Beverley Best
Verso, New York, 2024. 358 pp., $29.95 pb
ISBN 9781804294802
Reviewed by Carlos Velasquez
Former Greek Finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, recently adhered to the belief that we no longer live under capitalism. Bewildered by the contemporary forms that capitalist relations of production take, he argues that platforms have extinguished the labour-capital relation, and that we now inhabit a ‘techno-feudalist’ order. In overlooking what is continuous, what remains at the core of the two systems he identifies, Varoufakis misses the forest for the trees, or the base for the superstructure, contributing, thus, to the noise and turbulence of an already blurred reality. Beverley Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, is a beacon in this world. By advancing both a rigorous and original reading of Capital Vol. 3, Best illuminates the dynamics that govern and determine capital’s phenomenal forms, clarifying a muddled present and reminding us that, despite wishful thinking, we still live under capital.
The elucidation of the contemporary moment in The Automatic Fetish, as well as the proposal for the interpretation of the third volume of Marx’s Capital, is grounded on a straightforward premise: that the ‘determinism of the base/superstructure metaphor orients and coheres the analysis in Capital III’ (2). As Best explains, base determines superstructure, not the converse. The social relations that constitute capital’s base must always take a concrete form in the world as it actually is. Yet the ‘capitalist base disappears into the superstructure’ (4) while remaining the force of gravity that determines the form’s movement. On that account, Best proposes that ‘Capital III is a book about ideology’ (336). It is a work that looks to demonstrate how the movement of capital mystifies the ‘the essential character of capital’s movement’ (8). In other words, through the analysis of its different social forms and transformations – from surplus-value to profit, from profit to interest and rent – we find that these expressions, in their concrete manifestation, are mystified and reified. They appear as automatic subjects or essential conditions, burying, thus, the living-labour that constitutes them. Best defines this dynamic of obfuscation as capital’s ‘perceptual physics’ (9).
Through development of this notion, of the concept of ‘perceptual physics’, Best advances a fundamental contribution to the development of a Marxian conception of ideology. She does so by articulating both a concept of ideology as a process of subject formation, alongside consideration of ideology as a modality of capital’s reproduction, as inversion. By defining capital’s movement, its mandate to abstract and mystify as ‘perceptual physics’, Best is able to convey ideology not as something restricted to the superstructure or a false interpretation of reality, but on the contrary, as the consequence of capital’s dynamic, that subjectivity is constituted through participation in economic relations, by encountering the forms that value takes, for ‘capital, in its reproduction as both a system of exploitation and a mode of domination, is a dynamic of social content and social form that is also a mode of representation – the production of particular distorted appearances that stabilize into a generalized “common sense”’ (84).
As a companion to Capital Vol. 3, The Automatic Fetish follows the structure of Marx’s work as it emphasizes the dynamic of capital’s ‘perceptual physics’, what we could consider as a retracing of the steps for conveying a process of continuous separation of the forms of appearance from the source of new value. The first part of the book addresses this problem of estrangement and of the mystification of surplus-value more directly by explicating its transformation into profit and then, its further development by which profits are reified and converted into autonomous objects in the evaluation of their rate. In describing Marx’s critique of this process, Best underlines the dynamic unity or coherence of this tendency. Through her reading of Marx, we see how the collapsing of the organic composition of capital into cost price, and the consequential reification of the latter as the natural requirement for profit, are all part of a chain of obfuscation that is set in motion through the initial process of introducing value into the concrete world. It is from this very first instance, the capitalist social relation, that the dynamic of repeated and continuous inversion of subject and object, the fetishization of capital’s social forms as value-creators, is ignited (29).
In her description of this movement towards the reification of social relations, Best focuses on Marx’s critique of capital’s tendency towards crisis, the fact that ‘[c]apital carries on by breaking down’ (45). However, she adds to the comprehension of this tendency by first underlining the fact that while capital generates the production of surplus, it also ‘negates the actualization of abundance in the absolute development of production and consumption’ (131). She therefore proposes to think of capital precisely as the negation of abundance, not as the hinderance of the means of achieving it, but in terms of the constriction that production and circulation for the sake of capital imposes upon the satisfaction of human needs. Then, following this initial argument on the cause of crisis, Best proposes an innovative interpretation of Marx’s critique by arguing that in his evaluation of the development of an associated mode of production, Marx ‘scatters’ a series of speculative deductions which look to show how the advancements in production and circulation imposed by capital, if disengaged from the capital’s gravitational pull, could provide the means for a future of generalized abundance. Best therefore argues that the transition into post-capitalism ‘will be a matter of developing through, as opposed to against, capital’s inbuilt portals to another “non-existent but non-fictional”, higher because intentional, form of social modality’ (130). Hence, Best characterizes the dialectical manner of Marx’s critique as utopian, as a form of ‘speculative materialism’ (193).
In reviewing the transformation of profit into merchant profit, interest and rent, Best interestingly qualifies these changes as ‘decompositions’. Such a characterization has to do with the fact that with the movement to any of these subspecies of profit, we reach the instance of ‘pure form’ and ‘pure fetish’. The initially mystified object, profit, is then itself obfuscated as it is forced to take the shape of commercial profit, interest or rent. We arrive, thus, at the instance where money makes money, where ‘what is hidden is not simply the role of living labour in production but, the mediation by the entire production process itself in capital’s expansion’ (177). The pinnacle of this dynamic of fetishization is then achieved with the form of interest-bearing capital, the ‘automatic fetish’ (184), under which interest, as a sort of natural, independent and absolute object, appears to inherently produce profits. Here again, Best foregrounds the utopian dimension of Marx’s analysis, since the absolute form of abstraction represented by interest-bearing capital is also considered as a portal towards a world beyond capitalist production. The conception of profits as completely separated from the process of production allows us to think of manufacturing decoupled from production price. Furthermore, this form of absolute decoupling overturns notions of the requirement of capitalist management and strengthens Best’s idea that ‘for Marx, the social form of interest-bearing capital and its socialization in the credit system signal, on an immediate level, nothing less than the real (but unrealized) abolition of the capitalist and, on a deeper level, that of the capitalist mode of production’ (186).
It is then, in the analysis and untangling of the section on ground-rent where Best clearly traces and manifests the methodological operation of of value critique. While threading and clarifying Marx’s complicated arguments towards the demystification of land as a value producing entity, the author explains and displays the dynamic of Marxian critique as one that operates in terms of ‘representation and exposition’ (287). Value, just like gravity, can only be measured and mapped in relation to the force it applies upon other objects. To understand that this force exists, we cannot speak of it only in the abstract or focusing exclusively on the immediate object. The process of unveiling the invisible pull effected by value can only be achieved through demonstration, by mapping how value’s continuous disappearance into its surface expressions is not a marginal outcome of its action, but the central premise of its operation.
Because Best manages to both advance a coherent and original interpretation of Marx’s Capital Vol. 3, while at the same time using Marxian methodology as a process of unveiling to make sense of value’s contemporary forms of superficial manifestation, The Automatic Fetish ought to be considered not just as a companion to Capital Vol. 3, but as guide to the dialectical formulation that constitutes Marx’s critique. Therefore, just like Fredric Jameson’s characterization of Capital Vol. 1 as a book about unemployment allowed for a reconsideration of the work, Beverley Best’s claim that Capital Vol. 3 is a book about ideology constitutes the emergence of a new and comprehensive understanding or Marx’s critique of capital.
12 July 2024
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21578_the-automatic-fetish-the-law-of-value-in-marxs-capital-by-beverley-best-reviewed-by-carlos-velasquez/
The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital
Reviewed by Jacob Spenser Wilson
About the reviewer
Jacob Spenser Wilson is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington.
Capitalist crises cannot only be measured by its catastrophic effects on society, but also by the reception of their most staunchest critique: Karl Marx’s Capital. Many have pointed out that the rising interest in Marx’s magnum opus seemingly coincides with capitalism’s deepest moments of crisis, as if it suggests discontent with the present system. With much attention given to volume one or the many drafts to which it culminated, until recently there has remained little attention to the subsequent volumes of Capital. Beverly Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, contributes to this growing resurgence and gap by taking Marx’s value theory and using it to read volume three. This work is nothing short of a masterful reading of Marx’s form-analysis and defends the continued relevance of Marx’s work in the twenty-first century.
In a critical and methodological reading, Best uproots ‘capital’s hidden, inner movement and the identification of its historical conditions of emergence’ to study what she calls ‘capital’s perceptual physics’(9). Her work responds immediately to critics of value-form theory who conceive of it as a narrowed reading of the first few chapters of Capital, demonstrating how Marx’s initial investigation of value and its forms undergird the whole of Capital. Her argument hinges on the centrality of volume three for the critique of political economy, which she argues is ‘a theory of a particular movement that generates new percepts – a movement arising from collective uncoordinated activity that, over a couple of centuries of objectification through repetition, produces a particular appearance of things that launches a specific world history’ (326). In short, she takes the concept of fetish and asks what economic forms it distorts once capital is moving through its M-C-M’ circuit.
As Best shows, it is one thing to analyze the fetish-character of capital in the ideal-average scenario that Marx constructs at the beginning of volume one, but quite another to analyze fetishism in volume three where there ‘is both a broadening and a focusing of the concept’ (48). In building this analysis, Best gives one of the most detailed accounts of the consequences of capital’s fetishized forms inherent in its movement for the study of political economy. By placing value-theory at the center of volume three, Best is able to draw radical conclusions for the study and critique of economics and how the law of value maintains the coherent core of Marx’s project.
The book is organized as a companion to volume three and is made up of two sections which trace out the internal dynamics of capital’s ‘perpetual physics.’ The first section deals with the rate of profit, the fetish of the rate of surplus-value, to showcase how production, competition and finally crisis distort and contort the misery of the production process into a blind pursuit of M-M’. Best begins with the category of cost price to show how it ‘is the initial category from which all others will derive’ (23). Cost price, ‘a disciplining objective appearance’, is essentially the cost incurred by the capitalist to produce a commodity (18-19). It becomes the basis for competition since as long as a commodity is sold above the cost price, it can be sold below its value allowing for competitors to undersell and take a bigger share of the market. From this initial obfuscation, Best demonstrates how capital’s movement obscures the source of surplus-value, the subsumption of labor-power to ever increasing productivity, which as a result makes capitalist’s pursuit of profit a rational outcome in a commodity producing society. As she says, ‘[f]rom the standpoint of the capitalist, the only calculation of concern is rate of profit – the immediate form of appearance that today dictates global production and commerce across the world market’ (36). In short, Best demonstrates how the creation of surplus-value is obscured by the machinations of the economy as capitalists pursue profit as if money can magically double itself.
The second section deals with the metamorphosis of profit, following ‘Marx’s exposition of the decomposition of profit into the surface forms of industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, and ground rent’ (137). It is ultimately an examination of the forms of profit that obscure the ‘hidden abode of production’ across the M-C-M’ circuit, concealing the costs incurred on the lives and bodies of workers. Best unravels the deep irrationality that drives the capitalist pursuit of profit across industries, from agriculture and industrial production, finance and commerce in this theoretically dense yet prescient analysis. Part of the charm of the book is following Best’s excavation of these fetish forms and how they distort perceptions to pursue appearances, while the essence of the matter is driven by the subjugation of the working class to the few. The consequences of the movement of capital are vast, and to preserve people’s own experience, following Best’s exposition, I will highlight two key parts of the book: Marx’s theory of crisis and the analysis of ground-rent.
The chapter on crisis foregrounds capitalism’s dialectical identity as creative destruction. In recent years, this idea of crisis as an internal mechanism to ensure its reproduction has gained a lot of traction. What Best offers, in reading volume three, is an interpretation of crisis as an internal dynamic of capitalism itself, instead of an aberration of equilibrium. In Best’s own words, crisis is ‘the means by which capital displaces the obstacles it erects between itself and its singular objective’ (123). Yet it is not simply a negation of an obstacle that characterizes capitalist crisis; it is a negation of a contradiction by way of a contradiction: the universality of separation. This contradiction, expressed through crisis, is one of capitalism’s oldest conditions, and Best highlights how separation undergirds capitalism’s crisis tendency to render certain sectors superfluous in order to grow other sectors of the economy, to increase its flexibility to build regimes of accumulation. In this light, crisis at once tears down its own boundaries to erect new ones that it will eventually be forced to confront down the road of history. What lies behind this creative destruction, as Best describes, ‘entails precarity, unemployment, poverty, illness, gendered and racialized violence, and social exclusion’ of proletarians the world over (130). The movement of capital invokes a complicated question about the crisis tendency of capitalism into a simple one: why must capitalists instrumentalize humanity as a means to an end, that is, money that begets more money?
Ground-rent, the fetish form of landed property, occupies a significant chapter in the book and for good reason. The Financial Times recently published an article noting the significant increase in market value of arable land in the United States, causing private-equity to lead the charge in adding this asset to their portfolios. This phenomenon stands in stark contradiction to the many experiences of family-run or small farmers and ranchers in the US who, in many cases, are facing the heightened competitive pressures of an increasingly industrialized agricultural production, thus going out of business, paying more taxes and rent, as well as producing commodities for the market rather than for need. Marx, according to Best, provides the key to understanding this situation with the idea that ground-rent obscures the productivity of living labor as the source of surplus-value (250-251). The consequence is that ground-rent can increase even as the productivity of labor decreases, the prices of agricultural commodities goes up and the rate of profit demonstrably declines for agricultural production on a global scale. These tendencies arise from the movement of capital and, as Best says, ‘the virtually infinite ways in which human beings can be in metabolism with land are subordinated to the exigencies of the capital-labour relation – that is, to the law of value’ (243). Ground-rent shows itself as a form of social domination that subordinates land to the control of landowners for the sole purpose of making money from money. It renders land into a means for a ridiculous end, when agricultural products like food are produced not to satisfy hunger but again, to generate profit for landowners.
It is hard to disagree with Best’s work given its thorough reading, careful argument and clarity in demonstrating Marx’s internal coherence. Yet we might doubt Best’s assertion that Capital is, among many other things, ‘not a study of capitalist society, it is a book about how to think the material conditions of what might come after’ (341). While the task of critique is to comprehend the present in order to build a meaningful alternative to human society, uncertainty as a necessary mediation for its construction could be defended. While it is appealing to posit a latent kernel to be excavated for a future society, particularly after forty years of capitalist counterrevolution, we might nevertheless wonder what possibilities would be closed off if this were the case. Certainly, we need to understand and critique capitalist society in order to draw a path forward from its retched depths, and in so doing theorize alternatives. But we should also recognize the limits of our own imagination as it is determined by this base.
Despite this very minor point, The Automatic Fetish makes a strong case for why people should grapple with Marx’s work in its entirety and as an incomplete work that requires its application to the current political conjuncture. Best illuminates how the movement of capital produces dizzying heights and hidden surfaces that make capital’s reproduction possible. While the book gives focus to volume three, it draws much needed attention to all three volumes, which needs to be done if we are to adequately understand the value of Marx’s work. Best’s work recovers Marx’s essential critique of political economy, which revolves around its subordination of humanity to mere means for the ultimate end of making more money. Readers ought to sit with the book and work through it alongside Marx’s Capital. Its difficulty will reward the careful reader who applies its findings in the analysis of our present conjuncture, bringing economic science down to earth to show why another world is and must be possible.
17 June 2024
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21544_the-automatic-fetish-the-law-of-value-in-marxs-capital-by-beverley-best-reviewed-by-jacob-spenser-wilson/
Reviewed by Jacob Spenser Wilson
About the reviewer
Jacob Spenser Wilson is a PhD candidate at the University of Washington.
Capitalist crises cannot only be measured by its catastrophic effects on society, but also by the reception of their most staunchest critique: Karl Marx’s Capital. Many have pointed out that the rising interest in Marx’s magnum opus seemingly coincides with capitalism’s deepest moments of crisis, as if it suggests discontent with the present system. With much attention given to volume one or the many drafts to which it culminated, until recently there has remained little attention to the subsequent volumes of Capital. Beverly Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, contributes to this growing resurgence and gap by taking Marx’s value theory and using it to read volume three. This work is nothing short of a masterful reading of Marx’s form-analysis and defends the continued relevance of Marx’s work in the twenty-first century.
In a critical and methodological reading, Best uproots ‘capital’s hidden, inner movement and the identification of its historical conditions of emergence’ to study what she calls ‘capital’s perceptual physics’(9). Her work responds immediately to critics of value-form theory who conceive of it as a narrowed reading of the first few chapters of Capital, demonstrating how Marx’s initial investigation of value and its forms undergird the whole of Capital. Her argument hinges on the centrality of volume three for the critique of political economy, which she argues is ‘a theory of a particular movement that generates new percepts – a movement arising from collective uncoordinated activity that, over a couple of centuries of objectification through repetition, produces a particular appearance of things that launches a specific world history’ (326). In short, she takes the concept of fetish and asks what economic forms it distorts once capital is moving through its M-C-M’ circuit.
As Best shows, it is one thing to analyze the fetish-character of capital in the ideal-average scenario that Marx constructs at the beginning of volume one, but quite another to analyze fetishism in volume three where there ‘is both a broadening and a focusing of the concept’ (48). In building this analysis, Best gives one of the most detailed accounts of the consequences of capital’s fetishized forms inherent in its movement for the study of political economy. By placing value-theory at the center of volume three, Best is able to draw radical conclusions for the study and critique of economics and how the law of value maintains the coherent core of Marx’s project.
The book is organized as a companion to volume three and is made up of two sections which trace out the internal dynamics of capital’s ‘perpetual physics.’ The first section deals with the rate of profit, the fetish of the rate of surplus-value, to showcase how production, competition and finally crisis distort and contort the misery of the production process into a blind pursuit of M-M’. Best begins with the category of cost price to show how it ‘is the initial category from which all others will derive’ (23). Cost price, ‘a disciplining objective appearance’, is essentially the cost incurred by the capitalist to produce a commodity (18-19). It becomes the basis for competition since as long as a commodity is sold above the cost price, it can be sold below its value allowing for competitors to undersell and take a bigger share of the market. From this initial obfuscation, Best demonstrates how capital’s movement obscures the source of surplus-value, the subsumption of labor-power to ever increasing productivity, which as a result makes capitalist’s pursuit of profit a rational outcome in a commodity producing society. As she says, ‘[f]rom the standpoint of the capitalist, the only calculation of concern is rate of profit – the immediate form of appearance that today dictates global production and commerce across the world market’ (36). In short, Best demonstrates how the creation of surplus-value is obscured by the machinations of the economy as capitalists pursue profit as if money can magically double itself.
The second section deals with the metamorphosis of profit, following ‘Marx’s exposition of the decomposition of profit into the surface forms of industrial profit, commercial profit, interest, and ground rent’ (137). It is ultimately an examination of the forms of profit that obscure the ‘hidden abode of production’ across the M-C-M’ circuit, concealing the costs incurred on the lives and bodies of workers. Best unravels the deep irrationality that drives the capitalist pursuit of profit across industries, from agriculture and industrial production, finance and commerce in this theoretically dense yet prescient analysis. Part of the charm of the book is following Best’s excavation of these fetish forms and how they distort perceptions to pursue appearances, while the essence of the matter is driven by the subjugation of the working class to the few. The consequences of the movement of capital are vast, and to preserve people’s own experience, following Best’s exposition, I will highlight two key parts of the book: Marx’s theory of crisis and the analysis of ground-rent.
The chapter on crisis foregrounds capitalism’s dialectical identity as creative destruction. In recent years, this idea of crisis as an internal mechanism to ensure its reproduction has gained a lot of traction. What Best offers, in reading volume three, is an interpretation of crisis as an internal dynamic of capitalism itself, instead of an aberration of equilibrium. In Best’s own words, crisis is ‘the means by which capital displaces the obstacles it erects between itself and its singular objective’ (123). Yet it is not simply a negation of an obstacle that characterizes capitalist crisis; it is a negation of a contradiction by way of a contradiction: the universality of separation. This contradiction, expressed through crisis, is one of capitalism’s oldest conditions, and Best highlights how separation undergirds capitalism’s crisis tendency to render certain sectors superfluous in order to grow other sectors of the economy, to increase its flexibility to build regimes of accumulation. In this light, crisis at once tears down its own boundaries to erect new ones that it will eventually be forced to confront down the road of history. What lies behind this creative destruction, as Best describes, ‘entails precarity, unemployment, poverty, illness, gendered and racialized violence, and social exclusion’ of proletarians the world over (130). The movement of capital invokes a complicated question about the crisis tendency of capitalism into a simple one: why must capitalists instrumentalize humanity as a means to an end, that is, money that begets more money?
Ground-rent, the fetish form of landed property, occupies a significant chapter in the book and for good reason. The Financial Times recently published an article noting the significant increase in market value of arable land in the United States, causing private-equity to lead the charge in adding this asset to their portfolios. This phenomenon stands in stark contradiction to the many experiences of family-run or small farmers and ranchers in the US who, in many cases, are facing the heightened competitive pressures of an increasingly industrialized agricultural production, thus going out of business, paying more taxes and rent, as well as producing commodities for the market rather than for need. Marx, according to Best, provides the key to understanding this situation with the idea that ground-rent obscures the productivity of living labor as the source of surplus-value (250-251). The consequence is that ground-rent can increase even as the productivity of labor decreases, the prices of agricultural commodities goes up and the rate of profit demonstrably declines for agricultural production on a global scale. These tendencies arise from the movement of capital and, as Best says, ‘the virtually infinite ways in which human beings can be in metabolism with land are subordinated to the exigencies of the capital-labour relation – that is, to the law of value’ (243). Ground-rent shows itself as a form of social domination that subordinates land to the control of landowners for the sole purpose of making money from money. It renders land into a means for a ridiculous end, when agricultural products like food are produced not to satisfy hunger but again, to generate profit for landowners.
It is hard to disagree with Best’s work given its thorough reading, careful argument and clarity in demonstrating Marx’s internal coherence. Yet we might doubt Best’s assertion that Capital is, among many other things, ‘not a study of capitalist society, it is a book about how to think the material conditions of what might come after’ (341). While the task of critique is to comprehend the present in order to build a meaningful alternative to human society, uncertainty as a necessary mediation for its construction could be defended. While it is appealing to posit a latent kernel to be excavated for a future society, particularly after forty years of capitalist counterrevolution, we might nevertheless wonder what possibilities would be closed off if this were the case. Certainly, we need to understand and critique capitalist society in order to draw a path forward from its retched depths, and in so doing theorize alternatives. But we should also recognize the limits of our own imagination as it is determined by this base.
Despite this very minor point, The Automatic Fetish makes a strong case for why people should grapple with Marx’s work in its entirety and as an incomplete work that requires its application to the current political conjuncture. Best illuminates how the movement of capital produces dizzying heights and hidden surfaces that make capital’s reproduction possible. While the book gives focus to volume three, it draws much needed attention to all three volumes, which needs to be done if we are to adequately understand the value of Marx’s work. Best’s work recovers Marx’s essential critique of political economy, which revolves around its subordination of humanity to mere means for the ultimate end of making more money. Readers ought to sit with the book and work through it alongside Marx’s Capital. Its difficulty will reward the careful reader who applies its findings in the analysis of our present conjuncture, bringing economic science down to earth to show why another world is and must be possible.
17 June 2024
URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21544_the-automatic-fetish-the-law-of-value-in-marxs-capital-by-beverley-best-reviewed-by-jacob-spenser-wilson/
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