No matter many decades pass since Karl Marx’s Capital was first published, and no matter how many times it is dismissed as outdated, this classic text time and again returns to the center of debate. At a venerable 157 years of age (it was first published on September 14, 1867), the “Critique of Political Economy” has all the virtues of the great classics: it stimulates new thoughts with each rereading and is capable of illustrating crucial aspects of our present era as well as of the past.

One great merit of Capital is that it helps us put the developments of the current moment — and the often inadequate protagonists of our era — in proper historical perspective. The famous Italian writer Italo Calvino said that one reason why a classic is a classic is that it helps us “relegate the current events to the rank of background noise.” Such works point to essential questions and points that cannot be skirted around, in order to properly understand them and break a path through them. This is why classics always win the interest of new generations of readers. They remain indispensable despite the passage of time.

This is just what we can say of Capital. 157 years since it was first published, we can say that Capital becomes all the more powerful as capitalism spreads to every corner of the planet — and expands into all spheres of our existences.

Returns to Marx

After the economic crisis broke out in 2007–8, the rediscovery of Marx’s magnum opus was a real necessity — almost a kind of emergency response to what was happening. If Marx’s great work had been forgotten after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it provided still-valid keys for understanding the true causes of capitalism’s destructive madness. So while the world’s stock market indexes burned hundreds of billions of dollars and numerous financial institutions declared bankruptcy, in just a few months Capital sold more copies than it had over the previous two decades.

Too bad that the Capital revival did not cross paths with what remained of the forces of the political Left. They deluded themselves into thinking that they could tinker with a system that was increasingly showing its unreformability. When they did enter government, they adopted mild palliative measures that did nothing to dent the increasingly dramatic social-economic inequalities and the ongoing ecological crisis. The results of these choices are there for all to see.

But the present Capital revival did respond to another need: that of definining — also thanks to a heft of recent studies — which is the most reliable version of the text to which Marx devoted most of his intellectual labors. The German revolutionary's original intention, as he drafted the first preparatory manuscript of the work (the Grundrisse of 1857–58), had been to divide his work into six volumes. The first three were to be devoted to capital, land ownership and wage labor; the later ones to the state, foreign trade and the world market. Marx’s growing realization over the years that such a vast plan was impossible to carry off forced him to develop a more practical project. He thought of leaving out the last three volumes and integrating some parts devoted to land ownership and wage labor into the book on capital. The latter was conceived in three parts: Volume I would be devoted to The Process of Capital Production, Volume II to The Process of Capital Circulation, and Volume III to The Overall Process of Capitalist Production. To these was to be added a Volume IV — devoted to the history of the theory — which, however, was never begun and is often mistakenly confused with Theories of Surplus Value.

The five drafts of Volume I

As is well known, Marx only actually completed Volume I. The second and third volumes did not see the light of day until after his death; they appeared in 1885 and 1894, respectively, thanks to an enormous editorial effort by Friedrich Engels.

If the most rigorous scholars have repeatedly questioned the reliability of these two volumes, composed on the basis of unfinished and fragmentary manuscripts written years apart and which contained numerous unresolved theoretical problems, few have devoted themselves to another, no less thorny question: whether there was in fact a final version of Volume I.

The dispute has returned to the center of attention of translators and publishers, and in recent years many important new editions of Capital have appeared. In 2024, some of them came out in Brazil, Italy and indeed the United States, where Princeton University Press this week published the first new English translation in fifty years (and fourth overall) thanks to Paul Reitter and editor Paul North.

Published in 1867, after more than two decades of preparatory research, Marx was not fully satisfied with the structure of the volume. He had ended up dividing it into only six very long chapters. Most of all, he was unhappy with the way he had expounded the theory of value, which he had been forced to divide into two parts: one in the first chapter, the other in an appendix written, hastily, after the manuscript had been delivered. Thus, the writing of Volume I continued to absorb some of Marx's energies even after it was printed. In preparation for the second edition, sold in instalments between 1872 and 1873, Marx rewrote the crucial section on the theory of value, inserted several additions concerning the difference between constant and variable capital, surplus value, as well as the use of machines and technology. He also remodeled the entire structure of the book, dividing it into seven sections, comprising 25 chapters, in turn were carefully divided into sections.

Marx closely followed the process of the Russian translation (1872) and devoted even more energy to the French version, which appeared — also in instalments — between 1872 and 1875. He had to spend much more time than expected checking the translation. Dissatisfied with the translator’s over-literal text, Marx rewrote entire pages in order to make the parts laden with dialectical exposition easier for the French audience to digest, and to make what he considered necessary changes. They mostly concerned the final section, devoted to “The Process of Capital Accumulation.” He also broke down the text into more chapters. In the postscript to the French edition, Marx wrote that the French version had “a scientific value independent of the original” and noted that it should “also be consulted by readers familiar with the German language.”

Not surprisingly, when an an English edition was suggested in 1877, Marx pointed out that the translator would “necessarily have to compare the second German edition with the French one,” since in this latter edition he had “added something new and … described many things better.” These were not, therefore, mere stylistic retouches. The changes he added to the various editions also encapsulated the results of his ongoing studies and the developments of an ever-evolving critical thinking.

Marx revisited the French version, highlighting its pros and cons, again the following year. He wrote to Nikolai Danielson, the Russian translator of Capital, that the French text contained “many important variations and additions,” but admitted that he had “also been forced, especially in the first chapter, to ‘flatten’ the exposition.” He thus felt the need to clarify that the chapters on “The Commodity and Money” and “The Transformation of Money into Capital” should be “translated exclusively following the German text.” In any case, it can be said that the French version constituted much more than a translation.

Marx and Engels had different ideas on the matter. The author was pleased by the new version, considering it, in many parts, an improvement over earlier ones. But Engels, while complimenting some of the theoretical improvements made, was skeptical about the literary style imposed by the French language. He wrote that “I would consider it a great mistake to take this version as the basis for the English translation.” So, when he was asked, shortly after his friend’s death, to prepare the third German edition (1883) of Volume I, Engels changed “only the most necessary things.” His preface told readers that Marx had intended to “largely rework the text,” but that ill health had prevented him from doing so. Engels made use of a German copy, corrected in several places by the author, and a copy of the French translation, in which Marx had indicated the changes that he considered indispensable. Engels was sparing in his interventions, reporting that “in this third edition no word has changed that I do not know, with certainty, that the author himself would have changed.” However, he did not include all the changes pointed out by Marx.

The English translation (1887), fully supervised by Engels, was based on the third German edition. He asserted that this text, like the second German edition, was superior to the French translation — not least because of the chapter structure. He clarified in the preface to the English text that the French edition had been used primarily to test “how much the author himself was prepared to sacrifice, wherever in translating should be the sacrificed something of the full meaning of the original.” Two years earlier, in the article “How not to Translate Marx,” Engels had cuttingly criticized John Broadhouse's dismal translation of some pages of Capital, stating that “powerful German requires powerful English to render it; new coined German terms require the coining of corresponding new terms in English.”

The fourth German edition came out in 1890; it was the last one prepared by Engels. With more time on his hands, he was able to integrate several corrections made by Marx to the French version, while excluding others. Engels stated in the preface, “I have again compared the French edition with the notes in Marx's manuscript and have incorporated, in the German text, some other additions from it.” He was very satisfied with his final result, and only the popular edition prepared by Karl Kautsky in 1914 made further improvements.

In Search of the Final Version

Engels’s 1890 edition of Capital Volume I became the canonical version from which most translations worldwide were translated. To date, Volume I has been published in 66 languages, and in 59 of these projects Volume II and Volume III have also been translated. With the exception of the Communist Manifesto, co-written with Engels and likely printed in over 500 million copies, as well as Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, which had an even greater circulation — no other classic of politics, philosophy or economics has had a circulation comparable to that of Volume I of Capital.

Still, the debate over what the best version is has never gone away. Which of these five editions presents the best structure? Which version includes the theoretical acquisitions of the later Marx? Although Volume I does not present the editorial difficulties of Volumes II and III, which include hundreds of changes made by Engels, it is equally quite a headache.

Some translators have decided to rely on the 1872–73 version-the last German edition revised by Marx. A recent new 2017 German version (edited by Thomas Kuczynski) proposed a variant that — claiming greater fidelity to Marx's own intentions — includes additional changes prepared for the French translation but disregarded by Engels. The first choice has the limit of neglecting parts of the French version that are certainly superior to the German one, wherease the second has produced a confusing and difficult-to-read text. Better, therefore, are editions that enclose an appendix with the variants made by Marx Engels for each version and also some of Marx's important preparatory manuscripts, so far published only in German and a few other languages. However, there is no definitive version of Volume I. The systematic comparison of the revisions made by Marx and Engels still depends on further research by their most careful students.

Marx has often been called antiquated, and opponents of his political thought love to annnounce his defeat. But once again, a new generation of readers, activists and scholars is laying their hands on his critique of capitalism. In dark times such as the present, this is a small good omen for the future.

Editor's Note:

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