"Marx’s Capital": A Conversation with Paul North (Keywords: Capitalism; Surplus Value; Labour; Exploitation; Revolution)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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In this conversation with Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, Paul North presents Capital as a dynamic, multi-genre work that remains deeply relevant today. Capital blends economics, philosophy, and satire, with Marx using tools from German idealism and political critique to expose how capitalism constrains both workers and capitalists. At its core, North argues, Marx’s first volume lays out a theory of value – a social force produced in labour that structures life under capitalism. While rooted in 19th-century England, its insights extend globally, even to labour forms Marx overlooked. The system’s apparent inevitability is precisely what Marx challenges, offering readers a framework to see capitalism’s operations and imagine its undoing. North’s new translation emphasizes these dimensions with clarity, style, and renewed urgency.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia (ASdS): Capital is a rich and multi-faceted book, it’s also a long and daunting book to get to grips with. Could you highlight some of the key ideas that we can find in the first volume of Capital?

Paul North (PN): People claim Capital for all sorts of discourses and that is partly because it has all those discourses in it. Marx is and is not a philosopher and Capital is and is not a book of philosophy. The different modes of discourse that are represented in this book – sociology, philosophy, history, literature, politics, polemics – are represented much more forcefully in the new translation. The main contribution of volume 1 of Capital is to give you a theory of value and to tell you why value is the controlling entity in the capitalist system. Since value is something made in the production process, volume 1 concentrates on that. The first four chapters lay out the special kind of thing that value is. Using a phenomenological procedure, the book starts with something called the commodity, which is a produced product meant for exchange and which carries with it not just what it can be used for, but also a ghostly object called value. Unlike other social systems, people living under the capital system are dealing in the object called value and a lot of their decision making is directed by the value part of things. E.g. I would want a banana not only for its taste and nutritiousness, but also because it has a certain amount of value. Value is the purpose and the kind of substance that everyone living in the capital system handles. It also has a need to increase itself. It takes different forms and puts different pressures on social groups, workers, and capitalists to conform to its needs, to move around the system and to produce more value. Capital is a book about how value is produced, how it runs our lives, but also about how a market society functions and why sociality in a market society is different from sociality in any other society. The deformations to society that value creates (re-)shape the way we relate to people, and affects all aspects of experience, natural or historical, even space and time are re-formed under the imperatives of value. All relations and operations that we have and undertake, including working, acquire a different form.

The main contribution of volume 1 of Capital is to give you a theory of value and to tell you why value is the controlling entity in the capitalist system.

ASdS: What relation do we have to this text today, a text Marx wrote over a hundred-and-fifty years ago when, in some ways at least, the world was a very different place? In what way can we approach this text from the present? How can we relate to it and what is the continuing relevance?

PN: In the first instance it makes us throw out the idea of history as a kind of progress. Capital, the book, doesn’t get old, because, if you take Marx’s analysis seriously, the system of capital freezes history. A lot of things change, but the fundamental laws stay the same. The way to look at the book is not to look at it as an artefact of a different time, but rather to situate it within the history of the capital system: it was being written at a time when capital had taken hold in the late 18th century in Europe, mainly in England, where Marx eventually ended up after having been exiled from Germany. A whole tradition of describing the capital system already existed: beginning in 1776 with Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations, continuing with David Ricardo in the early 19th century. Marx arrived on the scene at an opportune time, when the first attempts to describe the system had to some degree demonstrated their lacks. What Marx saw were the lacks and the faults in the existing theories of the capital system. Before the system had taken over and become so totalising that you couldn’t see it, Marx came in with a certain set of tools and made a definitive entry in the theory of capital.

ASdS: Could you say something about the different versions and editions, the different attempts Marx made to write and rewrite Capital? In the introduction to volume 1 you write about Capital being unfinished, an incomplete book. Is it because of historical change being somehow necessarily incomplete, so that we have to be revising what Marx came up with in light of what we have experienced?

PN: That is the question. The book is actually not old, it is still very new because the capital system hasn’t changed fundamentally. But that raises the question of how it does change, and Marx has a theory of how it changes. The laws don’t change, but the phenomena change constantly, because capital needs to produce surplus-value whilst limits are constantly arising on that. We witness all sorts of new phenomena, whether it’s tech, consumer electronics, or the rise of finance as the holder and processor of about sixty percent of the world economy. These are things that Marx couldn’t foresee in the 19th century. But they are predictable from the laws of capital in so far as capital is always looking for new ways to get around limits and increase surplus value. Those laws, Marx claims, have such necessity under capital that all phenomena change according to them. Changes that happen under the capital system are always in order to increase the production of surplus value, never to decrease it. That helps explain a lot of economic phenomena today.

If you take Marx’s analysis seriously, the system of capital freezes history. A lot of things change, but the fundamental laws stay the same.

ASdS: How are language and style operating in Capital and how important are they to Marx’s project? How did you approach this question in the new edition?

PN: There are a number of styles in the book, a number of voices, a number of Marxes. Paul Reitter gets a lot of them into English, which is very hard to do, this is one of the strengths of his new translation. To give an example, one of the characters trying to sell their commodities in the first four chapters is a priest who is trying to sell a bible in order to use the profits to buy schnapps. This is a joke that comes up over and over again in different forms and is part of the metaphoric comparing capital to religion. If you over-focus on dialectics you don’t get to another critical tool, which is irony, or yet another critical tool, which is polemic. Or another critical tool which is misquoting. Marx sometimes makes his opponents’ statements sound a little worse than they are, to make his point about how bad they are. So, you need to have a very ample ear to get the styles Marx uses to make capital and its excesses apparent.

ASdS: To what extent are there philosophical aspects in Capital? Marx famously tried to distance himself and terminate the relationship he once had with philosophy as he was moving into the mature phase of his thinking. But many see very deeply philosophical aspects in Capital. What might those aspects be, and is there a certain philosophical approach in the book?

PN: I think it is a very innovative way of doing philosophy but I am curious to know what you mean by philosophy.

ASdS: In a way that’s part of the question itself because for many, Marx makes a break with philosophy and is doing something else, developing a new discipline, a new genre, maybe mixing up different disciplines and different approaches in a very unique way. Some claim Marx is still doing philosophy but perhaps reinventing what we think of as philosophy.

PN: If we put aside the politics of disciplines and really ask the question about what is philosophical about the book, Marx certainly is reinventing philosophy. For one thing, he is using his philosophical knowledge of Hegel, Spinoza, and Feuerbach to structure his argument. If we take the basic philosophical questions in modernity, for example, how does a subject contribute to knowledge, how much is our knowledge dependent on subjective aspects rather than objective aspects, Marx definitely has an answer to that. He thinks there is something beyond the objective and the subjective, namely the movement of history structuring social relations. He puts the movement of history at the centre of concern, rather than interpersonal relations or an individual subject’s knowledge or the coherence of the idea of God, or even what we can know. The basic unit of everything is social and that determines what counts as an object or a subject. Marx is making a strong entry in the history of philosophy, changing its object, adding an agent to history. The agent now is human society. Another way in which Capital is philosophical is that it shows how categories of understanding and action are generated. From one point of view, it is a categorial book. Value, sociality, surplus-value, and capital are categories. Marx is very concerned about the consistency of these categories. He is an inheritor, a direct student of German idealism, which is concerned with the relationship of freedom and necessity in human and natural history, and organizes reality into categories, somewhat paradoxically, to help bring that freedom to the fore. The German idealist project is that nature and human things are headed towards freedom, and philosophy should help them along the way with the right categories. Capital helps mainly inversely, by showing how you are trapped. If we accept this definition of philosophy, then Marx definitely is a philosopher.

The German idealist project is that nature and human things are headed towards freedom, and philosophy should help them along the way with the right categories.

ASdS: There is a debated question around whether what Capital is depicting is a closed or an open system and there are big political and social consequences of how we answer that question. On the one hand Marx says that the goal of Capital is to reveal the economic laws of motion governing modern society, depicting a system of objective economic laws which act upon us whether we want or believe that or not. For some that lends itself to reading Marx as a kind of determinist, with things just taking place and we being the passive object of these forces. On the other hand, there is a sense that Marx is clearly trying to show that the laws of capital and the capitalist system aren’t necessary or natural, that they can be changed and contested, so there is a possibility of resistance and rupture. How do you see this relationship between the objective and what you might call the subjective elements of capital and how were they approached in this new edition?

PN: Rumours of Marx’s determinism are greatly exaggerated! The Capital project, which includes all three volumes, but also all the drafts and revisions, lays out the laws that govern the capital system inexorably. For Marx, history is not deterministic. He shows how the capitalist system is special in history in that it freezes history for its own purposes, stops its contingent movements through its necessitarian inner mechanism. Capital capitalizes, the system reproduces itself. So, it has a kind of drive to keep its laws the same. Its necessity is made, not found, though this does not make it much easier to unmake it. That is to say: one of the necessities of capitalism is that everyone comes to depend on its continuation as is, in order to keep living, and it’s hard to imagine overcoming it. It is not deterministic, but so much of the world depends on it now. Capitalism steadily increases dependence on it, and the more of the world that it absorbs into itself and the more of our activities that it subsumes into its processes, the harder it is for anyone or any group to get free.

ASdS: The question of revolution is always looming in the background, but doesn’t Capital as a book push that question to one side in order to proceed with the exposition of the system?

PN: Marx and Engels were both extremely active on the practical side, trying to make revolution a reality, although they went through a series of disappointments. In Capital, Marx lays bare our captivity, so we can see how much work it will take to imagine a way towards freedom.

ASdS: How does the idea of capital freezing history connect with capital’s incessant transformations developing ever greater contradictions which could eventually burst it apart? What is the relation of this developmental dynamic to the way capital freezes history and in relation to the viability of the revolution?

PN: He lays this out in the section on so-called original accumulation, a phrase he sometimes puts in quotes. Capitalism is not natural and history was not progressing toward it inexorably. It took a lot of force to bring capital about and there is no necessity that this should be the social form we all live under. Once capital takes over, it has an internal necessity that shapes all the possible changes and freezes history so that everything is pressured to change to favour capital. So Marx’s argues. Revolutions and crises are two ways that history might break in and make capital’s necessity molten again, contingent again. Proletarian revolutions seem, by the time Marx writes Capital, hard to carry through. Crises are interesting, but at least until now no crisis has been so deep or decisive that capital’s laws couldn’t make use of it to push capital in a slightly different direction, so that it could continue with its non-history.

ASdS: Let us turn to a question about reading Capital from a global perspective: Marx focuses on England, takes English capitalism as the model and tries to extract from it the essential laws of the capitalist economy and the capitalist system. But it’s been much debated, particularly amongst thinkers from the global south, whether the system Marx sets out in Capital is a system which captures the way that capitalism works around the world, particularly outside of Europe and North America. In Capital there is an insistence that the labour which is exploited by capital is for the most part “free” labour, which is not coerced but rather sold “willingly” by the owner of the labour power, the worker. There is much research in many places around the world showing that capital is accumulated without “free” labour, or with labour which sits somewhere in a grey zone between “free” and “unfree” labour. So how can Capital be read around the world and how fixed are the economic laws that Marx is describing, once capital departs from England, Europe, or North America?

Capital is perhaps best used, from whichever perspective you occupy, as a way to train yourself to look for the ways that the capital system does its deeds.

PN: A very important question asked even since Marx’s time. Rosa Luxemburg famously said in the early 20^th century that colonialism and imperialism are much more important to the project than Marx said explicitly, although Marx is clear that they are part of capital. Furthermore, the ways colonialism and imperialism are described from Europe are not the only or the best ways to describe them. With this in mind, Capital is perhaps best used, from whichever perspective you occupy, as a way to train yourself to look for the ways that the capital system does its deeds. All sorts of labour that is not free in the Marxian sense of freedom need to be included. Many phenomena crucial for the system, which are not included even in his Eurocentric view of capital—reproductive labour, for example—are given short shrift. Chattel slavery in the Americas he saw as tied to capital and an engine of the capital system itself, even though he saw it as different and sometimes as secondary to “free” wage labour. It is important to remember that for Marx “free” labour, wage labour, is compelled labour. Compelled labour needs to be expanded to include every kind of compulsion, but the form doesn’t change the fundamental relation between capital and labour as laid out by Marx. Capitalists withhold the means of production so that unfree laborers are forced to submit to their demands if they want a means of living.

ASdS: Can Capital – because of the foundational tie Marx posits between surplus-value and the exploitation of labour – be read as a philosophical reflection on ethics? Does a focus or emphasis on ethics show up in this new translation?

PN: I don’t think there is much of a focus on ethics in Capital, in the sense of  good and bad decisions on interpersonal behaviour. Capital is what Marx calls an “automatic subject,” which subsumes the capitalist as well as the worker into its workings and makes them functions of the system. Capitalists may treat individual workers better or worse; capitalists may donate money to causes that benefit other classes, but they are nonetheless still exploitative. That is where their money comes from in the first place. This is another one of the strengths of the  new translation. It makes available the peculiarity of value, and how what Marx calls “its ghostly objecthood” directs action. By and large, we are not directed by how another individual will experience our actions, or even by the way an object will satisfy our needs, but by the way something can be exchanged on the market.

ASdS: So Marx is not trying to criticise the moral character of the capitalist but rather to explore the way in which worker and capitalist, once they slot into the system, have to fulfil the functions sanctioned by the system, so that the capacity for some kind of moral autonomy is extremely constrained by the way we enter into this system of commodity production and exchange.

PN: A capitalist who wants to pay their workers more has no choice but to lower wages, increase automation, or lay off workers, if the capitalist next door makes the same product more cheaply through the use of machines. The new translation makes it clearer that capitalists are slaves of the system just as much as so-called free workers. Capitalists benefit more in terms of their individual wants and needs, but they have to make sure they get that surplus-value out of production, every single time.

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.

Andrés Saenz de Sicilia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University London and a managing editor of The Philosopher. His book Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society was published by Brill in 2024.

First published online on 28th September 2025

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