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Inverted World. Fetish and Mystification in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Buy hardcover (Brill)
Published May 2026

Clara Ramas San Miguel

Author: Clara Ramas San Miguel
Translator: Michael Gonzalez
Why does capitalism appear as an opaque totality in which human beings function as things and commodities take on a life of their own? Inverted World invites you to rethink Marx as a philosopher of mystification and appearance. Clara Ramas shows that Marx’s critique doesn’t merely explain exploitation—it unveils capitalist totality as an inverted world and exposes the phantasmagorical forms of everyday economic life, which Marx theorizes as “fetish” and “mystification”. Drawing on philological analysis of Marx’s manuscripts and contemporary German debates, she argues that fetish and mystification are not rhetorical flourishes, but systematic organizing principles of his critique of political economy. This book offers a bold reconstruction of Marx’s conceptual architecture, and a fresh philosophical reading of Modernity that bridges political economy, ontology, and critical theory.

Biographical Note

Clara Ramas San Miguel, Ph. D. (2015), Complutense University Madrid, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at that university. She researches Marx’s critique of political economy and its roots in Classical German Philosophy. She published the Spanish critical edition of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Akal, 2023).

Readership

This book is especially relevant to scholars, specialists, and graduate or postgraduate students in philosophy, social and political theory, as well as to libraries, universities, and other academic institutions.

Table of Contents

Foreword: From Fetishism to Materialism – New Perspectives on the Critique of Political Economy
Preface to the English Edition
Works of Karl Marx Cited

Introduction: Marx’s Inverted World

1 On the Project of a Critique of Political Economy

2 The Problem of Fetishism and Mystification in the Interpretation of the Critique of Political Economy

3 Fetishism and Its Forms
1 The Core Form: The Commodity Fetishism
2 The Fetishism of Money
3 The Fetishism of Capital

4 Mystification and Its Forms
1 The Core Form: The Mystification of Wages
2 The Mystification of Profit (or Interest)
3 The Mystification of Ground Rent

5 The Structure of the Critique of Political Economy: Proposal for a Reconstruction

6 Theory of Value and Fetishism
1 The Theory of Value: the Quantitative and Qualitative Perspective
2 The Immediate Relation between the Theory of Value and Fetishism
3 The Value-Form

7 Theory of Surplus Value and Mystification
1 The Theory of Surplus Value: the Secret and the Appearance
2 The Immediate Relation between the Theory of Surplus Value and Mystification: the Trinity Formula, or the System of Illusion for an Inverted World

8 Conclusions: Towards a Critical Materialism

Epilogue to the Second Spanish Edition
Marx and the Twilight Modernity

Bibliography