The hotly anticipated 2024 publication of Princeton University Press’s new translation of Capital Vol. 1 brought, among other things, a simmering mix of barely concealed, politically explosive philological anxieties back to the surface of Marxist theory. With nearly two centuries of intricate debate and entire scholarly fields constituted to wrangle the sprawling body of Marx’s life work, the collection Marx and Le Capital: Evaluation, History, and Reception edited by Marcello Musto and published in 2022 has just begun to show its scholarly potential. Musto’s volume collects a wide range of intellectual perspectives on the French edition of Capital, first published in 1875, and represents a sustained and important intervention in a deeply unsettled scholarly terrain. Overlooked on publication, the essays collected here feel more important in Marxist scholarship than ever, especially with a revived and intense debate over which version of Capital might be viewed as definitive (if indeed, such a thing exists at all). The debate for Marx and Le Capital is further inflamed with controversy over the intellectual legacy of Marx’s noted and numerous edits to the text of Capital, their status in later editions, and the significance of an edition that Marx himself said had “a scientific value independent of the original” (4). It is thus particularly admirable that this collection does not artificially limit its scope to issues of translation, instead aiming to contain and contextualize linguistic debates to reveal the political and philosophical content of Marx’s final editorial work on Capital. To that end, the volume does not pretend to present a unified perspective on Le Capital and its afterlife; rather it acts as a ground for debate, where no one perspective on the true impact on the French edition of Capital (the last edition Marx would work on in his lifetime) controls the discussion.

The book is broken up into three clusters of essays and one additional supplement that collects correspondence on the translation of Capital, including 10 letters from Marx himself that were recently rediscovered and have never before been published in English. The three main segments, in turn, are titled “The Value of Le Capital” focusing on theoretical and political readings of Le Capital, “The Making of Le Capital” which launches the most sustained exploration of Le Capital as a translation, and “The Dissemination and Reception of Le Capital” which wraps the volume up with a series of comparative reception histories. These three sections draw a diverse array of contributors into Marx and Le Capital’s editorial fabric, from specialists in translation studies like Paul Reitter to Engels specialists like Terrell Carver; this review will naturally be selective in its presentation of the book’s myriad argumentative orientations. The editorial and critical apparatus the book builds effectively emphasizes the importance of Le Capital to Marx and his contemporary interlocuters. The opening essays by David Norman Smith and Kevin B. Anderson are both stellar arguments for a total re-evaluation of the standing of Le Capital, especially with regard to Marx’s own editorial changes to the text. Smith’s essay “Marx’s Capital After the French Commune” argues that Le Capital is “Marx’s own final edition of his undisputed masterpiece” that has been unjustly “disputed or ignored” (13). Smith goes on to argue that with the end of the “Engelsian orthodoxy of traditional Marxism” (15) comes a new strain of anti-authoritarian Marxism capable of properly evaluating the scope of Marx’s interventions in Le Capital. What does this amount to? In a large theoretical sense, Smith tackles Marx’s renewed account of accumulation and unemployment, arguing that Le Capital contains Marx’s most sophisticated account of the reserve army of labor. At the level of language Smith contends that changes in Marx’s language mark out a new path “Marx’s new metaphor – le changement des saisons – offers a valuable clue… When the mute pressure of the economy is disrupted, cracks disfigure the systems façade and fatalism can give way to anomie, or to a spirit of radical resolve” (27).

Kevin Anderson’s account, similarly engaged with the theoretical promise of Le Capital as a new frontier for Marx, instead explores Le Capital as an expression of Marx’s burgeoning thought on globalized capitalism and colonialism. This, for Anderson, emerges after “Engels begins over a century of attacks on the theoretical depth of the French edition” (page 43) and represents the clearest moment of difference between Marx and Engels. Anderson’s account of Le Capital thus emerges from a “rare instance of a fairly explicit difference of opinion between Marx and Engels on a major issue” (44), and while Anderson allows that Engels incorporated several important passages on the centralization of capital interesting to the anti-Stalinist Johnson-Forest Tendency, he also points out that Engels fails to take up several key additions. In particular, Anderson argues that Engels leaves out important passages on “the effects of colonialism on wages inside colonial powers” (48) which also links “the globalization of capital to increases in the severity and frequency of crises” (48). This ultimately comes down to, as Anderson sees it, Engels’s “relative lack of interest, at least as compared to Marx, in the peripheries of capitalism” (51). Anderson concludes that Le Capital is nothing less than the development of Marx’s “new, multilinear perspective on social development and revolution” (54). In particular, Anderson directly connects the editorial updates to the French edition of Capital with Marx’s famous 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich saying that “Marx employs the French edition in an important theorization of his position on the social transformation of societies outside of western Europe” (52). It is also from Anderson’s long essay on that Marx and Le Capital begins staging debates on the true status of the 1875 translation.

Engels, for his part, has supporters. Engels’s posthumous role in the re-issuing of Marx’s lifework after the French edition places him in a naturally controversial spot. The fourth German edition of Capital that Engels produced in the years after Marx’s death acts as a natural foil to Le Capital; arguments for the primacy of Le Capital must inevitably confront Engels. Terrell Carver in his essay “Engels and Le Capital” mounts the text’s most spirited defense of Marx’s closest comrade and collaborator. Carver argues that “Engels’s interests were manifested in activisms” (72), primarily outside of what he characterizes as Marx’s academic interests in political economy. Engels’s role as editor is also, for Carver, a role that shapes the “politics of the Critique of Political Economy” (80) and was defined by political and legal pressures in the face of post-commune anti-socialist laws. Meanwhile, in “An Unfinished Project: Marx’s Last Words on Capital”, Michael R. Krätke argues that Capital “remained very much a work in progress in Marx’s view” (145). And while Krätke admits that “the French version represents more than a translation” (150), its superiority to the German “is debatable” (150), and he is skeptical that there is a “perfect Marx in Marx’s own words” (165). Whether one subscribes to the thesis that the French edition represents a rewriting of Marx’s text with serious theoretical merits and differences with Engels’s fourth German edition, or that the French edition represents at best a deviation from the text and Engels’s editorial work, Marx and Le Capital communicates a sense of the richness of these scholarly debates and the stakes involved.

These stakes reach down to the deepest levels of Marx’s philosophical foundations. The prime example of the intersection of translation and philosophy is the various readings of Marx’s admission in a letter that he had chosen to “aplatir” parts of the French version. Musto, in the introduction, suggests that by aplatir Marx meant “to simplify” (4). Anderson, on the other hand, suggests in a footnote that Marx could have meant “make plain”, “smooth over”, or “clarify” (55). Paul Reitter (who was at the time working on the Princeton translation of Capital), in “Reading Le Capital: Marx as Translator”, uses aplatir as the starting point of his intricate argument about translation itself, moving from “flattening out” (132) to “smoothing over” (132) before exploring the wide implications of simply posing Marx as “pursuing an agenda peculiar to his interests and position as a self-translator” and “following a specific strategy of aplatir” (136). Reitter follows the strong disagreement of Marx critics such as Kyle Baasch, Rodrigo Maiolini Rebello Pinho, and Kevin Anderson to tease out Marx’s own practice of translation and self-translation. In one of the later essays, “A Tale of Two Translations” Alix Bouffard and Alexandre Feron directly compare the 1875 Joseph Roy-Marx French translation of Capital with the 1983 translation by Jean-Pierre Lefebvre with an eye towards the long consequences of these issues of aplatir. Bouffard and Feron contend that Roy and Marx made the choice to “erase almost all traces of Hegelian concepts” (198) in the 1875 edition both because Marx did not have “a high opinion of the philosophical capacities of the French” (198) and because there simply was not a ready-made Hegelian lexicon in French. Bouffard and Feron argue that this has massive linguistic implications for the Roy-Marx edition of Capital that the Lefebvre text must overcome, for example the translation in the case of mediation “is correct in terms of meaning but completely eliminates the Hegelian conceptual operator and thus the fact that Marx is drawing on the Hegelian analysis of mediation” (199).

What Marcello Musto and the authors of Marx and Le Capital have accomplished in a relatively slim volume ought to be applauded and receive more attention than it has received so far. The rich and fraught editorial and translational history of Le Capital gets here a strong introductory volume that effectively familiarizes its readers with key debates in the textual history of Marx’s most important work. This is not to say that it is a perfect text. While one must acknowledge that this is undoubtedly contentious academic ground, a more concerted attempt at editorial scaffolding would help the un-initiated navigate two centuries of heated debate. It is, however, understandable that Musto took the opposite approach, instead allowing the volume to function both as a collection of studied essays on Le Capital and as a forum for debate where the lines between tendencies become evident to readers on the lookout. It is also notable that none of the essays collected here demand familiarity with scholarly arcana; the authors seem to have made an effort to keep their writing accessible while preserving the difficult theoretical and philosophical material at hand. If anything, there is perhaps the need for more here: a chapter specifically on the history of Le Capital in 20^th century Marxism would have been especially welcome. Louis Althusser’s dismissal of the 1875 edition and the extended essay on Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s translation to one side, 20^th century Marxism still casts a long shadow here (this despite the fact that the first page incipit states that the purpose of the book is to rediscover Marx “beyond 20^th century Marxism”). The book is, otherwise, generally free of distracting errors and richly sourced. The endnotes in almost every chapter are particularly noteworthy and helpful for navigating the complex scholarly architecture of this volume. Marx and Le Capital presents a fascinating collection of essays surveying a neglected, difficult, and immensely rich part of Marx’s later additions to his greatest work. With contemporary debates on translating Marx reaching wider audiences and expanding in complexity, Marx and Le Capital is a welcome intervention that is both timely and hugely informative for non-specialist audiences.