My review of Beverley Best's new book on Capital volume 3
This is my review of Beverley Best’s new book, The Automatic Fetish. (https://www.versobooks.com/products/3032-the-automatic-fetish) The book is a close commentary on the third volume of Marx’s Capital, one intended to accompany someone while they read Marx’s book.
A companion volume like this is challenging for a book reviewer (at least for me as a reviewer anyway, and at least when it’s specifically a good book - and this is a good book, as I hope my remarks here convince you). A companion volume tends not to have a clear and easily summarized argument of its own and its worth ultimately hangs from the worth of the book to which it serves as a companion. With that in mind, I’ll begin by talking about Volume 3 and why it’s worth reading, with the hope that this makes you want to read both Volume 3 if you haven’t and also Best’s book, whether or not you’ve read Volume 3.
In 1844, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, a journal co-edited by Marx, published a text by Friedrich Engels called “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy.” The text was a big factor in Marx’s turn to studying political economy, though that study lasted far, far longer than Marx first anticipated. In 1859, Marx published a book called A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (and in one of the funnier cases of self-citation in history, quoted from it in the first line of the first chapter of Capital Volume 1: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity.’) In the early 1860s, Marx drafted several manuscripts that he never completed in his lifetime. After his death, Engels reworked some of that material in keeping with Marx’s intentions as best he could and published them as Volume 3. Marx published volume 1 in 1867 and continued to revise parts of it for subsequent editions and translations, then later writing further manuscripts that Engels would rework for publication as Volume 2. This means that in important respects, even though Volume 3 is obviously subsequent to Volume 1 - as the numbers indicate clearly - in other respects, Volume 3 is preliminary to Volume 1 both in the sense that 3 was part of Marx’s road to 1 and that in writing 3 he wasn’t able to draw on the insights he arrived at in writing 1 (though Engels could draw on the insights of Volume 1 in assembling 3). Engels worked heroically to rework Marx’s unfinished manuscripts into more finished prose and despite that Capital’s second and third volumes are, because unfinished, a harder slog than volume 1. This is also part of why it’s beneficial to have Best’s commentary, to help draw out the point of the arguments of the text, contextualize them in Marx’s larger project, and, very simply, to stay motivated to keep reading when the Marx gets to be a real slog at the level of the pages we’re currently reading.
Across these works, Marx developed an account of capitalism as a society characterized by the separation of people from what they need to live, a separation that can only be overcome by access to money. That access, in turn, requires selling something. For many people, the proletariat, what we sell is our time and energy - our ability to work or labor power - while for a few, capitalists, what they sell is a product made by people they employ. Under these conditions, where the products of people’s activity are sold are commodities, the point of producing is not primarily for the immediate object to meet people’s needs, but rather to make money from selling the product. Specifically, capitalist production is about turning money into more money - valorizing the value advanced, in Marx’s technical terms. A host of historical patterns and social pathologies stem from the subordination of production and social relationships to the making of money into more money. (For Marxist books that are good on these pathologies, you might see these two book reviews: https://spectrejournal.com/on-economic-compulsion/ and https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/. If it’s any interest, I argue as well in my chapter in this book that these patterns are what gives rise to social murder and pressure the state into being social murder’s accomplice https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-36167-8. I also argued here - https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9795&context=penn_law_review - using Marx’s account of capitalism and what I worry is a tedious recapitulation of evidence from my book, that these dynamics make capitalism an inherently disabling society.)
These harmful patterns play out in various ways in different times, places, and social locations, as people and institutions simultaneously live within the bounds set by these social dynamics and also live as vehicles for - pieces on the chess board of - the system’s reproduction. The different volumes of Capital get at these dynamics as they play out in these different times, places, and scales. While everyone in capitalism acts out these patterns, that acting out happens behind our backs, as Marx puts it, which is to say, we live in ways we’re not fully aware of and with consequences we didn’t intend and often don’t even notice at first.
The focus of Volume 3 is significantly on what Best, following Marx, calls fetishized forms of perceiving or representing capitalist society. If that vocabulary sounds wonky then another way to think of it is as being about the workaday accounts that different kinds of capitalists and pro-capitalist economic thinkers have of the immediate parts of capitalism they encounter in their specific corners of capitalist society, as they understand those immediate parts - or rather, misunderstand them, since they fail to situate those parts in their larger social context. That’s all to say, people navigate life in capitalism relatively successfully using ideas, depictions, emphases, and so on that are well suited to their immediate need to get around, and yet the contents of this practical consciousness - despite being useful in facilitating successful social practice - are really bad at actually understanding what’s going on in society.
I think of it this way: when I run errands to an unfamiliar part of Des Moines where I live, I don’t bother to place myself on a larger map of Des Moines, of Iowa, of the United States, or of the whole planet. I just use Google Maps to get a sense of the route from my house to my destination and back. I don’t need the larger context to do my thing locally, and I often don’t even notice that I’m ignoring that larger context. I’m just busy with pursuing my own small goals. Plus, paying too much attention to that bigger picture would actively be a distraction getting in the way of my errand running. By analogy, in capitalism, there is a proliferation of local contexts for people to do their thing and little reason to think about the big picture - indeed, thinking about the big picture can be a liability. Similarly, the routes I take doing my thing locally contribute little to understanding the bigger picture of those larger social and geographic contexts, and the workaday concepts and outlooks we have while playing our roles in capitalist society are bad concepts for thinking about larger social contexts.
To put it another way, the big picture of society does not consist of a lot of smaller pictures added up. There’s a logic to the big picture and there are patterns that unfold as a result of that logic. That logic and those patterns are what construct the small pictures we use and inhabit as we each do our thing in the local corners of capitalist society that we navigate. Understanding that larger logic is the whole point of Marx’s project, with each volume of Capital getting at parts of that logic.
As I said, a big emphasis in Volume 3 is situating the fetishized or workaday practical headspaces of various kinds of capitalists - as well as the representation of these actors offered by the system’s ideologues - within the larger logic of capitalism as social system. That situating is important for a few reasons: for better understanding the dynamics of the society we live in, for understanding the outlook and self-understanding of some powerful and influential actors, and for avoiding the easy to fall into misstep of trying to use those actors’ outlooks as building blocks for understanding the larger social logic.
As Best insists repeatedly via the technical vocabulary of fetishism and ‘perceptual physics’ as she calls it, the workaday concepts of business owners and business schools and so on are not helpful for grasping the logic of capitalist society but should themselves be explained through a critical theory of how this society operates. That explanation, focusing on a few especially important categories - like wages, rent, and interest - and the social relationships between classes as well as the relationships within different parts of capitalist class, is much of the work of Volume 3. It’s important stuff, expressed in unfinished and thus flawed ways by Marx, so it’s good that we have Best’s book now to help us better understand Marx’s account.
Straightforwardly, The Automatic Fetish is an effective companion book for Volume 3. The book proceeds chapter by chapter, following Marx’s exposition, quoting extensively from the text and glossing those quotes interpretively, occasionally giving additional intellectual-historical context as well as situating the work in relation to other of Marx’s works, and periodically connecting the text to the present world and big picture issues in it. As such, readers of Volume 3 will benefit from reading Best’s book, whether they read the two concurrently or one after the other. (Of course, the ideal way to read Volume 3, like any of Marx’s works, is in a reading group, and Best ends the book’s introduction by noting that her intention is for the book will serve such group’s well. I hope a lot of people read it and Volume 3 and do so specifically in a study group.)
There are a few things I want to highlight that I like in the book. One is Best’s underlining (for instance on pages 94 and 122-123) that capitalism has a tendency to generate crises and specifically that crises are to an important degree not problems for capitalism so much as they are the system solving problems for itself. Of course, that problem solving comes at the cost of a great deal of suffering and often literal bloodshed. This matters - and I should note here that this next bit is my gloss, I don’t want to put words in Best’s mouth - insofar as on one hand the system’s tendency to generate crisis is itself a tendency to kill, and on the other hand the system’s crises are not opportunities for the revolutionary left: crises are not openings toward a communist future so much as they are the pathological reproduction of the world that aligns itself strongly against that future.
Another is Best’s explicit statement in a few places (such as 176, 273, and 326) of the importance of thinking about capitalism as a whole system or totality - to put it another way, the importance of thinking holistically and understanding local and individual developments as system-determined parts of the larger whole. To borrow and slightly paraphrase the words of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, the point is to understand how things, in the broadest sense of this term, hang together, in the broadest sense of that term. This sensibility is the direct opposite of the tendency for people to think in circumscribed ways about their local errands (like me driving around Des Moines thinking only about my route to my destination and back home) and is necessary because there is in capitalism no social location from which the social whole with its logic (the logic that constitutes all our local errands and which we reproduce behind our backs) can be perceived directly through experience. Hence the importance of theorizing and social analysis.
A third thing I like is Best’s downright - and rightfully - impatient response to “calls to attend to this or that ‘new capitalism’, or to the death of capital altogether and its succession by something meaner (a new feudalism, a new colonialism, a new mode of dispossession), without attending to what is unique to capital that stays the same across these so-called new capitalisms.” While “it is true that” the institutional particulars of capitalism “do – indeed must – continually transform over time” (306) those changes are fundamentally a matter of changing to remain the same, which is to say, the system changes its specifics in order to continually reproduce its basic, general traits.
This is the problem with so many calls to attend to novelty in the system, they miss the fact that capitalism’s change and novelty is in service of fundamental continuities. This too has political stakes: while we of course prefer those forms of capitalism where some of the sharper edges are sanded down to other even harsher forms, it remains the case that all forms of capitalism are versions of blood-soaked relations of domination. It’s not enough to oppose, say, neoliberal capitalism, while advocating a nicer capitalism. Human dignity deserves and demands opposition to capitalism as such, in all of its variations - all of which are shitty and fucked up.
The final thing I will highlight is perhaps more inside baseball for Marxists and I suspect has far less important political stakes but I liked it because I thought it was a bold conceptual point for a Marxist. Best writes that financial instruments such as “derivatives, securities, credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations” are in important respects like “any other commodity” insofar as they are produced by a labor process inside a capitalist firm, and “new value is generated” in that labor process. (212.) It would be easy on the basis of some other elements of Marx’s writings to see these activities as not productive of value, in the way in which, for Marx and for Best, the activities of selling are not productive.
At the risk of getting lost in the weeds here, Marx distinguishes two kinds of unproductive labor in capitalism. One is labor that produces products directly for capitalists’ personal consumption, meaning simply that capitalists don’t make money when they spend money on whatever it is they do for their own enjoyment. (Marx calls these labors ‘services’, which is a little confusing in the present where people sometimes use the term ‘service economy’, which has little to do with Marx’s usage.) The other is labors of what Marx calls the formal metamorphosis of value. This is wonky sounding, I know, but bear with me a moment. Capitalists spend money in what they hope will prove to be a profitable investment. That means they buy stuff - convert their money into various other things like raw material, tools and machinery and facilities, and employees to use those other things to do and to make new stuff which can then be sold. That is, capitalists (or their agents) regularly go to markets as buyers, turning money into commodities including workers’ labor power within that bundle of commodities, then set workers to work creating new commodities. Capitalists then return to markets as sellers, turning the new commodities into money again, a larger amount of money. Marx abbreviated that process, from money to commodities to more money as M-C-M’, and it is that process which all of capitalist society must serve. The important point here is that this process is one with distinct phases and tasks for each phase, and those distinct phases and tasks all for the whole process. Furthermore, Marx argued that the middle of that phase was the production process. He expanded his abbreviation somewhat as M-C...P...C’-M’. The ellipses and P (for production) indicate the time required for workers to transform the initial bundle of commodities (represented in the abbreviation by “C”) that the capitalist acquired as a buyer in markets into the second commodity or commodities (represented in the longer abbreviation by the C with an apostrophe - pronounced “c prime”) which the capitalist turns into more money by returning to the market to sell. For Marx, the activities of doing and making things - the activities abbreviated by “...P...” - is productive labor, if the end products are successfully sold. On the other hand, the activities involved in executing the sale - the labors required to transfer the title of ownership of commodities and of money, which Marx calls “merely formal metamorphoses” - is unproductive labor for Marx. (Capital volume 2, page 132 in the Penguin edition.)
I mention this because it’s important for getting at why I think Best is bold to call the labors of producing financial instruments productive labor. It would be easy to say those instruments are all just part of the merely formal metamorphoses of commodities into money and back, which is to say, that those instruments are all just circulation. But Best argues that they are produced, meaning the labor of making them is production and, as she states directly, that labor is productive of value rather than unproductive. The reason it matters that one might call these activities all just circulation is that for Marx, the line between real metamorphoses and “merely formal metamorphoses” is the line between production and circulation, and circulation is, for Marx, unproductive by definition. (This can get a little confusing because in Volume 2 Marx sometimes uses ‘circulation’ to also refer to the movement of goods through space: transportation is ‘circulation’ in this sense, and for Marx in both Volume 2 and Volume 3 this activity is productive labor when conducted as part of capitalist enterprises, as Best notes on page 146, quoting Volume 3’s repetition of the point from Volume 2. Marx using the same term in these incompatible ways is an artifact of these works being unfinished manuscripts. (The way to avoid getting confused between the two uses of ‘circulation’, one of which can be productive labor and one of which can not be productive labor is to bear in mind the distinction between what Marx calls real metamorphoses and the merely formal metamorphoses that occur when goods and money change owners.)
As I said, this gets into the weeds a little, or more than a little, but it has some real world ramifications because if the growth of financial instruments is unproductive labor then it amounts to a kind of waste even on capitalism’s terms whereas if those instruments can be commodities like any other and their making can be productive labor like any other productive labor, then the growth of those instruments is not a problem within the system on the system’s terms. I wish Best had paused a little on the point to get at the some of the stakes, as it’s a point she makes in the book fairly casually. I’m not entirely sure if I’m convinced (I mean that genuinely, not as a form of coded disagreement: it’s a thought provoking point I’m still mulling over after finishing the book), but as I said, I admire the point because it strikes me as bold.
I have some minor reservations and quibbles (one of the costs of spending a long while reading Marx and Marxists is that over time one loses the capacity to agree with anyone else about Marx, Marxism, and Marxists, so that to read any of those or about any of those is to immediately become beset by a fit of quibbling. I’m a case in point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYO6oNEdYBs). I want to flag up three of these quibbles and I’ll try to be brief.
One is that Best makes use of the base/superstructure metaphor. I’ve written against that metaphor in a co-authored piece with the inimitable Rob Hunter, here: https://legalform.blog/2020/01/15/no-bases-no-superstructures-against-legal-economism-nate-holdren-and-rob-hunter/. I won’t restate the argument, I’ll just say I think the metaphor is not worth the baggage it comes with in much of the Marxist tradition and its reception among non-Marxists. I’d also point to EP Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, which is arguably the best badly written book - or the worst executed great book - in the Marxist tradition. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1978/pot/essay.htm. I’m sometimes tempted to try to write a book about Poverty of Theory, warts and all, but I’m unsure if I will, given the limits on my time, energy, and ability and the other things I’d like to do instead. Still, it’s a great book that rewards - really, requires, because of Thompson’s outrageous lack of sufficient revision - a charitable reading. I’ve done some notes on it at this blog if memory serves, and, again if memory serves, my longest most worked out notes on it are here: https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/poor-thoughts-on-the-poverty-of-theory-get-it. Anyway.) In Poverty of Theory Thompson gets into both the limitations of the base/superstructure metaphor and the limitations of some of the bad versions of Marxism that have actively embraced that metaphor, as well as laying out a framework, borrowed significantly from Raymond Williams if I recall correctly, for keeping the rational kernel of the metaphor. That rational kernel is that social being determines social consciousness, meaning that what people think in common is above all the result of how people live socially: ways of life generate collective beliefs, generally speaking, rather than beliefs creating ways of life. Thus to understand how and what people think we have to look at how people live, in the holistic way Best advocates, and in capitalism we live lives forced to be cogs in the make-money-into-more-money-and-kill-a-lot-of-people-in-the-process machine. Anyhow, this may be just a pet peeve on my part, but I wish she’d not done her gestures toward base/superstructure.
Second quibble: Best suggests that capitalism produces its own end due to the system’s internal drives. She is here fairly close to Marxists of the Second International (see for instance the discussion of Karl Kautsky’s thought in Simon Clarke’s book Marx’s Theory of Crisis, page 23). She is also - unfortunately! - on solid Marxological grounds here, as Marx definitely thought this, at least some of the time. It’s unclear to me if he kept thinking it after the publication of Volume 1 or not. Geert Reuten and Peter Thomas have written a very good article (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769084?seq=12, a slightly revised version of which appears as a chapter in this book https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/600-in-marx-s-laboratory) arguing that Marx in the late 1850s had what I would call a somewhat millenarian view that capitalism would breakdown of its own accord, a view he gradually abandoned over time, while remaining a committed revolutionary communist. The articles focuses specifically on the status, within Marx’s larger body of ideas, of the notion that profit rates must fall over time. Best’s point here is not reliant on the idea that profit rates must fall, to be clear, and it could be that Marx retained a sense that capitalism would, by following its own internal imperatives, give way way inexorably to a new, better kind of society. I hope he didn’t, as I think that’s a bad idea, but I’m not currently able to prove the Marxological point. (I do think capitalism will end and communism will win, but that’s not a conviction I root in the system’s logic so much as that I think more simply that eventually people will be so sick of the system and have experimented enough with what to do with that opposition that we will eventually managed to abolish capitalism and build a new, communist society. The whole point of reading and writing this kind of stuff is to toss a pebble or two into the water in the hope that these, along with other such stones, build up until they, in their millions, some day manage to divert the river’s course.)
The third quibble I want to mention is on crisis and profit rates. Best doesn’t spend much time on the role of profit rates in capitalism’s crises, and that’s good to my mind, but she does sometimes seem to suggest that she thinks falling profit rates are a cause of crises in capitalism, and an important one for Marx. I’d point to Simon Clarke’s work for two points here. First, in Clarke’s words, “perhaps the best indication of the importance that Marx attached to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is that he did not mention it in any of the works published in his lifetime, nor did he give it any further consideration in the twenty years of his life that followed the writing of the manuscript on which Volume Three of Capital is based.” (Marx’s Theory of Crisis, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-349-23186-7, 245.) Second, regardless of what Marx may or may not have thought about the falling rate of profit at various points in his life, Clarke notes that there is a logical issue regarding the relationship between crisis and falling profit rates. As he points out (in an article https://web.archive.org/web/20230301064333/http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/sands.pdf and an encyclopedia entry https://web.archive.org/web/20230301064356/http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/Economiccrisis.pdf, both of which compliment the longer argument of his book on Marx’s thinking on crisis) the connection between crisis and declining profit rates is unclear - in brief, how do we know a drop in profit rates is a cause of crises, rather than an effect? Indeed, as he argues, for much of the history of Marxism, the dominant view was that crises cause falling profit rates, rather than vice versa. He suggests (in the encyclopedia entry I linked to above) that the emergence of the falling profit rate “as the canonical Marxist theory of crisis” among Marxists in the 1970s was largely a kind of coping mechanism to the fact that “capital came to prevail over labour in the struggle over wages and social spending during the 1970s” - yes, the reasoning goes, the working class suffered a defeat by the capitalists, but the capitalists are creatures of a system that must of its own inexorable tendencies eventually cut those capitalists down, so maybe we won’t win against them but they’ll still lose because their system itself is against them. Clarke insists that this version of crisis as caused by inevitably falling profit rates “was more often invoked as a rhetorical device than as a systematic theory.” Best doesn’t fully embrace this account that Clarke criticizes, but she doesn’t fully reject it either. The book is ambiguous on this point, while her insistence that capitalism points (in ways, she claims, that prior modes of production did not) toward its own dissolution due to the unfolding of its systemic logic is at least in the spirit of the account Clarke criticizes.
On all three of these quibbles, I’d say the book is unfortunately too of a piece with what Moishe Postone called traditional Marxism (meaning bad and old timey, basically). All of that said, I want to underline that these are quibbles. As I said, it’s good book and I hope people read it - that’s the whole reason I’ve bothered to write about it here, that and the fact that I thought (since it is a good book) that writing about it like this would help me clarify my thinking further.
The last thing I want to do, briefly, is to draw a connection to the covid pandemic, that being a recurring preoccupation of mine and especially in the writing I do at my little blog here. As I’ve said above, the tendencies that Marx identified and which Best so capably explicates are an important source of social murder - they’re part of what makes capitalism so lethal and part of what organizes that lethality in particularly impersonal and unpredictable ways. (All class societies kill, but capitalism organizes class, and so the violence of class, in historically unique and dynamic ways.) I tried to talk about fetishized concepts and accounts above in terms of running errands locally and only looking at the small picture of the local map. That small local focus is widespread - it’s the default headspace really - and the lack of a bigger picture helps to bring about actions that generate social murder, helps make social murder harder to perceive as a collective phenomenon and a political one (rather than being dispersed into individualized apolitical and merely tragic inevitabilities), and helps institutional actors to live with their roles in enacting and defending social murder because of a kind of ambient thoughtlessness: if the hiring director doesn’t notice the harms done to applicants who aren’t hired, say, then those harms might as well have not even happened, as far as that director is concerned. That is to say, the fetishized forms of thinking that abound in capitalism are to a significant degree forms of not thinking or perceiving at all, and that thoughtlessness helps a lot of people to be the bearers of the system’s bloodier imperatives with less friction and distress. This isn’t an explicit theme in Best’s book but it’s often present as a loud subtext like when she talks about race and climate change, and is another thing that Best, and Marx, can help us think about.
To conclude, capitalism remains a nightmare and one that can be hard to understand, especially in isolation - the system harms us and also leaves us unequipped to understand the logic generating those harms. To end capitalism, we have to comprehend it, collectively. Marx’s work remains a necessary (though sadly not sufficient) part of that process of comprehending and opposing the system, and Best has written a good book enriching our understanding of Marx’s writing. I hope the book is widely read and specifically in Capital reading groups as per Best’s intentions.