The first complete Spanish translation of Das Kapital, translated by the Argentine socialist Juan Bautista Justo (1865-1928), the principal founder of the Socialist Party of Argentina (Partido Socialista de Argentina) and its acknowledged leader until his death.
Juan Justo’s particular brand of socialism provides an interesting example of the attempt to adapt Marxism to non-European, pre-industrialised socio-economic conditions. His politics were broadly aligned with that of the German social-democratic ‘revisionist’ Eduard Bernstein, emphasising gradual societal change over revolution, a position that was in turn determined by the influence of the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer in Justo’s thought. “Like Spencer, he linked the notion of human biological struggle to political theory and stressed evolutionary progress in society. While embracing Marx’s general vision of history as expressing evolutionary ideas, he rejected Marxist ideas of imperialism and even advocated the encouragement of foreign investment in Argentina in order to speed up economic and social development and, hence, the evolutionary process toward full socialisation of the means of production. He also revised the Marxist view of class with its emphasis on the proletariat to take account of the social composition of Argentina, where there was a very small, underdeveloped working class” (Walker & Gray, Historical Dictionary of Marxism, p. 161f).
Justo’s translation of Kapital came about as a result of a six-month tour of Europe made in 1895, which Justo would later credit with inspiring him to devote his life fully to politics and the development of socialism in Argentina. Justo departed for Europe via the United States, staying in London, Paris and Brussels where he met with and attended speeches by various leading social-democrats and socialists.
Most importantly, however, was Justo’s visit to Spain, staying first in Madrid where he was introduced to the great Spanish socialist Pablo Iglesias (1850-1925), the founder of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). The pair would remain in correspondence for many years to come, with Iglesias referring to Justo as the “wise Argentine Doctor Juan B. Justo” and hailing Justo’s Partido Socialista de Argentina as “the socialist Germany of Hispanic America” (quoted in Tarcus).
While in Madrid Justo also contributed articles to the newspaper El Socialista, the official organ of the PSOE, and delivered a speech at a memorial service held to mark the death of Friedrich Engels on the 5th of August 1895. Justo would move on to Barcelona in September 1895 where, upon the recommendation of Pablo Iglesias, he made contact with Antonio García Quejido (1856-1927), a prominent Spanish socialist and a founding member of the PSOE along with Iglesias.
García Quejido was a typographer by trade and had long explored the possibility of publishing a complete and direct Spanish translation of Das Kapital as the two previous earlier efforts had both been incomplete: the first was a partial translation by the republican Pablo Correa y Zafrilla’s (1844-1888) based on only the first half of Joseph Roy’s French version and serialised in the Spanish newspaper La Republica between 1886 to 1887, followed closely thereafter by a translation of the Gabriel Deville abridgement published in 1887, translated by Antonio Atienza on behalf of the PSOE.
The need for a full Spanish translation of Kapital was therefore clear, and the project was borne out of this September 1895 meeting between García Quejido and Justo - the Spanish publisher and the Argentine translator. Upon his return to Buenos Aires, Justo set about this enormous project, periodically sending sections of the book to García Quejido in Spain. Justo’s translation was based on the fourth German edition published in 1890, being the last to appear under Engels’s editorship. It contains Marx’s original prefaces to the first and second German editions as well as Engels’s prefaces to the posthumously published third and fourth German editions.
The translation was in turn edited by García Quejido in Madrid, who published the text in his short-lived series Biblioteca de Ciencias Sociales. It was issued in successive fortnightly pamphlets of thirty-two pages between 6 September 1897 and 19 December 1898, appearing alongside a Spanish translation of Gabriel Deville’s Principios Socialistas by Pablo Iglesias. García Quejido then began to have these individual parts bound-together at the start of 1899 and sold as a 688-page volume for 7.50 pesetas, some of which were exported to booksellers in Argentina.
The translation did not sell particularly well, in part owing to the continued popularity of the PSOE’s edition of Deville’s abridgement, and as late as 1903 García Quejido handed over the remaining 800 unsold copies (from a print run thought to have originally been 2,000) to the Madrid newspaper El Socialista, who this time advertised the book for a mere 3 pesetas.
Rare. OCLC list a single copy in North America, held by the University of Chicago, along with two copies in Spain. No copies on LibraryHub or KVK.
See: Horacio Tarcus, ‘Traductores y editores de la “Biblia del Proletariado”. La suerte de El Capital en el mundo hispanoamericano’; Carlos Rodríguez Braun, ‘Early Liberal Socialism in Latin America: Juan B. Justo and the Argentine Socialist Party’; Richard J. Walter, ‘Argentina’, in The Formation of Labour Movements: 1870-1914. An International Perspective, Vol II.
