2025 is the year I plan on reading Volumes 1-3 of Capital. I understand that Marxists.org has the Moore/Engels version, but most people seem to prefer the Fowkes translation in Penguin. Recently, there is the Reitter translation of Volume 1 that supposedly uses a later original German edition of Capital as the base than the widely beloved Fowkes translation, but I am not sure if anyone has any experience with it yet.
Which would you recommend for someone diving into Capital for the first time? I'd prefer a physical version (to take notes) but I am not too fussed if its an ebook, I'm not incapable of using a notebook or anything instead of direct annotation.
I don't have a suggestion on which translation but I'd like to plug "Reading Capital With Comrades" on Spotify as a supplementary reading aid. That's actually how I consumed the book(I haven't personally read it) and the guy that does it did a really good job at explaining things. The only complaint is that he cites 3 versions for each quote, each time and it gets a bit annoying. I wish he'd have just gone with one source.
Will keep that in mind, thanks! I want to take my time with it because at this point I feel that I am quite comfortable in the basics of Marxism-Leninism and feel that it's the right time to take on Capital, so having other comrades supplementing my knowledge via reading aids will be a part of that.
The way the podcast is set up is that you read a chapter, and then listed to that episode. I cheated and just listened but if you go the intended route, I think you will have an easy time, especially considering what all you've read already.
The first three chapters are gonna seem really familiar to you most likely since it's basically just "Wage Labor and Capital" and I think "Value, Price and Profit" but chapter 4 introduced the MCM and CMC formulas which is basically "money buys
capitalcommodities and makes money" andcapitalcommodities makes money and buys morecapitalcommodities" respectively. The rest of the book basically builds on these formulas and the first 3 chapters iirc(it's been like 2 years).E: C actually stands for commodity, not capital, woopsies!
Yep, I am already familiar with the overlying messages of Capital, but I really want to dig into Capital itself, hence the waffling about which translation to use.
I just did a quick search and there are 2 reddit posts suggesting the Penguin Classics translation by Ben Fowkes so maybe go with that one?
From the digging around of Reddit, most people agree Fowkes over Moore/Engels, but the new Reitter translation could be better than both. If I can't find a clear rec one way or the other with respect to Reitter, then I will likely default to Fowkes.
I just grabbed the Fowkes version since I never really added the actual book to my collection lol. It's 1152 pages though.
Yep, hence my intention to read all 3 volumes (ignoring Volume 4 for now) at a steady pace in 2025, haha. Most works I have read up to this point have been no more than 300 pages, but I feel prepared and motivated. If I'm going to be spending a long time with the text, I figured I'd at least ask what a good consensus on translation is, haha.
volume I penguin edition isn't as long as it looks. the first 100, maybe 150 pages are an introduction by, iirc, Ernest Mandel.
The very last 'chapter' is a summary of the whole book intended to prepare readers for volume II but not really 'part' of capital vol I; it's also about 100 pages.
If you focus on Marx' s words, it's still long but much more approachable. I would recommend reading the Marx and Engels front matter carefully, though - there's a lot of important and concise detail in those (the postfaces, prefaces, afterwords to different editions, etc). that said, these might be better to read at the end.