The Automatic Fetish (Paperback)

Beverley Best

ISBN 10: 1804294802 / ISBN 13: 9781804294802

Published by Verso Books, London, 2024

About this Item

Paperback. The Automatic Fetish demonstrates the clarity and coherence of Marxs critique in Capital III against the perennial tendency to shrug it off as a posthumous bundle of notes. Far from an incomplete theoretical system, Best identifies and elaborates a specific theory of movement and appearances (a perceptual physics) that lies at the heart of the matter of the third volume of Capital, and that forms the conceptual bridge between Capital I, II, & III. In addition to the coherence of Marxs project, Best demonstrates the need for demonstration: Marxs theoretical system in Capital cannot be posited or described; rather, it must be demonstrated, and this is what Best does, step by step, through an exposition of each Part of Book Three. Neither a back to basics nor newfangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show why, once again, Marx deserves to be read carefully. By unreconstructing Marx, Best demonstrates how the analytical power of Marxs critique is as relevant today as it ever was for the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, which is still in the process of immiserating and destroying everything there is. The Automatic Fetish is an apologia of Marx without apologies. Why the neglected third volume of Capital holds the key to Marx's theory of value Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781804294802

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Automatic Fetish (Paperback)
• Publisher: Verso Books, London
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1804294802
• ISBN 13: 9781804294802
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.