Beverley Best's "The Automatic Fetish" (2024) is a bit of a mess in structure, and quite simplistic, but engaging in its core premise, which concerns an aesthetic critique of capitalist society. The forms of representation of value (e.g. as revenues of production) become the "mystified" expression of objective social relations. Of course, this is simply the critique of political economy, continuous of the Classical Economists, who approach "the true relation of things" (Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 19) by seeing how the "Wealth of Nations" is really a class structure, which divides social produce between different sectors. Engels offers an original critique in his "Outline" (1844):
<The “national wealth” of the English is very great and yet they are the poorest people under the sun.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/df-jahrbucher/outlines.htmHere, "wealth" is both general and particular, not simply in possession, but in concept (e.g. Smith's "Paradox of Value") as we may read in the writings of Ricardo (1817):
<Value, then, essentially differs from riches, for value depends not on abundance, but on the difficulty or facility of production. The labour of a million of men in manufactures, will always produce the same value, but will not always produce the same riches.https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/ricardo/tax/ch20.htmThus, "value" esteems an inverse definition; not as utility, but its opposite, as a measure of the disutility of labour. The more "valuable" a thing is, the less useful in general. Here then in the "scientific" political economy of the aspiring bourgeoisie, we find a groundwork of critique, which Marx obviously advances from with enthusiasm.
In dealing with "vulgar" political economy (e.g. capitalist apologists who deal in phenomena alone), Marx directly excludes the Classicists, theoretically and historically:
<The narrow and pedantic expression of vulgar conceptions which are bound to arise among those who are the representatives of this mode of production is very different from the urge of political economists like the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and Ricardo to grasp the inner connection of the phenomena.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add3.htmMarx provides a brief history of the movement in his 1873 Preface to Capital Vol. 1, that the final period of "scientific bourgeois economy" (1820-30) was met with a crisis due to the class ascendancy of the bourgeoisie. For 2 decades after (1830-50) various contests were held, and Marx names two dominant figures; Bastiat, who represents vulgar political economy, and J.S. Mill, who attempts to preserve the scientific spirit of study. The meaning of "vulgar" political economy then cannot be lazily compared to "bourgeois" economics in itself. Some contemporary marxists claim that Marginalism in economics is a new vulgar political economy, but is this true? What is only implicit in marginal theories is the inverse magnitudes of MP and TP past the threshold of diminishing returns, which is the source of profit, as proven by Jevons' empirical account on rates of wages:
<the general tendency to reduce the hours of labour at the present day, owing to the improved real wages now enjoyed by those employed in mills and factories.https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/jevons-the-theory-of-political-economy#lf0237_head_060The only issue is that Jevons has it backwards; lesser working times is the cause of the higher wages, not vice versa. This is proven by jevons' exact model (Fig. VIII), that the working day (a-d) involves appreciating and diminishing returns, and so where it diminishes for the employee, it appreciates for the employer. Jevons then provides a "scientific" model of political economy, but is not conscious of his own conclusions. Jevons is not an apologist, but he is not yet critical of capitalism either.
So then, Beverley approaches her critique by seeing the distinction between essence and appearance (or what is otherwise referenced as base/superstructure). Moreso, her analysis is to show that "the automatic fetish" is the primary mystification of capital, as self-expanding value. Of course, this is dealt with by Marx early on in Capital:
<For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays goldeuyghs.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch04.htmThis "occult" or mystical property is also spoken of by Aristotle (referenced in the same chapter) through his description of Chrematistics (one of the "antediluvian" forms of capital: interest-bearing, or usruer's capital):
<The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.htmlHere, "the birth of money from money" (M-M') is treated as an "unnatural" process, and thus superstitiously. Marx speaks more directly upon this "automatic fetish":
<Interest-bearing capital is the consummate automatic fetish, the self-expanding value, the money-making money, and in this form it no longer bears any trace of its origin. The social relation is consummated as a relation of things (money, commodities) to themselves […] the creation of value arising from capital as such […] This is also the form in which it is conceived by the vulgar economists. In this form all intermediate links are obliterated, and the fetishistic feature of capital, as also the concept of the capital-fetish, is complete.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add3.htmI would say that this Addenda of Theories of Surplus Value (1861-3) also seems superior to Capital Vol. 3 as an accompanying text for a critique of the "automatic fetish" (since Marx already gives anouncement to it). Here, we also see the transhistorical nature of this fetish, as it first appears with interest-bearing capital:
<Interest-bearing capital, or, as we may call it in its antiquated form, usurer's capital, belongs together with its twin brother, merchant's capital, to the antediluvian forms of capital, which long precede the capitalist mode of production and are to be found in the most diverse economic formations of society.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch36.htmSo then, in addressing the "automatic fetish" of capital, I will provide some ancient sources on the the topic.
We can read in the Mesopotamian text, "Dialogue of Pessimism" (1000 BCE) the servant speaks upon his master's interest given from loans [grain = silver]:
<The man who makes loans, his grain is (still) his grain while his interest is profit […] Loaning is [swee]t as falling in love, getting back as pain[ful] as giving birth. They will consume your grain, be always abusing you, and finally they will swindle you out of the interest on your grain.”https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/2/4/SB/-Here, loaning is first normalised as a social relation, and secondly, the denial of interest is seen as 'swindling' and 'abuse', as though a great injustice is permitted by this denial of the capitalist automaton. As I have previously referenced, Aquinas (1274 CE) viewed interest as unjust because it adds nothing to products, and so Aquinas escapes the capital-fetish, while still retaining the commodity fetish somewhat, in viewing rent as similar to interest; as usufruct, but abiding by its custom. Engels himself is victim of the same uncritical error:
<[Housing rent] is simple commodity sale; it is not an operation between proletarian and bourgeois, between worker and capitalist […] On the contrary, we are dealing here with a quite ordinary commodity transaction between two citizens, and this transaction proceeds according to the economic laws which govern the sale of commodities in general and in particular the sale of the commodity, land property. The building and maintenance costs of the house, or of the part of the house in question, enters first of all into the calculation; the land value, determined by the more or less favourable situation of the house, comes next; the state of the relation between supply and demand existing at the moment is finally decisive.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/ch01.htmThus, Engels supposes that where the tenant doesn't pay the landlord, the landlord has been 'swindled' and 'abused'. This mystification by Engels proves the fetish (e.g. Engels imagines that land creates its own value, and so it must be returned as a revenue of rent, lest the "laws" of value are suspended and chaos pervades all). Of course, Smith (1776) is already critical of landlords:
<As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch06.htmFurther, the origin of rent is demystified by Smith as a product of labour, which then enters into the final price of goods. Smith is not beguiled by the automatic fetish. On the "automatic fetish" of the later capitalist cost-price (k), we also see Aristotle speak of Hephaesetus' automatons, that if only the master could treat artificial life as his own, he would have no need for slaves, and so wealth would develop from itself, by self-sufficiency:
<For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus […] the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.htmlFetishism and fantasy coincide on this point, with Virgil speaking of the automatic wealth from a Golden Age:
<the uncultivated earth will pour out her first little gifts, straggling ivy and cyclamen everywhere and the bean flower with the smiling acanthus.The goats will come home themselves, their udders swollen with milk, and the cattle will have no fear of fierce lionshttps://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilEclogues.phpThus, the very idea of automatic wealth is ancient, like the automatic fetish of interest-bearing capital itself (which seems to have relation to Plato's idea of perpetual motion, e.g. "Lusiteloun").