The Automatic Fetish

Description

Why you should read all three volumes of Marx’s Capital together

The Automatic Fetish recreates Marx’s analysis of capital, step-by-step, through the material compiled posthumously as Capital, Volume three. Identifying the critique of value as the central through-line of the analysis, Best elaborates Marx’s theory of value as a theory of movement through which the capital-machine generates social forms of appearance that are the inversions of its inner operating mechanisms.

Characterizing capital’s movement and the dynamic production of social form as a ‘perceptual physics,’ Best demonstrates the consistency and the coherency with which Marx’s theory of value orients all trajectories of analysis in Capital 3, as well as providing the conceptual bridge between Volumes on.

The book illustrates the way in which capital’s development to this day is as much as a story of the continuity of capital’s inner dynamics as it is a story of ongoing transformation of capital’s surface-forms.

Best develops, through Marx’s critique, an analysis of money, credit, crisis, and the derivatives of profit-interest and ground-rent, that takes the reader from their emergence as capitalist forms to their current expressions. Neither a back-to-basics nor newfangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show why, once again, Marx deserves to be read carefully.Acknowledgements

Introduction: Unreconstructing Marx: The Perceptual Physics of Capital

Part I
THE PHYSICS OF CAPITAL AND THE MYSTIFICATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE
1 Rate of Profit: Production
2 General Rate of Profit: Competition
3 Falling Rate of Profit: Crisis

Part II
SHAPESHIFTING: CAPITAL’S SOCIAL FORMS (WHERE MYSTIFICATION OF SURPLUS-VALUE DEEPENS AT THE SURFACE)
4 Transformation of Profit I: Commercial Profit
5 Transformation of Profit II: Interest
6 Transformation of Profit III: Ground-Rent

Conclusion: The Revenues and Their Sources: The Three Faces of Surplus-Value
Index“Beverley Best has reinvented Capital, Volume III.”
—Fredric Jameson

“Beverley Best’s excellent analysis of Volume Three of Capital addresses a mostly neglected terrain of Marxist scholarship and achieves something very special. Her critique of the economic categories of price, rent and interest cracks their economic objectivity and lets the light in. All social life is essentially practical, including economic forms such as production prices. This is a groundbreaking book.”
—Werner Bonefeld is the author of A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion

“The Automatic Fetish is a revelation. Following the red thread of Marx’s value theory through Volume 3 of Capital, Beverly Best makes an overwhelming case that far from being a collection of arcane posthumous drafts made even more obscure by Engel’s heavy hand, the third volume of Capital is a lucid culmination of the analysis Marx began in Volume 1. She shows us that Marx clearly identifies industrial profit, interest, ground rent, and wages as essentially similar expressions of the social relationship he called surplus value. She also shows us that Marx explains how we are induced, day after day, to see those phenomena as utterly separate – that is, to see them fetishistically. But conflicts over land, anti-gentrification battles, commodity bubbles, wage struggles: they all look different when they become so clearly visible as aspects of the same dynamic. The Automatic Fetish is that rare work of theory whose practical implications just sing out loud. It is surely among the most useful books on Capital III ever written.”
—Christopher Nealon, The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century

“The Automatic Fetish is that rare, double accomplishment that serves the need of the generalist reader while educating the specialist. Those new to Capital Vol III will find here a companion indispensable to helping them make their way. Meanwhile Marxologists still wondering whether Marx has a value theory of ideology will find here a most compelling answer in the affirmative. If I had to choose one book that would make the case for the relevance of Marx’s critique of political economy to the humanities, this might very well be it.”
—Colleen Lye, co-editor, After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century

“The Automatic Fetish is the most intelligent book I have read in years. It is, all at once: a reliable guide to the the third volume of Marx’s Capital; a stunningly fresh and inspiring interpretation of that often diffuse and refractory text; a convincing explication of our current historical juncture; and perhaps most surprisingly, the elaboration of a theory of ideology that Best finds implicit in Marx’s mature writings, one that stands as a corrective to other conceptions of ideology, both within and outside the Marxist tradition. The contribution of The Automatic Fetish is hard to exaggerate. It belongs on a shelf with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor – whose rigor, on my view, Best’s book surpasses.”
—Nicholas Brown, author of Autonomy: The Social Ontology of Art under Capitalism

“While the first volume of Capital is supported by several excellent guides, the challenging and vital Volume 3 has to this point not received similar attention. Beverly Best’s Automatic Fetish sets out to rectify this and generously meets a real need. It is sure to become an invaluable companion for co-thinkers, a reading group staple, and will make a significant contribution to the wider field of materialist theory.”
—Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot.

“Beverly Best gives us many good reasons to read Marx’s Capital all over again by giving Volume Three the careful attention it deserves. Best guides us through Marx’s account of capitalism as a whole, demonstrating its unmatched theoretical coherence and undimmed political relevance. We find that it is necessary to take this path precisely because so much criticism has been designed to avoid it. In Best’s hands, Capital becomes not only fascinating but useful, down to its last detail. Written with clarity, focus, and urgency, Best has “unreconstructed” Marx for our times.”
—Richard Dienst, author of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good

“Brilliant, eloquent and precise. Beverly Best has given us one of the most profound re-readings of Capital to have appeared in a generation and an essential source, especially for anyone now undertaking a serious study of volume III. Along the way, The Automatic Fetish redeems the much maligned base/superstructure methodology by discovering the astonishing truth of its “perceptual physics”: “The capitalist base disappears into the superstructure.””
—Neil Larsen, author of Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the AmericasBeverley Best works on Marx’s critique of political economy and teaches in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montréal. She is the author of Marx and Dynamic of the Capital Formation: An Aesthetics of Political Economy, and co-editor (with Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane) of The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. She is the vice-president of the Marxist Literary Group.GB

Additional information