Alumnus’ new edition of ’Capital’ tries to capture Marx’s original language choices

As labor is outsourced, finance becomes virtual and wealth grows increasingly concentrated, philosopher Karl Marx’s 19th-century critique of capitalism may feel more relevant than ever, according to Yale University professor Paul North.

North — a 1995 Binghamton University graduate — made the case during a recent lecture titled “Why Read Capital Now?” in which he argued that Marx’s Capital, Volume One remains one of the most powerful tools for understanding how capitalism operates today.

“This is a big book — it took us six years to do,” North said of his co-edited translation with Paul Reitter of Ohio State University. Their new English edition — the first in 50 years — is based on the second German version, the last one overseen by Marx before his death.

“Out of 10,000 anti-Marxists, none have read Capital,” he said. “And often, neither have 10,000 Marxists.”

North, a professor of German and comparative literature, pushed back against common misconceptions that Capital is mainly about poor working conditions or a call for communism.

“Communism isn’t even really mentioned,” he said. Instead, Marx explores capital itself — not simply money or industry, but a system in which value perpetuates itself, often invisibly.

According to Marx, under capitalism, people are not free agents but rather instruments of value accumulation.

“Capital is not just a thing,” North said. “It’s a force, a logic, a system. It moves us around. It tells us what to do.”

North walked the audience through Capital’s seven-part structure, beginning with the commodity. Though it appears simple, Marx argues that a commodity contains a contradiction: it is both a physical object and a vessel for abstract labor.

The book progresses through how capital circulates — Marx’s well-known formula M–C–M (money–commodity–more money) — and introduces surplus labor, or value extracted from workers beyond what they are paid.

“The source of surplus value is unpaid labor,” North said. “It’s hidden from workers, capitalists and even economists.”

Later chapters explore how industrialization and mechanization deskill labor and restructure work, separating workers from the products they create.

“Capital becomes monstrous,” North said. “Labor is reorganized. Workers are used up and discarded.”

Marx also describes how capitalism disguises exploitation through wages, and how “primitive accumulation” — often romanticized as the birth of modern economics — was in fact a violent and ongoing process of dispossession.

A key feature of the new edition, North said, is its effort to recover Marx’s literary style, including his irony, rhetorical mimicry and vivid metaphors. In one example, Marx describes abstract labor as a “gelatinous blob” — a translation of Gallerte, a German term for meat jelly made from scraps.

“He wants you to feel disgust,” North said. “That blob is what value looks like when you strip away the illusion.”

Previous translations softened Marx’s language, often losing the emotional punch. In the Penguin edition, for instance, Gallerte becomes “congealed quantities of labor.”

“We lose the gut response,” North said. “But Marx wanted both the conceptual and the visceral.”

While Capital is often treated as a closed ideological text, North emphasized that Marx never saw it that way. The most widely read version was edited posthumously by Friedrich Engels and includes material Marx may never have approved. The new translation returns to the second German edition and draws on recent scholarship to bring readers closer to Marx’s voice and intent.

“This book is unfinished,” North said. “Not just editorially — it’s unfinished because capital keeps changing.”

Reading Capital today, he said, isn’t about memorizing Marxist theory; it’s about gaining the tools to understand the systems that shape everyday life. North’s lecture left the audience with a challenge: to approach Capital not as a relic of the past, but as a guide to the present. In an era defined by complex markets, digital labor and growing inequality, North argued that Marx’s work still offers a framework for making sense of a system that shapes nearly every aspect of modern life.

“Marx gives us the categories to name what we live through,” North said. “The goal isn’t to revere the book, but to use it — to think with it, argue with it and see through the logic of capital as it operates today.”