The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx's Capital

by Beverley Best

Why you should read all three volumes of 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.

Genres: Economics, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy

368 pages, Paperback

Published May 21, 2024

About the author

Beverley Best researches the modalities of contemporary capitalist society and how these modalities are expressed in conventions of perception and representation, dynamics of collective subjectivity, aesthetic ideologies, and cultural forms and practices. Her recent work focuses on the deep value dynamics of financialization, as well as the social and ideological formations of that historical process. Dr. Best has also pursued studies of analytical methods such as critical theory, critique of political economy, and dialectics. She is currently preparing a monograph titled, The Automatic Fetish: Perceptual Economies of Capital.

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

functions really really well as a guidebook to Vol 3, with an implicit positioning of all of Vol 3 as an elaboration of Ch 25 of Vol 1. i have been persuaded by this argument ever since I started teaching Ch 25--still the only chapter of Capital I've ever been lucky enough to teach! in that regard, I found this book wildly successful. and also, it helped me unlock Hegel a bit more (along with a Chris Nealon talk from his forthcoming book that draws on Best a bit).

on the other hand, and perhaps because the Automatic Fetish is beholden to a structure of reading Vol 3, I found several of its broader ambitions to describe capital's "perceptual physics" -- as a new/different theory of ideology -- leaving me with many questions. These stated goals of the book are described in the introduction, which is only 11 pages for the book's ambitions! Early chapters feature some intellectual sparring with other readings of Marx, which are extremely clarifying for Best's perspective on Marx and value. As the book goes on, the references to other readings drop out - the ground-rent chapter, longest in the book, engages with Harvey, but I would have loved an extended engagement w some of the other prevailing theories of rent. the politics of dialectical/utopian inversion are a bit cavalier (though some of that is admittedly Marx's fault ha). all that said, it's really worth reading and as good as everyone says it is.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best, Beverly. 2024. The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value on Marx’s Capital. London: Verso.

Despite the amount of ink spilled over Capital Volume I alongside its earlier drafts, a dearth of material still afflicts Volume II and III, particularly regarding introductions and companions. One of the most popular, David Harvey’s Companion, ignores large sections of Volume III and intersperses its material between discussions of Volume II. Michael Heinrich’s  Introduction consigns Volume II to a chapter and completely skips past the section on ground rent from Volume III. Beverly Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, helps to fill this gap by providing a step-by-step commentary on Volume III of Capital.

Best frames Volume III as “a book about ideology” (336) in that it traces the movement of capital into its disappearance into its empirical forms of appearance which mystify and obfuscate its real basis in the exploitation of labor. It is this dynamic of fetishized forms of representing capitalist society that Best characterizes as a “perceptual physics.” In other words, people navigate their day-to-day existence through a partial and warped understanding of society that disguises the fundamental tensions and conflicts at the heart of capitalist civilization. There is an undergirding logic to capitalist society that can only be viewed from the perspective of the system as a whole, not from an accumulation of smaller pictures. These smaller pictures, these different viewpoints, are instead informed by the system’s inner logic.

The first part of the book follows this dissimulating movement of capital by tracing the transformation of surplus-value into profit and the profit-rate. The second follows a further mediation and mystification as profit is transformed into commercial profit, interest, and ground rent. The book concludes with the most fetishized form of appearance of capital: the trinity-formula: profit of enterprise, wages, and ground-rent. Alongside this exposition of capital’s perceptual physics, Best also charts how “throughout Capital III, crisis is consistently represented as a double movement, towards recuperation on the one hand, and post-capitalism on the other” (339). Capitalist crises serve to solve the system’s problems for itself as a bloody readjustment that causes a great deal of suffering for the inhabitants of capitalist society. At the same time, according to Best, capitalism generates a number of tendencies that create the conditions for its replacement by a cooperative form of society, a socialist society.

The strength of Best’s commentary is her ability to portray Volume III as a unified whole alongside the rest of Marx’s critique of political economy. There is a tendency to pick the three volumes of Capital apart. Many assert that critical or value-form readings of Capital flounder after the first volume. By contrast, Best’s reconstruction of Volume III presents a unified and coherent text on the fetishism of the empirical appearances of capital that both stands on its own and continues the critique of political economy that flows through Volumes I and II.

From this standpoint, Best is also able to critique the recent fascination with the changing surface appearances of capitalist accumulation as new kinds of capitalism or society.  Considering how much Automatic Fetish’s publisher Verso seems to pump out new varieties of capitalism (cannibal, rentier, keystroke, disaster, dead, and so on), it is refreshing when Best criticizes such tendencies as part of “capital’s self-narrative” that fails to attend “to what is unique to capital that stays the same across these so-called capitalisms” (306). This is not only a pedantic point, but one that has political consequences. By only dealing with capitalism’s changing surface appearances, these calls tend to correspond with political demands for a softer more humane face to capital accumulation rather than recognizing the exploitation and dispossession at the heart of the movement of capital.

Despite the strength of the majority of the commentary, the book opens with a rather flawed reading of the base/superstructure model. Before getting into Best’s peculiar reading of the metaphor, let me state my skepticism toward said metaphor. The metaphor positions economic relations as the ground of other social relations. This inverted pyramid of primary and secondary relations is historically and theoretically problematic.

On a historical level, the separation of a distinct sphere of economic relations from other social relations is a unique feature of capitalist society.  Unlike earlier forms of society, production and distribution are no longer directly embedded in extra-economic relations of direct coercion. The mute compulsion of the market and the law of value replace the sword. Understanding this relative separation of economic and political functions is crucial to understanding the transformation of society from earlier modes of production into capitalism.

On a theoretical level, Marx’s mature critique of political economy does not fix upon the “economic base,” but understands the capitalist mode of production as a complex and contradictory totality that views society holistically. Elements of the “superstructure” struggle to remain at that “level.” For example, juridical and political relations such as absolute property and contractual relationships form both the conditions for capitalist property relations while also being conditioned by those relations.

Beyond general reservations towards the metaphor, Best’s particular conception of the base/superstructure model is problematic in its own right. As she puts it, “the base of the base/superstructure is the singular dynamic that Marx calls ‘capital’ itself – a social relation that invents a world in its image, a particular mode of sociality that we can also call ‘value’” (3). It is to Best’s credit that such a reading is a rather original take on the model by reading the movements of mystification, inversion, automation, and fetishism onto this metaphor. However, such a reading is clearly not what Marx had in mind, given that the metaphor is used to describe a trans-historical process that governs all modes of production and not just the capitalist mode of production.

Even if one were to read a softer version of Best’s claim, i.e. that the dissimulation of value into its phenomenal forms is the specifically capitalist form of the base/superstructure model, her claim reproduces the problems of an ontological primacy given to the sphere of the “economic.” There may be some justification to granting ontological primacy to the value relation over rates of profit and forms of revenue as between capital’s inner movement and its phenomenal forms of appearance. However, this becomes a problem when other elements of the “superstructure” begin to be viewed in this way, such as the state and politics. The former may be described as an ideological or perceptual relation, but the latter cannot be reduced to a mystification or automatization of the law of value.

Given that the base/superstructure metaphor does not extend far beyond the introductory chapter, this criticism is ultimately a quibble. A deeper issue is Best’s reading of Capital as “not a study of capitalist society” but rather “a book about how to think the material conditions of what might come after” (341). Best characterizes capitalism as a system that moves “to drive straight through its own forms and (potentially) out the other side” (341). In other words, besides some hedging against teleology, Best reproduces the traditional Marxist notion that capitalism produces its own end through its own internal drives, through crisis. This reading has plenty of textual backing in Marx, a long inheritance in the diverse Marxist tradition. What then is the issue?

Historically, the inevitability thesis tends to instill political passivity. One can only remember the Third Period and Nach Hitler kommen Wir. Rather than viewing crisis as the Götterdämmerung of capitalist civilization, it might be better to view crisis as Simon Clarke does in Marx’s Theory of Crisis as “the superficial and transient expression of the most fundamental contradiction of the capitalist mode of production” (191). What contradiction? The subordination of production to the accumulation of surplus value. The exploitation of living labor by dead labor. The class conflict. Crisis may be taken not as a break immanent to the movement of capital, but the normal form of capitalist accumulation as capitalists seek to displace the inherent contradictory tendencies of the movement of capital onto the proletariat.

Insofar as capital’s contradictions act as some entropic principle that eventually break the system down, we would do well to remember Marx’s allusion to the common ruin of the contending classes in the Manifesto. Capitalism provides the material conditions for an associated mode of production and a classless society, but such a development will not be the bursting forth of already existing social relations constrained by capital’s fetters just as much as capital did not merely burst from the seams of feudal society. Rather, socialism will be the spoils of a victorious proletariat who have won the class struggle once and for all.

Despite these critical diversions, Beverly Best’s The Automatic Fetish is one of the best published volumes on Capital III in English language literature. Immensely helpful as a refresher for those with experience with Capital and as a companion for first time readers, despite some academese here or there. Given the growing fascination with the shifting surface appearances of capitalist society, the critique of the obfuscatory character phenomenal forms of economic activity is necessary in grounding analyzes of the contemporary moment. Socialism may not emerge from the utopian dialectic that Best portrays, but any real movement to abolish the present state of things benefits from a critical grounding in the analysis of the inner movement of capital, lest socialists fight for another form of capitalist class exploitation.

[Peter Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read Capital volume 3 twice now, and as I wrote in my review found it interesting but visibly unfinished and a little disorganised, lacking the polish in the structure and presentation found in volume 1 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3. Beverley Best's book is a good corrective to this. She sets out clearly the organising themes and structures Marx's argument, working through each part in turn in a separate chapter. She describes Marx's approach as setting out the the "perceptual physics" of capital, in other words the gap between essence and appearance where what the capitalist sees is simply the surface movement that reflects the deeper analysis motion that drives the system overall. Volume 3 concentrates on that surface appearance, working through how what in volume 1 is simply surplus value becomes to the capitalist profit, interest, and ground rent.

Best's book works within Marx's thought, helping the reader to get to grips with his argument. While this is a key strength, there are a number of occasions when I felt that she missed an opportunity to more clearly connect Marx's analysis to the turn of modern capitalism. This is particularly true in the section on ground rent, given the recent interest in describing modern capitalism as something which is 'neofeudal' or 'technofeudal' and therefore more dependent on rent than profit. It also means that she doesn't really engage with criticisms of Marx's analysis in a meaningful way.

For all that, this is a useful book for understanding volume 3 and bringing out the structure of the arguments Marx is making.

[Jordan Ecker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very effective reader's guide to Volume 3 of Capital that insists on the usefulness of the work, worries about its completeness and the place of what are essential Marx's notes from 1864-5 aside. Not for those uninitiated in Marx's dark rites.

A bit ambiguous on the question of crisis, but much more forceful and useful on the question of what Best calls the 'perceptual physics' of capital, or the question of how capital's appearance interacts with its essence. Following Hegel, for Marx appearance is not lesser than essence; rather essence *must* appear, and so the appearance of the essence is a crucial step in the essence's realization. Volume 3 is a crucial site of the essential appearance of capital. Most critically, we get here a good sketch of the relationship between price and value, one of the most controversial and important moments in Marx's theory. Also really nice summary and aside comments on the origins of capitalism and a good exploration of the trinity formula, but maybe doesn't quite explain the significance of the trinity formula to Marx's critique of political economy (for that, see Clarke's Marginalism book). Anyway, good stuff.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

"In the chaotic complexity of capitalist society, classes are social maps crossed, and crossed again, by the tracks of history and struggle: amalgamations that are the sediment of technologies of group differentiation, legal modes of granting and restricting access to social wealth and the means of subsistence, the social scar tissue of those histories of separation, and the combined, deeply stratifying effects of all these modalities in turning over the ground of social experience, material interest, cooperation, and solidarity. On this register, what we call classes are not specific to a capitalist mode of production. They may precede the capitalist formation and always express the historical conjuncture that informs them, capitalist or otherwise as in, all history is the history of class struggle" -Best

[An · Rating 4 out of 5]

L'he gaudit molt. La importància del llibre tercer del Capital no es pot exagerar. És el primer pas cap a la reconstrucció del concret real i, per tant, un pas indispensable per comprendre el present tal com se'ns presenta. En demostrar la unitat del tres llibres del Capital, Best demostra com la plusvàlua pren la forma de les aparences mistificades amb les que opera la classe capitalista i, per tant, permet comprendre com la llei del valor pot explicar les categories de preu, preu de cost, cost de producció, taxa de guany, crèdit, renta, salari, etc. Molt recomenable per llegir de la mà del llibre tercer!!!!!!!
el problema de la transformació del valor en preu s'ha superat!
llarga vida a la lectura de Best!

[The Coat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was OK. I love the emphasis on value theory, I like some of the takes, disliked others of the takes... but... I would rather read Capital Vol 3... Do people read this because Capital Vol 3 is too long? idk...

Read Capital Vol 3. Especially, read the recent translation published as "Marx's Economic Manuscript of 1864-1865" (edited by Mosely and translated by Fowkes) where they took out all the stuff Engels did to it (the Capital Vol 3 that you'll get in the Penguin edition is heavily transformed by Engels). Its really quite wonderful. If it feels too daunting, just read parts that you're interested in. If you have questions DM me cuz thats my favorite pastime. Or maybe email Beverly Best! She'd probably like that too.

[joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential. A meticulous, step-by-step orchestration of Capital III from the core logic of capitalist value to its increasingly mediated and inverted everyday appearances. Also the best possible person to hold your hand through the TRPF.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

We love Bev