Historical Materialism Book Series382- Inverted World

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.