Wolfgang Fritz Haug: David Harvey’s American Marx. A Critique of his >Companion to Marx’s Capital< – Summary

In: Das Argument 297, vol. 54, 2012, no. 3, 373-387

Harvey and Haug, both born in 1936, started giving introductory lectures and organizing reading groups on Marx’s Capital in the same year as well, 1971 – and since then never stopped. Their approaches to Marx and to contemporary capitalism in crisis are in many regards parallel – except that Haug develops his reading in Marx’s own language, whereas Harvey – claiming to >pay careful attention to Marx's language – what he says, how he says it< – relies on Ben Fowkes’s English version from 1976. Herein lies the problem. When Harvey believes to read Marx >on his own terms< he reads Fowkes’s terms, which in many cases have a different thrust than Marx’s >own terms<. Haug compares Fowkes’ version with Engels’ translation from 1887 and both of these with Marx’s own last edition and his French translation. When Harvey says that >the mainly German critical philosophical tradition weighed heavily on Marx< and that in Marx’s first chapters >half the time you have no idea what he is talking about<, Haug highlights a number of basic mistranslations which all contribute to obfuscating what Marx calls >my dialectical method<. – This comedy of errors reaches its peak in the German translation of Harvey’s Companion. Haug’s philologically tight analysis reveals instances of what he calls >a twofold linguistic money laundering<. Given the status of English as lingua franca of globalization and the importance of Harvey’s crisis lecture on Capital, widely followed via internet, Haug calls attention to the necessity of a new English translation and critical edition of Marx’s main work as a means of establishing a reliable textual basis for its international reception and the debates surrounding it.