Microsoft® Translator

November 17th, 2009 (816 Tage her)

Demnächst wird die neue Version des Microsoft® Translator veröffentlich, wer mag kann sich bereits jetzt von der Qualität und wirklich gelungenen User Interface Design des Google Killer vertraut machen. Hierzu der englischsprachige Text über Marx und den Kapitalismus aus der englischen Wikipedia – also im reinsten Englisch, ohne deutschen Blockwarte

Marxian political economy

Karl Marx considered capitalism to be a historically specific mode of production (the way in which the productive property is owned and controlled, combined with the corresponding social relations between individuals based on their connection with the process of production) in which capitalism has become the dominant mode of production. The capitalist stage of development or “bourgeois society,” for Marx, represented the most advanced form of social organization to date, but he also thought that the working classes would come to power in a worldwide socialist or communist transformation of human society as the end of the series of first aristocratic, then capitalist, and finally working class rule was reached. Karl Marx

Following Adam Smith, Marx distinguished the use value of commodities from their exchange value in the market. Capital, according to Marx, is created with the purchase of commodities for the purpose of creating new commodities with an exchange value higher than the sum of the original purchases. For Marx, the use of labor power had itself become a commodity under capitalism; the exchange value of labor power, as reflected in the wage, is less than the value it produces for the capitalist. This difference in values, he argues, constitutes surplus value, which the capitalists extract and accumulate. In his book Capital, Marx argues that the capitalist mode of production is distinguished by how the owners of capital extract this surplus from workers—all prior class societies had extracted surplus labor, but capitalism was new in doing so via the sale-value of produced commodities. He argues that a core requirement of a capitalist society is that a large portion of the population must not possess sources of self-sustenance that would allow them to be independent, and must instead be compelled, in order to survive, to sell their labor for a living wage. In conjunction with his criticism of capitalism was Marx’s belief that exploited labor would be the driving force behind a revolution to a socialist-style economy. For Marx, this cycle of the extraction of the surplus value by the owners of capital or the bourgeoisie becomes the basis of class struggle. This argument is intertwined with Marx’s version of the labor theory of value asserting that labor is the source of all value, and thus of profit. Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), modified classic Marxist theory and argued that capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism – which he also called “imperialism” – in order to find new markets and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism. Some 20th century Marxian economists consider capitalism to be a social formation where capitalist class processes dominate, but are not exclusive. Capitalist class processes, to these thinkers, are simply those in which surplus labor takes the form of surplus value, usable as capital; other tendencies for utilization of labor nonetheless exist simultaneously in existing societies where capitalist processes are predominant. However, other late Marxian thinkers argue that a social formation as a whole may be classed as capitalist if capitalism is the mode by which a surplus is extracted, even if this surplus is not produced by capitalist activity, as when an absolute majority of the population is engaged in non-capitalist economic activity. David Harvey extends Marxian thinking through which he theorizes the differential production of place, space and political activism under capitalism. He uses Marx’s theory of crisis to aid his argument that capitalism must have its “fixes” but that we cannot predetermine what fixes will be implemented, nor in what form they will be. This idea of fix is suggestive and could mean fix as in stabilize, heal or solve, or as in a junky needing a fix – the idea of preventing feeling worse in order to feel better. In Limits to Capital (1982), Harvey outlines an overdetermined, spatially restless capitalism coupled with the spatiality of crisis formation and its resolution. Furthermore, his work has been central for understanding the contractions of capital accumulation and international movements of capitalist modes of production and money flows. In his essay, Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development, Harvey examines the causes of the extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes across and between spaces of the world economy. He bases this uneven development on four conditionalities, being: The material embedding of capital accumulation processes in the web of socio-ecological life; accumulation by dispossession; the law-like character of capital accumulation in space and time; and, political, social and “class” struggles at a variety of geographical scales.

Jedem ist ersichtlich, das der deutsche aus dem englischen erzeugte Text weitgehend unverständlich ist. Insofern nichts Neues, seit über zehn Jahren wohlgemerkt. Wer genau hingesehen – oder geklickt hat – dem wir aufgefallen sein, das sich der Ansatz im Vergleich zu den historischen Lösungen geändert hat. Inzwischen wird der Text “gechunked”, also in seine Sätze zerlegt. Macht im Ergebnis keinen erkennbaren Unterschied, wer sich aber – wie ich in den 1990er Jahren – einstmals köstlich über die völlig verunstalten Übersetzungen solcher Werkzeuge amüsiert hat, dem kam damit eine weitere Freude abhanden. Tweet