Marx at the Margins by Kevin B. Anderson

Author:Kevin B. Anderson [Anderson, Kevin B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

The most significant of these editorial choices was Engels’s decision to leave aside considerable material from the 1872–75 French edition, even in the 1890 German edition, which became the standard. Yet the French edition was the last one Marx had personally prepared for publication, as he heavily edited and amended the translation by Joseph Roy. Hidden here are some theoretical differences between Marx and his friend Engels, who prepared the 1883 third German edition and the 1890 fourth German edition, both published after Marx’s death. These Engelsian editions, especially the 1890 one, have been the basis for all English-language ones to date. Marx’s first German edition was published in 1867, and his second German edition, with major revisions, followed in 1873. This was followed in turn by the 1872–75 French edition, translated on the basis of the 1873 German one, but very extensively edited by Marx.

One undisputed fact will illustrate the scope of these changes from 1867 all the way to 1875, and reveal the 1867 edition to have been a rather early stage of this work in progress: In the 1867 edition, the most-discussed first chapter on the commodity17 had an entirely different form than in later editions. What was to become this chapter’s section on commodity fetishism was only partially finished in 1867, and what had actually been written was divided between the first pages of the book and an appendix on value at the end. By the 1873 German edition, the text of the first chapter had become quite similar to the one we know today from the standard edition. Unfortunately, today’s standard edition is also problematic, based as it is on Engels’s 1890 fourth German edition. For example, MEGA2 II/10, the closest thing we have to a variorum edition of volume I of Capital, contains a fifty-page appendix entitled “List of Places in the Text of the French Edition That Were Not Included in the Third and Fourth German Editions” (732–83). Many of these passages left out by Engels from the standard edition are significant, and as will be discussed below, some of them bear on the themes of this study.18

From the first, Engels had a different opinion of the French edition’s worth than did Marx. In Marx’s 1875 postface to the French edition, his last published statement on Capital, he stresses that “whatever the literary defects of the French edition, it possesses a scientific value independent of the original and should be consulted even by readers familiar with German” (Capital I, 105). Again and again in his correspondence, Marx expresses appreciation for the fact that the title page included the phrase, “completely revised by the author” (MEGA2 II/7, 3). As early as May 28, 1872, Marx had written to one of the translators for the Russian edition, Nikolai Danielson, that although he had some reservations about it, he wanted to make the French edition the basis for the work’s future translations:

Although the French edition . . . has been prepared by a great expert in the two languages, he has often translated too literally.

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