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Beverley Best with Philip Wohlstetter
Join us for a special Saturday afternoon event as we partner with Red May Seattle to celebrate Verso Books. We'll host two readings that day: At 1:00 pm, we'll welcome Beverley Best, author of The Automatic Fetish, to the Readings Room, and following an intermission, we'll host Jason Read, author of The Double Shift, at 3:00 pm for a second book talk. Red May founder Philip Wohlstetter will join Beverley onstage.
The Automatic Fetish recreates Marx's analysis of capital, step-by-step, through the material compiled posthumously as Capital, Volume three. Identifying the critique of value as the central through-line of the analysis, Best elaborates Marx's theory of value as a theory of movement through which the capital-machine generates social forms of appearance that are the inversions of its inner operating mechanisms.
Characterizing capital’s movement and the dynamic production of social form as a 'perceptual physics,' Best demonstrates the consistency and the coherency with which Marx's theory of value orients all trajectories of analysis in Capital 3, as well as providing the conceptual bridge between Volumes on.
The book illustrates the way in which capital’s development to this day is as much as a story of the continuity of capital's inner dynamics as it is a story of ongoing transformation of capital's surface-forms.
Best develops, through Marx's critique, an analysis of money, credit, crisis, and the derivatives of profit-interest and ground-rent, that takes the reader from their emergence as capitalist forms to their current expressions. Neither a back-to-basics nor newfangled reconstruction, The Automatic Fetish eschews novelty to show why, once again, Marx deserves to be read carefully.
Beverley Best is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Marx and the Dynamic of the Capital Formation: An Aesthetics of Political Economy (2010), The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital (2024), and editor (along with Werner Bonefeld and Chris O’Kane) of the Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (2018). She is the Vice-President of the Marxist Literary Group.
Philip Wohlstetter is a writer and a director of performances. He was the founder of Invisible Seattle, which conducted a project called The Novel of Seattle written By Seattle (1983). He is the founder and co-curator of Red May, a month long vacation from Capitalism.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2422328-0
