'Das Kapital' unveiled in Bahasa Indonesia

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Kapital
Hilmar Farid, ed.
Oey Hay Djoen, trans
Hasta Mitra
986 pp

At a time when communism has been rendered implausible after the demise of the Soviet Union, and capitalism and democracy have taken center stage, a Jakarta-based publishing house has launched the Indonesian translation of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, considered a bible of radical socialist ideology.

Hasta Mitra publishing house is renowned for its hardened resolve to print the work of dissident writer and multiple Nobel Prize for Literature nominee Pramoedya Ananta Toer. In keeping with the guerrilla-style marketing it mastered during the oppressive regime of the former president Soeharto, it published the first of three volumes of the Indonesian translation, titled Kapital, with little fanfare.

Kapital is Marx's major and most influential work, and was the result of 30 years' close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. Volume One is the only volume that was completed and edited by Marx himself.

Kapital tries to provide a rational explanation of a world that was built by exploiting workers, with the rich and powerful gaining wealth and power as a product of the labor force. Marx coined a new social order, the bourgeoisie, only after workers overthrew the ruling class.

Having ceased to exist as inspiration for radical social movements, intellectuals abandoned Kapital's social and political theories -- which emphasized the domination of the material world over the social and spiritual realm -- as it was no longer adequate as a holistic explanation to social reality.

Aware of the oppression that took place behind the Iron Curtain under the banner of communism, Western intellectuals attempted to uncover a more humane and benign face to Marxism, something they would later find in the work of Italian thinker and activist Antonio Gramsci and Marx's earlier works focusing on the role of the individual as well as ideology -- as opposed to the material forces posited in Kapital -- in effecting social change.

The Indonesian translation was released when the market niche for Kapital had been saturated with literature promoting leftist thinking of all strands. Works by guerrilla leader Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Soviet leader Vladimir Illyich Lenin and Indonesia's silenced leftist leader Tan Malaka thrived after the downfall of Soeharto, who had long put a stranglehold on radical, particularly "Red" ideas.

The massive proliferation of leftist sociological and philosophical works has, ironically, turned them into mere commercial gimmicks that have lost all their subversive potential.

Market saturation aside, the publication of one of the most influential books in 20th century thinking is in itself a cultural milestone.

"The publication of the book marked a turning point for the country. It signaled the moment the public had grown accustomed to all kinds of political thinking and had cast aside all stigma left behind by the past (New Order) regime," philosopher Frans Magnis Suseno of the Driyarkara School of Philosophy told The Jakarta Post.

A case in point is Magnis' own book on the history of Marxism as political ideology, Karl Marx's Thinking: From Utopian Socialism to the Revisionist Debate by publishing giant Gramedia, which has sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Hasta Mitra defended the long overdue publication of Kapital, saying that although the communism experiment may have failed to create an equal and classless society, the theses of Kapital that provided the foundation for communism was still in explicating social phenomenon, i.e., capitalist society.

"Marx may have used England, where capitalism reached maturity, as a foundation for his analysis, but Kapital is not only an analysis on what transpired there. Instead, it explains how capitalism works in abstract. Only rarely does Marx refer to factual conditions. Therefore, Marx's approach can be used to analyze all stages of capitalism starting from its primitive form, commodity production" it said.

The publisher also said that translating the canon was a mammoth task, given the complexity of the heavily footnoted original text.

"Readers will find that we have retained a number of terms used in the original text, as we could not find their Indonesian equivalent. This also serves to maintain their original, intended meaning," editor Hilmar Farid said.

A team of translators calling themselves the "European friends" undertook the laborious challenge of transliterating Kapital's Russian and Hungarian texts into a rough manuscript. This draft was judged against the original German version, then "retranslated" in Indonesian and given Farid's final editorial touch.

The hard work has been successful, and the final Indonesian translation that hit the shelves is superbly readable, despite the complex technicalities of Marxist theory.

In addition, the translated version has tried to refine the dry language of the original text by finding Indonesian words that would ameliorate the rigid English. For example, "accumulation" is translated as timbunan, which means amassing, instead of using akumulasi or penumpukan.

Despite the excellent translation, readers will have to toil through the text to grasp the content of Kapital, which Marx proclaimed to be a scientific explanation of the social world -- the way Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was a scientific explanation of the natural world.

All in all, it is doubtful that the Indonesian translation of Das Kapital will give rise to a moribund socialist movement as Soeharto so feared -- the merit of this tome is that it provides an alternative worldview to the contemporary world dominated by a relentless hunt for material gain.