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"Why Read CapitalÌý±·´Ç·É?

...and I have to add — why read it in US America and other core economies? One answer is, because the system that supplies our wants and needs and puts us and the majority of the world to work is even more hidden from habitants of the center than it was in Marx’s day. Labor and finance are both 'offshored,' deregulated, privatized, and concealed beneath layers of new ideology. Marx’s book uncovers the hidden components of the system, its categories and mechanisms. In this talk I will give an overview of the more and less known of them: fetishism of the commodity, but also the wage form; exploitation, but also extortion and extraction; surplus-value, but also formal and real subsumption. We read Capital now because the effects of the capital system are as destructive as ever, and this book remains the basic textbook for understanding it."

Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He is co-editor of the , which appeared in 2024 with Princeton University Press.