phase in Marx translation had to be done by literary scholars or critical theorists: What do you think that you and Paul Reitter brought to the table that was not previously there?
Paul North: I guess the way you frame the question makes it sound like we thought we were the best people on earth to translate the book, and it was time for literary people to get their hands on it. I’m not sure that’s true, and I don’t think that’s exactly what the translation is, but I do think that people trained especially in the German-Jewish tradition, which both of us are, and in the tradition of German idealism, which I am, get access to the way language is used in a way that someone who was simply a Marxist wouldn’t have.
So what can we do? Well, we can look at Marx’s comedy, and we can put it in context, in our minds, with a lot of funny, and critical, German Jews like Salomon Maimon, whom Paul Reitter had translated before. Maimon wrote a hilarious autobiography tinged with all of the political problems of his time at the end of the eighteenth century—when he went to Berlin and had to sleep outside the city because as a Jew he couldn’t get in. When he reminisces about his rabbinic and still country-bumpkin family from the Pale of Settlement it is particularly funny, and poignant. A lot of this is Marx’s background too. He has rabbis going back many generations on his father’s side, and the situation of Jews in Germany was complicated at the time, and it really did inform the way he wrote. As someone a step or two on the outside of Germanic culture, he ventriloquizes a lot of voices. Part of that is because he has an aim to critique different positions in general society, but his perspective on those positions in society is informed by being on the margin, by being a kind of pariah, as Hannah Arendt put it.
His versatility is part of his critical strategy. So in our translation there’s a great sensitivity to shifts in style and prose technique. The other side of that, of course, is that Marx really wrote philosophically a lot of the time, meaning that he was terminologically rigorous. His thinking owes a debt to German idealism, and the Hegelian revolution in language really affects his writing too—not just understanding how dialectic works, but understanding how, for example, describing a certain conceptual scene ends with the condensing of that scene into a short phrase that is a new amalgam of old entities.
What’s important, I think, is less that we were Germanists or philosophically minded than that we were scholars who could take into account all the amazing scholarship that, especially over the past fifty years, has intensely shifted the focus on Volume One from questions of historical materialism to the story of value. A translation is an interpretation, and this one is made to look at the book with fresh eyes.
AB: You describe the ways in which Marx does not fit into any recognizable mold of a disciplinary scholar or a professional, really, of any sort. You say he worked “in a space apart, which may not exist now, a place where revolutionaries met with thinkers, and thinkers gave speeches at worker congresses and on the barricades of nascent revolutions.” What do you think about this space not existing anymore? Do you think that it’s harder to carve that space for oneself today? Is it possible to recover something like it?
PN: Well, it has been recovered. Let’s take the Paris Commune as one example. In 1871, in the middle of Paris, the barricades are up, and to the council of the International Marx gives an address, which became part of his famous text “The Civil War in France.” This is an example that has been repeated over and over and over again in worker reading groups of Capital for the past 150 years, and it was repeated in its own form in Occupy Oakland, where people had study groups and produced a small community and were working both in a social fashion and an intellectual fashion at the same time.
So, it happens. What is unfortunate about the social opening of a space where people are actively talking to each other about the good life and building it is that it tends to happen in times of crisis, and there’s no general movement toward it in society. But it does open. It opens in a classroom. It opens in a family. It opens on the streets, especially in protests. At Yale during the Palestine protests, they built a library in the encampment. They brought an archive of books together, they laid them out, and they talked about them.
AB: I wonder specifically about the possibility of doing the incredibly rigorous, capacious and creative kind of work that Marx did. It does feel like, today, serious thinkers are channeled toward the academy. Do you think Marx would have survived the contemporary academy?
PN: You know, Marx was not very popular in the public sphere in his day. Marx was in a small part of it, and often behind the scenes, writing documents for the International, writing a lot of letters to his friends. So there’s a kind of parallax or historical confusion, if you look back and say there was the possibility for a kind of public intellectual that wouldn’t be possible today. An intellectual like Marx is rare, period. Yes, we have a Marx, we have a Kant, we have a Plato, we have a Laozi, but there’s very few of them who could do that for all sorts of material reasons.
Marx also stood at the confluence of all sorts of traditions. On one hand, he lived at a moment of disappointment in revolutionary possibilities and in the possibilities for social mobility. For a Jew in Germany, he could see, partly due to his own insight, and partly due to the work of his friend Engels, what it looked like for workers. And he could see what the capital system was becoming because he was at an early enough stage to be able to have, in cultural memory, a different way of working and living, but also not too late that it had totally formed. So here you were at a time where you could synthesize all these things while viewing the descent of European society into a kind of hell for 60 or 70 percent of the population. I don’t want to say it was luck, but there is a historically contingent aspect to it.
When we ask whether there could be a Marx today, it could imply that Marx needs to be superseded. But a lot of what Marx said is still accurate: for example, his conclusion that the rate of profit will fall. It’s very hard for people who are in the system now to see it, because the effect has been so normalized. Yet we’re in a phase of capital that is, by all measures, highly capitalized, that is, the wheels are seriously spinning around themselves. So the intellectuals who want to “do what Marx did” are the ones who decide to spend some years reading Marx. We have this great guide—they don’t need to write it again. We’re still in the same epic saga where the analysis takes us.
I didn’t know it at the beginning of our project, but as I went through six years of reading this text carefully, I came to see that the goal is for people to read through this and say, “This is what we’re living in. This is why I can’t get any more out of my labor. This is why I have no capital, or very little. This is why the capital is all drifting to the top. This is why money governs politics. This is why the dollar runs the world.”
AB: As you well know, Marx’s text has had a life of its own in the public sphere. The terms he uses and that many of his readers know from previous translations have become terms of art. They’re canonical: people who have not read Marx at all, let alone read him in the original, use these terms to communicate about ideas that matter a great deal to them. Did you ever worry about producing a Marxist Babel, with new students of Marx learning your version, who are in some small or large ways unable to communicate with older readers?
PN: It’s an important question. When you study a text like Capital you enter a kind of scriptural community with strong interpretive traditions. But you could say this translation comes at an inflection point in that history.
We thought of it as a post-socialist translation, based on critical materials that weren’t available before for—this sounds pessimistic—the thousand-year reign of capital. Many generations will read this book. For the two main previous translations—the one overseen by Engels and carried out by Moore and Aveling, and the one by Fowkes in the Seventies—there was a sense that revolution was at hand, and that a certain angle of the book needed to be brought out. In the Seventies, it was the dialectical angle. In the 1880s it seemed to be something like communicating some of the hard ideas in the language of an educated English reader. So, some things get flattened out. In the Seventies, I think things get over-dialecticized. But if you don’t think the revolution is coming tomorrow, then you can work on the nuances, as Marx himself did, over and over.
I’ll give you an example: the term “primitive accumulation.” It’s widely acknowledged even by people who use that term in their critical writing that it just isn’t right. “Primitive” in English really has the connotation of simple and early, “proto,” not fully developed and even possibly defective. There’s nothing simple or early about original accumulation. It’s a very sophisticated social and political activity. What does original accumulation mean? It is the way sectors of the feudal economy get appropriated for capitalist use. Let’s take agricultural lands. How do you make a peasant agricultural scene into a capitalist agricultural scene? You take the land away from the peasants, by hook or by crook, but really always by state intervention, and sell it to somebody who will then be a capitalist farmer. But Marx doesn’t simply call it original accumulation; he puts that term in quotes because he’s actually quoting the Ricardians who used that term. He doesn’t think there’s anything original about this kind of bloody expropriation. It is a para-capitalist way of taking things, done by force, by blood, by steel and without any recompense. And this is what he wants you to understand about it, that the path to capital is violent. “Primitive” makes it seem like there’s some developmental necessity that leads from an earlier stage to a later stage, and that’s not part of the argument at all.
In fact, you would make a mistake if you thought “primitive” carries the idea of an intrinsic movement in history that goes from an early stage to a late stage, or a simple stage to a complex stage. It’s a misunderstanding that scholars have been correcting for many decades. So you can see how the choice of a translation leads to certain conceptual possibilities that could lead to new political choices. If you imagine there’s a developmental tendency toward capital, you could use that for all sorts of activities that Marx didn’t intend.
AB: Are there other key examples of terms of art that have become closely identified with the Marxist vocabulary that you thought we ought to give up?
PN: Most of them are more or less the same. Take, you know, the main innovation, surplus-value. In German the word is Mehrwert—now, you could call it “more-value,” or “plus-value”—it’s translated as plusvalor in Spanish—but there wasn’t any need to change it, because surplus-value really did convey the distinction. Although—and I could talk about this forever—“surplus” has a kind of illusory sheen to it, as though it popped up out of nowhere. Because, of course, it doesn’t just pop up; it’s pulled out of workers’ bodies and effort.
I would make a distinction between a terminological way of thinking about translation and, let’s say, an argument-oriented way of thinking about translation, or even a rhetorical way of thinking about translation. We preserved the terminological distinctions in their philosophical rigor, because that’s a crucial part of Marx’s innovation over political economy. The terms weren’t used consistently; it wasn’t clear what terms meant or how the concepts fit together, whether “value” was something different than “price” or not. Marx’s great innovation, following Engels’s call, was to clarify the concepts and make better categories. We tried to keep to that rigorously and keep the terms closely tied to the philosophical impulses underlying them.
What’s the aim of reading Capital? Is it to get a few phrases and a few Stichworte, a few slogans? Slogans are useful for doing political action. But the eye-opening part of, especially, Volume One, is that it shows you how everything you take to be about one thing is really about value increasing itself, and all the ways it does this. So you have to follow the argument, and you have to be willing to go into it. And that means being led by a voice that doesn’t lose you. Marx is actually quite good at doing that in German. But because there’s been a kind of scientific obsession in English translations, the arc of the argument hasn’t come through as much. The aim of this translation is more holistic than what I would call terminological or lexical translation, although that’s often the sticking point for reviewers, who might say, “I like this word better,” or “I missed this phrase from the previous translation.” This is fair, but I think the gain in this translation is that people will find their way into the argument. They are led through it and will come out with an understanding of the book.
AB: Are there important ways in which your understanding of Marx has changed over the course of working on this translation?
PN: Yes. When I first started teaching Capital, I was concerned with the way human beings are taken up and manipulated and spit out by the system—a kind of humanism underlying the reading, maybe even an existential approach. People, even structural Marxists, have avoided Capital to some degree, I think, because the impersonality of the system is scary. Marx had something like a humanistic approach early on, and it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century and became very influential for Western Marxism, as you know.
But once I got schooled in the systems thinking that Marx thought was the best way to approach this global economic network, I got used to it. It scared me less. And I think it’s better politically and better for thinking about change to understand just how inhuman the system is, how its relays and circuits and positions are determined by its basic drive to accumulate. Marx is absolutely clear that the capitalists don’t have to be greedy and so we have to do a kind of systems analysis. We have to understand how to redo these systems, how to take them over, how to make decisions about them. That would be the aim. So I’ve changed my orientation completely.
AB: After this monumental undertaking, does the world look any more to you like something that collective agency could be brought to bear on now? Are you more or less hopeful about Marxist politics, or about politics in a small-m Marxist sense?
PN: Marx teaches us that groups who are getting the particularly short end of the stick—let’s say workers in the peripheral economies now—can show what collective agency looks like for the rest of us—the people who are relatively well off—by taking steps to better their position. I think that’s still true and still the most viable way out. I wouldn’t say I am hopeful. But I would say that one of the brilliant insights of the book is that being put together under the worst circumstances as a worker puts you together for all circumstances. And the consciousness of indefatigable togetherness is the start of something.
You can see it in worker movements around the world, or in the underground resistance to Trump here in the U.S. People trying to protect what they have in their communities learn interdependent ways of being. That’s an enormous lesson from the book, and it gives me, if not any grand hope, then inspiration, that these things are happening.
Sometimes intellectuals forget that’s where it starts. But intellectuals—Marx is pretty clear about this—can work on behalf of interdependent togetherness as well. Althusser knew that too. The idea is to bring the case of the people who are pushed together in the worst circumstances to the world court, and to argue on their behalf, everywhere you possibly can. Argue it in your classes, argue it in public forums, argue it in your writing.
AB: In Jacobin, Paul Reitter said that everyone should read Capital because “The fate of the planet depends on whether we can curb capital, and the book remains the most brilliant and comprehensive critique of the capitalist system and market fundamentalism.” So granting, for the sake of this conversation, that Marx’s analysis and critique of the movement of capital and its contradictions is just correct, do you think Marx gives us a way to curb that movement, and if so, what is it?
PN: Nobody has an answer to that question. If they say they do, they’re lying.
I think there is a shortcut to an answer to that question. For example, if you’re thinking about climate change, it is carbon swap. It’s a shortcut, because what it does, as you know, is keep the mechanisms of capital going, only ameliorating some of its effects in one area.
AB: Maybe there is no long way to an answer. Maybe we can’t curb it. Maybe only a god could save us now.
PN: If he doesn’t show us a way, Marx does show us that only we can save us. But that means what you get in Capital, across the three volumes, is a picture of the metastatic system that under most threats repeatedly rights itself, and there is no answer—yet—to what you can do to curb it. Because it is, as Marx also shows, too big, too extensive, too installed, I think you need to find ways from within it to transition to socialism. I think that’s the only way, because on its own terms it isn’t curbable.
So I would amend that Jacobin statement to say that the only way to evade the worst consequences of capital—where 95 percent of the world’s population falls to the bottom and 5 percent floats to the top, and we continue to put out waste that destroys our environment, and we make the majority of human lives unlivable and the planet unlivable—is to find a way to socialism, but there is no pre-established plan for that, no recipe in this book. What there is is a very clear picture of the places where capital isn’t the beneficent force it claims to be, where capital itself isn’t the path. So that’s the first recognition, and you get this from the book. And second, you learn that by and large it resists normal processes of change. Where change will come from is to be discovered, made. Take war economies, for example. Some would say they’re a model for a transition from capitalism to socialism. Because a war economy is a command economy that brings together the population. It’s true. War economies are almost socialist. We pitch in together for a common purpose, reduce competition and so on. Whether that’s the answer or something else is the answer, we don’t know. We can imagine a revolutionary general strike or a sector of the world that becomes cooperative in the way it organizes its businesses and then catches on.
One beautiful silence that Marx has here, I would say, is how society will look after capital is overcome. He thinks that’s because the shape of things will come out of the actions of the people who step forward to transform it. So once people understand how rapacious capital is and how it doesn’t lead to the good of all, they will start taking steps to change it, and the new social form will grow out of the ways they learn to work together. And you can’t predict it, since predicting puts an unreasonable limit on what can happen. Maybe none of us thinks that Occupy was the movement to finally succeed in overcoming capital, but it was an attempt. Resistance to capital will emerge from a flourishing of a discourse of resistance and a questioning and even an embodied way of living that is already outside of capital.
AB: You can also argue—depending on how seriously you take the idea that the critique of Capital is immanent, i.e., completely internal to the logic of capitalism—that Capital tries to articulate the logic of capitalism. And if the work is trying to articulate the internal logic of capitalism, it makes sense that beyond pointing to the contradictions and saying there’s something here that’s not sustainable, it cannot point to the mechanism by which we will overcome it.
PN: There are a few insights about the way out of capitalism. One is that cooperation in the industrial factory, where people are taken away from the artisan’s relationship to the work, where they don’t know what the whole work even looks like, actually breeds a new togetherness, where they depend on each other in such a way that out of that might grow a movement. Now that’s a theoretical thought. Whether that’s true or not, or practical or not, I don’t know.
Another thing he says is that economies really do go into balances in which wages go up and the call for goods goes down, especially after a production glut. The call for goods goes down, and working hours go down, and people have more free time and higher wages, so there are moments of respite inside of it.
He also thinks that crises are important. And ultimately, in Volume Three, he’s toying with the idea of a general tendency toward slowing and stagnating growth because of hyper-capitalization, and while the reasoning is flawed, we’ve seen in the core economies stagnating growth now too. So the aim has to be, for people looking to curb capital, to take those as models, to really look for the immanent moments in which the thing is starting to break down or can’t sustain itself.
AB: You’ve been teaching Capital at Yale for many years. Has your students’ reception of Marx changed over the years?
PN: Yes, it used to be a kind of underground thing. People would come to me in my office hours and say, Can you teach us Marx? Some of the editors at certain left-wing journals read Marx with me, but we did private reading groups, and I would teach Marx in other classes, for example in the staple Marx, Nietzsche, Freud class. Now everybody wants to read Capital. And it isn’t just because of the new edition. People are really interested.
It started after the 2008-2009 crisis, I think, but really ramped up over the last five years. Also the cultural memory of McCarthyism, and the cultural memory of different movements of Marxism, has faded. There were purges in the university, as you know, over the twentieth century, and that really inhibited the ability to teach Marx openly, directly and well. The effects of that lasted a long time. Other texts and traditions in political theory took its place. The cycle is swinging back now, for good economic reasons, and because of other moves of history that are hard to calculate.
AB: How many of these Marx-reading students go into finance?
PN: Well, I did present this book at a prestigious law school where there were a hundred baby lawyers in the audience, and one sheepishly raised his hand and said, “You know, most of us will go into mergers and acquisitions. What do you expect us to do with this?”
AB: That’s a good question.
PN: Yeah. I have taught it in prison where someone asked me the question, “Can I start a business with this?” I do think there’s a general education for all of these people that needs to be had, that the capitalism that they think they’re going to make use of, because they just have one lifetime, really hurts a lot of other people. The lawyers at prestigious law schools need to know that. The finance bros need to know that. And a person who just wants to be an entrepreneur and eke out a living needs to know that it’s always at the cost of someone else’s suffering on the other side of the world. And so we read Capital.
AB: Surely we don’t need Capital to tell us that the iPhone materials are extracted by child slaves in Africa—and then other slaves in Asia assemble it.
PN: We need Capital to tell us that that’s not an anomaly.
Art credit: State Publisher of the USSR, Karl Marx, 1925. Collection of the New York Public Library General Research Division.
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