Karl Marx 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.

In this event, Paul North and Paul Reitter will discuss their new translation of Capital vol.1, the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself. The conversation will explore the many aspects of Marx’s challenging and powerful magnum opus, in what sense we might think of Marx as a philosopher, the complicated theoretical and political legacies of Capital and the continuing relevance of Marx’s ideas for understanding contemporary capitalism, more than 150 years after Capital was first published.

Paul North is the Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. He writes and teaches on literature and other media, continental philosophy, literary and critical theory. He is editor (along with Paul Reitter) of a new translation of Marx’s Capital.

Paul Reitter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures and former director of the Humanities Institute at the Ohio State University. He is translator and co-editor of a new edition of Marx’s Capital.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London. He is the author of Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society, forthcoming with Brill in Dec 2024.