Podcast 40: Marx and Poetics w/ Keston Sutherland

We are joined by poet and scholar Keston Sutherland to discuss the poetic language used in the works of Marx. In an essay entitled ‘The poetics of Capital’, Sutherland contrasts Marx’s use of language with that of Henry Mayers Hyndman’s bungled translation of Marx’s Capital, published in 1881, as England for all. As Sutherland notes:
“Marx assaults his reader with the image of beloved limbs ripped up and darling heads crushed flat. Hyndman softens the mental lighting so that these same beloved bodies instead more agreeably just ‘fade away’, ephemeral as an enchanted fairy in a forest dim by Keats. The workers who in Marx are crushed, sucked out, laid waste, decertified, elasticated, tortured and distorted into human specks, stumps and fractions, are by Hyndman regenerated in the language of literary respectability as lyric poets, ‘who now rejoice in the gleam of a transient prosperity, only to be cast into a deeper despair on the next stagnation.”

Keston Sutherland, ‘The Poetics of Capital’ in Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image. Aspects of Marx’s Capital Today.

It isn’t simply enough to understand the intellectual and critical content of Marx’s writings. To fully grasp Marx’s ideas we have to understand Marx’s poetics. As Sutherland notes, Marx’s “Capital is both critique and poetics at once”.