(An English edition of this book is forthcoming from Monthly Review Press)
http://www.revistapolis.cl/english/22e/resfernandez.htm
"The book of Michael Heinrich has the double merit of presenting a mediation of the top work Karl Marx, written in clear and accessible language, and proposing, at the same time, a dense and erudite interpretation of the famous text. The author not only avoids the simplifications and schematic diagrams, but he even penetrates the complexities and paradoxes of the marxian thought, that has given rise to discussions and controversies, never settled, and provides us always a argumentatively solvent position founded in a deep knowledge of the texts of Marx. The work is preceded by an excellent prologue written by César Ruiz Sanjuán, who is in addition the translator of the Spanish edition. There we are warned that, for a full comprehension of the objectives of the book, it is convenient to situate it within the framework of a collective programme undertaken by a conjunct of German studious, who searches to produce a "new reading of Marx"; this is, a reading capable to recover the fundamental marxian contributions for the understanding of the structure and functioning of the capitalist production mode, without confusing his theoretical-critical project with the vulgar versions of the "ideological marxism", diffused along the XX century at the heat of political struggles. Within this vast programme it is decisive to understand the concept of "critique of the political economy". The expression, used by Marx as subtitle of The Capital , precisely designates the nucleus of his theoretical project: to submit to critique the political economy as scientific system which provides the theoretical supplies through which the capitalist society self-understands and justifies itself. That criticism of the capitalist rationality expressed as "science" of itself, points to the essence of society in which the social process is mediated by the generalized exchange of goods, resulting from this that men only relate to each other through the relations of things. The inevitable consequence, spontaneously produced behind the actors, is that these remain in fact submitted to objective processes, independent of their will, which acquire the consistency of a “natural” structure and, therefore, unmodifiable. The phenomenon of "fetishism" (of goods, money, capital) is the fundamental object of the "critique" which Marx formulates to the political economy as science that theoretically reproduces, naturalizes and justifies as much the spontaneous perception of the individuals living in a society as such, as the investment objectively produced on a practical level, by which men have become an appendix of the thing-oriented world"
Full review: http://www.revistapolis.cl/english/22e/resfernandez.htm