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.