Highlights of Capital Volume III: The Automatic Fetish

Volume III of Marx’s Capital – The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole – integrates and completes Marx’s analysis, enabling us to understand and make sense of how the phenomena we see occurring on the surface of society are related to the underlying system of capitalism. It is essential to understanding the current moment of late capitalist/imperialist development, in which we see the rise of rentier and finance capital and the commodification of debt; continuously rising prices that bring still more poverty and starvation; new technologies turned into means of extracting rents; the privatization of public spaces, properties and institutions; and the list goes on.

In this series of ten weekly sessions, we will be guided through the key concepts in Capital III using Beverley Best’s highly praised companion volume, The Automatic Fetish: The Law of Value in Marx’s Capital.

Fred Murphy will facilitate this group. Since 2015 Fred has led numerous MEP study groups on ecosocialism, science and technology, the history of capitalism, and Latin American politics. He studied and taught historical sociology at the New School for Social Research and reported from Latin America for several socialist publications.