Marx for the twenty-first century. The first new English translation in fifty years--and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself. Featuring extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown.

“An astounding achievement.”—China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx's thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by "value"--to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx's German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.

“In this new edition of Volume I of Capital, Paul Reitter and Paul North offer a new occasion and a new and ample set of reasons to deepen our study of Marx’s invaluable critique of value. The generous severity of what he gives and what they regift provides for our sustenance and renewal with an analytic force that only love and fury can inspire, showing us what we can create and what we must destroy.”—Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

“By bringing out the sharpest edges of Marx’s concepts in the course of their development, Paul North and Paul Reitter make his style visible in unprecedented ways. This refreshingly faithful, judiciously annotated translation is destined to become the center of an exciting new revival of Marx’s thought for everyone.”—Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

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Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University. His translations include The Autobiography of Solomon Maimon (Princeton).

 

 

 

Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation.

 

 

 

 

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, and a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Her books include Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Personality Brokers, The Ferrante Letters, and The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway. She has been awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.

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