ComradeRat

Afaik this is the transcription of the original letter rather than a translation (it can be found in MEWBand32). I'm not a German speaker, but my guess would be that any weirdness is a combination of:

1. it being 19th century German;

2. it might have traits of 19th century Rhineland dialect;

3. it uses random English;

4. it's a speedily written letter so may have errors

Marx tends to use random English, French, Latin, Greek, Italian, etc words and grammar in his personal writings along with his own contractions in German, and just words he's made up

New English edition of Capital

no mention of inclusion of changes from the French edition

Manga Kapital is better bc it isn't translated by Edward Aveling

Engels translated his own name as Fred actually

We have evidence of this as early as the 1838-9 letters to his sister Marie (Engels was in the habit of using random bits of English even in his earliest letters).

And it becomes more prominent ofc once he moves to England and lives there. Marx himself used 'Fred' to refer to Engels often, including in this Dec. 6 1868 letter

Rent is expensive

irony poisoning, it's bad folks! Boomers got lead in their blood but by god zoomers have iron in their brain

edit: i do wanna point out that this isn't so much an issue of 'smartness' as "large groups generally fail to understand anything more subtle than a hammer to the head" thing (i.e. a critique of irony in mass consumer culture of which the internet is a part)

Another interesting late Marx letter is the drafts and reply to Vera Zasulich: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/

One of the really neat things about the drafts it that Marx's deletions (in the manuscript, crossed out) are indicated with square brackets. Really gives a sense of Marx's thought in process. Also lots of indications of him rephrasing to be less rude.

Note: Marxists.org has placed quotation marks around first and second. This is because the 'second' draft was actually written first (Riazanov mislabelled it in MEGA1 😔 )

The draft labelled 'second' on Marxists.org actually begins discussing the very topic of the (lack of) suprahistorical validity:

I. I have shown in Capital that the [transformation] metamorphosis of feudal production into capitalist production had its starting-point in the expropriation of the producers; and, in particular, that ‘the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process’ (p. 315 of the French edition). I continue: ‘Only in England has it (the expropriation of the agricultural producer) been accomplished in a radical manner. ... All the other countries of Western Europe are following the same course’ (loc. cit.).

Thus [in writing these lines] I expressly restricted [the development in question] this ‘historical inevitability’ to ‘the. countries of Western Europe’. So that there should not be the slightest doubt about my thinking, I say on p. 341: ‘Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where ... the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non­workers, private property has a different character.’

Thus the process I [described] analysed, substituted a form of private, fragmented property of the workers- capitalist property(a) of a tiny minority (loc. cit., p. 342), substituted one kind of property for another. How [ would it apply] could it apply to Russia, where the land is not and never has been the private property of the agricultural producer? [In any case, those who believe that the dissolution of communal property is a historical necessity in Russia cannot, at any event, prove such a necessity from my account of the inevitable course of things in Western Europe. On the contrary, they would have to provide new arguments quite independent of the course I described. The only thing they can learn from me is this:] Thus, the only conclusion they would be justified in drawing from the course of things in the West is the following: If capitalist production is to be established in Russia, the first step must be to abolish communal property and expropriate the peasants, that is, the great mass of the people. That is anyway the wish of the Russian liberals [who wish to naturalise capitalist production in their own country and, quite consistently, to transform the great mass of peasants into simple wage-labourers], but does their wish prove more than Catherine II’s wish [to graft] to implant the Western medieval craft system in Russian soil?

[Since the Russian peasants’ land is their common property and has never been their private property.... ]

[In Russia, where the land is not and never has been the peasant’s ‘private property’, the transformation metamorphosis of this of such private property into capitalist property has no sense is impossible is therefore out of the question. The only conclusion one might draw is that .... All that can be concluded from the Western data .... If one wishes to draw some indication lesson from the (Western) data .... ]

[The most simple-minded observer could not deny that these are two quite distinct cases. In any case, the Western process.... ]

Thus [the process I have analysed] the expropriation of the agricultural producers in the West served ‘to transform the fragmented private property of workers’ into the concentrated private property of capitalists. But it was always the substitution of one form of private property for another form of private property. [How, then, could this same process apply to the land in Russia to the Russian agricultural producers whose land is not and never has ... whose property in land always remained ‘communal’ and has never been ‘private’. The same historical process which [I analysed] such as it was realised in the West.... ] In Russia, on the contrary, it would be a matter of substituting capitalist property for the communist property [of the tillers of the land – a process that would evidently be quite ... ].

Yes indeed! If capitalist production is to establish its sway in Russia, then the great majority of peasants – that is, of the Russian people – will have to be transformed into wage-labourers, and hence be expropriated through the prior abolition of their communist property. But in any event, the Western precedent would prove nothing at all [about the ‘historical inevitability’ of this process].

Rate of profit has a tendency to fall over time. This tendency results from increasing amount of constant capital, i.e. all inputs other than labour, in production. The tendency of constant capital to increase results from the search for relative surplus value. There's a countertendency of course; rate of profit can increase or constant capital decrease for various reasons (e.g. one industry might see the value of its inputs decrease by annexing land to the market, another may manage to gut environmental regulations to save money on waste disposal). But there is a limit to this ability to grow, so after capital finds something to gorge on the rate of profit resumes its steady fall (setting aside financial/debt nonsense that postpones this fall until it becomes a crash).

Overproduction is when the producing capitalist produces more goods than there are buyers for. Because capitalist production runs on debt, this rapidly causes cascades of bad debts leading to the abovementioned bubble and crash. Overproduction is of course relative to demand to consume the products. Therefore it can result from 'simply' producing too much, but another factor is people not being paid enough to buy things. Overproduction can (has been) avoided by enabling massive amounts of debt (another bubble), or by creating massive consumer nations whose main purpose is to consume the good produced for surplus value in the underdeveloped nations (right now we are of course doing both, a wonderful bubble)

Both are relevant concepts, fetishising and focusing on one of them is faulty analysis. One, both or neither may be relevant in any given situation

some suggestions Kohei Saito - Marx in the Anthropocene (292 pages)

Kayanesenh Paul Williams - Kayanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (472 pages)

Leigh Brownhill - Land, Food, Freedom: Struggles For the Gendered Commons in Kenya, 1870-2007 (350 pages)

James Ferguson - The Anti-Politics Machine: 'Development', Depoliticisation, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (336 pages)

Ira Katznelson - When Affirmative Action was White; an Untold History of Racial Inequality in America (272 pages)

Vol2 of Capital is most directly relevant to the time question. Timed etc games mean the consumer will consume the game faster. This means they will buy another game faster, enabling more rapid turnover of the capitalists investment in games. As with historical games/sports, as they become a spectacle and a source of profit, capital takes it over and subsumes it, reorganising its production and rationalising its consumption. In search of relative surplus value, it must be turned into a more appealing spectacle than any of its competitors. One of the easiest ways to do this is simply aim to break records, leading to the drives you point out, towards (extremely fierce, violent, unsafe, unfriendly) competition and efficiency (the latter of which is capitalism's favourite word; its positive connotation hides the fact that it almost always means "efficiency for the production and realisation of surplus value" rather than "efficiency for the realisation of living needs").

Regarding the competition and focus on soley athletics and efficiency, yeah we (overdeveloped capitalist nations) are a weird society in terms of the constant competition. Rybczynski's Waiting for the Weekend gives a very good example of this (as well as a more in depth analysis): in the 1920s, it was common for regular folks to go ski-ing by simply tying long flat objects, or even round ones, to their work boots. The wealthy scoffed at this and attempted to be 'professional hobbyists' as opposed to these mere 'amateurs' (sidenote; the word 'amateur' used to be positive, meaning one did something for fun, but has turned into a negative word implying lack of skill and purpose because we demand constant production of surplus value), and bought 'professional quality' skis, pants, jackets, etc, etc, etc. In the imperialism-fueled postww2 economic boom, this tendency was expanded to the growing 'middle class'.

Unrelated to any of your main points of inquiry, but a neat book that looks at the economics of video games through an explicitly marxist lense is Marx at the Arcade by Jamie Woodcock

I remember playing Civ IV when I was like 13. I had a nice socialist state set up, everyone was happy and healthy. And then the UN voted for global capitalism and all my cities started starving. I think that played a part in my radicalisation.