Really good talk on the upcoming new translation of Capital, and why it's necessary.

  • Yanqui_UXO [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Very interesting! Would you mind summarizing the talk in a few words? Like what the new one is going to improve on?

    • gammison [none/use name]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Yeah basically the current Fowkes translation could not use the MEGA project which gives a lot of translation context (and unpublished appendixes and a version of chapter 6), and Fowkes still misses a lot of Marx's jokes, literary flourishes, sarcasm etc and relies too much on the original English translation, and that changes the tone and meaning of important passages (for example there are times when Marx says dialectics as a joke, and of course times he does not, but Fowkes makes no distinction), and existing terms in the English lit are bad (like they've changed primitive accumulation to original accumulation in the new translation since primitive has too many connotations that were not what Marx was trying to say), and there's new Marx/Hegel scholarship to include like Heinrich's work which changes some philosophical concepts and need new words. The other purpose is also to introduce the book in a new way to readers.

      To give an example, in the section on commodity fetishism, Fowkes has Marx saying something like the social characteristics of labour take as their material form the equal value objectivity, and there's a whole debate with this line and some surrounding ones about substancialist vs non substancialist interpretations of value, and by saying material form, Fowkes is taking Marx in a substancialist direction. However the word he translated as material form should probably be translated as something like thing-like, which substantially changes what that line means and pulls Marx's theory of value further away from Ricardo.

      • Yanqui_UXO [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Very dope, thank you! This sounds very promising and exciting.

  • drinkinglakewater [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    3 years ago

    Cool! As a question before I dive into watching this, do we know approximately when the new translation might be released?