Paul Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University, has produced a new translation of the first volume of Capital that restores to the book a freshness it had lost in the half-century since Ben Fowkes’s 1976 translation, and which was little in evidence in the original English translation by Engels and his two colleagues, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Engels extensively revised their work). Here is the Fowkes version: Centuries are required before the ‘free’ worker, owing to the greater development of the capitalist mode of production, makes a voluntary agreement, i.e. is compelled by social conditions to sell the whole of his active life, his very capacity for labour, in return for the price of his customary means of subsistence, to sell his birthright for a mess of pottage. Here is Reitter’s translation: It took centuries for workers set ‘free’ by the advanced capitalist mode of production to get to the point where they would sell – in other words, would be forced by society to sell – the entire active period of their lives, even their very capacity to work itself, for the price of their normal means of subsistence: to get to the point where they are forced to exchange their firstborn for a bowl of lentil stew.
Author: languagehat
Published at: 2025-04-07 21:31:09
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