Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx's ​Capital, Verso, 2024. Hbk, pbk.

RATING: 96

Buy this book?

Yes

---

Don't be put off by the somewhat forbidding title, or the appearance that this book does no more than offer a reading of Capital, Volume III. That would in itself be enough, but it doesn't give the measure of its significance. Best shows just how narrow and abstract Marx's project was, and paradoxically how broadly, as a consequence, it informs an understanding of 'the world as it actually is' today. The summary at the beginning of Chapter 4 (137-140) brings out the character and limits of Marx's project, which was oriented to grasping 'capital in its basic inner structure', and only touched as far as was necessary for this purpose on the origins and emergence of 'capitalism', and the concrete forms of capitalist production, and I recommend reading it first, to get a sense of the magnitude of Best's achievement here.

Need to grasp the capitalist mode of production in its specificity

wages for housework would expose domestic labour to the logic of capital.

Industrial capital precedes​ merchant capital: topsy turvy e.g. capitalism and pre-capitalist forms (informality)

​