Interview with Beverly Best, author of The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2024), by Sean O’Brien.

 

Sean O’Brien: Thanks, Bev, for this opportunity to chat about your brilliant new book, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital, and the razor-sharp reading of Volume 3 it offers. Volume 3 has a rather controversial history of reception, of course, from the notoriously thorny transformation problem to the endlessly disputed law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. There are also Marxological debates about the textual history and accuracy of the published version, including questions of editorial license regarding the interventions Engels made in posthumously compiling Volume 3 from Marx’s unfinished manuscripts. Readers might therefore bring certain preconceptions to the text. In The Automatic Fetish, you insist not only that Engels’s work on the manuscript “does not, as some have suggested, distort the movement and meaning of Marx’s analysis,” but also that “simply reading the book as published, front to back, puts the consistency, clarity, and logical flow of Marx’s argument in unmistakable evidence” (8, n. 8). I thought we might begin our discussion by clearing the air, so to speak, with an account of what you describe in the book as the “internal consistency” (11) of Marx’s analysis in Volume 3.

 

Beverly Best: The project began the first time I read Capital Vol. 3 linearly. Before that, I had only pulled out chunks of text that spoke to certain themes, without a sense of the material’s expositional order and movement, that is, without a sense of its analytical narrative. When I did read it systematically – in order, from front to back – my understanding of the analysis changed, as did the meaning of all those chunks. I was stunned actually, yes, by the consistency, and then by the coherency and deep systematicity of the analysis and its exposition. Analysis and exposition – together with their object, of course – are a dialectical whole and, accordingly, the whole exceeds the aggregate of its parts. But for Marx, and in the case of Capital Vol. 3, this lesson in dialectical reading and thinking isn’t a premise but rather an outcome. Marx’s careful attention to the object (which I’ll point to momentarily) produces a dialectical reading, but it is the lesson of the object, rather than that of the method/approach. One doesn’t (because one needn’t) “take” a dialectical approach to the object; the object (in this case) articulates it – “demands” it – generates it as a function of its own movement despite itself. In Capital Vol. 3 Marx demonstrates this “necessity,” over and over again, case after case, as a series of logical derivations. In other words, Marx shows, as we move forward through the analysis – looking backwards! – that each case (each stage of the analysis) necessarily presupposes the one before. We could call this movement of the analysis dialectical, but we needn’t bother to call it anything. Perhaps the objective of dialectical reading lies in building an analysis that reaches the point where its internal movement becomes self-evident – or, evidently objective – and naming it, redundant. Marx never tells you what dialectical physics are; he only ever shows you the movement of the object, and by the time the demonstration has done its work, naming the movement “dialectical” is beside the point.

Anyway, I’ve gone off at a tangent; let me find your question again. The consistent, relentless even, analysis in Capital Vol. 3 concerns the ways in which the drive-like production of surplus-value in a capitalist mode of production (what Marx calls accumulation) is mystified – hidden or concealed – in the immediate appearances of its own mechanisms of production and distribution and therefore in our “easy” or immediate perception of how the world works as a global system of social reproduction. The capital-machine does this (and it must do this; Marx demonstrates that it is the existential necessity of a capitalist mode of production, i.e., the condition of its reproduction) because surplus-value does not have an empirical, phenomenal reality. Surplus-value must take empirical, social, historical forms of expression, and in doing so, its essential character – its where/what/when/how – is distorted in appearance and consequently in everyday perception. This movement of value striving to become capital is what Marx calls value’s (or capital’s – take your pick) fetish character. Now, this is not a new idea, or analysis, or understanding of Marx, per se; that this is Marx’s critique of the capital-machine has long been understood and articulated. If The Automatic Fetish brings anything to that tradition of reading Marx, it might be in a systematic enumeration and characterization of the precision and determinacy of that process of distortion. The latter is what I call capital’s perceptual physics, and its elaboration is the through line of Capital Vol. 3. From the first page to the last, the analysis is single-minded in its focus; there is not a single sentence in the text that is not in the service of its articulation. And that which Marx calls value in its historically specific capitalist movement is at the centre of it all.

This last point brings me to the first part of your question about the hearsay surrounding Capital Vol. 3, and that other tradition of keeping a little skeptical distance from, and a vigilant suspicion of, the published version of the text due to its unfinished, draft-stage prematurity, and Engels’s (potential or likely, profound or negligent – depends on the critic) misconstruing of Marx’s analysis in his organization of the material. That I read the text without sharing much of this skepticism may have been the “silver lining” of my own naiveté. I didn’t approach this project as a Marxologist or a Marx scholar for the obvious reason that I’m neither of these – would that I were. I read Marx in English translation; this is definitely an obstacle and a shortcoming. However, it entails that one “learn the analysis” like one learns a first language, by experiencing its patterns and rhythms. Marx’s analysis is cyclical: it protracts and retracts over and over again. Repetition is very important; some of the meaning of the analysis is conveyed in its movement and its structure, in when it looks forward and when it looks back, in the way it builds. Please don’t mistake me for saying that not reading Marx in German is an advantage! It just means you experience the text in a different way and this inevitable alternate emphasis puts other things in relief. All this is to say that my experience of the text simply didn’t match the conventional (English language) hearsay.

 

SO: We’ll no doubt return to this idea, so pivotal to your argument, of the physics of capital and the mystifications thrown up by its movement. I’d like to first follow up on this point about the dialectical exposition of Volume 3, which as you say arises directly from its object. You note in The Automatic Fetish that the organizational format of your reconstruction of Marx’s analysis follows the architecture of Volume 3, but I’ve been struck by your remarks, both in the book and elsewhere, about what we might call the aesthetic experience of the text. This relationship between aesthetics and Marx’s critique of political economy has been an interest of yours for some time, I understand, and as someone who also works at the intersection of aesthetic theory and value theory, I’m fascinated by the conceptual overlaps of the two discourses, which employ a common vocabulary: abstraction and representation, essence and appearance, form and content, and so on. My impression is that we share this conviction that the sheer brilliance of the conceptual inversions in Marx’s analysis renders this difficult work deeply pleasurable to read. Would you agree? And what might this reveal about his object?

 

BB: That’s a lovely set of nesting questions, Sean. I think we could say in general that method of analysis and/or exposition should always arise from the object; the object tells us how to approach it. But if we get more specific and the object of analysis in question is the internal movement of the capital-machine – or “the concept of capital” (9) – then the question becomes how do you study and present that historically specific object? What does that object call for in its analysis or exposition? To enumerate the characteristics of the concept of capital to which one’s method must respond is well beyond what I can do here, so I’ll choose one that you brought up: capital’s “inversions.” There are too many of those to enumerate as well, but let’s point to the dynamic of productivity to make the point. A capitalist mode of production coheres into a historical objectivity when a scale of productive capacity, in synergy with other circumstances, reaches a tipping point such that it transforms into a process of expanding productive capacity per se. It so happens that this process is a dual process; it also emerges as one of expelling an ever-expanding portion of a capitalist society’s population (its makers and bearers) from the conditions that allow them to meet basic needs, or (to say the same thing another way), to consume enough of the (necessarily) growing social product to facilitate a dignified or simply viable subsistence. So: a system of expanding production is at one and the same time the systematic pre-emption of a generalized partaking in that capacity – the radical denial of a potential (but unrealized) generalized (because collectivized) experience/reality of abundance. Now, we can posit this contradictory movement around productive capacity as the nature of capital’s movement, but why would simply positing that point persuade any thinking reader? In Capital Vol. 3, Marx doesn’t posit these inversions as the characteristic movement of capital, he demonstrates them – he demonstrates the way in which capital, logically, could not move otherwise. Capital’s inversion of a historically emerging capacity into a perverted and topsy-turvy reality is a logical necessity of its movement: history becoming necessity. But, again, the necessity of that movement must be demonstrated (to be persuasive as an analysis, I think) and what I tried to do in The Automatic Fetish (to use a comrade’s phrase shared with me when they read the book) is to demonstrate the need for demonstration. And, yes, one aspect of that demonstration is carried by the structure and logical progression of the material that constitutes Capital Vol. 3 – its conceptual reconstruction of the object. As you say, I tried to capture that structure/progression in the layout of the parts and chapters of The Automatic Fetish.

This last idea is one possible segue to your question about value theory and aesthetics. We could talk about the aesthetic experience of the text, or, we could talk about the aesthetic work of the text; although, my instinct is that these are actually the same thing from different standpoints. I agree: the nature of the object of analysis (the movement of value in becoming capital) puts questions of presentation and representation (form, exposition, even narrative and metaphor I think) into the mix necessarily. But in earlier work I’ve also thought of Marx’s critique – and then the practice of doing critical theory more generally – as “aesthetic work” in another (related) way. The point of Marx’s critique of capital was not to interpret the world that capital informs but rather to aid in changing it, and in the most radical sense: to eradicate it altogether and introduce the conditions that will inform a different, not yet existing one. Of course, analysis doesn’t change anything, per se; only people working and struggling in concert do. If the capital-machine is what you want to replace, only a collective subject can carry that out. So, can (and if so how does) the analysis aid in producing and fortifying that collective subject? Does it change the makers and bearers of capital themselves when it alters their perception of their own (even individual) relationship to the object of critique and struggle? Is persuasion (propaganda, even) that kind of aesthetic work? Does that work address the senses, experiential knowledge, or the intellect (or all of these in combination)? Can critical theory as aesthetic work persuade the potential changers that what seems impossible is actually conceivable, doable, and so on. I know this is all very simply put, but I think there is something useful in putting the matter so simply. It’s also simple because I never finished answering those questions for myself in earlier work before putting them aside to take up other ones after 2008. Many years later, the question of aesthetics has passed me by and there are too many people better equipped, like yourself, currently taking it up. My graduate students are very interested in aesthetics and/as politics, so I’ll just let you (and so many of our MLG comrades) and them work it out and I’ll be over here learning from you all.

If that is a note on the aesthetic work of the text, I haven’t yet touched on what you call the aesthetic experience of the text (Capital Vol. 3, in this case), and this is more a personal observation than a political one (while recognizing that those comportments are not separate). Yes, I do agree with you that, “the sheer brilliance of the conceptual inversions in Marx’s analysis renders this difficult work deeply pleasurable to read.” Mind you, is it the reading or the culmination of that work? – because it is work, as you point out, made a little more arduous by the first-draft prematurity of the text we mentioned earlier. However, consistently throughout, the work of reading relents to an amazement of the analysis in the way it builds and recreates the movement of its object. In The Automatic Fetish, I wanted to convey my experience of being as astonished by the analysis as horrified by its object. I found the experience of reading Capital Vol. 3 stunning, like walking into a cathedral (I haven’t travelled far and wide and so don’t have many examples to refer to; insert preferred awe-inducing edifice here). Perhaps, in the case of Marx’s analysis in Capital Vol. 3, the experience of being stunned is pronounced by it being a matter of revealing something that is hidden – making something that in the everyday is invisible, visible; something that is silent, scream, or play music, and so on. If there were a sign over the gate to Capital, it would say “if you’ve decided you have an aversion to depth analysis, do not enter.” Then again, let’s not put up that sign because we want those folks to stumble into the text anyway and get stuck in before preconceptions can undo its work!

 

SO: I like that defense of depth analysis, which brings us back to questions of forms and appearances, and so also to your concept of perceptual physics. As Marx teaches us, capital turns reality itself inside out. The mystifications capital generates are not a matter of false consciousness, exactly, but rather of fetishism, or what Adorno calls in his 1962 seminar on Marx “the objective process of ideology.” Could you explain what you mean by perceptual physics, and how it helps us to make sense of our topsy turvy world?

 

BB: I promised things would get downright telegraphic from here on, so I am tempted to say that what I mean by perceptual physics is exactly what you (and Adorno) just said: fetishism as objective process, as in, one objective aspect of the process of capitalist accumulation. The social production relations that constitute capital’s historical content – its internal movement – are objective but immaterial, formless. They are dynamics that can only operate by taking form in laws, institutions, state formations, shared perceptions, generalized understandings, commonsense, and so on – “appearances” wherein the actual workings of the system are inverted. In The Automatic Fetish, I describe this as the way in which capital’s content disappears into its social forms. Again, this is not a new reading. But, what happens in the analysis in Capital Vol. 3 is that Marx’s critique of fetishism becomes a little more systematic and narrowly defined: capital’s social forms serve the perceptual delinking of the production of surplus-value (the augmenting of capital’s pool of social wealth) from its source in people’s cooperative labour – directly in the context of productive enterprise, and indirectly in the context of nonproductive, or informal, or unwaged social reproductive labour. Simply put, the source of wealth in a capitalist mode of production is systematically obscured. The term perceptual physics was meant to emphasize, as you say, that this is a dimension of the capitalist system itself, and not a subjective mistake of understanding. But, in a way, that is a strategic or political emphasis: there must be an internalizing of these forms in people’s minds to an extent – that is a part of their concretizing as form. There can, of course, be “mistakes of understanding,” but they are collectively, systematically generated and thoroughly conditioned; we could say they circulate as dominant ideology.

As for the idea of physics, I had arrived at the idea that Marx’s value theory was a (particular to capital) theory of motion. Then, thanks to a friend, I wandered into Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, after which I read Michel Serres’ book on Lucretius (The Birth of Physics). Under the influence of Lucretius and Serres, it seemed to me that Marx’s “science” could usefully be described as a physics. I don’t say much about physics in the book, but I hope the demonstration of it speaks for itself. That said, while working on it, I planned to undertake a fuller exploration of Marx’s theory of value as a particular theory of motion in the next project. Then I discovered (and so as not to be accused of thievery) that Thomas Nail (a scholar and translator of Lucretius) recently wrote a book called Marx and Motion that puts Marx and Lucretius together! It’s a very interesting read. Whatever I might come up with, it would be quite different from Nail’s book, but I’m not sure I’ll return to my iteration of that project anyway.

A quick example of how value theory (because that’s all we’ve been describing) can help make sense of our topsy turvy world: I read an article in the newspaper this morning about “overtourism” in some European cities. You can already guess the gist of it: inhabitants of those cities are protesting the mass tourism that is making cities like Barcelona, Mallorca, Florence, etc. unliveable for local inhabitants (housing and cost of living crises, noise, crowds, destruction of historical and ecologically fragile sites, a near total dependency on tourism-related industry, and so on) and exiling them to the periphery of those cities and beyond. An interviewee, one of the protestors, who worked in the tourism industry and was completely aware of the contradiction in which he was ensnared – dependent for survival on the same industry that is making his survival precarious and ruining his city – voiced the desire for a functional balance between tourism and the needs of local inhabitants that would alleviate these problems. Now, what value theory can do, and why I think it’s an important moment (even though it is only one relatively small moment) in the wider analysis of this situation, is that it demonstrates how and why, in a capitalist mode of production, such a functional balance is a logical impossibility. The movement particular to capital is one of incremental (and sometimes lurching) progression towards a tipping point (or, crisis). In other words, capital always, by the nature of its own internal dynamics, pre-empts precisely the kind of balance here invoked, as a stable (i.e., long term) possibility.

The next question should be why/how? Marx answers it in Capital Vol. 3 (and I gloss the analysis in The Automatic Fetish). I can only point to that answer here: the growth of tourism industries as a ratio of global industry in general, the absorption of an increasing portion of workers both waged and informal in tourism-related industries, the sinking of wages in the tourism sector to well below living-wage levels, growing investment in short-term rental properties and the conversion of residential properties into tourist-serving/rent-seeking properties (on the part of real-estate developers, speculators and people who can’t make ends meet without turning their own homes into hybrid short-term rental properties), and the redirection of capital towards real-estate over productive industries all together – all these things are compelled by forces to which the invention of laws and regulation are entirely helpless to mitigate or curtail, never mind arrest. Yes, laws and regulation are able to address some of the effects of these forces (not the forces themselves, which are nothing other than the value-metabolism itself), for a while, and perhaps provisionally divert some of their most extreme manifestations. It is crucial to do just that wherever possible. However, in the end, stop-gap regulation can kick the can down the road where the contradiction returns, amplified, and where its effects are now more deeply structural. The reason why this is, in part, a problem of perception is that these internal, invisible ‘forces’ – what I’ve called the value metabolism – are entirely obscured in the surface presentation of the problem. One might rightly ask, if something like a “balanced tourism” once existed, why could it not exist again? Nothing in the prima facie of the constellation of problems identified and experienced as so-called “overtourism” suggests (never mind explains) why it could not, nor why that constellation of problems, at the end of the day, has only a radical, post-capitalist resolution.

And we haven’t even pointed to what I think is the real moment of capital’s inverted sociality at the heart of this “quick example”: capital’s turning of land into “real estate” and “housing” into a force of putting people out of their homes and cities, and without a place to live. Now that’s a topsy turvy world.

So much for telegraphic.

 

SO: Your answer makes me want to jump ahead to the final chapter on ground rent! In your book, you track a series of conceptual inversions and mystifications: from the transformation of surplus-value into profit and the rate of one into the other, through the fetish of supply and demand, to the “automatic fetish” of interest-bearing capital, or what Marx calls “the mother of every insane form” (596), and finally to ground rent. Before we get there, though, perhaps you could outline those initial inversions, and the importance to the analysis of the category of cost price, which you suggest is the cell form of Volume 3.

 

BB: In Capital Vol. 3, Marx begins the series of derivations that will illustrate the movement of value becoming capital with the category of cost price. As you mention, I suggest that cost price has a foundational place in the building of the analysis in the way that the commodity does in Capital I. And like the commodity, we come back to cost price much later in the analysis in its transformed form as production price (more on that later). In ordinary description, cost price simply refers to the cost to the industrial capitalist of initiating a cycle of production, an initial investment in means of production (what Marx calls constant capital) and labour-power (what Marx calls variable capital) – even more simply, the cost of doing business. Cost price is significant because, in its concept, it constitutes the baseline of viability for an enterprise; if the latter does not recuperate in revenues a value-magnitude that is at least equivalent to cost price, that enterprise will not be viable for long. Therefore, with this category, Marx begins to spin the narrative of the movement of value as objective, “economic” or, (as Marx says in Capital I) “silent compulsion.” This is why I argue that, for Marx, value theory is a theory of determinacy: no operating capitalist, under the normal conditions of capitalist production (and the “normal” qualifier is important) can out-maneuver this compulsion; it is always-already determining the range of motion of capitalist accumulation. Cost price is one (and the initial, in the narrative in Capital Vol. 3) form taken by value as silent compulsion.

But cost price has an important function in the reproduction of the system as a whole – in what I call capital’s perceptual physics – in that it launches a series of mystifications that obfuscate variable capital (the investment in labour power) as engaging the source of new value in the system for the members of the capitalist class to share amongst themselves. Surplus-value is a ratio of variable capital (i.e., the investment in labour-power; see Capital I), but profit is a ratio of cost price (i.e., the combination of constant and variable capital). The operating capitalist makes no distinction between constant capital/means of production (not a source of new value) and variable capital/labour power (a source of new value) because there is no need to do so from the interests animated by that standpoint on the system. From that standpoint, generalized as the “commonsense” of capitalist enterprise, surplus-value disappears into profit, along with the (potentially generalizable) understanding of where it comes from and how it is generated.

Bear in mind that cost price is not a positive entity; rather, it’s a standpoint on the system. For instance, as we move through and with Marx’s analysis, we see that cost price (the price at which the capitalist buys) is actually production price (the price at which the capitalist sells) from a different standpoint on the system. Cost price and production price are the same thing from different standpoints (and therefore materially different at the same time). You can see why one cannot do without the concept of totality as a critical or analytical comportment in the analysis of capital: cost price and production price are the same, but different. As we say in the cult, it’s dialectical!

 

SO: This idea of standpoints and your comments on value-determinism remind me of your defense of the base/superstructure metaphor in the opening pages of The Automatic Fetish, which you rework so that the abstraction called “the economy” is not the base but—if I’ve understood you correctly—is in fact part of the superstructure, while value is the base, or “the centre of gravity” (57), as you put it, following Marx (279). Like the falling rate of profit and the transformation problem, the base/superstructure metaphor comes with a fair amount of conceptual baggage. What is it about this figure, which sometimes gets dismissed as part of an outdated tradition of Marxism, that works for a value theoretical reading of Marx?

 

BB: What, you mean other than it fulfilling some unexamined need to be contrary? (Just kidding; I’ve really been working on that.) Yes, you have understood me perfectly; and, what’s more, I think, both of us, Marx! The idea of value determinism has everything to do with homing in on both the subtlety and simplicity of the base-superstructure metaphor. My argument is that in Marx’s use of that figure, “base” refers to the invisible, immaterial but objective, movement of value (or value becoming capital, or the concept of capital, or value as centre of gravity, the movement of accumulation, and so on – all of these articulations work), and, in a capitalist mode of production, the movement of value (or base) determines the conditions for social reproduction in the widest sense. The movement of determination is stealthy because it’s not mechanical: it establishes a range of possibilities for social reproduction, it sets limits and boundaries, it both produces and requires a seemingly endless amount of diversity and differentiation in the way it determines the survival of the community whose ground zero is global. However, the directionality of its movement with respect to those limits cannot be gainsaid, negotiated, or managed. Part of the stealthiness of the value metabolism is also in the way it genuinely does not give a shit (that is, if it were endowed with consciousness and a will) about a lot (possibly even most) of what does go on in the world – the good, bad, wonderful, stupefying, hateful, etc. It is simply a social thermostat regulating production, but one that produces really dire, anti-social collateral damage.

But value (that invisible, immaterial objectivity) must take form – phenomenal, historical, empirical forms of appearance and experience in the world. The superstructure refers to this world of forms; it is what Marx calls “the world as it actually is” (117; 134), the world of actually lived, particular lives, in all their togetherness and separateness, and the ideas, ideologies, commonsense, laws, conventions, institutions, state formations that inform them, including those forms that constitute “the economy”: property, money, goods and services, markets, prices, banking and the credit system, finance, debt, interest, trade, etc. In Capital Vol. 3, Marx shows how (invisible, intangible) surplus-value must take the form of profit, and with that transformation of form we move closer to the messy surface world of real lived appearances. But the category of profit-in-general takes even more particular, more concrete, lived forms in the actual world: profit of enterprise, interest, rent, wages. The disappearance of the base into its superstructural forms is both subtle and simple.

I agree: the base-superstructure figure comes with a lot of baggage – let’s call it the 90s! (I can hear people out there shouting, no, it was the 80s! It was the 70s! For Marx was published in 1965! All that imagined shouting is partly what made it seem fun to resurrect the figure.) I think in its heyday (however we periodize that) it was contested because if you conceive of the surface world of economic forms (even in their own objectivity) as determining all other aspects of social life, as somehow mysteriously trumping all other social forms in which lives are lived and experienced (and implying a mechanical sense of determinism that, in the case of the movement of value, for instance, cannot be realized), then it becomes impossible to imagine that it was not contested – the analysis is untenable, illogical, historically baffling. However, when you think about the base-superstructure figure as capturing the capitalist dynamic between essence and appearance, or content and form, i.e., the dynamic that is the movement of capital itself, what about it doesn’t work for a value theoretical reading of Marx?

 

SO: Well, I’m entirely here for a value-theoretical account of determinism! Foregrounding the dialectic of essence and appearance in Marx also returns our attention to the concept of abstract domination, or what is sometimes called “silent” or “mute compulsion,” depending on the translation. I’m curious how you see the relationship between abstract domination and abstract wealth, but I want to home in on a more concrete example of class antagonism in the book, what Marx calls “the freemasonry of the capitalist class” (361). You show how, despite all appearances to the contrary, competition between individual capitalists is a surface phenomenon, and that, in fact, raising individual profit margins requires raising the general rate of profit. How does this work? And what does it tell us about the nature of class domination under capital?

 

BB: The dynamic that Marx characterizes as the “freemasonry of the capitalist class” is a stunning moment in the analysis that, for me too, came like an anvil to the head. It’s so much at the heart of the overall movement of capital and, what’s more, Marx does not elaborate its full range of expressions in Capital I. It is a dynamic – a dialectical movement – between the surface activities of capitalist competition and the hidden, necessary (necessary in that without it there’s no capitalist mode of production) process of profit equalization among competing capitalists. In the overall movement of capital, competition and equalization are two fused moments both in the process of accumulation and in the movement of accumulation’s breaking down. In other words, competition/equalization articulates capital’s mode of accumulation and its tendency to crisis – its progression toward a crisis tipping point. Or, if you like: equalization is the ongoing systemic inverting of the surface movement of capitalist competition.

How does this work? Unfortunately, we’ll have to be schematic, but here’s a quick description moving from the surface of things to the invisible core: within a single sphere of capitalist production, survival of enterprise requires out-performing competing enterprises. When you have winners in this game of survival it simultaneously creates losers. “Losing capital” becomes mobile capital, or capital on the hunt for new and different profitable investment opportunities – i.e., capital that moves across spheres of production (its redeployment facilitated in large part by the credit system). Everywhere in the system, capital is on the move, searching for profitable prospects and retreating from those (in some cases entire spheres of industry) that have run their course. But, the hidden outcome of capital always on the move across spheres of production, fleeing devaluation and striving for the next big venture, is a generalized movement of equalization, or, the ongoing leveling out of profitability on investment into a general rate of profit system-wide (always mystified in any empirical snap-shot of the field, where profits margins both within and across spheres of industry appear significantly divergent). The equalization of profitability as a ratio of investment is the unintended, automatic outcome of competition-compelled (i.e. profit-driven) privatized production where production is nonetheless socially divided up.

Now, there is much more to say about competition/equalization; if that is a description of equalization as an outcome of capitalist production, capital simultaneously posits equalization as a presupposed condition of its reproduction. Equalization entails, as you point out, that profit-of-enterprise, as a value-magnitude, is not equal to the magnitude of surplus-value generated by that same enterprise. Marx demonstrates that a more adequate conceptualization of the movement is as such: productive enterprises (in the narrow, technical understanding of “productive” or value-generating) contribute surplus-value to a common shared pool – social surplus-value as totalized magnitude – from which every individual capitalist (productive or otherwise) draws a generalized rate of profit on their overall investment (or cost price). Equalization, therefore, takes form in the departure of a commodity’s price from its value. And it becomes clear why this is a necessary (and automatic) dimension of capitalist accumulation given the vastly different technical compositions – and therefore value compositions – of production across spheres of industry: capital wouldn’t last for long (it wouldn’t have emerged at all!) if each different sphere of industry produced at vastly different rates of profit. This situation would not be viable in a system of socially divided, private production, that is, a system of all-round material interdependence where widgets A–Z are all equally required for that system’s reproduction. How long would the system last if the private production of widget A consistently produced at a rate of profit significantly higher than the production of widgets B–Z? Who would be compelled to produce B–Z? Only on the surface is capitalist production a system of cut-throat competition; under the surface, and “behind the back” of the individual capitalist for whom this process is entirely invisible, it is a thoroughly collective project, a freemasonry of capitalist brethren working with and for each other to keep the whole machine turning over.

If that is a description of the movement of capitalist accumulation, let’s shift perspective and describe its break-down. This movement is explored in Capital I. Individual capitalists attempt to best their competitors largely by reducing their production costs relative to their competitors (which is the same thing as saying, by increasing their productivity in relation to that of their competitors). If they succeed, they reap the profit-benefits of this new advantage until the time when its means are standardized across the field of competition. When this happens, this initial “early-adopter advantage” enjoyed by our capitalist, now comes to express a new social average; that is to say, the profit-advantage is nullified in becoming the new social average price-point of production. The greater profits achieved by the out-performing capitalist are therefore ultimately temporary, but the social costs of this precarious individual victory – expressed in a temporarily cheaper but now larger product output – are catastrophic and permanent: the pillaging and wasting of natural resources, the pillaging and wasting of human labour time/energy expended now in worsening and often life-threatening conditions, the effects of intensified production on the climate, environment, and atmosphere, a larger social product that doesn’t reach those who need it (because they can’t afford to consume what would be their share of it) on its journey to the landfill as the graveyard of useless goods and services (spent cooperative time, energy and ingenuity) undesired and surplus to the needs of those who have too much.

What Marx theorized (as relevant now as then) was how the striving for a new profit-advantage on the part of the (atomized) capitalist meets its subsequent systemic nullification for the (collective) capitalist class. The insanity Marx sought to reveal is this: the whole of social reproduction is subordinated to this striving and the nullification of its outcome, over and over again, each time ratcheting up capital’s value metabolism, and, with each ratcheting up, a deepening of the human and planetary toll: the cost price of enterprise ascends further out of reach, a higher ratio of the total global (potential) workforce is made redundant (and often, as we see, forced into migration), and for those who keep their jobs, wages are forced downwards as a ratio of the total social product. All this, the devilish outcome of a system of blindly asserted social averages and tipping points, is “the nature of class domination under capital.”

 

SO: The language of “social averages and tipping points” (5) provides to my mind one of the most compelling formulations on offer in the book, not least because it clarifies how a value-theoretical reading of Marx might account for the historical trajectory of the capitalist mode of production. Value theory has a vexed relationship to questions of temporality and history, more often finding room to move in spatial or logical modes of abstraction. One of the great accomplishments of The Automatic Fetish is to put value theory in service of a specific kind of diachronic analysis, at times by mobilizing the category of the tendency, so central to Marx’s thought, about which an entire book might be written. Can you say a bit about the approach to history found in the book?

 

BB: I can but, to be honest, I have yet to articulate that approach, for myself, in a way that is satisfying. Even so, Marx’s historical approach in Capital Vol. 3 was the most engaging aspect of that study and all I wanted to do in The Automatic Fetish was to convey a clear and faithful sense of it. There is an important distinction to make between the work of writing history and the work of historicizing. They are related projects and there is often overlap between them. Ideally, in the necessary dividing up of intellectual labour, the two approaches supplement one another. It’s hard to imagine any single study accomplishing both; it would be like trying to create a map of a territory at a scale of 1:1! David Graeber, for instance, wrote a history of money and debt; Marx, on the other hand, historicized the money form: two very distinct projects, and their differing characterizations and narrativizations of what is only prima facie a shared object are in conflict only if you lose track of how they differ in orientation and purpose.

The movement of historicization is genealogical in the sense that it is an attempt to discern the logical presuppositions of an existing social form, configuration, or modality. We might as well take the example of the social modality that is Marx’s actual object of study, capital: if we agree that capital exists where it didn’t always, what logical conditions (or “raw material”) had to be present, and/or what had to have taken place, in order for capital to emerge as a system? Or, in other words, if capital now exists (as an immaterial objectivity) and didn’t before, then capital is the outcome of what transformation story? And if we don’t agree that capital is a particular, extant social modality, historicization is also an exercise in making the case: a characterization in the service of delimiting a certain historical specificity as the emergent outcome of otherwise contingent (accidental and unintended) conditions and circumstances. Marx uses a lot of historical material in Capital Vol. 3, but it is all in the service of historicizing the logical and currently extant (and still so to this day, I argue) relationship between capitalist production (specifically, the production of surplus-value) and capitalist modes of circulation (i.e., the distribution of surplus-value among the personifying factions of the capitalist class: producers; merchants; financiers; landowners. To hone this objective further (which in the case of capital means stepping back and totalizing to another degree), Marx’s objective is to historicize that social dynamic we call capital itself, and why capital necessarily presupposes that an abstract form of wealth – “value”– succeeds and demotes (as a new form of social power, as a historically novel mode of social determination and organization) traditional forms of wealth/domination, what I’ve lately been referring to as forms of wealth-in-kind.

Here is the intriguing part, in my opinion: Marx demonstrates that the story of capital’s emergence as new abstract form of wealth (a novel mode of sociality, an emergent logic that will inform a never before-existing kind of society, and so on) is carried out through a kind of horror movie-style possession of traditional social forms, where the incremental scaling up of new synergies of production-circulation come to take possession of those forms by dissolving their traditional social content and infusing them anew with the “soul of capital.” Marx works through these historical transformation stories – merchant trade to commercial capital; usury to finance capital; landed gentry to capitalist property in land – demonstrating that the soul of capital necessarily inverts the social content of pre-capitalist social reproductive forms, animating them with a new logic even if on the surface of things (i.e., with respect to the actors involved, specific practices, and so on) nothing may have changed. Eventually, however, surface appearances/forms do change, and dramatically, as an expression of the soul (logic) of capital itself, which compels the development of capitalist production toward gargantuan economies of scale that meet their limits of viability in a world of finite resources and dwindling means of consumption.

 

SO: The final chapter of The Automatic Fetish takes up one of these historical transformation stories, that of “landed gentry to capitalist property in land” as land gets pulled into value’s gravitational field. It’s one of the meatiest chapters of the book, presumably in part because Marx’s writings on ground rent are more unfinished and unwieldy than the rest of Volume 3. Ground rent is also one of the more difficult forms of value to grasp as a distribution of surplus value created in production. And as you note, rent seeking has become ever more central to contemporary profiteering after decades of stagnation. How does ground rent differ from that more universal category of rent? In other words, what is its specific relationship to value?

 

BB: Chapter 6 on Marx’s analysis of ground rent is indeed the meatiest chapter in the book, in part for the reasons you say, and in part because the transformation of land into its economic form of rent is more convoluted than it is with the other forms of profit theorized in Capital Vol. 3; there are more dimensions of the process and, consequently, it takes more mystifying twists and turns. For these reasons, however, what Marx demonstrates is even more fascinating and surprising in its dramatic departure from commonsense: that ground rent, in its “pure form” – as he says, “free from all adulterations and blurring admixtures” (762), that is, the concept of ground rent at the abstract core of every instance of its worldly actualizations – is nothing but surplus-value, a magnitude of congealed abstract/social labour time, the same historical “stuff” of every value magnitude in whatever form it takes, drawn from the same common well of total social surplus-value. The entire thrust of part six of Capital Vol. 3 is “simply” to demonstrate that the theory of value holds in the case of ground rent, that the movement of value continues to determine the profitability of land once it, too, is possessed by the soul of capital.

With ground rent, Marx is specifically theorizing production scenarios where land itself is a means of production: agricultural production, mining, resource extraction, and so on. When this is the case, what makes ground rent different in its formation from the other forms of profit, including other forms of rent, is that the ownership (or control) of a piece of land constitutes a monopoly on that particular means of production; its use and its particular attributes (its location, climate, accessibility, the richness of its resource reserves, etc.) cannot be generalized across the wider sphere of production, that is, across the field of competition, and therefore whatever advantages the producer might enjoy in terms of product-yield cannot be equalized across the competitive field. Essentially, ground rent, as a value form, is that unequalized, opportune portion of surplus-value. Marx characterizes it as a “surplus” portion of surplus-value that falls to the producer who monopolizes advantages that cannot be separated from the land itself – a portion of surplus-value that then falls to the landowner in the form of rent (when the producer is not also the landowner).

There is much more to say about ground rent as a value form, of course, but let me just emphasize one last thing: no less than in any other part of Capital Vol. 3 is the focus of the critique of ground rent the movement that I refer to as capital’s perceptual physics. As with each of the other parts, the red thread of the analysis is a social modality that produces appearances in the world that conceal and distort that same modality and, most importantly, in doing so, obscures the actual source of all wealth in a capitalist society in people’s cooperative labour. In the case of land as capital, Marx is concerned to show that ground rent is a thoroughly social economic form and not an expression of the natural properties of the soil. Some might be surprised to hear, for instance, that every one of the tables in part six of Capital Vol. 3 serves the illustration of this perceptual dynamic: each series of tables calculates the rent-profit-price outcomes of a different set of hypothetical circumstances of a crop production cycle. In each case, the tables show that the productivity differential (by which I mean the level of productivity in relation to competing parcels of land, and all parcels in relation to a wider social average) must logically be the determining factor, even though appearances to that effect will be systematically obscured. In a nutshell: because the only way capital can “count” productivity is as a differential and not as an absolute, an increased level of productivity on a piece of land can potentially be expressed in either increased prices (or profit/rates/rent), static prices, or falling prices. Or, a steady level of productivity can be expressed in rising prices, static prices, or falling prices. Or, a falling level of productivity can be expressed in rising prices, static prices, or falling prices. You see what I mean? If we take only the “empirical outcomes” of productivity–price as evidence of their relationship, it would suggest that there is no systematic connection between them at all; appearances distort the actual inner connections and the direction of determinacy. I’m not good with math, so working through those tables left me in the foetal position many times. But that’s how I know that if I can figure them out (with effort and patience, granted), anyone can. However, if readers are satisfied to take my word, I summarize the gist of all Marx’s hypothetical case studies illustrated in those tables in chapter six.

 

SO: I want to finish by asking you about one of the most eye-opening moments in The Automatic Fetish, where you highlight Marx’s argument in Volume 3 that interest-bearing capital and the development of the credit system points towards the abolition of capitalist ownership and is therefore a potential portal to communism. Marx writes, “There can be no doubt that the credit system will serve as a powerful lever in the course of the transition from the capitalist mode of production to the mode of production of associated labour” (743). Readers may wonder how we get from credit to wealth in common. Could we conclude with an account, however brief, of the relationship between interest-bearing capital and free association?

 

BB: We’ve decided that this is our final exchange for practical reasons, so this response will be briefer, and I hope pardonably so, because it is the response that is quite unfinished and needs be ongoing: the project of theorizing (along with you, and together with so many others) from the point of view of Marx’s critique of capital, what the conditions for, and mechanics of, “wealth in common” on a wide scale might look like – that is, on a scale where it is the rule and not the exception. Of course, Marx doesn’t go there in Capital, but what he does do, punctually throughout Volume 3, is ask readers to imagine what might be the case if, in the transition story we call capital, the social content introduced to history (socialized production/a socialized division of labour) in its capitalist form (private property) could be separated from its capitalist form and exploited as a social power to the benefit of everyone – because it already extends from everyone.

We’ve discussed how the movement of value is the movement of a social relationship, the movement of relativity, of social averages and tipping points, and so on. However, there is one “absolute” that Marx identifies as a historical development on which the entire capitalist edifice hangs: the capacity of human beings, when working in concert, to produce more than what is required to satisfy (and then some) their own immediate needs; collectively, human beings can produce not just in surplus to their own minimal needs but to their abundant comfort, and enough to meet the comfort requirements of all, in whatever way each of us will participate in social reproduction in this world to come. Marx asks readers to imagine the credit system abstracted from its capitalist constraints as private property, that is, as historical possibility: as the mechanism of pooling social wealth, as a reservoir of resources held in common, that can be released in any which way they might be needed, or applied to projects that require the large concentration of resources in order to be realized (I emphasized “abstracted” because, in Marx, abstraction is not just a mode of domination, but also the movement of historical possibility, of the speculative).

This is not a vision of “free credit”; in the Grundrisse Marx dismisses as ridiculous the idea that people would “borrow and repay” the surplus that their own labour produces (even at zero rate of interest); “free credit” is an expression of the logic that, for Marx, socialized production (and reproduction) released from its capitalist straitjacket has the potential to make obsolete. It’s also the occasion (I think) for one of Marx’s funniest jabs at Proudhon – that he certainly hears the bells ringing but never knows where. So, if the idea of free credit doesn’t come close, the question is (still), what might socialized (re)production released from its capitalist form (or associated production; or the Commune; or wealth-in-kind held in common; or how ever we code that historical, “not yet realized and has no obligation to ever arrive” possibility) look like? My guess is that whatever comes immediately to mind will (still) not even be close (and why poets and science fiction writers do much of the heavy lifting). But I’m ready to lift the sanctions on speculative blueprints, even just for the purpose of making richer compost.

 

SO: Thank you for taking the time to respond to my questions with such generosity and erudition, Bev. It’s been a real pleasure.

 

BB: Thank you for such thoughtful questions, comrade; this conversation has been a joy!

 

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All page references are to Beverly Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (Verso, 2024), and Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (Penguin, 1981).