'Das Kapital' unveiled in Bahasa Indonesia

'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.