UC Berkeley Hosts Nov. 12 Discussion on Paul Reitter’s 2024 Translation of Marx’s *Capital* with Responses from Brad DeLong and Rakesh Bhandari

A discussion of Paul Reitter’s 2024 translation of Karl Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Volume I) is scheduled for Thursday, Nov. 12, 2026, from 3:30 to 6:00 p.m. Pacific, in 220 Stephens Hall, the Townsend Center’s Geballe Room. The program includes responses beginning at 4:00 p.m. from economist Brad DeLong (UC Berkeley) and, at 4:15 p.m., from Rakesh Bhandari (UC Berkeley, Interdisciplinary Studies Field).

The event frames Reitter’s work as more than a new English rendering of a classic text. It presents translation itself as a way to think about reading—especially when the author lived in a different century and intellectual universe. The point is anchored in George Steiner’s influential 1975 book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, which argues that interpretation is, in an important sense, always a form of translation. When the gap is as conspicuous as mid-19th-century German versus early-21st-century American English, the obstacles to understanding are visible—lexical choices, historical references, and tonal registers stand out on the page. Yet Steiner insists that similar problems operate quietly in everyday comprehension, each time one person tries to grasp what another means.

Seen through that lens, Reitter’s translation becomes a public demonstration of the normally hidden work of interpretation. Even German readers approaching Das Kapital today are not simply “reading” in a transparent way, the argument goes; they are translating across time, political context, and philosophical vocabulary. English-language readers, however, witness that interpretive labor exposed: the translator’s decisions are explicit and therefore easier to scrutinize, debate, and contest.

Steiner describes translation as a four-part movement. It begins with what he calls “initiative trust”—a decision to assume that the text contains meaning worth recovering. Next comes “aggression,” the necessary act of entering the work, extracting sense from it, and carrying that sense into a new setting. Third is “incorporation,” the difficult step of fitting imported meanings into a language and culture already crowded with connotations and inherited assumptions. Finally, there is “restitution,” an attempt to restore balance after the earlier stages have inevitably disturbed the relationship between original and translation.

The case of Capital adds further layers. Reitter is not only translating Marx’s German; he is translating Marx in dialogue with a long chain of prior English versions and interpretive traditions. His work stands alongside, and implicitly against, the widely used 1976 Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes. It also meets the legacy of the earlier Moore–Aveling translation produced under Friedrich Engels’s supervision—an inheritance that shaped later editions, including Fowkes’s. And it arrives burdened, inevitably, by roughly 150 years of commentary: Marxist, Marxian, Marxological, and various Marx-adjacent schools that have built frameworks around the book.

That complexity makes Steiner’s first step—trust—an especially pointed question. Marx was a German intellectual of Jewish heritage, trained deeply in classics and philosophy, who wrote a dissertation on ancient atomism and the problem of free will (The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature). After the Prussian state blocked his academic path during its absorption of the liberal Rhineland, he reinvented himself as a political activist in a French revolutionary mode, and later again as an English-style political economist working within a post-Ricardian socialist tradition. The implied challenge is stark: does this intellectual itinerary yield a work that still repays the effort of understanding?

Steiner’s second stage—aggression—can illuminate what goes wrong when translation and interpretation become extraction without care. As a cautionary example, the article points to the intellectual framing that accompanied Fowkes’s edition: Ernest Mandel’s lengthy introduction, which it portrays as pressing Marx into the categories of 1970s European Trotskyism. In that reading, Marx is presented as fully correct and universally authoritative, provided one follows the “proper” interpreter—while other interpreters are dismissed. One specific claim highlighted is Mandel’s assertion, made in 1975, that capitalism would not last to 2025, a prediction the article treats as emblematic of interpretive overreach.

The discussion is set up, in other words, not merely as a book event but as an inquiry into how classics travel: across languages, across centuries, and across ideological battles that can distort as much as they clarify.

Why it matters

New translations can reshape how scholars, students, and the broader public encounter foundational texts—especially ones as politically charged as Capital. Reitter’s edition arrives amid renewed debates about capitalism’s stability and inequality, making questions of framing and fidelity newly consequential. Watch for how this translation influences teaching, citation, and the balance between historical Marx and the many later “Marxes” constructed by interpreters.