This article by Rasmus Fleischer was first published in the Swedish

magazine Subaltern in late 2011.

Robert Kurz and the collapse

of modernity – an introduction
Quarter of a century ago, the Nürnberg school of Wertkritik (value-
critical theory) emerged as a project to develop a third critical
theory, pertinent to the third industrial revolution. This essay aims
to outline some recurrent figures of thought within this particular
school, especially in the work of its most prominent representative,
Robert Kurz. First of all, something should be said about the relation
between critique and crisis.

When the growth of capital (or, more precisely, the

Wertvergesellschaftung) begins to stall, if so only for a brief period
of time, this does not only equal an “economic” crisis, but also a
nascent decomposition of the whole “pseudo-nature” which is
historically constituted around the value form and its form-
immanent expansion. The crisis also involves labour, politics, nation,
art, reason and other categories of realized metaphysics. If growth
reaches its absolute limits, this means that all these mentioned
categories are doomed and, in the long term, beyond any saving.
Most important of all, they cannot give any orientation for the acute
search for an exit.

The crisis is opening a gap between fetish and experience. The

theory of the fetish-character of commodities was developed by
Marx in the first band ofCapital, showing how the commodity-form is
mediating human relations as relations between things. Fetishism
should not be misunderstood as an obsessions with commodities in
themselves. It means that we experience the categories of the
modernity – that is, societies of commodity-production – as
naturally given, rather than as something we take part in shaping in
our interaction with our environment. Everyday reason may rest
safely within the fetishized categories, which everyone must
internalize within their own consciousness to have any chance to
take the role of a subject on the commodity-market, which is a role
necessary to take in order to survive in a world based on wage
labour. The manifestation of crisis means that the fetishes are no
longer fit to explain everyday situations. Thinking may recognize
crisis in two was: as ideology or as critique, both to be understood
as a response to the experience of suffering, of a “damaged life”.

Ideology means affirmation; a thinking with an affirmative relation

to one or several fetishized categories. Usually these are played out
against each other: politics against economy, labour against capital,
art against industry, or something similar. Ideology comes as an
abundance of positive visions for the future; nevertheless, every
ideology is essentially an ideology of crisis. Ideology itself is a
symptom specific for the situation of a crisis within a society built on
growth, that is, self-valorizing value.

The alternative to ideology is called critique. The precondition for

critical thinking is to realize the impossibility to remain a subject
envisioning community with others without recourse to fetishized
categories. Critique can only begin from what Adorno called the
non-identical, that which is not absorbed in fetishism. It cannot be
reduced either to the form of pure theory or pure practice. Even
when critique appears as theory, this can only be in attempt to
sustain its negativity, a negativity which must also confront the very
category of “theory”.

Any taking part in the competition of the marketplace of “theory”

will imply a capitulation of theory before ideology. On the other
hand, trying to immediately “get practical”, so that theory is made
into an justification of a certain practice, will ultimately mean
exactly the same kind of capitulation.

Critique demands both distance and closeness to the object of

critique. Distance can only be kept by radically historicizing. Thus,
radical critique is primarily to be understood as critique of fetishism,
while the critique of ideology is secondary but indispensable. There
is hardly any room for a genuine critique of “injustice”, as such
jargon necessarily implies a positive notion of justice, which can
only be formulated by recourse to fetishized categories and thus
transform itself to ideology.

The Nürnberg school of Wertkritik are not defining themselves as

representatives as a “third” critical theory. They do, however,
address a tradition in which the two great forerunners are called
Karl Marx and Theodor W. Adorno. Schematically, these could be
thought as formulating a “first” and a “second” critical theory,
corresponding to the first and the second industrial revolution,
respectively. During these two epochs the critical theorists
confronted an expansive modernity. Capital generally did work as
self-valorizing value, even if sometimes hit by periods of crisis,
which Marx as well as Adorno could experience on a personal level.
After a while, however, every crisis was followed by new cycles of
growth, which indeed made capitalism appear to be about the
eternal recurrence of the same, also for those critics who strove to
surpass it.

Neither the first critical theory, nor the second, had any chance to
relate to the reality which has materialized in the third industrial
revolution, based on microelectronics and digitalization. During the
1980s, Marxists like Fredric Jameson and David Harvey began to
describe this reality as “postmodernity”. The Nürnberg school of
Wertkritik preferred to understand it as “the collapse of
modernization”.

Wertkritik, in this sense, is a rather marginal current, due to the fact

that it takes place outside academia and inside the German-
speaking country. There are, however, some parallels to the more
academic “value-form analysis” represented by theorists like
Christopher J. Arthur. The similarities are stronger than the
differences between Wertkritik and Michael Heinrich, who has
written an accessible, well-read and yet untranslated book on Marx’
Capital, in which a few sections are dedicated to polemic against
Robert Kurz on the topic of crisis theory.

Most of all, Wertkritik does have strong affinities with the writings of
Moishe Postone. As long as these are approaches to reading Marx, a
common part of departure consists in the pathbreaking re-readings
known as Neue Marx-Lektüre, made during a few years around
1970 by some students of Adorno’s (most importantly Hans-Georg
Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt). Another influence comes from the
rediscovery of I.I. Rubin (1886–1937), who already in the 1920s
had emphasized the critique of fetishism as the central point in
Marx, which was indeed an idea far from existing Marxism.

While all the mentioned writers tend towards a theoretical

strictness, the writers associated with Wertkritik are often oscillating
wildly between abstraction and concretion. This critique does not
allow for itself any calm contemplation of the laws of movement of
capital. On the contrary, it constantly returns to the question about
how all theory is specific for a historical moment. One example of
this turn is Robert Kurz’ essay “The end of theory”, translated to
Swedish in this issue of Subaltern.

Robert Kurz was born in 1943 in Nürnberg. Around 1968 he got

engaged in Germany’s maoist movement and during the 1970’s he
was a member of KABD (Kommunistischen Arbeiterbundes
Deutschland), which was one of innumerable “K-groups” in the
sectarian left of West Germany. After his farewell to marxist-
leninism he oriented himself towards a splinter group of ex-maoists
around the magazine Neue Strömung. Already at this time Robert
Kurz gained some notoriety for the polemic style which he himself
likes to describe as “sharp-edged” (zugespitzt). There is
undoubtedly something sectarian in saving one’s juiciest epithets for
former comrades. So far, a certain heritage of Maoism is alive in
Robert Kurz. The polemical style is not only a matter of personal
temperament, but is grounded in an explicit aversion against the
conventions of academic theory. Kurz has repeatedly expressed his
contempt for what he terms the “bookbinder synthesis”,
materialized in anthologies of academic theory as in vaguely leftist
magazines which want radical critique as content without letting it
question the editorial line. The refusal to take part in many such
contexts is keeping Wertkritik at a distance from academic leftism.
Instead, it has mainly proceeded in the form of long essays in thick
magazines edited by a few people in Nürnberg.

The beginning of Wertkritik can be traced to 1986, with the very

first issue ofMarxistische Kritik, a magazine which a few years later
would change its name into Krisis. This first issue contained a
programmatic essay by Robert Kurz, raising the claim that
capitalism is entering its end crisis. The simple reason given for this
was that the third industrial revolution has raised the productivity in
commodity-production to such a degree that the generation of
relative surplus value no longer can rise but must be beginning to
fall. Capitalism makes itself impossible or is digging its own grave by
emancipating itself from labour. The flight of capital from real
accumulation to financial speculation is just a symptom of a stalled
generation of surplus value. (It might be noted that 1986 marked
not only the beginning of Wertkritik, but also the year in which the
world’s financial markets were connected to one single system, an
event which has been termed “the Big Bang” and which is given
some attention by David Harvey in his recent work on crisis theory,
The Enigma of Capital (2010).

Here is not the place to discuss details of the value-critical theory of

crisis, which has been disputed a lot in Germany and is sometimes
described by opponents as a kind of “catastrofism”. Around ten
years ago, there was a major debate between some value-critical
thinkers and Michael Heinrich, with the latter denying any inner
logical limit in capital to infinite growth. Heinrich wrote: “The theory
of collapse has historically played the role as a relief for the left. No
matter how miserable the real defeats have been, one has been
able to assert oneself that one’s opponent is about to lose it.”

This objection indicates that Michael Heinrich is underestimating the

ambitions of the Nürnberg school. To the latter, the collapse of
capitalism can hardly be thought as the defeat of an opponent, for
to the extent that everyone living in capitalist society is caught
within its fetishized forms, this will mean that the collapse of
capitalism is also a collapse of their own conditions for living. There
is an infinitely destructive potential in the crisis of capital. Indeed,
Robert Kurz has returned a number of times to the idea of an death-
drive immanent in the value-form as an absurd end in itself. The
absolute end of self-valorizing value can, according to him, only be
the “gnostic” annihilation of the world.

Only if people are consciously trying to transcend capitalism, and to

resolutely negate the value-form, can there be a possibility to create
a post-capitalist society. This is stressed also by Claus Peter Ortlieb,
author of an important explication of the theory of collapse which in
Germany has come to defineWertkritik.

Already before the fall of the Eastern bloc, Wertkritik was regarding
Soviet and other “socialist” states not as failed alternatives to
capitalism, but as belated and resolute attempts by states to
achieve a stronger position on the capitalist competition on the
world market. In the West as well as in the East, “socialism”
essentially remained an adjective which could be put before all kinds
of fetishized categories in order to legitimate their continued
existence: “socialist politics”, “socialist economy”, “socialist culture”,
“socialist state”, “socialist growth”, “socialist labour”…
An definite break between Wertkritik and existing Marxism occurred
in 1989, as Robert Kurz published an article titled “Der
Klassenkampf-Fetisch“. There is indeed an antagonism between
labour and capital, he argued, but this is an antagonism of the
commodity-market, which is as essential for capital as is the
antagonism between competing capitalists. Class struggle is just a
manifestation of the universal competition within capitalism and is
therefore not able to lead the way out of it. Wertkritik was rather
seeking an exit from the society built on of abstract labour, and
during the 1990s this became a central theme for the group
associated with the magazine Krisis. They got a certain fame in
1999 as they published their “Manifesto against labour” which sold
surprisingly many copies in Germany and was also translated to a
number of other languages.

The critique of labour was also broadened towards a critique of the

fetishized forms of anti-capitalism which are affirming decent labour
against indecent capital. This included not only a critique of
traditional Marxism, but also of various ideas about an “alternative
economy”, be it based on the abolition of interest or on the abolition
of copyright. In this context Robert Kurz has, in a similar manner to
Moishe Postone, discuss the relation of antisemitic ideologies to the
value-form.

Wertkritik is characterized by a strictly anti-political stance, in

opposition to all those leftist tendencies seeking to rescue “the
political”. Common for all political parties and all political activist are
a short-circuiting of critique. Political reason means to define
objectives and to represent interests, but these objectives and
interests can only be expressed within categories immanent to the
real metaphysics of value. In the end, politics can have no other
objective than the totalization of the commodity form and the
transformation of all human relations into relations between legal
subjects.

After formulating the fundamental critique of labour and politics,

Robert Kurz tried to further radicalize Wertkritik in terms of a
fundamental critique of subjectivity, reason and enlightenment. He
abandoned certain remnants of Hegelian thinking (like the concept
of Aufhebung) and, in the name of negativity, rejected the idea of a
“dialectic of enlightenment”.

Just as the first critical theory did degenerate into ideology as its
representatives where playing out state against capital, the second
critical theory met a dead end as it approached enlightenment by
playing out its ideal against its reality.

Just like the critique of labour knows two Marx, there are also two
Adorno: one who affirms subjectivity and one who is staying true to
negative critique. Subjectivity is, according to Robert Kurz, the form
into which human individuals are forced by the fetishism of
commodities. To the extent that people are acting as subjects, they
are prisoners within a dialectic of subject and object which can only
be destroyed by an “organized individuality”, which may be able to
intensify critique to the point of an “ontological rupture” putting an
end to modernity in its entirety. Beyond this point, critical theory
will not be able to give directions. The destruction of the value-form
does not liberate any fettered substance, neither “labour” nor “life”.

Nevertheless, Robert Kurz has a few times indicated how he is

imagining a process pointing beyond capitalism. Crucial is that
liberation can never build on prohibition, because the prohibition of
a fetish would itself be a degeneration into fetishism. The
destruction of the existing can only happen by practical confutation,
and the process is not about destroying everything old that exists.
Robert Kurz is rather describing liberation as a process of laborious
selection, based on criteria which can not be defined in advanced
but may only arise in the process of abolishing capitalism. Organized
individuality has to sort out and judge the whole existing history of
productive powers and cultural techniques. These might be
appropriated or rejected, re-grouped or re-directed. In a curious
way, Robert Kurz is here arriving close to some ideas of Bruno
Latour, or even of the recent turn to ontology within British
philosophy, when suggesting the need to give proper judgement to
every singular thing in the world, if only after a process of
intensified critique which is yet to be realized.

The historical origin of anything – a work of art, a technological

innovation, a figure of thought – cannot be the basis of its
judgement. At the point of transformation, all things must be judged
by the same emergent standards, regardless if they have arisen
from any phase of capitalist development or if they are inherited
from pre-capitalist formations. This transformation will probably
involve the resurrection of some of the potentials in agrarian society
which was annulled by capitalism.

Around the turn of the century, Wertkritik was becoming a

fundamental critique of existing civilization. At this point, some
editorial members of Krisis began to think that Robert Kurz had
gone too far. Conflicts within the group were intensifying and in
2004 the split became a fact, as the group around Kurz leftKrisis in
order to found a new magazine, Exit.

On the theoretical level, this conflict was mainly played out as a

dispute about the status of feminism. According the group around
Exit, it is now necessary to get beyond a simple Wertkritik in order
to develop a critical meta-theory calledWert-Abspaltungskritik
(roughly translatable as “critique of value-secession”).

While the value-form is in itself totalizing, it can never become total.

In order to exist and to expand, value must have the support of its
own shadow, consisting of that which is systematically excluded
from exchangeability. The precondition for human life under
capitalism is that some activities – those associated with love, care
and sensuousness – are given a special kind of reservation. This
reservation happens to be largely synonymous with what is
regarded as “female”. Even if this theory operates on a high level of
abstraction, it does indeed give a reason for the continued
dominance of a dualism of sexes in the contemporary ordering of
gender.

The theory of Wert-Abspaltung is indeed a meta-theory, stressing

that value and its “secession” must be understood at exactly the
same level of abstraction. Consequently, this is not another theory
about how capitalism is behind patriarchy. Rather it is a
development of the critique of Marxist feminism that has been
formulated by Roswitha Scholz, a writer in Krisis and now in Exit.
Later on, Robert Kurz has made a couple of loose attempts to also
understand how “artistic” activity is “seceded” from capital.
Through this theoretic upgrade, Exit has succeeded in remaining an
always experimenting and radically unfinished project. The
remaining group of value-critical writers, around magazines like
Krisis and Streifzüge, are far more prone to let their theories be
used to legitimate practice, for example the practice of free
software. In response to this, Robert Kurz tends to turn into a
schismatic on the level of Guy Debord. The polemic against former
comrades here tends to involve more coarseness as well as more
brilliance. It is also contributing to make Kurz impossible in the
radical milieus of art, activism and academia which are otherwise
fond of idolizing symbols of “communism” like Antonio Negri, Alain
Badiou and Slavoj Žižek.

Robert Kurz does not really show any interest in connecting his
thoughts with contemporary leftist theorists. In his writings it may
seem like the history of philosophy ended around 1970 (after
Adorno and Arendt); the only exception from this is Agamben.
Otherwise, Kurz is only referring to contemporary philosophy when
he wants to demonstrate its general degeneration. He is rather
drawing his influences from contemporary historical research, in
which he seems well orientated.

Robert Kurz is, as an economy journalist specialized in crisis theory,

a regular contributor to German as well as Brazilian newspapers
with a monthly column inNeues Deutschland. He does not, however,
really come to his right in that short format.

Over the years, hundreds of his articles have been translated from
German into Portuguese. Almost nothing has been translated into
English. There are exceptions online, but these are in many cases
translated in two stages, via Portuguese, which means that these
text are not very readable. The central texts of Wertkritik and
Wertabspaltungskritik – the books and the longer articles from Krisis
and Exit – have never found a substantial readership outside
Germany, which is unfortunate. There are however rumours about a
forthcoming English translation of Robert Kurz historical work,
Schwarzbuch Capitalismus(1999), which found quite a large
readership in Germany. It is yet to see if and how the critical theory
from Nürnberg, at a time where capitalist modernity is showing
signs of collapse, may be received outside Germany.