Daniel Bensaïd’s essay was original published as Les dépossédés: Karl Marx, les voleurs de bois et le droit des pauvres (Paris: La fabrique, 2007). A modified French text was prepared for audiences in Quebec in 2008 by Lux Éditeur. German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish translations have also been published.
Bensaïd is a relatively clear and accessible writer, yet there are still challenges in translating his work. In this case, two persistent issues are pertinent. The title of the essay refers to le droit des pauvres, a phrasing repeated throughout the text. Le droit can mean both “law” and “right,” depending on the context. Here it is most often used in the latter sense. In English it is awkward to speak of the “right of the poor” in the singular. Instead, English tends to refer to “rights” in the plural, which can more easily denote the subjective and possessive (i.e., my rights versus yours). This ambiguity is also evident in translations from German. In the Rhineland articles, for instance, Marx speaks of Das Recht, which carries precisely the same issues for English translation. These ambiguities of meaning have been deliberately preserved in the title of this book. A second issue concerns the word la possession, which is used frequently throughout. Depending on the context, this can be translated as either possession or ownership, because there is not the same linguistic distinction as in English. When Bensaid is speaking about the status or fact of having something, I have translated this as “possession.” When he refers to the claim of legitimate title, I render it as “ownership.”
In both the Bensaïd and Marx writings, a few rather technical legal terms have no direct literal translation in English because of differences in the historical development of the respective legal contexts. For instance, Bensaïd discusses les ayants-droit, which refers to rights holders who gain their claim on the basis of long-standing use or personal connection, which may be variously translated as “beneficiary,” “entitlement claimant,” and so on. It has been translated here as holders of “entitlement rights.” In a similar vein, Le droit d’aînesse has been translated as “birthright.” Marx occasionally mentions der Ritterschaft, which has been rendered as “knightly estate.”
The appendix to Daniel Bensaïd’s original Les dépossédés contained a heavily edited and abridged set of Marx’s Rhineland articles. They have been restored here to their original full-length versions. Originals of Marx’s articles on the Rhineland Parliament are published in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Gruyter, 1975–), Erste Abteilung, I/8. A previous English translation is available in Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 1 (Chadwell Heath: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 224–63. These were originally translated by Clemens Palme Dutt, the early twentieth-century British–Indian Communist writer and translator. I benefited from this translation but have attempted to modernize it by updating the vocabulary and reorganizing the paragraphs into a more standard contemporary English format.