Ethnographic displays disappeared after World War II
An
exhibition in Paris looks at the history of so-called human zoos, that
put inhabitants from foreign lands, mostly African countries, on display
as article of curiosity.
Over
four centuries from the first voyages of discovery, European societies
developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human “specimens” shipped
back to Paris, London or Berlin for the interest and delectation of the
crowd.
What started as
wide-eyed curiosity on the part of observers turned into ghoulish
pseudo-science in the mid-1800s, as researchers sought out physical
evidence for their theory of races.
Finally,
in high colonial times, hundreds of thousands of people visited “human
zoos” created as part of the great international trade fairs.
Human Zoos: The Western World’s Shameful Secret, 1900-1958
Filipinos are pictured in loincloths sitting in a circle together at Coney Island in New York in the early 20th century while crowds of Americans watch on from behind barriers.
Where ‘Human Zoos’ Once Stood, A Belgian Museum Now Faces Its Colonial Past
by JOANNA KAKISSIS
In 1897, Belgian King Leopold brought 267 Congolese people to his country estate to display them in a mock African village — a practice referred to as a human zoo. IMAGE/Alphonse Gautier/RMCA, Tervuren
Aimé Mpane remembers when he first saw the old statues.
It
was 1994, and the Congolese visual artist had just moved to Belgium,
which once ruled his country. Growing up in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Mpane says he had been taught in school that the Congolese were
descended from the Gauls — “that they were our kings.”
Many theories have been presented for their origin. The writer explores a link with the Jebusites of Canaan
The Kalash are a non-indigenous tribe with a
distinct culture, religion, and way of life living for centuries in
District Chitral. Where they come from has been an enigma for centuries.
The first British envoy to the king of
Kabul led by the honourable Mountstuart Elphinstone started a story of
Greek ancestry about the Kafir of Afghanistan who were the Kalash of
present day Nuristan. In the 1890s, Amir Abdurehman forcefully converted
the whole Kafiristan to Islam and changed its name too. However, the
Kafir on the other side of the border, which was under rule of the
Mehtar of Chitral, retained their Kalash religion and identity.
According to the three main theories
written about the Kalash people, it is said that they are either Greeks,
Aryans, local inhabitants and previous rulers of proper Chitral.
The Kalash people and their oral traditions
tell a different story of a place they call Tsiyam, from which their
forefathers came many centuries ago. This place has been identified with
Yarkhun by some academics, while others say it is a place somewhere in
Afghanistan. A research paper written by Gail H. Trail, of Summer
Institute of Languages, interprets Tsiyam with Sham, the Urdu name for
Syria.
The Greek theory says that Seleucus I, a general of Alexander who was governor of Bactria, could be Shalak Shah, who the Kalash name as their forefather. Or he could be the one who settled the Kalash people here. This Greek ancestry claim is one of the most prominent ones and purports that the Kalash people were left behind from Alexander’s army, but a genetic study by Ayub, Mezzavilla, et al. (2015) found no evidence of this claim. Thus the hypothesis of Greek ancestry has no roots in reality.
Guardians of a Kalasha village in the valley of Mumuret (Bumburet) IMAGE/Wikipedia
In my exploratory research on this subject
by the Islamabad Think Tank, I posit the hypothesis that the Kalash
people are Jebusites, or one of a subgroup of Canaanites who practiced a
Phoenician religion. Phoenicians living in different city-states like
Tire, Jebus, Byblos, Sidon, had different deities specific to each
city-states and one supreme god and goddess, which could be El and
Asharat.
Present day Israel and Palestine were known
as Canaan before the arrival of Prophet Abraham. Canaan himself was a
son of Ham, and grandson of Noah according to the Book of Genesis in the
Hebrew Bible. These Canaanites or Phoenicians used to worship several
deities and basically were polytheists.
On a winter’s day in 2022, Mediyana Talantbekova failed to turn up for an exam. Two years later, her family and friends grapple with the events that led to her death.
This article is a collaboration between Kyrgyzstan-based media outlet Kloop and Al Jazeera and is based on reporting conducted between 2022 and 2024.
Osh, Kyrgyzstan – When Mediyana Talantbekova was about 10 years old, she would watch over her family’s calves. One day, one of them went to graze in a field of clover, a plant that can cause deadly bloating, and died.
Mediyana, who lived with her family in Osh, a city in southwestern
Kyrgyzstan, was distressed by the calf’s death and felt she was to
blame.
When her father, Talantbek Ergeshov, a farmer, returned home that
evening he found her sitting quietly in a corner of the house. “What’s
wrong, my daughter? You seem upset,” he recalled asking her.
Mediyana started crying. “Dad, I killed a calf,” she told him.
Talantbek comforted his daughter. “Aw my girl, don’t cry, it’s not such a problem,” he told her. He helped her understand that the calf’s death was not her fault and, to cheer her up, he told her he would take her to the bazaar the following morning to buy a pair of earrings.
That night, Mediyana got out of bed and went to wake her father.
“Daddy, the sun is not rising,” she told him, impatient for the day to
begin.
When morning came, Talantbek took his daughter to the gold bazaar to
get her ears pierced. He then bought her a pair of earrings shaped like
suns. He remembers how happy Mediyana was and how she told him: “Dad,
from now on I will watch the calves so none of them dies.”
Twelve years later, on a winter’s day in January, Mediyana, a
22-year-old student, would fail to turn up for her dentistry exam. Her
friends, family and the police would search for her for nine days until
her body was discovered in the back yard of a house in Osh. Talantbek
would go to the morgue to identify his only daughter, the sun-shaped
jewellery still in her ears.
Mediyana was murdered by a classmate who, just a few weeks earlier,
had drugged and raped her. The shame and stigma associated with rape,
even more so in a deeply conservative society like Kyrgyzstan, meant
Mediyana initially didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she felt compelled to
“negotiate” a marriage to her rapist to secure a future where she could
raise her unborn child.
‘She loved this house’
On a sunny day in early September 2022, Talantbek, 47, a small, solidly built man, dressed in a plain white T-shirt and lightweight grey pants, stood in front of the one-storey yellow brick house in central Osh where he had lived with Mediyana.
“She loved this house. While we lived here my daughter tried to do
everything to make it cosy,” he said, describing how Mediyana had
decorated the place with potted flowers, cactuses and succulents.
When it was warm, Mediyana and Talantbek would sit on the front porch
on “toshoks”, colourful, burgundy-hued patchwork mattresses, drinking
tea and talking about their day.
“She was always a very kind and smiley kid — very friendly,” Talantbek said.
Mediyana spent almost all her life in Osh – Kyrgyzstan’s
second-largest city after the capital Bishkek – which lies close to the
Uzbekistan border.
The city, which grew out of a settlement along ancient Silk Road
trade routes, is known for the low-lying Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain,
which has long attracted Muslim pilgrims and is one of three Krygyz
UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Simple one-storey houses line narrow streets in the centre of the
city of 300,000, while traditional eateries serve samsa, lamb or mutton
pastries baked in clay ovens, and the bazaars are crowded and noisy.
In 2023, about 14 percent of Osh’s population lived below
the poverty line, earning an average of $2 a day. Since the early
2000s, residents from Osh, and elsewhere in the country, have migrated
to Russia in search of better work opportunities.
What most of us would recognise as
a jellyfish – the otherworldly, gelatinous aquatic animals renowned for
their sting-filled tentacles – is actually just the final stage of
these animals’ life cycle.
Not all jellyfish play by the same rules, and one species may have discovered the secret to immortality.
How does the immortal jellyfish live forever?
The life cycle of most jellyfish species is similar. Museum curator Miranda Lowe
explains, ‘They have eggs and sperm and these get released to be
fertilised, and then from that you get a free-swimming larval form.
‘The larva will move about in the current until it finds a hard
surface to establish itself. It will then start to mature and grow.
Larvae mature into polyps, which will then bud off and mature into young
jellyfish.’
An adult jellyfish is known as a medusa. Jellyfish belong to a group
called Cnidaria, which also includes sea anemones and corals. As
animals, they are subject to the cycle of life and death – though one
species is known to bend the rules.
The hydrozoan Turritopsis dohrnii, an animal about 4.5
millimetres wide and tall (likely making it smaller than the nail on
your little finger), can actually reverse its life cycle. It has been
dubbed the immortal jellyfish.
When the medusa of this species is physically damaged or experiences
stresses such as starvation, instead of dying it shrinks in on itself,
reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim. It then
settles on the seafloor as a blob-like cyst.
Over the next 24-36 hours,
this blob develops into a new polyp – the jellyfish’s previous life
stage – and after maturing, medusae bud off. This phenomenon has been likened
to that of a butterfly which, instead of dying, would be able to
transform back into a caterpillar and then metamorphose into an adult
butterfly once again.
The process behind the jellyfish’s remarkable transformation is called transdifferentiation and is extremely rare.
Medusa cells and polyp cells are different – some cells and organs
only occur in the polyp, others only in the adult jellyfish.
Transdifferentiation reprogrammes the medusa’s specialised cells to
become specialised polyp cells, allowing the jellyfish to regrow
themselves in an entirely different body plan to the free-swimming
jellyfish they had recently been. They can then mature again from there
as normal, producing new, genetically identical medusae.
This life cycle reversal can be repeated, and in perfect conditions, it may be that these jellyfish would never die of old age.
‘We might be distracted watching much larger jellyfish, but the tiny
things such as this can inform so much of our science about these
animals,’ says Miranda.
The western world and mainstream media have once again jumped on an opportunity to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism after Israeli football hooligans, protected by the Mossad, wreaked havoc on the streets of Amsterdam, deliberately provoking a harsh response.
For the first time in living memory,
mainstream media has risen to defend football hooliganism. On 6
November, Tel Aviv’s traveling thugs arrived in Amsterdam, beginning
their rampage by tearing down Palestinian solidarity flags, chanting
racist slurs like “Let the IDF win to f** the Arabs,” and attacking taxi drivers.
By
the night of 7 November, as their team faced Ajax, their provocations
escalated into a full-blown spectacle of chaos, spilling into the city
both before and after the match. Yet, in an extraordinary twist, the
provocateurs who left a trail of havoc were transformed into victims.
Imagine a rowdy guest smashing bottles at the bar, getting shoved out
the door, and then calling the police to report being assaulted. That’s
the level of irony we’re witnessing here — a tale as inflated as it is
easily debunked.
The mainstream narrative, amplified by Israeli
outlets, would have you believe Amsterdam had hosted a premeditated
attack on Jews — a “pogrom” so harrowing that emergency evacuation
flights were required to whisk the supposed targets to safety.
Dutch right-wing politicians and media wasted no time in seizing the moment, re-framing the incident to suit their agendas.
This
investigation will unravel how the night’s events were weaponized — not
only to conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism, but to stoke fears of
Islamic communities in Europe.
Beneath the headlines lies a more
complex story: hooligan provocation, citizen frustration, and the
calculated exploitation of crisis for political gain.
The timeline goes as follows:
6 November: The arrival of chaos
The
chaos in Amsterdam began on 6 November, with the surreal sight of a
state dispatching its premier intelligence agency to act as bodyguards
for a fanbase notorious for racist chants and violent behavior. Mossad agents, ostensibly sent to ensure “security,” arrived alongside the first wave of Tel Aviv’s traveling hooligans.
Far from embodying the spirit of sportsmanship, these provocateurs wasted no time stirring tensions, tearing down Palestinian solidarity banners, and setting the stage for the disorder that would engulf the city in the days to come.
Israeli ‘Maccabi Tel Aviv’ fans did not only tear down Palestinian flags and chant violent slogans against Arabs – they also reportedly refused to respect the moment of silence held for the Valencia flood victims and intentionally interrupted it.pic.twitter.com/f3RYaPhaFS— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) November 8, 2024
Provocations
begin: Palestinian solidarity banners, displayed by local residents in
support of Gaza, became their first targets. These banners were torn
down with an air of impunity, an act of symbolic violence that set the
stage for further unrest.
Activists and relatives of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei march calling for an end to femicide, 2024. IMAGE/Andrew Kasuku/AP Photo
While feminist movements have made significant strides in naming, recognizing, and advocating against femicide, the rest of the world appears disturbingly indifferent.
In Kenya, Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegi was brutally
murdered—doused in petrol and set on fire by her ex-boyfriend just three
weeks after returning from the Paris Olympics. In Switzerland,
authorities recently revealed that Kristina Joksimovic, a former Miss
Switzerland finalist, was killed by her husband, who confessed to the
crime and allegedly dismembered her body and pureed it in a blender. In
London, Cher Maximen was fatally stabbed in front of her daughter by a
stranger while on her way to the Notting Hill Carnival.
Another day, another femicide globally. Although these incidents
occurred separately, and these women live worlds apart, their deaths are
tragically interconnected. While global homicide rates have generally declined, femicide has been steadily rising over the past two decades. In 2022, the UN recorded
89,000 cases of femicide globally, with 55% of these deaths caused by
intimate partner violence or other perpetrators known to the victim. On
average, this means that every 11 minutes, a woman or girl is killed somewhere in the world.
In response to these troubling statistics, women across the globe have
mobilized, with movements like #StopKillingUs in Kenya, #TotalShutdown
in South Africa, and #NiUnaMenos in Latin America, fighting to end this
violence.
Femicide is broadly understood as the killing of a woman or girl
because of her gender—the most extreme form of gender-based violence.
The 2012 UN Economic and Social Council’s Vienna Declaration on Femicide
was the first to outline and recognize various forms of femicide,
including intimate partner violence, targeted killings of women and
girls in armed conflict, female infanticide, deaths related to genital
mutilation, honor killings, and murders following accusations of
witchcraft, among others.
Allama Iqbal (left) during his visit in 1933 to the historic eighth century Grand Mosque of Cordova (Mezquita) in Andalusia, Spain. His eight-stanza poem, Masjid-e-Qurtuba, was inspired by Andalusia’s Muslim heritage. IMAGE/Iqbal Academy The poet (right) in the courtyard of his Lahore house in the 1930s. IMAGE/The Allama Iqbal Collection in the possession of Muneeb Iqbal
Pakistan’s ideological journey has reshaped the great poet
philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal into a patron of its hardening
worldview. Reviewing how he has been ‘reinterpreted’ into an ideological
platitude is now hazardous because of his state-approved and
clerically-backed identity as an orthodox thinker opposed to all
modernist revision. At times, secular commentators longing for an
identity rollback consign him to the category of ‘orthodox’ while
praising Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the true modernist. There is, however,
steady evidence from his life that defies this orthodox labeling.
The climactic moment in Iqbal’s relationship with Pakistan came on
December 25, 1986; some 48 years after his death. It happened during a
national seminar presided over by General Ziaul Haq in Karachi on the
birth anniversary of the founder of the state, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali
Jinnah. The topic of the seminar was, What is the Problem Number One of
Pakistan? Present among the invitees was the son of Allama Iqbal, then a
sitting judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In his speech on the
occasion, Justice Javed explained why his father was opposed to Hudood
(Quranic punishments) which Gen Zia had promulgated in Pakistan.
The controversial phrasing from the Sixth Lecture in Allama Iqbal’s book, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam,
was: “The Shariat values (Ahkam) resulting from this application (e.g.
rules relating to penalties for crimes) are in a sense specific to that
people; and since their observance is not an end in itself they cannot
be strictly enforced in the case of future generations.”
The reaction from Gen Zia was dismissive of Allama Iqbal rather than
the Hudood he had imposed to appease his vast hinterland of clerical
support. He had gotten into trouble with the clergy when his Federal
Shariat Court decided that since stoning to death (Rijm) was not
mentioned in the Quran it could not be a Hadd, that is, a punishment in
the Penal Code. He had to change the Court to retain Rijm.
But Iqbal was prophetic: Pakistan has not stoned a single woman to
death despite Rijm being on the statute book, nor has it been able to
chop off hands for stealing. More literalist Iran gave up the ghastly
practice of Rijm in 2014.
Pakistan is disturbed today by the continuing practice of bank
interest after the Federal Shariat Court banned it in 1991 as Riba
(usury) specifically mentioned in the Quran as also by Aristotle in his
Nicomachian Ethic. Islamic banking which actually excludes the taking of
Riba does so under a policy of complex self-confessed Heela
(subterfuge).
In his publication Ilmul Iqtisad (1904), Iqbal’s first book
in Urdu as an introduction to how a modern economy worked, he explained
and clearly accepted bank interest as the lifeblood of commerce, knowing
that it was considered banned by the clerics and accounted for so few
Muslims in India’s commercial sector. He did so by accepting Sir Syed
Ahmad Khan’s view that “interest-banking was not the same as
Riba/usury”.
On Sunday, November 10, at 3 p.m. EST, the Socialist Equality
Party is hosting an online event, “The Election Debacle and the Fight
Against Dictatorship.” Register and join the event at: wsws.org/FightTrump
Trump’s election sets the stage for repression & social counter-revolution. The Democrats, despite their warnings of his “existential threat” to democracy, are in full retreat. Attend Sunday’s urgent online event to discuss a strategy for the working class to stop fascism.
David North
The election of Donald Trump is a critical event whose political
repercussions will be felt throughout the world. This fascist demagogue
has won the 2024 election with both an electoral and popular vote
majority. He will be re-installed in the White House in 73 days.
Countless
millions in the United States and throughout the world are stunned by
the outcome of the election, which was made possible by the policies of
the Democratic Party. But the shock is turning into disgust as they
witness the Democrats’ craven surrender to Trump.
Forgetting not
only Trump’s attempted violent overthrow of the Constitution on January
6, 2021, but even the open threats he made during the election campaign
to rule as a dictator from day one, President Biden and Vice President
Harris are promising to assist Trump’s “transition team” between now and
Inauguration Day on January 20, 2025. It is not enough that they
cleared the way for his return to the White House. They are now
promising to polish the seat of Trump’s chair in the Oval Office.
Little
more than a week ago, Kamala Harris was warning that Trump was a
fascist. Now she tells her supporters that there is nothing to worry
about, and that everything will be all right. Biden promises proudly
that there will be a “peaceful transition” of power on Inauguration Day,
as if his spineless transfer of power to a fascist president deserves
to be celebrated as a triumph of democracy.
The Democrats are attempting to chloroform the public.
Trump
has proclaimed that this is the last election, and that his supporters
will not have to vote again. The political reality is that the election
of Trump sets the stage for an unprecedented repudiation of democratic
rights, a wave of mass repression, and violent social counterrevolution.
While Biden extends an olive branch, Trump’s advisers are threatening
vengeance against their political opponents. Steve Bannon, a key Trump
adviser who was recently released from prison, has threatened them with
“rough Roman justice,” that is, with murder.
Plans are being drawn
up for mass deportations. And on the economic front, Elon Musk has
stated that the policies of the new administration will result in pain,
by which he means the slashing of funding for essential social programs,
especially those related to healthcare, education and retirement
benefits. The corporations will be given a free hand to implement
massive layoffs.
Moreover, despite his claims to oppose war, the
Trump administration will pursue a foreign policy no less aggressively
militaristic than Biden’s.
The defense of democratic rights and
the social interests of the working class cannot be entrusted to those
who are responsible for Trump’s victory.
IN EARLY 1845, a young and precariously employed holder of a Ph.D. in
philosophy named Karl Marx signed a contract with a German publisher
for a book, in two volumes, on political economy. He had already filled
notebooks with extracts from his studies in the field, and at the time
likely felt like he was already reasonably far along on the project. But
his publisher canceled the contract two years later, in part on the
grounds that Marx rejected the suggestion to write with an eye to avoid
provoking the authorities.
The gestation of Das Kapital (1867) took another 20 years,
most of them in England, where the author did research at the British
Museum (a library) digesting official reports on factory conditions as
well as economic and business literature in several languages. Marx also
worked with British trade unionists, including many from abroad, and
served as a foreign correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune.
Documenting the extremes of inequality in Victorian Britain was
ultimately secondary to Marx’s efforts to understand capitalism as a
dynamic system—one already well along the way to instantiating itself
everywhere, remaking the world in its own image.
Marx’s model of capitalism as an inherently crisis-generating system
became more plausible to many readers in the wake of the global
financial system’s near-collapse in 2008. Arriving 16 years later—to the
month, as it turned out— Princeton University Press’s new translation of Capital
arrives as a certified classic. The edition draws on generations of
scholarship on Marx’s economic manuscripts, which are voluminous in mass
and headache-making in penmanship. Prefatory essays by the political
theorist Wendy Brown and by Paul North, a scholar of German literature,
move between the 19th-century context of Marx’s writing and the
21st-century horizon of the new edition’s readers.
The translator is Paul Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and
literatures at Ohio State University. He answered a few questions about
his work by email. A transcript of the discussion follows.
Q: Nobody undertakes the translation of a massive, recondite
book into English for the fourth time without feeling a very clear and
distinct need. What motivated you to take it on?
A: It’s true that on some level I wanted to produce a translation
that conveys elements of Marx’s text that in my opinion the other
English translations of Capital don’t convey so well—which isn’t
to suggest that those translations are failed efforts, just that they
clearly didn’t prioritize textual elements that have come to matter a
lot for 21st-century readers, including me. Since I had taught both the
Moore-Aveling translation (1887) and Ben Fowkes’s translation (1976), I
had experienced their limitations in a very particular and highly
motivating way—all my retranslation projects have begun in the
classroom.
Q: What’s your personal history with Capital? What aspect(s) of its historical, theoretical or literary qualities, say, made the strongest impression?
A: I’ve connected with Capital in a number of ways—as someone
who became devoted to intellectual history pretty early in life, as a
student of critical theory, as a scholar of radical German-Jewish
intellectuals and, not least, as someone trying to understand the
workings and effects of capitalism and the persistence of market
fundamentalism in the here and now.
What made the biggest impression? The scope of what Marx was trying
to do is astonishing. According to one well-informed estimate, volume
one represents 1/72 of the project he had in mind to carry out. But this
is of course a hard question. Although Marx turns decisively away from
classical political economy’s focus on the egoism of the individual, and
instead wants to understand capitalism in terms of its “laws of
motion,” there’s a humaneness to the project, because he keeps asking
whether these laws promote human flourishing among those doing most of
the work, a question most economists today neglect to pose. Also, the
writing in Capital is often really brilliant. I hope my translation has managed to preserve something of that.
Q: What effect did translating Capital have on your sense of the book? Did it change anything about how you understood it?
A: I certainly think that I’ve come away from the work of translating Capital
with a much keener understanding of many of the book’s most important
ideas and arguments, by which I mean such things as Marx’s notions of
value and commodity fetishism. You’d expect this, of course: translating
entails very, very close reading, or, for example, thinking at great
length about how this or that individual term is being used, and if the
process of translating doesn’t leave you with the sense that you’ve
truly deepened your knowledge of a text’s form and content, well, you
should be surprised (and alarmed).
But the kind of poring over I just described isn’t necessarily
conducive to coming up with a big new interpretation. If it were, we’d
see lots of translators writing books about the texts they just
translated. We don’t see so much of that, however, and keep in mind:
Many of the people who retranslate classics are scholars, i.e., people
who write books. On the other hand, I could imagine writing about
certain impressions of the Capital that didn’t take shape until I translated it.
Here are two. First, I had seriously underappreciated the
sophistication of Marx’s mimetic techniques: There are places where he
pulls off a kind of free indirect imitation, essentially impersonating
someone without having that person speak directly—an unusual and, I
think, very effective device. Second, I had underappreciated the extent
to which Marx makes an effort to locate positive possibilities in
developments that in the short run cause a lot of suffering, such as the
rapid development of machinery. According to Marx, this drains the
content from labor and throws a lot of people out of work but
increasingly necessitates that workers be retrained again and again,
allowing them to cultivate an unlikely and fulfilling well-roundedness.
Q: In the spring, someone on social media predicted this would
be the “definitive” translation. It came as a relief to see you don’t
claim that! Marx himself might have been dubious about the idea. He
prepared a second, revised German edition of Capital in 1872 and
left notes for additional corrections and tweaks he did not live to
make, plus he had a hand in the Russian and French translations, with
the latter incorporating changes he regarded as significant for
understanding his arguments. You’ve translated the second German
edition. Why did that seem like the one to work on?
A: There’s really no definitive source text to work from here. Some
scholars point to the authoritativeness of the first French edition of Capital
(1875) because it’s the last edition of volume one whose publication
Marx oversaw, and Marx himself said that the changes he made—he revised
Joseph Roy’s French translation—gave it an “independent scientific
value.” But it’s easy to push back against this. Marx, who didn’t have
the highest opinion of the French reading public, also said that he had
to smooth/flatten out/simplify the French edition, and in fact the
edition drops some important formulations. Furthermore, we don’t have
the manuscript of the translation by Roy that Marx worked over, so most
of the time, we don’t know what’s from Marx and what’s from Roy.
We do have some lists where Marx identified passages in the French
edition that should be translated into German for future German
editions. But the passages that scholars dwell on when they talk about
the important changes in the French edition, the ones that are supposed
to reflect changes in Marx’s thinking, mostly aren’t from his list, and
you can make the case that some of the passages that scholars have
treated as crucial, change-reflecting “revisions” are in fact
translations—I do this in my translator’s preface.
Not only that, Friedrich Engels didn’t exactly follow Marx’s
instructions when he edited the third (1883) and fourth (1890) editions
of volume one, and to me the formulations of his own that he inserted
into the fourth edition, which are meant to clarify Marx’s arguments,
sound like Engels, not Marx, and are sometimes counterproductive. That’s
how we landed on using the second German edition (1872), the last
German edition Marx saw through to publication, as our source text.
Although someone writing in Jacobin recently suggested
otherwise, the back matter in our edition includes quite a bit of
material informing readers about how the first German edition differs
from the second edition and about how the French edition differs from
the second German edition. Will Roberts contributed a great afterword
essay on the latter topic.
Q: You are also translating the second and third volumes of Capital, left in manuscript at the time of Marx’s death and edited for publication by Engels. Is it too early to ask how that part of the project is going?
