A couple of months ago I was scheduled to debate Frank Engster in Berlin. As preparation, I did the obvious thing: I tried to read him. I had not encountered his work before, so I hunted down what was available in English. What I found was not profound, nor even particularly difficult — it was simply unreadable. Entire passages were so opaque that they defeated any attempt at interpretation. At first I wondered whether Engster’s argument was simply confused. But the more I read, the more I realised the problem was not Engster’s thought but the English itself. The translation was so mangled that it rendered the text unintelligible.

This is not an isolated case. Over the years I have repeatedly run into English translations of continental Marxist theory that seem designed to mystify. They take concepts that were clear in the original language and bury them under layers of pseudo‑technical jargon. The same pattern appears in Engster’s case. His argument leans heavily on the term valorisation, and he repeatedly uses the phrase “the valorisation of value.” In standard economic English this is not a concept — it is a tautology masquerading as theory. It is the linguistic equivalent of fog.

Why does this keep happening? Why do English translations of Marxist theory so often obscure what was originally clear? And what does this tell us about the intellectual culture that produced them?

To answer that, we need to look at the two very different traditions of translating Marxism into English.

Two Traditions: One Clear, One Obscure

The first tradition is the one associated with Engels and the early translators of Capital, such as Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Their translations were aimed at self‑educated workers — people who needed clarity, not mystique. Engels supervised these translations closely, and the result was a body of English Marxism that was readable, concrete, and faithful to the original.

The second tradition emerged in the mid‑20th century, particularly among translators associated with New Left Review and the early British Althusserians — Nicolaus, Fowkes, Fernbach, Brewster, and others. These translators were writing for a very different audience: graduate seminars, university reading groups, and the burgeoning academic industry of “theory.” Their translations often imported foreign terms directly into English, creating a specialised vocabulary that signalled sophistication but frequently obscured the underlying ideas.

This shift in audience produced a shift in style. Students, especially those immersed in theory, often take pride in mastering obscure terminology. A text filled with unfamiliar words can appear “deep,” even when the reader has no idea what the words actually mean. Obscurity becomes a badge of intellectual seriousness. And translators, consciously or not, catered to this expectation.

The result is a body of English Marxist writing in which mystification is not a bug but a feature.

Let us look at four of the worst offenders.

1. Valorisation — A Word That Was Never English

Valorisation is now a familiar term in academic Marxism, but historically it was never an English word. Between 1925 and 1975 it barely appears in English at all. Its earlier uses, from 1900 to 1925, refer exclusively to coffee price‑support schemes in Brazil. It was a loan word from Portuguese, where valorização described government efforts to maintain coffee prices.

A 1907 lecture on the São Paulo scheme makes this clear:

“The object of the valorisation scheme… was to ensure a minimum price for the planters…”
— Ramos, The Valorisation of Coffee in Brazil (1907)

This is what valorisation meant in English: price support.

Google Ngram confirms the rarity of the term. Between 1955 and 1965 it appears only once in English — in a book on agricultural price problems in India. Its sudden reappearance in the 1970s is almost entirely due to the 1975 English translation of Marx’s Collected Works, which introduced the term into academic Marxism.

But this was a disastrous choice. If we take the prior English meaning seriously, “valorisation of capital” would mean “price support for capital,” which is obviously not what Marx meant by Kapitalverwertung. The first English translation of Capital, supervised by Engels, rendered Verwertung with phrases like “creation of surplus‑value” or “self‑expanding value.” These are clear, intelligible, and faithful.

Valorisation is none of these things. It is a foreign‑sounding abstraction that obscures a simple economic process. It is mystification by translation.

2. Overdetermination — A Term That Misleads More Than It Explains

The term overdetermination entered English left theory through the translation of Althusser. But in English, the word already had two meanings:

1. The overwhelmingly dominant meaning was mathematical: an overdetermined system has more constraints than variables and therefore no solution.
2. A much rarer meaning appeared in clinical psychiatry.

Neither meaning corresponds to what Althusser meant by surdétermination. For him, political phenomena have multiple, complex causes — economic, institutional, ideological. A translator concerned with clarity might have chosen “complex‑determined” or “multi‑causal.” But Brewster opted for a term that allowed him to hint at Freudian psychoanalysis, even though most English readers in the 1970s had no familiarity with Freud.

The result was a cipher: a word that conveyed nothing and erected an immediate barrier to understanding. Students dutifully repeated it, often without any clear sense of what it meant. The obscurity became part of the term’s appeal. It was a perfect example of translation as intellectual gatekeeping.

3. Interpellation — A French Verb Smuggled Into English

Interpellate was never an English word. Brewster simply inserted the French verb into his translation of Lenin and Philosophy. English readers, having never encountered the term, were forced to guess its meaning from context. This guesswork produced a haze of pseudo‑understanding.

A clearer translation exists. “Ideology arrests the individual” captures both senses present in the French: the act of being stopped by an authority and the act of being seized or captivated. It is powerful, direct, and conceptually rich.

Instead, English readers were left with the impression that ideology somehow injects the philosophical subject into the human brain — a mystification produced entirely by translation.

4. Aleatory Materialism — Obscurity for Its Own Sake

The French word aléatoire simply means “random,” “chance‑based,” or “contingent.” In English, aleatory had only a narrow usage in music theory, referring to compositions determined by dice throws. Any translator with even a basic knowledge of 20th‑century science — quantum mechanics, information theory, statistical mechanics — would have rendered matérialisme aléatoire as “stochastic materialism.” Stochastic is the standard scientific term for processes governed by randomness.

The choice of aleatory instead of stochastic has three consequences:

• Obscurity: Most readers have no idea what “aleatory” means.
• Missed connections: It fails to link Althusser’s concept to the scientific discourse on stochastic processes.
• Unnecessary jargon: It invents a new term where a perfectly good English one already exists.

This is mystification, not translation.

Why This Matters

The mystification we see in these translations is not inherent in Marx or Althusser. It arises from the translators’ decisions — decisions shaped by academic culture, by the desire to signal theoretical sophistication, and by a readership inclined to equate obscurity with depth.

In the Engels‑supervised translations, clarity was a political necessity. The audience was composed of workers who needed to understand the mechanisms of capitalism in order to change them. Obscurity would have been a betrayal.

In the New Left Review milieu, by contrast, obscurity became a kind of intellectual currency. Foreign terms, pseudo‑technical vocabulary, and untranslated French phrases signalled membership in a theoretical elite. The result was a body of English Marxist writing that is harder to understand than it needs to be.

This is not a trivial matter. Translation is not a neutral act. It shapes the reception of ideas. When translators choose obscurity over clarity, they do not merely distort the original text; they reshape the intellectual landscape in which that text is received.

A Personal Coda

When I finally went to Berlin, I decided not to bother responding to Engster’s arguments. The English translations were so muddled that it was impossible to reconstruct a coherent position worth debating. Instead, I presented my own mathematical analysis of the value‑form — an approach grounded in clarity, precision, and the avoidance of unnecessary mystification.

If Marxist theory is to remain a living intellectual tradition, it must resist the temptation to cloak itself in obscurity. The task of translation is not to create mystery but to dispel it. Concepts that were clear in German or French should remain clear in English. Anything else is not translation but obfuscation.