The Automatic Fetish

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 <i>A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion</i> 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, <i>The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century</i> 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, <i>After Marx: Literature, Theory and Value in the Twenty-First Century</i>