![Translation Launch: Capital vol. I by Karl Marx translated & edited by Paul Reitter edited by Paul North in conversation with Sophie Lewis](https://powerhousearena.com/arena/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/CAPITAL-Cover-image-scaled.jpeg)
Monday Sep 16, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
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.
About the Translator & Editors.
Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. His books include The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation.
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).
About the Moderator.
Sophie Lewis is an ex-academic (independent scholar) and the author of Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family, and Enemy Feminisms. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches short courses on critical theory online at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. You can find her essays at lasophielle.org and support her free-lance writing, if you wish, at patreon.com/reproutopia.