by Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido
In The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2024), Beverley Best places the logical core of Marx’s value theory at the heart of Capital, volume III, first by reconstructing his dissection of the rate of profit (Part I) and subsequently by exploring profit’s forms of appearance (Part II). Benjamin Gaillard-Garrido interviewed Beverley Best about her book and ongoing research.
Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido: In The Automatic Fetish, you argue that Capital, volume III, (CIII) holds clear internal consistency not only in relation to itself but also to the other prior two volumes of Capital. Could you speak to the close reading of CIII that you offer in the Automatic Fetish? Could you also speak to why, in your opinion, so many “misreadings” of CIII developed over the years?
Beverley Best: I see my own reading of CIII as quite narrowly descriptive and exegetical, even if I also bring Marx’s analysis to the threshold of certain aspects of the contemporary historical conjuncture in a cursory and (hopefully) bridging way so as to hand the work of that always-ongoing analysis over to those thinkers who are equipped (because I’m not) to carry it out. If not necessarily a generous reading, I aim for a close and careful reading, but more specifically one that oscillates between setting the dial on ‘close-up and detailed’ and setting it on ‘macro and synchronic.’ In this case, you need to see both the forest and the individual trees, but you cannot see them both at the same time. Marx’s analysis constantly moves between the aporia of the forest and the trees and in doing so theorizes (i.e., historicizes) the relationship between those points of view. My reading simply depicts that oscillating movement of Marx’s analysis.
I am more receptive than many (even most) contemporary Marxist thinkers to the idea that Marx’s intellectual work constitutes, in one of its aspects, a “critical political economy.” At the same time, I am part of the contemporary consensus that adheres to Marx’s own designation of his analysis in Capital as the critique of political economy, whereby Marx captures the dynamic of capital in thought through a critique of the “discourse”—the terms and categories—of classical political economy as capital’s own products, its travelling carpet bag of necessary (as in, compelled) forms of appearance in which it dresses up and conceals (by distorting or mystifying) its own mechanics. In historicizing the categories of classical political economy, which is to say in laying bare their presuppositions, Marx demonstrates the inner, hidden movement of capital at its abstract core, or concept. But in addition to this, in a more simplistic sense that I don’t think is untrue, Marx is reading a body of work—political economy as a living “intellectual tradition,” the analysis of a specifically capitalist social formation—and building on it, adding his name to that tradition, even if his contribution is to say, all you previous thinkers have misunderstood the true nature of the social formation in question and how it works; rather, this is what it is and how it works. I don’t bristle, as most now do, at calling that aspect of Marx’s project a “critical political economy,” even if I have stopped using the term—mainly to signal, “yes, I get it, I’m on side!” I’ve tried out the term “negative political economy” in certain contexts, but I’m not sure about it. It’s alright not to be sure; trying out different words and their combination is part of thinking it through.
Finally, as to the question of “misreadings”—your actual question! I have to fess up to not being a scholar of Marxist theory in any comprehensive way such that I could reflect on the reception history of CIII. You might be speaking to the cloud of suspicion hanging over the text, one suggesting that all readings of it will inevitably be speculative given its unfinished state and the fear that Engels, in his attempt to turn it into a coherent study, ended up putting it beyond the pale of comprehension. I appreciate that suspicion given that, here and there, Engels seems to have had some questionable interpretations of Marx’s critique. That said, in the case of CIII, my sense is that close and careful reading dispels the cloud of suspicion and makes the coherency and systematicity of the analysis unmistakable. However, if my sense of the reception of CIII is far from comprehensive, I have read a fair bit of the existing analysis and commentary on the material comprised in that volume, and, far from misreadings, I’ve found much important, foundational analysis on the part of thinkers whose work I have been learning from for decades—Fred Moseley, Martha Campbell, Patrick Murray, Chris Arthur, Paul Mattick, Werner Bonefeld, Michael Heinrich, David Harvey, the Endnotes collective (it’s a really long list so I’ll just say, ‘and so on’ with apologies). If my reading contributes to that body of work it would be in sustaining the analysis of CIII across the material Marx gathered for that volume (to the extent he had), and in conveying the more macro or holistic point of view on the movement of the theory that is articulated in that material. It’s true, though, that this point of view itself admits of different analyses.
BGG: In a recent interview with Sean O’Brien, you say that the capitalist mode of production is “a system of expanding production [that] is at one and the same time the systematic pre-emption of a generalized partaking in that capacity.” Could you say a bit more on this, whether this implies that capital has a certain directionality, and finally how this relates to yours or Marx’s conception of capitalist crisis?
BB: This question goes to the heart of the matter. That sentence you quote is aphoristic in combining and condensing a few different, oft-rehearsed moments of Marx’s analysis in order to convey the internally contradictory movement of capitalist production and the profoundly irrational character of social reproduction when it is subordinated to the reproduction of capital. I’ll draw some of those moments schematically because I think your interest is more in their implications.
When generalized production is organized as the accumulation of private property, competition in the marketplace between enterprises that produce a comparable product is compulsory; when production is unorganized and unplanned, market competition mediates what is produced, by whom, and how much. For the capitalist enterprise, making a profit is tied to survival: the enterprise must out-compete, and, at the very least, stay competitive to survive. There are different means by which capitalist producers stay competitive, however most of these means can be gathered under the heading of increasing productivity. When a producer increases their productivity, less value (as an expression of socially necessary labor time, or abstract labor) is congealed in each commodity, and therefore the price of the commodity can be lowered. But this also means that less surplus-value (the basis of profit to be distributed system-wide) is congealed in each commodity, with the result that more must be produced and sold to achieve the same margin of profit as before, and more again to increase the margin of profit. Therefore, in the uncoordinated pursuit of profit on the part of the individual enterprise, the capitalist class inadvertently ratchets up the scale of the total social product to compensate for the lesser amount of potential profit stored up in each of its individual units. This dynamic is what I’ve called the “system-wide raising of the value metabolism” (and what I meant by “a system of expanding production”). The contradiction here is that individual capitalists compete to get ahead and in doing so keep all competitors, relatively speaking, in the same place (with the exception of those who succumb), and historically make the conditions for enterprise viability more difficult for all to achieve.
That’s the capital side of things; what’s happening on the labor side? As is well rehearsed in the literature these days, it’s the production of a growing surplus population. Labor power becomes a smaller portion of the value congealed in the total social product as productivity increases, which means that a growing portion of humanity globally becomes redundant to the needs of productive enterprise relative to the scale of production. That’s a logical objectivity, not a historical argument, though that logical dimension must be animated by the careful historical work of situating the formation of surplus populations, their plight, struggle, fight back, and ingenuity for survival in place, time, and under specific conditions. In summary, Fredric Jameson was right when he famously said that Capital is fundamentally about unemployment. Crucially, the growth of under- or unemployment shrinks the generalized mass capacity to consume, the very condition of surplus-value’s realization. That is the articulation of capitalist crisis to which you rightfully allude. Capitalist accumulation requires a vast and growing capacity of mass consumption for the realization of profit, but its own course diminishes this capacity at every turn. Marx says in CIII that under-consumption is at the heart of every economic crisis. In that moment Marx was thinking logically rather than historically, but that logical movement will have a specific history that resists prediction.
I fall into the group of readers that understands this dynamic as expressing a certain directionality, but that directionality is neither teleological nor predictable. Rather, it means that capital is a system that only functions in a certain limited way and is thoroughly constrained in what it can do and how it can overcome the obstacles it inevitably meets in the course of its compelled and dysfunctional expansion. All we can say with quasi-certainty is this: the producing segment of the capitalist class will strive to produce more cheaply, and consequently capital’s value metabolism will rise. But not without friction; it will rise against ongoing pressures of devaluation that will push it back down and painfully draw out the course of its upward movement. Nonetheless, upward it will go, save a movement of devaluation so profound that it would signal the conditions for the system’s collapse and the emergence of something new and potentially worse, as many folks are reminding us lately (Wark 2019; Dean 2025; Varoufakis 2023). This is what is so irrational (one is tempted to say “insane”) about capital as the basis on which to organize social reproduction. When capital’s “functioning” is relatively stable, many people, creatures, and what we colloquially call the planet suffer. In periods of crisis or “dysfunction,” more suffer more profoundly. The antisocial character of capital cannot be regulated or managed into submission. This is what I’m referring to as capital’s directionality. It sounds apocalyptic, but that’s only because it’s the point of view of the system left to its own devices—unorganized, unplanned, unintentional—that is, its own silent compulsions. Yet the system is never left to its own devices; we haven’t considered the point of view of people struggling against it and, in concert, building things differently and building different things.
Finally, you’re right to wonder (between the lines) whether I’m simply presenting Marx’s analysis, or whether my exegesis is also a tacit endorsement of the adequacy of Marx’s theory. I think you’ve rightly guessed that it is both: in my opinion, this is Marx’s analysis, and I do think it is at least still the foundation for the most accurate accounts of how a capitalist society works today in terms of its hidden inner motion and how that motion informs the big scheme of things on the surface.
BGG: You note in Part II, chapter 4 that “the generalized abolition of the value form, of a dominant mode of abstraction and equalization, will be intentional, an assertion of collective will.” What do you see as the political aspects and stakes of a project like The Automatic Fetish? How do you think or hope that your reading can influence the way we think about the relationship between immediate political strategy and long-term revolutionary horizons?
BB: My instinct is to be careful not to overstate the political aspects of a project like the Automatic Fetish. That project is, firstly and lastly, an account of Marx’s critique of political economy in CIII and a demonstration of why that critique constitutes a theory of capital as the movement of a new social substance, namely socialized wealth, that he calls ‘value.’ So, The Automatic Fetish is not a work of political theory, and, with respect to questions of political strategy, it can make only broad and indirect observations. For instance, in pointing to the necessary relationship between capital’s more immediate surface forms and its hidden inner movement, the analysis implies the need for the struggle against capital to be carried out on both of the registers you invoke—that is, in terms of more immediate struggles and the long term revolutionary movement toward a communist horizon. Capital’s rising value metabolism will always present as immediate, as varied, and as proliferating forms of oppression, predation and deprivation. These forms are too manifold to list, and they do and will continue to scream for whatever kinds of mitigation or redress can be mobilized in direct response, if and when a response is possible. But this “big picture” intolerable situation will continue for as long as the capitalist system is dominant, and dominance is a condition of capital’s existence; it only emerges and “functions” at a scale of global operation and capture. The analysis in CIII demonstrates that, in the end, the only reprieve from capital’s daily deprivations and assaults will be the longer-term overthrow of the system itself. If what is to replace capital is something we might call communism—an intentionally planned and organized, associated mode of production that has not yet existed, that has otherwise no obligation to arrive, and that might emerge in lieu of the ‘something-worse-than-capital’ that could succeed capitalism—the longer-term political project will be and exceed the serialization or accumulation of immediate struggles.
In saying that, I’m searching for a way to articulate the dialectical movement of abolition as also a positing of something new. If that something new is the Commune (in whatever form it might take), it could only be the outcome of an “intentional assertion of a collective will,” an outcome that we will call ‘communism’ in retrospect. Today, some are arguing that that something worse than capitalism, a mode of neo-feudalism for instance, has already arrived or is in formation. I’m not one of them, but I can’t say more until I’ve looked at that analysis more closely. So while I’m not prepared to say that “doing value theory” has political stakes, it can open onto questions of political strategy, and, very bluntly, onto the life-and-death questions that theories of the Commune take as their order of business.
Therefore, if a project like The Automatic Fetish has political aspirations, they involve making bridges to work that takes up these challenging political questions more directly. These bridges could extend in two directions: 1) to the historical analysis of actually existing capitalist social formations, residual, dominant and emergent—obviously, a much, much vaster collective project of theory, analysis, and historical work. On this bridge, the analysis of capital’s hidden inner movement meets the analysis of the forms of actually lived social life and the categories that their analysis conscripts. These include categories of state and institutional formations; so-called culture and/or the economy; aesthetics (including conventions of perception and representation); and technologies (or “the disciplines,” Foucault’s useful term) of subjectification, e.g. racialized ascription, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability, criminality, deviancy, and more. And, 2) to the (also much more challenging) work of political theory and strategy of which we were just speaking. This second bridge recalls the brilliant work and the heartbreaking loss of Joshua Clover, whose “value theory for the end of the world” sat on the top of that pile. I would also point to another recent project, Jasper Bernes’ fantastic book, The Future of Revolution, as an example of a project that articulates Marx’s theory of value alongside a theory of political strategy. Jasper might not agree of course, but I see my reading of Marx as aligned with Jasper’s theorizing of the distinction between what he calls the “test of communism” and the abolition of the “test of value.” I think his argument is exactly right, and I’ll be referencing Jasper’s work to support a new project I’ve begun on Marx’s theory of money.
BGG: I’d like to press you on the distinction between the sphere of production and the sphere of circulation (industrial versus commercial capital, productive versus circulatory capital, etc). In the Automatic Fetish, you mention the “Walmartization” of capitalism, in which massive retailers like Walmart or Amazon are able to wield enormous power over producers. You note that “the observation that circulatory [or commercial] capital has gained the upper hand on productive capital in the battle over control and profit is accurate with respect to the surface movement of capitalist forms,” but that, “with respect to capital’s inner movement… the same development signals a continuity rather than a transformation in modality: expansion of commercial enterprises is a consequence of technological and organizational enhancements in capitalist productivity.” Could you elaborate on what you mean here? What do you consider to have changed with regards to the place of commercial capital today among total social capital?
BB: That is a finicky distinction and debate around it continues. But your suggestion that the relationship between the spheres of production and circulation provide a framework for thinking capital as a dynamic of both transformation and continuity (or repetition and difference, if you like) is an insightful way to set up the question. And if we complicate matters further and add the sphere of finance/credit to the series (perhaps, as a sub-sphere of circulation), then we come even closer to the chaotic concrete whole of what Marx calls “the world as it actually is,” the daily mess that conceals a mechanism of surplus-value production that is deceptively simple and necessarily consistent (so long as we are still talking about capital).
In Capital, volume I, Marx demonstrates that the sphere of production is the singular location for the generation of new surplus-value on which accumulation rests; once again, this is a logical analysis whose demonstration is carried out rather than stipulated, even though I can only stipulate it here. In some cases, surplus-value can also be generated when commodities (goods or services) are produced for the purpose of circulating other commodities; for Marx this was a matter of productive enterprise in the context of circulation (in Capital, volume II, Marx characterizes transportation industries in this way, and that argument is, unsurprisingly, a source of debate). Of course, for accumulation to happen, producing new surplus-value is not enough; the value congealed in the total social product in the course of production must be realized (i.e., the product must be sold), making the sphere of circulation (as the sphere of value’s realization, of buying and selling, of both productive and unproductive consumption) as necessary for accumulation as is that of production. Same thing for finance: a credit system is a necessary aspect of capitalist accumulation. However, again, for Marx (and I continue to be persuaded by Marx’s argument here), to say that all three spheres—production, circulation, and finance/credit—are necessary for the viability of accumulation is not to observe a simple relativity between them with respect to the process of accumulation. On the contrary, for Marx, the emergence of a capitalist mode of production establishes a particular logical derivational priority or seriality between them (which is not a temporal or chronological one!); capitalist forms of circulation and finance derive from the exigencies of capitalist production. As Marx simply points out in CIII, you can only circulate what can be produced; even vendors like Amazon, whose gargantuan economies of scale and oligopoly over the marketplace allow them to exercise disproportionate powers of command over producers, can’t circumvent that simple fact, which largely explains rising rates of inflation over the past several years. Likewise, financiers cannot claim a portion of profit as interest on commodities that are not produced and sold, even though they will continue to try to invent new ways of subverting that simple law! The same point can be made in this way: surplus-value is produced in the sphere of production, however it is distributed in the sphere of circulation, among those who have a legal claim to a portion of it through buying, selling, lending or renting. That is a totalizing analysis, one that unfurls from the standpoint on the system as a whole.
So, if the circulation of commodities and whatever profit it generates is dependent on the production of commodities, and finance is dependent on them both, why does the reproductive priority of productive capital often appear to be subordinated in power, command, and profitability to circulatory or finance capital in the actual world of capitalist economy? In other words, and to oversimply, why does the circulation-tail often wag the production-dog; and if we think of finance as the flea on the dog’s tail (to extend the now ridiculous metaphor), why does the flea often appear to control the tail and the dog? As a baseline for analysis, let’s recognize that logical priority doesn’t inform dominance in the field of capitalist competition; once again, competition conceals the directionality of capital’s logical derivations. From the standpoint of inter-capitalist competition, there is no reason why giant retailers cannot gain the upper hand, as they did in the 1990s, as finance capital did in the lead-up to the financial collapse of 2008 (not to say that they do not have it still), or as certain giant platform rentiers have done more recently. From the standpoint of competition, enormous growth and innovation in capitalist circulatory logistics, for instance, is a matter of circulatory capital winning the battle of competing capitals. However, from the standpoint of the system as whole, we need to invoke Marx’s idea of the “freemasonry of the capitalist class” with respect to which the development of circulatory logistics serves to lower the costs of production as well (at least temporarily, because production costs are relative), making it possible, for instance, to relocate segments of the productive enterprise to zones with access to cheap labor-power, and so on. Development in circulatory logistics therefore serves to release some of the pressure that builds up (again, temporarily) on productive enterprise when the value metabolism rises for the system as whole.
Finally, toggling between the standpoint of individual competing capitals and the standpoint of the system as a whole demonstrates why the movement of transformation-continuity is capital’s singular (dialectical, if you like) dynamic: capital’s hidden continuity lies in the fact that it cannot generate surplus-value by any means other than the exploitation of human labor, and yet this same mechanism, subject to the exigencies of private property, compels continuous competition-driven expansion and therefore continuous transformation of the vehicles of exploitation. We observe that ongoing transformation of capital’s surface forms all around us, every day. We feel and experience capital’s necessary continuity every day as well: the system’s cruelty, violence, and numbing spectacle.
BGG: You mentioned that you are working on a new project on Marx’s theory of money. What can you tell us about that?
BB: Thanks for asking. I understand that there’s an issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture in the works with some pieces on The Automatic Fetish, so the next thing I may complete, at least, will be a contribution to that issue. However, I’ve begun work on another longer project, the one I mentioned above, which I’ve been referring to as the ‘money book.’ For now, it has three parts: the first is a close reading of Marx’s “theory of the dazzling money-form” as distilled from the three volumes of Capital, the Grundrisse, and Theories of Surplus-Value. Though much great work on Marx’s theory of money already exists, there is still more to say about it, more to point to, more to figure out, some dimensions of traditional readings to challenge, in some cases even quite fundamental conceptualizations of what money is, what it does, its uncanny movement, and so on. Once that foundation is laid, the second part will bring Marx’s theory of money to the analysis of a number of contemporary formations: current manifestations of finance and speculation; a rehearsal of the distinction between money and currency (including cryptocurrencies) and what can be mystified in blurring that distinction; the antinomic temporalities of circulation (i.e., capital’s surreal globalized games of musical chairs); a value-theoretical analysis of inflation (leaning on Paul Mattick’s recent The Return of Inflation); a demonstration of why Marx’s theory of money is inherently a theory of capitalist crisis (one which continues to be animated in contemporary dynamics); the persistent confusion around whether money is a commodity—whether it was once a commodity and is now no longer (this being a nonsensical formulation in the terms of Marx’s critique); money’s relationship to gold and policies like gold convertibility; and finally the now widespread understanding of money as a form of credit, and why Marx’s demonstration that money must necessarily be other than credit (in a capitalist mode of production) stands, despite appearances to the contrary. I would like to bring Marx’s theory to the doorstep of these kinds of so-called ‘economic’ questions, which, in the big scheme of things, have a more than ‘economic’ import and impact. The third part of the project is a speculative reading of capitalist money. If money is the outward appearance of a certain historical social content—a social relation that Marx calls “pure sociality”—Marx demonstrates that that social content drives against its capitalist form as private property. I’d like to experiment with the thought of what could happen if that drive were facilitated instead of arrested and contained. It might sound fantastical—and in some ways I hope the reading does comport as sufficiently “impossible” to actually be practical or realistic—but I want to argue that Marx’s critique of money can be a bridge to conceptualizing what Kristin Ross has recently called the “commune form.”
As to the when and where, I don’t know. If I manage to complete the money book one day, I’ve already informally bartered it away; there’s no need to make that arrangement formal until the time comes. Further, when writing to an institutional deadline (there are different kinds of deadlines), I find that the writing slows down and turns into something unsatisfying. I don’t compartmentalize that pressure well, so now I largely avoid it. And I write slowly enough as it is, as you’ve now discovered first-hand. Thanks for your patience, comrade!
Beverley Best is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. She researches the modalities of contemporary capitalist society and how these are expressed in conventions of perception and representation, dynamics of collective subjectivity, aesthetic ideologies, and cultural forms and practices. Her recent work focuses on Marx’s theory of the value dynamics of capital, as well as the social and ideological formations of that historical process.
Benjamín Gaillard-Garrido is a PhD candidate in Latin American and Caribbean History at New York University. He researches the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of Colombia.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: Diagram of the production and circulation of capital, from Ernest Mandel’s introduction to Capital, volume III, pp. 14–15, pages merged, colored.
