Rereading Marx’s Capital, Volume 1

Nasser Paydar

Foreword

Capital or any text of Marx’s critique of political economy could be the living, breathing, present, and decisive manifesto of every worker in the dynamic of his daily struggle against capitalism. It could become the language of his ongoing struggle, his intelligence, knowledge, resourcefulness, capacity for solution, and ability to find solutions in the process of the struggle against the system of wage slavery. No book had the same consistency, bloodline, and homogeneity to play this great role as Capital. But it did not, and why did it not? The reason was everything, the only thing that was not, was the unfamiliarity of the content of Capital with the life, struggle, work, exploitation, pain, suffering, and understanding of the working masses. No economist, mathematician, sociologist, or philosopher has the same familiarity and understanding as ordinary working people, even uneducated, unschooled, and unschooled workers, with the fabric of Marx’s critique of political economy or his radical dissection of capitalist production. What was written in the Grundrisse and then Capital was a tale of painful, exhausting and psychotic realities that workers suffer from in every moment of their lives, in the chains of their existence, under their pressure and driven to the abyss of psychosis by their poisonous whips. “Capital” talks about the “law of value”, the commodification of the product, the commodification of labour power, the exchange of goods, the personalization of the object, the fall of man into objecthood, the fetishization of goods, the creation of products, the creation of producers, the subjugation of the use value of products, the domination of the exchange value of goods, the transformation of goods into everything, the disappearance of humans, the enthronement of the principles of the relationship of goods, the disappearance and terrible decline of human interactions, and it explains these issues in a shocking, terrifying, hopeful, empowering, exciting, manifesto-like and radical way, why should workers not understand these statements and sayings!! Why shouldn’t they find these discussions the best food for their consciousness and the inevitable need for life, growth, dominance, gaining power and expressing their social existence? Capital has spoken about necessary and surplus labour, abstract and specific labour, daily labor, exhausting and criminal exploitation of the worker, the emergence of two opposing and hostile classes, the bourgeoisie and the worker, the expansion of the relationship of buying and selling to society, economics, politics, civilization, rights, culture, ethics, habits, thoughts, traditions, ideology and social values ​​of the capitalist class and the transformation of all of these into weapons of the bourgeoisie against the working class. Why and based on what logic should it be difficult for workers to understand these issues and difficult to educate them!! Why should the vast mass of people who are being crushed day and night under the pressure of enduring these calamities need great men and philosophers to understand these poisonous realities!! Every unadulterated consciousness recognizes that there is a contradiction here, but capitalism is a swamp of contradictions. This contradiction must also be taken into account in all its contradictions. Finally, this happened, capital was abandoned from the life, work and struggle of the working masses. This happened and of course, this contradiction, like all the identity contradictions of this system and all the consequences and effects of these contradictions, can be explained. The workers became unfamiliar with Capital, not because they were unable to understand its content, but because they distanced themselves from the real battleground of their class struggle. Why did they do this? This is a question I have written about on various occasions. It would be tedious to repeat the explanations here. What is immediately emphasized was the consonance and synchronicity of the working class’s distancing itself from Capital, or the whole of Marx’s teaching of the critique of political economy, on the one hand, and the separation of the European and world labour movement from the real field of the struggle against wage labour, on the other. The events of the last years of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, in Europe, America and the 5 continents of the world, are the most eloquent demonstration of this reality. Many have divided the period of the Second International’s life into two parts!!, a part which, in their opinion, symbolized the radical and communist orientation of the proletariat!! and another part which showed the apostasy of the workers’ parties from that approach or a break with the Marxist strategy of class struggle. This division, in turn, was and is a continuous part of the destructive capitalist-oriented inversions, in order to deepen the separation of the international workers’ movement from the battlefield against wage labour. The Second International became an obstacle to the class struggle of the European workers from the very beginning. The parties that created it came together with this orientation. Let there be no misunderstanding, the discussion is not about people and their intentions, beliefs or even the degree of communist purity. What people think of them, what goals they have, what beliefs they cling to or what fantasies they have in their heads and what flight they have under their wings, it is not a matter of judgment, it is all about what they do, the role they play and where their work, struggle and role play are in the dynamics of the ongoing class struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie. Some of the activists of this Second International were the faces of brave men, thinkers, fighters and communist devotees. There is no point in this. The debate is about the kind of impact they had on the balance of class forces of the working masses against the system of wage slavery. There is room for long discussions in this passage, and I will limit myself very briefly, reviewing some points from Engels’s introduction (March 6, 1895) to Marx’s “Class Struggle in France”, to a brief analysis of his words as a person who for many years was Marx’s closest comrade-in-arms, his cave companion, “one soul in two bodies with him”, the collector of his works and the co-author of some of his books. Engels is the most prominent figure among the founders of the Second International, he was more radical than most of them, and what he brought in this introduction clarifies better than any other text the orientation of the workers’ parties that formed the Second International and the current state of the labour movement in the final years of the nineteenth century. Before reviewing the aforementioned introduction and for its radical critical reflection, a point should be made.

The French Revolution of June 1848, the founding of the First International, and, most glorious of all, the uprising of the Communards, were events that each represented a chapter of conquests, brilliance, and vanguard in the history of the labour movement. It was these events or demonstrations that, without exaggeration, terrified the capitalist class of the continent and the capitalist system of the day. These formations, with all their great achievements, each had their own shortcomings and Achilles’ heels, and suffered stagnation under the pressure of these same deficiencies and heterogeneities. Facts that carried with them the most vital lessons for refining the labour movement and paving the way for its subsequent victories. Leaving that period behind, this movement should have been prepared for a great critical, radical, Marxist and anti-capitalist analysis, seeking out weaknesses to eliminate, finding impurities to purify, and illuminating inferiorities to make their elimination and elimination a pact of radical victories. If the labour movement had done this, if it had carried out this house-cleaning and refining with a Marxist and anti-wage labour consciousness, then where would it have ended up and what would have been the result of its investigations? The answer is almost simple. Marx had pointed out a multitude of inferiorities years before. The First International itself, with all its internal conflicts, was, from Marx’s perspective, a step in criticizing the Achilles’ heel. The European labour movement in England, in the February and June revolutions in France, was defeated in the uprising of the Communards, because it lacked the necessary framework, a council, a nationwide, and anti-wage labour movement. The working class could not smash capitalism without establishing a powerful movement with these characteristics and by simply radicalizing within the limits of a city or a small region of Europe. The uprising of the Communards was a brilliant manifestation of the socialist rallies of several hundred thousand French workers against capitalism with a manifesto of human emancipation and the architecture of a free human society, free from wage slavery, but this uprising could only flourish, triumph, flourish, and push capitalism into the dustbin of history as a living and growing link of a nationwide anti-capitalist movement. Otherwise, it was doomed to failure, and it actually did. There is no place to open this discussion here, nor is there a need, because in this passage, we have discussed it enough over the past few decades. The gist of the matter is that the past of the labour movement, especially the important events of the 1940s to 1980s, should have been dissected, and if this work had been done with a Marx’s and anti-wage labour perspective, then naturally the urgency of establishing a strong, nationwide, organized, soviet, and anti-capitalist movement would have been the result of the radical critique of the day. Now, after stating these points, which again were the need of the present discussion, let us turn to what Engels and his companions or the left wing of the Second International did in this regard. In the same introduction mentioned, a text written on the occasion of the re-publication of Marx’s famous work “The Class Struggle in France”, Engels, after making some points, says: “When the Parisian uprising was echoed in the victorious uprisings of Vienna, Milan and Berlin, when the whole of Europe joined the movement even beyond the borders of Russia, when in Paris, in June, the first great struggle for power between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie broke out, the days when the victory of the class so terrified the bourgeoisie of all Europe that it took refuge in the arms of the reaction of the overthrown feudal monarchy, left us with no doubt that under the existing conditions, a great decisive struggle had just begun.” This battle must be carried out in a single, long and tortuous sequence of revolutions, and that the battle will end only with the final victory of the proletariat,” he formulates his and Marx’s view of the past events of the European labour movement, or in fact Marx’s analysis of the events of that time and his own alignment with him in this regard, as above, and immediately adds a few lines below: “… But history has shown us to be wrong and has revealed that our point of view at that time was an illusion. More than that, history has not only thrown away the false concepts we held at that time but has completely transformed the conditions under which the proletariat must fight. The method of struggle of 1848 is obsolete in every respect, and this is a point which requires a more careful examination in the light of the present conditions…” Engels continues, writing that the defeat of the Paris Commune shifted the focus of the European workers’ movement from France to Germany. In industrialized Germany, the hotbed of capitalist production, “Social Democracy grew with double speed. Thanks to the intelligent use of the German workers’ right to universal suffrage, in 1866 the astonishing growth of the class party was revealed to the whole world in unquestionable figures.” Let us carefully consider Engels’s criticism of the past of the labor movement, his new strategy for this movement, and his twisted prescriptions for the stratagem of the class struggle of the workers of Europe and the world. Many things are clear. The anti-capitalist campaigns of the working class in the 40s to 70s, including the June Revolution, the First International, and the Paris Commune, were nothing more than a shambles!! All those role-playing games, anti-capitalism, and uprisings that even Engels himself admitted terrified the bourgeoisie, were backward, militaristic, localist, and blind action-playing!! All of these should go to the archives of history. Instead of all of them, we should have “universal suffrage”, parliamentarism, partyization above the heads of the working masses, an International composed of parties hanging on “scientific socialism”!! Or the miraculous power of the leaders of these parties, overwhelming the trade unions in the shroud and burial of communism, the abolition of wage labour, and the like. The essence of Engels’ speech as a symbol of the radicalism of the Second International at the very time of its establishment is this. He especially insists on instilling in the consciousness of the workers that if Marx were there, he would definitely say the same thing!!! From this very point of view, he observed the shortcomings and deficiencies of the labour movement of the 40s to the 70s!! He threw away his previous analyses, investigations and statements about the labour movement of those years, about the June Revolution, the Paris Commune, other events!!, he called the Paris Commune a hopeless rebellion once again!!, and finally he shouted “I found it, I found it” and called the workers of the world to parliamentarism!! In this area, Engels does not stop at the above points but rather goes to the farthest horizons and leaves no stone unturned. “The German workers have rendered their cause another service. A service which was only possible because of their existence in the form of the strongest, most organized, and most growing socialist party. By showing how universal suffrage can be used, they have equipped their comrades in other countries with a new weapon. One of the most effective weapons is universal suffrage…” We are not talking about the end and aftermath of the Second International, we are talking about the labour movement of that day in Europe and its most radical activists, the Engels and later, the Liebknecht’s, Luxemburg’s, Pannekoeks and people of this spectrum. The fundamental question is this. With this orientation, perspective and strategy, what need did this movement have for Capital or other texts of Marx’s critique of political economy? Is it the product of the bourgeoisie’s twisted version of the suffrage or, at best, the product of the bourgeoisie’s deliberate and conscious retreat from the working class? What fusion and homogeneity does it have with the communism of the abolition of wage labour, what affinity does it have with the Marxian critique of political economy?! Let us not forget that what history witnessed was by no means limited to the recourse of social democracy and workers’ parties to parliamentarism; the situation was more catastrophic than this. Everything was shouting with a terrible voice that proletarian communism, Marxian communism, had been cut off from the current struggle of the working class by the aforementioned parties and their International. The class struggle in the programs, orientations and strategies of these parties gave way on the very day of the founding of the Second International to the struggle to replace one form of capitalism with another. The version of parliamentarism here, from within this historical event, was a strategic and identity break with Marxian communism, the abolition of wage labor, which found parliamentarism as its homogeneous tactical model, the latter being born from the lap of the former. Let us return to our question. When the situation was rushing in this direction, when the working class had to roar to replace one form of capitalism with another and with the weapon of parliamentarism, what need did it have to read and understand Capital?!! Why did it have to go to the Grundrisse?! The establishment of state or semi-state capitalism, party formation, union movement, interference with suffrage and parliamentarism, controversial election campaigns, passionate party campaigns to seize more seats in the bourgeois parliament, and the like. Where and how did these activities require a reference to Marx and a critique of his political economy?!! The fact is that this need was taken from the workers and the labour movement. The errors that were dug up before this movement surgically removed any desire for a relationship with capital from the consciousness of the workers. “Capital” is the torch of the class struggle against wage slavery. It dissects capital and digs up the roots of wage labour. The basis of its analysis is that by selling his labour power, the worker is deprived of all his human rights and privileges, the right to intervene in determining the fate of work, production, and life. The clear meaning of Capital is that what the bourgeoisie calls rights and freedom is, from the worker’s perspective, a pure injustice and a massacre of freedom. Marx’s critique of political economy is the harbinger of this historical warning that the capitalist, personified capital, the state, parliament, law, rights, civilization, the social and legal values ​​of the ruling system, are capital personified in the form of social relations and institutions. Capital says that the proletariat’s war against capitalism is its combined war against the basis of wage labour, against all these relations in all spheres of life. The spirit of Marx’s words is that the proletariat has no choice even to reduce the pressure of capital’s brutality in these areas except to resort to its independent, organized class, council, and anti-wage labour power. Capital said these things, and now, in the final decade of the 19th century, the European labour movement was becoming hostage to parties that saw the path to the liberation of the working masses or humanity in the arrangement and decoration of capitalism, parliamentarism, and the burial of the workers’ fighting power in the institutions of order, planning, and policy-making of capital. Why should this movement turn to capital under these conditions and with this approach and strategy?!! What message did he expect from it and what help did he demand from it?!! This is how Capital was practically collected from the homes of the workers and from the path of the ongoing campaign of the working mass. Marx’s critique of political economy was the blazing torch and the unfurled banner of a movement that wanted to establish, in the depths of capitalist existence and under the domination of the system of wage slavery, a strong, growing, conscious, soviet, universal power, consisting of all workers, always and everywhere fighting against class exploitation, against the rights, civilization, politics, culture, ideology and morality that protect the capitalist mode of production. What did the construction of democratic capitalism, the parliamentarian movement have to do with the struggle against wage labour and what need did it have for a Marxian critique of political economy??!! In these circumstances and following the occurrence of these events, Capital was no longer a living, present and omnipresent manifesto in the hands of the working class in the trenches of the war against capital, but on the contrary, along with other works of Marx, an ideological document in the libraries of parties and party leaders, a book of revelation “Marxism”, a pamphlet for the followers of the religion of “scientific socialism”!! And in all these cases, it was a vehicle for justifying socialism as capitalism, parliamentarism, syndicalism, sectarian partisanship over the working class and, in a word, a closure of the class struggle. It was the Kautskys, Plekhanov’s and co. who had to interpret Capital and other writings of Marx in a parliamentarism, Hegelian interpretation and the propagation of Sharia. But the story did not end there. The Second International fell into the abyss of division. The caravansary social democratic parties of the labour movement, including the very party whose large number of members Engels called a sure example of the workers’ access to the “ship of salvation” and the “lamp of guidance”, voted in Favor of the war credits of the governments for the greatest inhuman incendiaries in the same parliament that Engels called the real abode of the class struggle and the field of victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. Following this event, while maintaining unity in the way of looking at capitalism, socialism, the labour movement, the future prospects of this movement, the state and the fundamental issues of the class struggle, split in the area of ​​how to advance the campaigns and achieve the goals. The world labour movement also split and was divided between party blocs. The influential section of the working class in the advanced industrial countries explicitly and officially rejected and declared obsolete everything that showed signs of class struggle. It raised the banner of defending capitalism and dissolving the labour movement in the structure of the economic, political, legal, civil, police, military, ideological, and moral order of capital. The second section, in the less developed areas of capitalism, took the same path with a different strategy, a different twist, and seemingly contradictory slogans. The parties of this section, together with the Russian Social Democratic Party, later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Comintern, based their work on paving the way for the further expansion of capitalism, people’s anti-imperialistic and the strategy of ensuring an increasing share of surplus value for the domestic bourgeoisie, the overthrow of the allied regimes of the Western imperialists, the rise of the people’s parties and the entrance to the throne of political power in the countries, the establishment of state capitalism and the advancement of this entire strategy under the banner of “Marxism-Leninism” or other extensions. Let us repeat the same question as before. What need did Marx’s critique of political economy and the workers’ familiarity with Marx’s Capital have to do with these things?!! What connection did the people’s anti-imperialist ideology, the alignment of the people and the anti-people, the anti-imperialist democratic revolution, the establishment of a people’s democratic republic, and this type of desertification or desertification have with the content of Capital, the Grundrisse, and other similar texts? But the problem was not limited to the incongruity and irrelevance of the two. The tragedy was that the Leninist bourgeoisie promoted all of this under the name of Marx and communism, and in this regard, all capital-oriented and anti-communist misrepresentations had to be labelled “Marxism.” Marx’s Capital had to become the guiding theory of people’s anti-imperialist and anti-imperialist democratic revolution. Workers had to become more and more deeply and decisively alienated from Marx’s critique of political economy. State capitalism was introduced as Marx’s communism. Lenin’s Imperialism essay took the place of Grundrisse and Capital. Marx’s and anti-wage labour consciousness, understanding, and strategy of class struggle were removed from the reach of the life, thought, and struggle of the working masses of the world. Their place should have been filled with “What is to be done”, “Three sources and three components”, “The two tactics of social democracy…”, “Empiriocriticism”, “One step forward, two steps back”, “The disease of the left”, “Sexual taxation” and Lenin’s “State and revolution”. To be brief. What happened from the last years of the 19th century onwards within the world labour movement, Marx, the communism of the abolition of wage labour, the class struggle with the Marx’s strategy and any radical anti-capitalist orientation were surgically removed from the cycle of the ongoing struggle of the working masses. Both poles of social democracy, the spectrum of parliamentary parties in Western and Northern Europe on the one hand and the Leninist parties on the other, had to do this, and they did it with all their insight and awareness. Marx had to leave the heart of the working class struggle and become the prophet sent, communism, the abolition of wage labour, the divine law, became “Marxism-Leninism”, Grundrisse and Capital gave way to “imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism”, and Marx’s works, instead of playing a manifesto-like role in the storm of the anti-capitalist class campaign of the working masses, became jurisprudence, principles, rulings and transcendental texts outside the jurisprudence of Marxist seminaries. Interpretation, explanation, teaching and acquiring ijtihad in them became the prerogative of the elites, the greats, the scholars and the academics. Workers had to learn Capital from these jurists, and the jurists, having risen to the highest levels of ijtihad, had the right to make every clause of these texts a thoughtful expression of the social existence and the economic, political and sociological prescriptions of their class. Just as Lenin and Leninist parties made them the guiding light of people’s anti-imperialism and the establishment of state capitalism!! Just a few years ago, “Hu Jintao”, the then President of China, stated: “Marxism-Leninism” is the most suitable guide to elevate Chinese capitalism to the greatest power pole of global capital!! Before that, in the 90s of the last century, dozens of arrogant tyrants of “Marxism”, imams of the Marxist community with tens of millions of people!!, famous people, dignitaries and role models of Marxist-Leninist, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist theorists held a congress in Paris called Marx and the Recognition of Capital, and sat down to discuss in various meetings with the aim of making “Capital” and Marx the source of legislation for “market socialism”!!

With the world workers’ movement derailing the anti-wage war and falling into the futile infantry of capitalist parliamentarism, right-wing union reformism, degenerate bourgeois communism, people’s anti-imperialism, Leninist leftist reformism and the banner of replacing one form of capitalism with another, there was no place left in this movement for Marx, the Grundrisse, Capital, the German Ideology and other works of Marx. If the workers of the world broke away from Capital, it was rooted here and had nothing to do with the difficulty of content, the complex prose, the academic expression, the burdensome literature, the verbosity or the elaborate descriptions of Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy. Capital became difficult for workers when the great Marxist treasury became the great Marxist authorities. A situation that we are witnessing right now in the most disastrous form. The capitalist world is full of high-ranking “Marxists”! great institutes of Marxism!!, university departments teaching “Marxism”!! and such institutions, individuals, research and research centers. The results of the investigations and research of these renowned “Marxists” and prominent Marxists are an endless list of treatises, books, theses, collections of works, and writings that, if collected together, would probably not fit in any library, and the “seven seas” of the world would not be enough to wet one’s fingertips and count their pages. Not only is no one against conducting these studies, but the freedom of individuals to pursue them without any conditions should be as unlimited as possible. The most misleading theories have the right to be expressed, but it is also the right of individuals to criticize them radically. As a member of the international working class, diving into the ocean of Marx’s radical critique of capitalism, searching for the essence of this critique, depends not only on the ascetic and meticulous study of the categories and concepts of Hegel’s logic!! Or I do not see the belief in the “great efficiency of the laws of Hegelian logic compared to the Kantian type” as I find the presentation of these arguments as evidence of people’s obvious identity alienation from Marx and the Marxian critique of political economy. If it were otherwise, if the path to a deeper understanding of “Capital” went through academies, think tanks, research institutes and publishing centers of the philosophy of Kant, Hegel and their predecessors, then the task of overthrowing capitalism or the revolution of human liberation would also be assigned to the philosophers and the magnificent heads of the philosophical and scientific departments of “Harvard”!! Many people think so, even if they do not say it, if they talk about its opposite, if they hide this opposite with thousands of philosopher-like magic and tricks, they finally believe this!!, but the story is fundamentally different and contradictory for every activist of the movement to abolish wage labour. The movement for the liberation of man is not made by philosophers, but by workers, not by academic intellectuals, but by the masses of wage slaves, not by theorists, but by rebels against the pressure of capital exploitation, not by school owners, but by the hungry, who have been tortured by the whip of capitalism. Communism is not a handful of ideas, beliefs and philosophy, nor a school, a creed and an ideology, but by the conscious and anti-wage labour movement of the hungry masses of workers. Ideas do not create the social existence of humans, the opposite is true, Marx’s “Capital” or his other teachings and findings, not “Marxism”!! Not “scientific socialism”!! Not “revolutionary theory” which is the proletarian’s dissecting, radical, revolutionary and praxis critique of capitalism, who, what people, what social class understands such a text better, deeper, more real, more radical and more internal than the working masses or has the ability to understand it?! A class that, with its moment-by-moment work, life, exploitation, subordination, hunger, humiliation and language, protest and struggle, uprising and rebellion, what Marx has written and has set out to explain, suffers and cries out with all its being. No one can understand Marx’s words better, more deeply, more fundamentally than these workers. Capital is not an economics book, it is not a sociology text, it is not a philosophical treatise, it is a radical and working-class dissection of capital as a social relationship. A kind of dissection that sounds the scandalous drum of the entire theorizing of the bourgeois class about economics, politics; civilization, law, culture, morality, thought, ideology, society, thought, tradition, habit and the relationships between them, forcing the senses, brains, consciousness and cognition of the workers of the world in the corners full of the infection of this system to analyse the class roots. When Capital describes capital, it also sheds light on the entire core and context of the current policy of capitalism in all areas of social life. When it explores the relationship between the purchase and sale of labour power, it dissects the foundation of man’s separation from work, from the process of determining the fate of work and production, and his complete loss of any right to intervene in determining his own life. It shakes the foundation of what the bourgeoisie calls democracy, freedom, civilization, rights, and choice, and issues the most devastating human manifesto in history against all of these. When Marx uncovers the contradiction of abstract and concrete labour, he reveals the inner workings of the distribution of the total international surplus value among the totality of world capital, and in this way he lays bare the secrets of the alliance, conflict, peace or war between the various sections and poles of the international bourgeoisie. At the same time, he places before the curious eyes of the workers the compelling need of the proletariat to establish a radical internationalism against wage labour. In the anatomy of capital, Marx’s Capital exposes the dissolution of all the wonders, magic, and charms of human knowledge in the process of capital’s valorisation and their use by the bourgeoisie in the massacre of the living environment and human health. In his radical description of capital as a social relation, Marx has exposed the state structure and the capitalist political order brick by brick under the sharp knife of recognition, clearly and nakedly showing that in the hell of wage slavery, the state, politics, civilization, laws, thoughts, morality, and everything dominant, are nothing other than the personified social forms of capital. Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy is the radical and revolutionary critique of every conscious worker on his exploitation, subordination and oppression, on his separation from work and the process of determining the fate of his work, production and life, his class’s critique of the entire objectivity of existence. Marx’s Capital dissects these realities, and the fundamental question is which human beings, and which social class need to understand, recognize and reflect on these issues for their life and survival, as much as the air they breathe, bread, water, medicine or blood in their veins? Beyond this, which social class or force is the real source of the self-realization of these truths and the fertile soil for the growth and flourishing of such an anatomy. Should we still say, despite all this, that workers are incapable of understanding Capital or other texts of Marx’s critique of political economy? In this passage, it is necessary to clarify one more point, a truth that must be taken out of the aura of inversion. If the working class has difficulty reading Capital – which it certainly does – this is not due to the scientific, philosophical or economic complexity of the content of Marx’s words, contrary to what “philosophers”, “theorists” and “academic luminaries” believe.  We must distinguish between the difficulty of the content of a topic and the type of literature and language used to introduce, explain or translate it into other languages. The translators of Marx’s works, whose efforts we should all be sufficiently appreciative of, have overlooked one thing. To translate works like Capital and Grundrisse, it is not enough to simply master German and English. One must be a grounding, real, movement-based, class-based, radical and rebellious partner in all the pain that engulfs and revolts a person like Marx as a member of the working class. One must breathe in the atmosphere of his thought, life and struggle, he was thinking of a solution. He saw the mountain of degradation and misguidance of the working class crashing down on his being, and he was searching with all his might for a way out of the predicament that had gripped it. If the translator is not like that, if translation becomes a party mission for people, if it becomes a market business, if it is a tool for seeking fame and shopkeeping, even a galactic mastery not only of language but also of German and English literature will not help much in winning capital among the workers. A movement-based, real, earthly and class-based translation of Capital cannot be a translation of the concepts, terms, words, sentences, phrases, theme and content of Marx’s words. One must be an empath, a confidant, a ally, a comrade and a shipmate of Marx amidst the storms, so that his critique of political economy can be made the weapon of the workers’ day. The workers of the world want to see Marx alongside them and hand in hand in the course of the events of daily life and amidst the stormy waves of the ongoing struggles, and Marx’s Capital must enter their lives and the dynamics of their struggle with such a role. The workers’ problem is not at all whether a certain Persian word is verbally compatible with a certain German word or not, their need is to get help from their comrade Marx to advance the class war of the day.