"Capital's Relevance Is a Function of Capitalism's Persistence"

"Gone is the certainty that capitalism will be felled by its own crises or interred by its proletarian gravediggers. Reitter and North pitch their Capital more as a guide for students than for revolutionaries. There is, as a result, something melancholic about this edition. It marks a shift in Marx's status, a step in his elevation to serious philosopher—but perhaps at the cost of some of his political potency. By reading what Marx actually published, we might get closer to what he really meant, but we seem unlikely to get any closer to the end of capitalism." 

At The Nation, Alyssa Battistoni reviews a new English-language translation of Karl Marx's Captial.