The Automatic Fetish

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.

Beverley 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.