Capital

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 humour 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 labour deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannise our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonisation, 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.

'An astounding achievement.' – China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

'No previous English version of Capital has featured such an erudite critical apparatus or such an exacting translation. It’s a remarkable achievement that forces readers to attend to the philosophical subtleties of Marx’s argument.' – James Miller, New York Times Book Review

'A new landmark translation' – Jacob Berger, Wall Street Journal

'Truly excellent – it made me read it again, cover to cover, with the old Moore-Aveling and Fowkes translations also open on the desk, for fun.' – Brad DeLong

'Reitter’s meticulous care with Marx’s terminology, however, doesn’t inhibit his efforts to render other language in the book more colloquial... The resulting text is remarkably crisp and contemporary, laden with contractions and slang, at times even bordering on the conversational... [This] translation will richly reward those well versed in Marx in addition to those approaching Capital for the first time.' – Alyssa Battistoni, The Nation

'Here in the third decade of the twenty-first century, Princeton University Press presents Capital as the story not of inevitable proletarian triumph but of "value" and how the law of value "came to tyrannise our world"...[Reitter and North's Capital] represent...this original document, [and] make for a new and somewhat undiscovered book, even to Marxist adepts... Reitter’s literalism restores a proper...honesty to a text whose nature is to reveal itself only fitfully, and never once and for all.' – Benjamin Kunkel, Harper's

'Paul Reitter, a professor of Germanic languages and literatures at Ohio State University, has produced a new translation of the first volume of Capital that restores to the book a freshness it had lost in the half-century since Ben Fowkes’s 1976 translation... Paul North, a professor of German at Yale, has co-edited this new translation with Reitter. They have furnished it with a fine set of endnotes, which help to elucidate the book’s often complex terminology.' – Peter E. Gordon, London Review of Books

'The new translation is in a different league: Paul Reitter and Paul North go back to Marx’s text of 1872, taking account of reams of recent scholarship as well as commenting knowledgeably on problems of translation and coming up with some neat solutions...They bring out the audacity of Marx’s prose.' – Jonathan Rée, Times Literary Supplement

'In a world that burns more quickly by the day – after centuries of industrial rapacity, and with ever-increasing flares of fascism – a new English translation of Marx, and the first to be based on his final revision of this foundational critique of capitalism, is just what the people ordered.' – The Millions

'Marx’s model of capitalism as an inherently crisis-generating system became more plausible to many readers in the wake of the global financial system’s near-collapse in 2008. Arriving 16 years later – to the month, as it turned out – Princeton University Press’s new translation of Capital arrives as a certified classic. The edition draws on generations of scholarship on Marx’s economic manuscripts, which are voluminous in mass and headache-making in penmanship. Prefatory essays by the political theorist Wendy Brown and by Paul North, a scholar of German literature, move between the 19th-century context of Marx’s writing and the 21st-century horizon of the new edition’s readers.' – Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed

'The introduction, translation, and critical notes, by Paul North and Paul Reitter simply make this the edition to have.' – David Murphy, Open Letters Review

'Reitter’s new translation continues the life of Capital, creating something new while faithfully delivering an accurate text...The Reitter translation of Capital will likely be the English speaking world’s access text to Marx for at least the next fifty years, as the Fowkes was before it.' – M. P. Ross, Applied Political Theory

'An outstanding translation of one of the most important and influential books of the last 150+ years. The quality of editing, the copious explication, and the stellar supporting documents result in a translation that will be definitive for decades.' – Library Journal (Starred review)

'The first English translation in 50 years of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume 1...this version is...a more readable, relatable, and refreshed Capital, that is more conversational, with Marx’s own style visible.' – Jon Baldwin, Morning Star

'[A] luminescent new translation.' – Christopher Bray, The Tablet

'Reitter’s translation ... is a most important event for scholars not mastering the German language. I expect that in the future many of these scholars when they cite Capital-I will turn to Reitter’s 2024 translation, rather than to Fowkes’s 1976 translation.' – Geert Reuten, History of Political Economy