Capital: Volume 1, A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx. Princeton. 2024. Princeton University Press. 9780691190075. Translated from the German by Paul Reitter. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Foreword by Wendy Brown. Afterword by William Clare Roberts. 857 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Chris Ferrante.
DESCRIPTION - 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. DAS KAPITAL, originally intended as an unbelievably ambitious (and never completed) six-volume work, represents one of the key landmarks in the scientific understanding of capitalist development, bourgeois society and the economics of class conflict. ‘What I have to examine in this work,' wrote Marx in the Preface, ‘is the capitalist mode of production,' its natural laws and tendencies ‘winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity'. In Volume 1 (1867) years of research resulted in a marvellously lucid exposition that builds up from the basic unit of the commodity to a detailed consideration of the labour theory of value, the role of money, the modern factory system and the ways in which capital extorts surplus-value from wage-labour. Throughout, Marx draws on a profound knowledge of nineteenth-century England to support his analysis and generate countless fresh insights. Yet despite the failure of some of his prophecies, there is nothing dated about Marx's main contentions and conclusions. In the words of Ernest Mandel in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of the book,
‘Today's Western world is much nearer to the ‘pure' model of CAPITAL than was the world in which it was composed.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karl Marx (5 May 1818 - 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He is one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894).
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