I was recently reading an English translation of a non-theory-related non-fiction book that was published just a few years ago. Next on my list was re-reading Engels’ “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”.
I can only describe my experience as the most severe whiplash; comparable only to reading the comments on a news thread on .world after checking the Lemmygrad thread.
I found myself reading so slowly. In 30 minutes I would have barely read a few pages, even though I was not struggling with the content itself.
I found that it’s just that the language is so needlessly impenetrable. So many run-on sentences, so many odd turns of phrases, archaic terms (not relevant to Marxist theory), and bizarre sentence structures.
I have never read the original German text nor any other language translation, so I don’t have a point of reference. I don’t know how much of it is Engels’ writing style, versus the translator’s 19th century English.
A translation written in 1892 was not written for English speakers in 2026.
My question is: Would these works not become so much more accessible if we had a modern English translation from the original text?
If this would be considered useful, how could we realistically realise this for all of the fundamental works from that time period?
-
I imagine that finding and hiring a translator who is familiar with Marxism to re-do the translations would be extremely difficult and expensive.
-
Community translations are probably not feasible as translation requires a very specific skill set, not just fluent speakers.
-
Machine translations might be possible, but it’s crucial to not lose any specific terminology and not misconstrue the meanings of certain quotes and phrases. The translator (whether human or machine) needs to have a strong grasp on Marxist theory and history to not distort the meanings in the text.
I would really appreciate everyone’s thoughts and suggestions on this. Maybe I completely dropped the ball on this topic.
P.S.
This is not just in regards to “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, it’s just the experience that inspired me to write this post.
I’m not unfamiliar with reading theory from that time period nor Marx and Engels’ writings in general. I’m also not completely unfamiliar with 19th century English, I’ve read plenty of fiction written in that time period as well.
I actually think Engels is fairly readable, all things considered. Some of the vocabulary and expressions are a bit antiquated but the sentence structure is not that bad (though as a speaker of German and (mediocre) French, i can see how some of his sentence structure is more natural in those languages than in English). There are much worse writers both in the 19th and 20th century, especially when you get into the realm of philosophy. It’s just the style of the time that you have to get used to. Once you do you can digest it faster.
I don’t think it’s something you can translate away without losing some of the meaning and nuance of the original. That’s why summaries and commentaries on Marx and Engels exist, where more modern writers express their ideas in simpler language.
For me the main difficulty when reading 19th century works comes from the large amount of references to their contemporary politics, to what for them would have been recent history but to us today falls in the realm of fairly obscure historical knowledge, and implicit assumptions that the reader would be familiar with the social and economic environment of that time. Reading old theory requires you to make an effort to acquaint yourself with what the world was like and what was happening at that point in history. This can be quite exhausting.
At first it’s like you learn 70% history and 30% socialist theory. But this also gets easier over time the more you learn and the more you begin to be able to imagine yourself in that time. It will always feel a bit alien though.
Personally i prefer reading Lenin over Marx and Engels, partly because he feels more modern and partly because, to me, the way Russians write feels more straightforward than French and German authors.
For me the main difficulty when reading 19th century works comes from the large amount of references to their contemporary politics
This is a big problem for me, especially cause I have ADHD and I just wanna get to the point. Bringing up references to events and things I have no context for is extremely distracting. It’s the biggest obstacle when reading theory cause I just get so bored of the tangents that I just get annoyed and do something else.
There also needs to be a better medium for theory, I hardly have the energy to read a wall of text on here let alone something someone wrote over 100 years ago that I can’t even relate to.
I get that. Reading the original is not suitable for everyone. Some people learn better from listening to (e.g. via YouTube videos) or reading summaries (such as this or this or this or this). Others might benefit from working with a reading guide (alternative). And others learn best from group discussions in a literature reading circle. There is no one correct way to engage with theory. Experiment and see what works best for you.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
I definitely agree regarding the history aspect, and having to understand the context in which the works were written and the particular events and currents the authors were referring to.
However, I would like to clarify that I do not mean simplifying the texts, that is, as you said, the job of summaries and commentaries. Here I am strictly talking about the language.
As far as I know, you are German or at least a native German speaker, so I can only assume that you read Marx and Engels’ works in German. This I cannot comment on, since I have not read the original works as I do not speak the language. I’m not sure if any of the concerns I have expressed are applicable at all to the German and French editions (or any language other than English).
My point is that if we were to take the original German text today, for example from “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” and translated it to English, it would be more legible to today’s English-speaking audience compared to Edward Aveling’s 1892 translation.
As far as I know, you are German or at least a native German speaker, so I can only assume that you read Marx and Engels’ works in German.
I am neither actually, i just speak fluent German as a second language. I also have never read Marx and Engels in any other language than English (which is also not my native language) … though i probably should, just to see how it compares and which is easier.
My point is that if we were to take the original German text today, for example from “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” and translated it to English, it would be more legible to today’s English-speaking audience compared to Edward Aveling’s 1892 translation.
On this i have no doubt that you are correct.
I am neither actually, i just speak fluent German as a second language.
That’s my bad, I shouldn’t have assumed. Though in my defence I’ve seen you comment on events in Germany a few times and Gauss is German, lol.
deleted by creator
A lot of theory is like this. Mostly because at the time it was written for a more academic public so the language is both outdated and sometimes needlessly complex. I often wished for a lot of theory to be more reader friendly or updated but we need people for that.
I wonder if it would be feasible to do with machine translation (such as through an LLM with specific prompting to not mess up the terminology) + voluntary review from some of our members.
Maybe we could have a pilot with a very short work such as “Wage Labor and Capital”, for example.
Yes, writing conventions were very different back then and texts are made much more difficult today because they’re archaic. You can see this in interview transcripts and Wage labour and capital. WLC was written from a series of conferences Marx gave to a workers union in 1847 - it may be that the speeches were rewritten for the book format, but even then, I have to assume he gave the lectures mostly the way they’ve been written.
I don’t have as much problem reading theory in French vs. the English editions, part of it could be a second language thing but I think it’s also that (written) French has practically not changed from 1850s. It’s how we learned to read and write it in school. I don’t have that problem reading more modern authors (20th century) in English.
One thing I’d like to develop on ProleWiki is an easy way (with a clear dropdown menu for example) to select different editions for the same book, and have them switch out instantly. That way we could also host new editions in the age of the internet, where everyone can make their own. It’s a far-off idea though, I have no idea how I’d achieve this yet.
As for how to achieve this… I do echo another comment that it might not be the most important factor when it comes to theory. There’s lots of videos too on youtube which people are probably more likely to search for first before a book. But I think the experiment is interesting and worthwhile, you could start with a shorter work, send both editions to a sample audience, and compare their impressions of the two.
In the practical the problem as always will be to correctly convey the material without (inadvertently or not) removing or rewording things. Older editions are not innocent of this btw (and neither are youtube videos! but people still open them first before reaching for the book), there have been terrible official translations in the past. Something that seemed innocuous to the translator and they decided to leave out or didn’t understand completely changes the meaning of what the author actually meant, and the error gets repeated centuries later lol.
Like just the way Oppose Book Worship starts with “you must investigate! You must not talk nonsense! It won’t do! It won’t do!” could be translated any which of 100 different ways and each paints a slightly different picture of Mao.
However yog is working on a project that I don’t want to divulge before he does, but it may be a usecase for something exactly like this. @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml
edit: or perhaps just adding footnotes as a companion guide sort of thing?
To add to that, it’s also worth remembering that people like Lenin or Mao weren’t writing guides for future generations to use. They were developing theory for the movement they were building focusing on the conditions of their time. While a lot of the ideas are invariant and generally applicable, the examples used are not really relatable today. When Lenin rants about Bernstein or Kautsky that means nothing for most modern readers. It would be really valuable to take books like The State and Revolution and update them to use modern relatable examples that people have some context for. Like swap out Bernstein with Sanders, show how his soc dem policies are a dead end.
And the thing I’m working on will definitely help with restyling, which should reduce the labor involved in creating a consistent feel for the text.
It would be really valuable to take books like The State and Revolution and update them to use modern relatable examples that people have some context for. Like swap out Bernstein with Sanders
I agree completely. While the general points are still correct and I personally find it interesting from a historical point of view to read Lenin’s polemics against Bernstein and Kautsky and can definitely see many parallels with modern day socdems and radlibs, there are also things which are specific to Lenin’s time which do not necessarily translate one-to-one to our situation. And at the same time we have our own unique conditions which the classical Marxist writers did not and could not have addressed (they did not have a time machine to travel into the future).
Yup, and what ends up happening now is that we’re just preaching to the choir. People who are willing to read these books, and relate them to current events have already bought into these ideas, and it’s just helping us refine our existing understanding. All the jargon and examples people have no context for create an unnecessary barrier.
When Lenin rants about Bernstein or Kautsky that means nothing for most modern readers.
It depends on the state of said modern reader; not all live in the same conditions. Some have read a lot of older texts, and some haven’t. Some have taken an interest in the late 19th and early 20th century, and some haven’t. Some believe that the Democratic party will get better, others don’t believe so, but without exactly understanding why. It is in my opinion varied from reader to reader, especially in diverse places from, say, the Bible Belt, to Bavaria, to Okinawa. In this case, the ideology not just of Lenin, but of Kautsky would mean something very different, provoke a different amount of interest, a different reaction, &c. I personally think that it is best when you first teach the history of what went on, then the Marxist application. For instance, teaching what happened in WWI, and then WWI as explained by Lenin. I was able to get my brother to understand a good amount of MLism by explaining how exactly Capitalism affects Japan, and why they have not just the problems that they, but their particular problems.
Sure, but if the goal is recruitment and broad education then it makes sense to create texts that are as accessible as possible.
Something that seemed innocuous to the translator and they decided to leave out or didn’t understand completely changes the meaning of what the author actually meant, and the error gets repeated centuries later
This is a big issue when you study older texts where the original was not preserved and you only have a translation of a translation that survived. But it still happens regularly even today when books get translated into different languages, especially when they are not scientific literature but meant mainly for entertainment, translators take a lot of liberties and sometimes noticeably change the meaning of the original in order to have it sound “cooler” or more natural in their own language. To some extent this is just unavoidable. Very rarely will you be able to fully convey the entire nuance and “feel” of another language when translating.
deleted by creator
Translating poetry is the most extreme example. Because if you want to preserve the rhyme and the meter you have to take enormous liberties with the meaning. If you want to faithfully preserve the exact wording then you will very likely completely lose the rhyme and meter.
You basically have to be a poet yourself to translate poetry halfway decently.
Agreed on all points. I also definitely think we should leverage the fact that these works are digitised and available on the internet; we aren’t bound by the limitations of publishing in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the practical the problem as always will be to correctly convey the material without (inadvertently or not) removing or rewording things. Older editions are not innocent of this btw
We also have the benefit of later works that have built upon the work of those 19th century books and essays. I wouldn’t doubt that well-read MLs today would have a better understanding of the relevance of certain phrases and terminologies than the 19th century translator, and that they would be better equipped to relate and connect it to other relevant theory.
I’d be interested to see what @yogthos@lemmygrad.ml is working on if he chooses to publicise it.
Basically, I ended up going down a rabbit hole of seeing whether you could train a LoRA to do believable writing in a style of a given author. I spent a few weeks on it, but looks like it’s mostly working now. I ended up training it on Lovecraft cause I found his entire corpus conveniently compiled here. The trickiest part was ensuring that the meaning was preserved during the style transfer. I found that with smaller models like Qwen 2.5 with 8 billion params you didn’t quite get the right results. It wasn’t very consistent about either the style or the content. I hit a sweet spot with a 32 billion parameter model though. Ended up renting out some GPU time on runpod, and it cost me around 20 bucks total to train it. The results are great though.
For example, I had it style my last blog post just now. You can see the styled version here, and the original draft here:
What makes Greenland important is that is has valuable resources, while also providng a foothold in the Arctic where the melting ice creates new trade routes that Russia and China are well positioned to control.
What makes Greenland attractive: it wouldn’t be a long engagement, it’s just about the size of an operation that the US military is capable of carrying out successfully. It’s a big political stunt that will dominate the news. It signals that the US shift in policy away from international law. It demonstrates that the US no longer has enough geopolitical pull to dominate the UN Security Council, and is now reduced to take unilateral action as a rogue state.
The whole idea of Western unity was underpinned by an unspoken understanding that the vassals of the US would get to partake in the plunder of the world. Any atrocity could be excused under the guise of bringing freedom and democracy to the world, but it was never supposed to happen to the supposed allies of America. But the times have changed. As the world shakes off western parasitism, the share of the pie is shrinking, and the ring leader decides it now needs a payment in flesh from those who chose to subordinate themselves.
At its heart, Greenland is a disciplining action for Europe. The US already has a base there, it is a NATO protectorate, and NATO itself is an institution created by the US to subordinate Europe. There is no functional reason why the US would need to annex Greenland. The goal is to humiliate the Europeans, force them to publicly bow down and accept that the US can take whatever it wants from them with impunity, and all they can do is say thank you daddy. Everybody knows that when Trump goes to officially annex Greenland, it’s purely a symbolic move.
And of course, you might be saying to yourself, surely the Europeans won’t stand for it. Surely this will be the time that they stand up for their interests! But the reality is that they have no choice but to accept the humiliation because Europeans now have a powerful and angry Russia on their border, and they’ve burned all the bridges that could be burnt. Yet, they know full well that they’re not capable of fighting Russia on their own. They lack energy, industrial capacity, and even the ability to produce basic things like explosives. The armies of Europe are small and inexperienced, while Russian army is now well seasoned in its fourth year of fighting. Russia was forced to figure out its logistics out of sheer necessity, and its economy is now reorganized to support the war effort. Russia also enjoys the benefit of having abundant resources, large industries it has inherited from USSR, and vast energy reserves. Anybody looking at the situation objectively can see that Europe would not be able to fight Russia in its current state.
Of course the other option would be to accept that Russia won, and to try to find a path towards peaceful coexistence. Yet, the entire legitimacy of the current European leadership rests on having Russia as the enemy which requires the US to stay in Europe since Europeans know they can’t fight Russia on their own. And hence we see a scenario where Europeans are forced to accept any and every debasement to keep Americans in play.
Meanwhile, the US doesn’t really see Europe as strategic as during the Cold War when USSR posed an ideological opposition to the US model on the world stage. Today, China has risen to become the new ideological opposition, and Europe is just so much dead weight to be stripped it for parts and discarded. Now that the unipolar moment is over, the US see domination of its hemisphere as the primary focus for securing resources in order to contest China going forward.
And so, Europe is destined to suffer humiliation in its desperate attempt to keep its role as the junior partner in the western alliance. This stems primarily from two illusions. First, it hinges on the hope that “the US will be better if a different party takes power”; second, it holds a wishful thinking that “Europe will not become the next target of bullying.” This mentality reveals a harsh reality: Europe feels powerless to cope with various changes alone, and therefore regards its relationship with the US as a higher-priority “strategic asset” that must be carefully maintained. Consequently, some attempt to exchange compromises of principles for the preservation of their so-called core interests in the face of hegemonic behavior. This is a typical appeasement mentality, fantasizing about pacifying powerful forces through concessions.
Respect for and protection of the sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of all states is a widely accepted norm of international relations forged through the blood and fire of World War II. It is also the foundation and soul of the UN-centered international system and of an international order based on international law. Historical lessons have long written a painful verdict on appeasement.
Eventually, the current liberal order in Europe will lose its legitimacy as a result of living standard will collapsing due to austerity to drive military spending on one side, and American predation on the other. The governments of all the major European countries are already hanging by a thread with their approvals hovering close to single digits. It is only a matter of time until nationalist parties such as RN, AfD, and Reform start sweeping elections. At that point NATO and EU will fall apart, with nationalists in better off countries pulling up their ladders. Europe will become a fractured continent again with different countries going their own ways, and historical grievances resurfacing.
Now I can really just jot my thoughts down and structure the narrative I want, then throw it at the model and get well written text out of it. I find this is really liberating for me, because previously I’d always get stuck on language and phrasing to get it to read the way I want. Now, I can just focus on the content and what I’m trying to say.
No offense, i’m sure you put a lot of effort into training your model, but your draft here is far more readable and logical than the article itself.
I struggled to make sense of parts of the actual article, even after reading the draft here, some of the sentences ended up being written in a very confusing way, some of the choice of vocabulary is unnecessarily pretentious, and a couple of parts were just grammatically wrong.
Content wise excellent but stylistically i really did not vibe with this one.
That’s fair, it is trained on somewhat archaic way of writing. Now that I have the process down, I can easily experiment with some other authors. It does illustrate the point though, you can take the content, and rewrite it in a new style that’s completely different from the original writing. And it will be consistent across, so for something like a wiki, this approach is great because you can have everything look consistent even when you have many authors editing the content.
Lovecraft was impenetrable even in his time, but the principle works. For wiki work or places where it’s important to have a cohesive style across entries this could be great, I’d love to try it on prolewiki pages because style varies a lot depending on who wrote the page.
I think I’m mostly happy with the way it works now. I just need to clean, and package it up here, and I’ll ping you once it’s ready to play around with.
This is quite interesting, but do you think it would be applicable to translation work? So if we use your example, the original version of the text would be the “draft” and it would be able to modernise the language? (not sure what it would be trained on though, maybe modern marxist texts?)
I would assume it’s possible to reign it in so it doesn’t attempt to modify the content itself too much.
Definitely, in fact there’s already translation happening internally. What I found out was that if you just gave original writing to the model, then it would often retain a lot of stylistic elements. What you have to do is neutralize the input first to strip out the style and simply keep the propositions. The first thing I tried was to get an LLM to try and rewrite the text in a neutral way, but that was spotty and sometimes it would drop some propositions. But then I had this idea to translate the text to Mandarin at HSK 5 level. It has completely different grammar, and the HSK5 forces it to use simple words and sentence. So that becomes the basis for the styler where it can now take what’s being said and write it using its own words.
And it doesn’t really matter what subject the writer whose style you’re adopting wrote about. What the model learns is the speech patterns, the adjectives, and so on, and then it’s smart enough to apply them in the context. So, you definitely could train it on some modern writing, and then feed old text to it to produce modern prose.
My only concern is that it could over correct and overwrite theoretically-relevant terms (proletariat, bourgeoisie, contradiction, labour power, work, etc.), which is why I believed it needed to be trained specifically on marxist texts to understand the relevance of these terms.
I’m not sure how much of this would be addressed through training or simply just prompting. In any case there would need to be multiple runs of manual review.
As with any LLM tooling, you do need a human to check over the work after, because it can’t guarantee correctness on its own. But it can save you a lot of time up front because now you just have to read through, and make sure things make sense instead of actually figuring out how to rewrite the text. So, manual review is key.
Training the model on Marxist texts will help too, especially more modern ones that use the right terminology without the archaic language. Basically the way the training works is that you create pairs of paragraphs, one with input text and one with the target output. You create thousands of these pairs, and then the model gets scored on how closely it managed to produce the desired output from the input during training, and learns the patterns through reinforcement. So, if you mix some Marxist text in that will help it see the terms and know they need to be preserved.
When I first started to get into theory, I did find a lot of books were rather difficult, so I did not bother to even try and digest them all. I would just read the book and if I didn’t understand what was being said, I would continue reading anyways. Many books I would only feel like I got very little out of it, but over time reading more books that very little bit starts to add up, and I start to feel like I understand the general concepts, and then I could even go back to an older book and get more out of it.
Some of these works are probably still a bit dry in the original language, and indeed many of the translations are fairly old. Some even have translation mistakes. The Manifesto has that famous line that summarizes communism as “the abolition of private property,” despite that being a mistranslated as that is not what was said in the original German. The word “abolish” means to “completely do away with” whereas “sublate” is closer to “take over,” which is completely different.
Sadly, you just have to put up with poor translations, but as I said, the more you read the less of a deal it becomes. You start to understand things eventually even if the first book or two you read sound like 95% gibberish to you. It sometimes also helps to read a summary of what it is arguing before you read it, because having a general idea of the arguments that will be presented makes it easier to follow along.
A lot of valid points here. This method you describe is actually quite common for learning languages.
I only take issue with this:
Sadly, you just have to put up with poor translations
Sure, 20 years ago we might have had to put up with them, but why now? Today we have the digital infrastructure and communities to distribute new works without publishing houses. We have the technology to revise and update old translations to more legible modern standards. Why shouldn’t we at least attempt to take advantage of the tools we have at our disposal?
Translating by hand is very hard and time consuming, and so you are unlikely to find someone to do it for you for free. The only tools you really have available for that are AI. Something like Qwen Max is indeed pretty good at translating as well as summarizing things. But actually expecting a person to translate a book for you is just too much to ask.
Yes, of course. I already elaborated on that in the post and in various comments in this thread. The most realistic idea would be to use some form of machine translation with specific parameters and have a crowd-sourced review and adjustment approach.
Whether it’s feasible or not depends on how well the machine translation works, but there’s good reason to believe that it’s already good enough these days for a task like this. (and if it’s not quite there, then it’s only a matter of months or at most 2 years)
Oh, a fellow S:U&S reader! I also found it rather hard to digest so I switched to reading it in my mother tongue. The translation is a bit quirky, but I can comprehend it better that way.
I find reading Marx and Engels in Vietnamese and Chinese better than English because they’re directly translated from French source. When I need to read Capital I just go back to ancient translation like Ben Fowkes or Chinese publisher like Foreign Language Press.
Honestly I don’t think difficulty reading and understanding theory is what is holding back the movement. We lack agitation and organization.
Maybe it is better that theory is a bit cumbersome. It encourages reading groups where the ideas an be assimilated as a community instead of as an individual.
To clarify, I’m not claiming that the idiosyncrasies of 19th century English translations are holding the movement back. I’m just saying that they make reading theory more difficult that it needs to be, which might not be a major factor overall, but why not attempt to improve accessibility in this sense?
I would have to say I disagree about the second point. I don’t see the benefit of making theory more cumbersome by keeping around old translations in a language that’s not very familiar to the majority of people. Reading groups are very valuable, but moreso for discussing the contents of the books and explaining the context, history, etc., not for translating 19th century English idioms and phrases.
It’s not just the translations, the originals read weird as well.
Yes especially Marx, not to disrespect his works but he was not a good writer at all. I dont mean the content but how it is written. I never read Marx in english, only in german though
To be fair I think this is more of a very recent issue.
Text in the 1800’s used to read like:
Verily the man of well read status hath much to educate the less read masses
While today it’s:
Skibidi rizz on that thang, the gigabrain sigma telling all you put the fries in the bag gyattless fanum-taxable NPCs the 6 7
This is awful, I love it.
