Need help locating Marx quotes

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http://marxists.catbull.com/

Here is the TSV reference. I'm pretty sure this has the same pagination as the MECW... Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Book III (Amherst: Prometheus, 2000) p. 163.

The first quote is on page 348 of MECW vol. 32.

Afraid I can't help with the second - I don't have that volume of MECW (Volume 40) and though excerpts from the letter are reprinted in the 1957 Selected Correspondence it's a totally different translation. For what it's worth it's on page 125. It's not in the 1934 Selected Correspondence.

Marx, K and Engels, F. Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, - the book itself has no date so strictly it's 'n.d.' however my copy has a Lawrence and Wishart stamp on the title page saying 1957.

The quote is on p. 125 and is translated as :

Translating Marx is far from easy though, as Ollman notes, some words in his vocabulary have no single meaning and are quite-multifaceted, Verhältnis is one such words where it gets really dodgy at times.

I, for one, can totally see where the (mis-?)translations of this passage come from, and I wouldn't even say most of them are plain wrong. I mean, Bestimmung CAN mean "purpose", so the question is what Marx "really meant", and that's quite a big question at times... I don't know the broader context of this quote but it seems to me Bestimmung is another dialectical "weasel word" that means a multitude of things at the same time without one excluding the other. So maybe Bestimmungen in this case does mean "purposes" and "determinations"? But again that also depends on the context of the quote...

Though as a native speaker of German "determinations" does sound like the right translation of it.

Speaking of Hegel, would you recommend reading anything by the man himself or is it too hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, ie the dialectic method from its idealist content in Hegel's thinking?

I'd like to get a bit more into the dialectic method but have no idea where to start. Ollman recommends Hegel's Logic but I dunno...

Well, translation isn't "easy", but I don't think it should be mystified.

"Verhältnis" is actually not a problem. Depending on context, it can usually be translated as either "relation" or if in the plural,"conditions". Though in the context of Marx's writings, it's usually going to be the former, even in the plural, e.g. "relations of production."

This reminds me of the old chestnut about "aufheben" not having any real English equivalent. Actually, it has a perfectly exact English equivalent: "sublation".

Yes, "sublation" is a very specific word, so it doesn't convey the double meaning of aufheben (which in banal, everyday German can also just mean "to preserve" or "to keep"), but in the context of Marxist usage of the word, it's rather exact.

I don't mean for this post to seem like I'm picking on your post or anything. I agree that translation is not an easy task (otherwise people wouldn't get paid to do it!), but there's sometimes this irritating tendency by Marxists especially to pretend like the German language has some magical properties. Pseudo-Hegelian wankers are especially prone to that kind of mumbo jumbo.

If you read Marx in German, it can't be that bad... his writing style is so dense it's really hard to grasp for native speakers at times...

Thanks, I bookmarked this on amazon before but looks like I have to get this now.

Cheers!

P.S. on Hegel, Germans find reading Hegel difficult too.

Hegel isn't difficult because German is untranslatable, Hegel is fucking difficult because he's difficult!

Johannes Agnoli used to relate an anecdote that anyone without a deep grounding in Swabian dialect would be unable to really understand Hegel.

That would be pretty cool, though I guess I could just hit my uni library and scan it myself...

Pretty busy with my other scan projects right now (in the end, I have started typesetting Hilferding's Finanzkapital even though I told myself to leave it for later...)

I'd appreciate it though, if you have the time and leisure.

Railyon, it's online already: http://archive.org/details/DasFinanzkaptial.EineStudieZurJngstenEntwicklungDesKapitalismus

Hey Noa,

thanks for pointing that out but I know the scan is online (Entdinglichung pointed that out to me), and I'm working with that one actually.

Saves me having to scan it myself, but the OCR job was pretty bad and I'm currently typesetting it (along with Rubin's Essays) in LaTex for pdf output (=searchable text document, in contrast to a "simple" image scan). My aim is a "proper" digitalization, which is a lot of work but hopefully worth it.

The Nicolaus translation is horrible. He uses the same word (realization) for both the valorization of value and the realization of value. The McLellan one is better, but it's not the whole thing. I wish I could get my hands on the MECW, but it's just too expensive and my library doesn't have it.

Speaking of translation and Johannes Agnoli; why has virtually none of his work been translated?

thank fuck for that! someone else finds Hegel incomprehensible!

as an amusing aside I remember feeling exceedly pleased with myself for "borrowing" (ahem) a copy of Hegel's Phenomenolgy from a local bookshop when I was about 17. Stopped feeling quite so smug when got it home and found I couldn't understand a bloody word!

Jura, Khawaga et all. there is also a searchable pdf of the mecw volumes 1-47 available at http://www.mediafiredotcom/?8ucud101l6kfmra.

Thanks Jura and Hektor!

Well, to be fair, most of his work isn't even in print in German, ever since his widow successfully fought his former publisher over the rights to his work.

But the most banal answer to your question would be: Agnoli just isn't very known, outside of the Open Marxism guys, some of whom attended German universities in the 70s.

I also think that maybe the nature of much German Marxist theory is different from the stuff that gets translated from other European countries. Much of German theoretical Marxism is heavily philological, often devoted to clarifying or deepening understanding of Marx, or it's pedagogically oriented, towards university students, so it aims to clarify very basic questions ("What is the state?") in a rigorous manner, or it's solid empirical work (like Elmar Altvater's and Joachim Bischoff's conjunctural economic analyses).

Contrast this to the more fashionable stuff that gets translated from other countries: folks like Badiou or Negri. Without really wanting to pass any kind of judgment on the value of their work, I'd say thinkers like that are less concerned with examining Marx in a rigorous way, but rather just kind of using Marx as a springboard for their own ideas. These guys sort of construct entire worldviews or schools of thought. I think that kind of thing is more appealing to the publishing business, which like any other industry that has to survive, is subject to the vagaries of fashion and hype, searching for the "next big thing" that supposedly replaces whatever came before. People like Badiou or Negri write "theory" in the sense that it's understood by Anglophone humanities academics.

Ironically, the one German "school" that actually does try to construct something like a comprehensive worldview to replace traditional Marxism (and which is a purely non-academic phenomenon around autodidactic publicists, more like a traditional interventionist political group), the Wertkritik school around Krisis and Exit, isn't actually taken very seriously anymore in Germany itself, because it's so transparently cobbled together from various other "schools" of the past: a bit of value-form oriented Marxism, some Weberian critique of the quantification of social life under modernity, The attempt, already undertaken by adherents of Operaismo and Autonomist Marxism, to ground a Foucauldian critique of disciplinary apparatuses in an analysis of capitalism, and a Marxist-Feminist critique of the dichotomy between waged and domestic labor. As a "brave new worldview" this is rather warmed over stuff, but I think it's why for example a website like Principia Dialectica always snipes at Zizek and Badiou: they don't have anything against intellectual fashions, they just think the current mainstream of the literati left are embracing the wrong intellectual fashions.

Back to Agnoli, if you look at his collected works, it basically consists of one long extended essay on the state which is arguably his most important "theoretical" work (Der Staat des Kapitals), another theoretical essay on Fascism, an analysis of post-war German parliamentary democracy which is historically kind of interesting, but is also kind of ephemeral, very situated in the specific context of the immediate post-war period in West Germany, so probably wouldn't have much contemporary relevance for most readers outside of Germany ("Transformation der Demokratie"), a bunch of shorter conjunctural essays and interventions, and some cool transcribed university lectures ("Subversive Theorie"). Agnoli's work is definitely worth investigating for any serious student, but from a publisher's perspective, it's probably only of interest to a very specialized niche. Agnoli never claimed to be the originator of any bold new theoretical school; he was just a very smart university professor with a lot of good insights and observations.