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No Way Out but Through (The Portal)

A Review of Beverley Best’s The Automatic Fetish

November 6, 2024

The cover of Beverley Best’s The Automatic Fetish
The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital
by Beverley Best
Verso
2024

In our era of ongoing and worsening crises and catastrophes, you have likely noticed two things, or even taken part in them: a renewed interest in Marx and a proliferation of ways of describing capitalism (as neoliberal capitalism, platform capitalism—or even via the suggestion that we have passed through capitalism and into something possibly worse, a neo- or techno-feudalism, for example). In The Automatic Fetish, Beverley Best insists with searing clarity that capitalism continues now to run along paths set out at its origins; and those looking to Marx to understand the current conjuncture have reason to turn to the relatively unstudied third volume of Capital. Best finds in Capital, Volume Three, methods of analysis salient to contemporary discussions about digital labor, social reproduction, financialization, landownership, and more.

She opens by referring to a debate that has been argued many times: the relationship between the capitalist base and its superstructure. Best argues that the path of determination only goes one way, from the base of capitalist value to everything else, and yet clarity and specificity about how that works is hard by necessity. This is because it is at once unique and fundamental to capitalism that the base “disappears” into the superstructure, in a determinism that appears not to be one. There is what she calls a “perceptual physics” that buries capitalism’s essence in its surface appearances, obliterating the truth of capitalist value in the process of its unfolding.

The resulting reign of appearances obfuscates “the potentially subversive comprehension” that living labor, which is cooperative (developing toward “universal labour,” in Marx’s account), is the only source of capitalist wealth.11. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 199. In Best’s assessment, labor’s “accumulated knowledge and skill” is of course “truncated by its conversion into private wealth” and “objectified in machinery”; it comes to stand in perverse “opposition to the workers, who become [its] appendages,” and this leads ultimately to the formation of a population made redundant “to the production process in the course of its progressive mechanization.” Yet their accumulated knowledge and skill do not disappear in being pitched against them.

Capitalism is “a force antagonistic to the embodied source of human ingenuity that created it,” Best argues, and this antagonism is rationalized and disguised when profit is construed as the result of innovations introduced by the owners of capital. Capital is itself bestowed a social power of continuous magical expansion—a “self-valorizing value,” as if a quantity of capital could grow on its own without human intervention and activity, spontaneously, simply by virtue of being what it is.

These social forms are abstractions that are ‘autonomized’ as part of the trajectory of capitalism’s unfolding.

In this fantastical imagining, capital becomes what Marx described in Capital, Volume One, as the automatic subject or substance: the mystified, self-justifying, self-generating source of all wealth. Best explains belief in this self-valorizing value as arising from the process of fetishization, “whereby capital’s social forms”—such as profit, interest, rent—come to “accrue to themselves, in the general consciousness of capital’s bearers, the value-creating capacity that is, in reality, an attribute of living labour alone.”

These social forms are abstractions that are, over time, “autonomized” as part of the trajectory of capitalism’s unfolding. The historical process of transition to a capitalist mode of production thus also entails an unfolding “mode of conception,” Marx wrote. 2Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 940. Its reign is characterized by, in Best’s terms, the continuous erection of barriers to “undistorted perception and comprehension.”

 

Interest

Best’s forensic account of interest exemplifies her way of breaking these barriers down. Best emphasizes that interest has only one source: “it is a portion of the profit that is generated by the capital–commodity when it is set in motion.” The capitalist employs capital, leading to profit, some of which is “redistributed back to the money capitalist as the price paid for the use-value of the capital–commodity.” Marx writes that interest is “part of the profit which the actually functioning capitalist has to pay to the capital’s proprietor.”3Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 460. Best restates the matter boldly: “there is no form or amount of interest that is not a portion of the profit generated in productive enterprise.”

Yet anyone who has ever invested in anything—mediated by bankers, no mention of any workers doing anything anywhere—will have noticed how it proceeds as if capital can “expand on its own steam” and not “as a function of the productive capacity of living labour.” With the development of capitalism, interest-bearing capital became a fundamental component, a sedimented and naturalized necessity, of a system in which “generation of new value is disjointed, temporally and spatially, between processes of production and realization.”

Industrial capitalists need to sink capital into the production process before they see any profit; merchants need capital to create storefronts and buy stock and hire staff. Once a loan is in this way no longer a matter of direct relation between an individual lender and a borrower, it is socialized and dissimulated: the interest you receive on a savings account balance is hardly dependent on the success of any one company. Instead, in the common social form of interest, living labor is hidden, as is the mediating role of the entire production process in capital’s expansion.

This matters because, in essence, Best is keen to emphasize that the third volume of Capital is fundamentally concerned with both this expansion and its obfuscation—with how the social form, in this case interest-bearing capital, has dissimulation traveling right alongside it, resulting in “perceptual obliteration” of interest’s only real source. The instruments commonly associated with financialization, the forms of packaged and securitized risk—the various procedures and practices that Marx characterized as fictitious capital—cannot but be claims to future surplus value, designed to extract it from the system “with as little risk to the owner of money capital as possible.” Yet everything is put in the way of this being common knowledge.

The instruments commonly associated with financialization cannot but be claims to future surplus value.

Interest-bearing capital is one of the clearest instances then of how capital’s social forms of appearance “bludgeon their way into a form of ‘common sense’ and inform how capital’s bearers perceive their own material interests,” inhibiting comprehension of living labor as the source of capitalist wealth. It is in fact the working class, which includes “those who ‘produce’ workers,” who produce all the wealth, and yet the development of capitalist productivity entails the expulsion of living labor from the production process, so that, instead of the abundance of social wealth there is its direct opposite: “the systematic proliferation of human need itself, unmet and denied.” Our fundamental social property “is negated in order to be put at the disposal of a few adventurers.” We are left with an occluded, though constitutive, “negative presence of class struggle” that “haunts every phenomenal aspect of capital’s circuitry.”

 

Digital Labor and Merchant’s Capital

Best brings this analysis right up to our present. It is easy to see that a “few adventurers” play an outsized role in today’s economic imaginary: Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos. Best argues against the idea that online activity is value-producing labor, but, she claims, digital users do provide capital with a “free gift.” Contemporary life entails a “virtually mandatory engagement with the digital,” and so workers are more and more expected to simply possess digital skills. The more these skills are generalized, the less particular digital capacities “register as the outcome of formal training and specialization” and “once-specialized labour comes to represent the new baseline of unskilled labour, a unit of simple labour-power, and its value diminishes accordingly.”

This is the real meaning of the development of the “general intellect” that concerned theorists of immaterial labor: it is “a means to reduce the value of labour-power,” or “generalized skilling as a method of deskilling labour.” It’s “free worker training,” in short. The example of social media is telling. It is in essence, in Best’s treatment, a process of attunement to “image/narrative production and management,” which induces “an aestheticized comportment towards the object world and an ability to arrange, capture, and archive one’s surroundings and ‘experiences’ in images and quasi-promotional narratives.”

Best is referring here to basic activities like posting on Instagram, which involve seeing the things in our lives as available for aesthetic arrangement and depiction, and creating an archive of images and captions that curate our worlds and experiences for others to appreciate. As these skills and proclivities are generalized via networks and platforms, the average person becomes a “highly skilled commercial practitioner.” For many users of social media, the basic and unavoidable “manoeuvres of everyday life” arethe once specialized skills belonging to commercial labor power—think of taking pleasing photographs of a meal, or of recommending basketball shoes. These skills are devalued consequent to their generalization.

Best’s account of merchant’s capital, which is at once historically oriented and perfectly contemporary, clarifies the matter of digital labor yet further. Let me get this straight out of the way for those with a horse in this race: Best states clearly that value is created only in production, not in circulation, which is instead only where value is realized. Merchant’s capital is what is “set in motion to carry out the cycle of accumulation”; it is “mobilized in the service of realizing surplus-value in the sphere of circulation,” for instance in wholesaling, retailing, marketing, advertising, and accounting.

Historically, merchants carried goods from producers to buyers, making a profit from transactions by charging more for the goods than the amount they returned to the producers. It was worth it for producers because it expanded their market. With the development of capitalism, these once contingent individual relationships became sedimented social practices; the producer of goods became the industrial capitalist employing labor, and the merchant took a portion of the surplus value that resulted from their work. For the industrial capitalist, sharing profit with the merchant makes sense, because a general increase in the rate of profit comes with quicker sale of commodities, and they can thus hold smaller quantities of capital in reserve, keeping the productive cycle going at the fastest possible pace.

Best states clearly that value is created only in production, not in circulation, which is instead only where value is realized.

Eventually the existence of merchant’s capital comes to dissociate entirely circulation practices from production, such that we attribute Bezos’s wealth to his ingenuity in logistics instead of to the surplus value generated by the labor that produces the commodities sold via the Amazon platform. In other words, merchant’s capital develops in such a way that production and circulation undergo the autonomization that Best is concerned to chart throughout: a “separation in appearance, of capital’s social forms from their internal connection, as capital-in-general.”

Autonomization describes the history of aspects of capitalist social relations coming to appear autonomous; the division of labor is one form of it. It is the gradual separation in our minds and experiences of processes like making things, such as bread or soap, versus buying and using them. That this separation has reached such advanced forms today helps explain why it might never occur to us that, for an online merchant, not having retail workers means they can appropriate more of the surplus value realized in the circuit of capital-in-general—and that endeavouring to pay as little as possible to retail workers, or to online marketing professionals, whose skills are now scarcely distinguishable from what many people do every day online, stems from the same basic motive and process. And yet, in sum, while retail and marketing professionals are not themselves value-producing labor, their work’s platform-based devaluation simply leaves more of the surplus available to the holders of capital.

 

Rent

To grasp Best’s sense of the place of Volume Three within Marx’s thought, we now need to consider her tour-de-force account of rent. Most of us have experienced rent: paying the owner of a space to be allowed to use it temporarily, and the owner is likely in turn paying down an interest-bearing mortgage, ultimately benefitting both the landlord and whoever financed the loan. Best argues that, historically and today, it is important to see rent as the owner’s share of surplus value produced elsewhere: “the profit that falls to those who own land or rent-seeking assets is always, if indirectly and invisibly, a portion of surplus-value that is produced in productive enterprise.”

This is clear to us in the case of the farmer who pays the landowner who has allowed him to use his land “in the course of productive enterprise.” It is less clear when thinking about the apartments I have rented—say as a graduate student. I was not using these locations for any enterprise and was not being paid for productive labor. Still, Best argues, if we see all landownership as itself a “legal mechanism” through which surplus profit is “redirected from the pool of social surplus” to the landowner, my situation is clarified. My money for rent came from student loans, university funding, and government fellowships—so a mix of taxes on other income (state funds), university tuitions, interest accumulated from the university’s investments, and so on. My rent was thus still the redirection of funds from the social surplus to the landowner.

Rent expresses a value that can only be fully rationalized and understood from the point of view of the social totality. If value is a “shorthand for a mode of sociality,” Best argues that careful analysis of its inner movement is the essential groundwork for the “more important and urgent work of mapping capital’s historical trajectory.” Aspects of this historical trajectory are treated throughout The Automatic Fetish, and this is work that Best will no doubt continue in her research going forward. Consider, briefly, her account of the historical form of labor rent. Labor rent entails working to earn permission to inhabit a piece of land held by another.

Best points out that it does not disguise but rather exposes its own conditions. If “the economic form of land in rent, in all class societies, is a function of the capacity of human labour chained to it,” labor rent does not pretend otherwise. Capitalist rent, however, appears in a mystified form because, unlike labor rent, it is “a form of social domination rather than the domination of individual producers” and “involves a perceptual dissolution of the source of collectivized misery.”

Poised between labor rent (direct and exposed) and capitalist rent (indirect and dissimulated), then, is money rent, which Best argues plays a crucial transitional role in capitalism’s history. For the person forced to pay rent in money, production costs matter, and productivity becomes a concern. The “now-dependent possessor of land” morphs into the “tenant farmer–capitalist”; this precipitates the formation of wage labor, by inducing the tenant to exploit workers as a response to the economic necessity of paying the landowner.

In this way land—especially fertile land—is a “free gift” available to those who manage to arrange to have it at their disposal, and this is one reason for the centrality of colonialism to the expansion of capitalism’s scale. Attention to the historical development of labor rent and, in turn, money rent, clarifies how the “genealogy of all capitalist profit is rent, or surplus labour,” as manifest in the surplus profit returned to the landowner—profit that comes to be generated by wage labor, to the mutual benefit of the capitalist and the landowner.

 

Utopian—that is, Dialectical—Portals

The part of Best’s analysis that is likely to produce the most querying involves capitalism’s so-called “portals”—phenomena within capitalism that promise a way out of it. She describes a “utopian, which is to say dialectical, derivation of forms” turning capital’s “social concentration of means of production and labour-power,” in Marx’s words, into a genuinely associative mode that makes the capitalist redundant.4Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 567.

One of these portals is to be found through development of interest-bearing capital, as the credit system “introduces the objective means by which to push through and beyond the capital relation itself.” Best is sticking close to Marx here in her exegesis, as is true throughout the book. She seems largely to agree with Marx’s argument that the credit system represents the socialization of capital and thereby portends “its succession by an associated mode.”

Marx wrote: “Not only does profit consist in the appropriation of other people’s labour, but the capital with which this labour of others is set in motion and exploited consists of other people’s property, which the money capitalist puts at the disposal of the industrial capitalist.”5Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 640. According to Best’s exposition, genuinely associated production might be conceived as the fullest development of this system rather than its negation, “the ground for the emergence of its only alternative: social production.”

Capitalism has inadvertently introduced to us a form of universality that could unfold—Best deems it “historically possible”—into a genuine expansion of the available modes of social reproduction. The dynamic of self-abolition inheres within capital itself. The “transition from capital to post-capital will not be a matter of replacing a capitalist mode of production with an alternative associated mode,” Best argues, “but, rather, of activating the virtual, if not-yet-actualized, dimensions of capital itself”: “it will be a matter of developing through, as opposed to against, capital’s inbuilt portal to another ‘non-existent but non-fictional,’ higher because intentional, form of social modality.” That this modality would emerge into its fullest fruition appeared likely to Marx, but now “challenges today’s imagination.” It surely does.

We live in a financialized age, awash in fictitious capital that never materializes into anything that would help anyone except the wealthy. The policy environment protects the wealth hoarders and their assets. People turn away from thinking about where socialized wealth is being invested if it means a better return on what was put in. We can be forgiven for some bafflement in the face of the idea that any utopian potential lies herein. Its depredations seem too encompassing.

Yet Best insists that imagination matters—that capitalism is also an aesthetic problem, because of its “topsy-turvy” regime of representation, illusion, trickery, ideology, and dissimulation. It is important that we understand what is true and use precise language in describing it. For Best, this means carefully specifying what is and is not “subsumed” by capital, what is and is not value-producing—as a way of reminding ourselves, perhaps, just how much is not in fact encompassed. This is how I understand her approach to social reproduction theory.

By focusing not only on productive labor but on the making of the worker at home and elsewhere, social reproduction theory provides a lens onto “the relationship between the whole of social being (the often-neglected ‘work’ of making communal life and well-being, or simply surviving)” and “the exigencies of capitalist accumulation.” Like online user activity, and fertile land, the work of social reproduction is not value-generating but is rather a “free gift” to capital.

The fact that it is not value-producing does not mean that it is not stitched into the whole propulsive system. The forms of making-do and surviving that we mean when we speak of social reproduction “cannot not be impacted by the movement of capital,” but they are “not directly subsumed by it either,” Best writes. Capitalist labor is the “inverse of creative, life-giving, life-sustaining, community-building activity that is meaningful and valuable in and of itself”: it turns the activities of workers against them and turns life-making into reproduction of workers. That’s the whole point.

Yet at the very same time, capital’s unfolding is nonetheless also a means to the development of socialized capacities and skills that are portals to another dispensation. In this other dispensation we could act in the service of communized social organization and development rather than having all our work endlessly pitched against us.

The urgency increases by the day. In Volume Three Marx identified a “permanent communal property” that is “the inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of the chain of generations.”6Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949. Best argues that workers are in their interests structurally aligned with the cares of the planet and its other species, and that all are “subverted by the mystification that conceals the fact that it is their creative life force that is objectified as alienated wealth.” What life force will be there in a ruined world, one inevitably asks? There is a “universality of the separated,” which Best describes also as negative universality, and “an irreducible unity of interest in the overcoming of separation.”

The threat of climate catastrophe is surely one aspect of this irreducible unity. Will pushing through to the next form of social organization arrive us—and soon—at planetary responsibility and accountability? It “may, or it may not,” Best writes. Which only means there is no reason not to try. ×

  1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 199.
  2. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 940.
  3. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 460.
  4. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 567.
  5. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 640.
  6. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 949.
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