Historical Materialism 22.

3–4 (2014) 395–407

brill.com/hima

Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism’s Heart of Darkness

Anselm Jappe
Accademia Belle Arti di Frosinone
a.jappe@accademiabellearti.fr.it

Abstract

The late Robert Kurz was one of the principal theorists of ‘the critique of value’ in
Germany. This paper uses the recent release of a collection of his essays in French trans-
lation and his posthumously published Geld ohne Wert [Money without Value] (2012) as
a starting point for a discussion of the critical project that Kurz undertook over a period
of 25 years. Kurz was exemplary in returning to the most radical insights of Marx, even
when these went against some of the other ideas of the master. He was an ardent pro-
ponent of a crisis theory of capitalism: that the categories of the capitalist mode of
production have reached their ‘historical limit’ as society no longer produces enough
value. On this basis Kurz argued that none of the proposals for dealing with this crisis
within the framework of capitalism are feasible. Kurz demonstrated that the basic cat-
egories of the capitalist mode of production, such as money, are not universal but that
they developed at the same time, towards the end of the Middle Ages, with the inven-
tion of firearms and the states’ need for money that this fuelled. In Geld ohne Wert, Kurz
asserts that money in pre-capitalist societies was not a bearer of value but a representa-
tion of social ties. He wonders whether, with the current crisis, we are seeing a return to
a form of money without value, but now within the framework of a social sacrifice to the
fetishistic form of mediation. The paper concludes by suggesting that Kurz has not yet
reached a wider public outside Germany because for many his ideas still prove too radi-
cal to face.

Keywords

Robert Kurz – critique of value – crisis theory – money – sacrifice – social origin of
money and value – Germany

Translated by Alastair Hemmens. John McHale assisted with some points of translation.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341340

396 jappe

Robert Kurz, the principal theorist of ‘the critique of value’, died on 18

July 2012 in Nuremburg (Germany), following a botched surgical procedure.
He was 68 years old. This premature death signals the end of an immense
body of work conducted over a period of 25 years, with which the English-
speaking public is only just beginning to become acquainted. Born in 1943 in
Nuremberg, where he spent his entire life, Kurz took part in the 1968 ‘student
revolt’ in Germany and in lively debate within the ‘New Left’. After a very
brief flirtation with Marxism-Leninism, and none at all with the ‘Greens’
who were at that time undergoing their ‘realist’ transformation in Germany,
in 1987 he founded the Marxistische Kritik [Marxist Critique] journal, which
was renamed Krisis a few years later. The rereading of Marx put forward by
Kurz and his comrades-in-arms (among them Roswitha Scholz, Peter Klein,
Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle) did not endear them to the radical left. The
latter saw one after another of its dogmas upset, such as the ‘class struggle’ and
‘labour’, in the name of a re-examination of the very foundations of capitalist
society: commodity value and abstract labour, money and commodity, state
and nation. Kurz, a prolific author with a gift for the spirited, well-turned and
often controversial phrase, garnered a much wider readership with his book
Der Kollaps der Modernisierung [The Collapse of Modernisation] (1991), which,
in the midst of the ‘Western triumph’ that followed the collapse of the USSR,
asserted that the days of global commodity society were numbered and that the
end of ‘real socialism’ was merely a step in this direction. A regular contributor
to leading newspapers, particularly in Brazil, and a remarkable speaker, Kurz
nevertheless chose to stay outside academe, holding down a menial night-job
packaging copies of the local newspaper for distribution. The dozen books
and hundreds of articles he published are situated more or less on two levels:
on the one hand, a fundamental theoretical development, conducted mainly
through long essays published in Krisis and Exit! (founded in 2004 after the
split from Krisis); on the other, a continual commentary on the deepening
crisis of capitalism and an investigation of its past – in particular through
his major history of capitalism Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus [The Black Book of
Capitalism] (1999), which was, despite its 850 pages, a bestseller in Germany,
but also Weltordnungskrieg [The War for World Order] (2003), Das Weltkapital
[World Capital] (2005) and his journalism.

Decline of the Production of Value and the Historical Limits

of Capitalism

Vies et mort du capitalisme [The Lives and Death of Capitalism] (Lignes, 2011), a
relatively recent French collection of his essays, brings together around thirty

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Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 397

articles and interviews analysing current events. This volume thus extended
the earlier French collection of articles by Kurz, Avis aux naufragés [Notice to
the Shipwrecked] (Lignes/Léo Scheer, 2005). The new texts date from 2007 to
2010 and thus mainly cover the period marked by the crisis of capitalism that
broke in 2008, generally considered the most serious since 1929. Indeed, what
has claimed most attention about the critique of value is the assertion that
capitalism is sinking into an irreversible crisis – Kurz has even been described
as a ‘prophet of the apocalypse’ in certain parts of the media. For 25 years,
and even during what appeared to be capitalism’s absolute triumph in the
1990s, Kurz, on the basis of a thoroughgoing reading of Marx, maintained
that the basic categories of the capitalist mode of production are currently
losing their dynamism and have reached their ‘historical limit’: mankind no
longer produces enough ‘value’. Value (which contains surplus-value and
therefore profit) expressed in money is the only goal of capitalist production –
the production of ‘use-values’ is only a secondary aspect of it. The value of a
commodity is given by the quantity of ‘abstract labour’ that was necessary to
create it, that is to say, labour as pure expenditure of human energy, regardless
of its content. The less labour a commodity contains, the less ‘value’ it has (and
it must be the labour that corresponds to the level of productivity established
at a given moment: against the backdrop of production at an industrial level,
if an artisanal weaver only produces in ten hours of labour what a factory
weaver produces in one hour, ten hours of an artisanal weaver’s labour can
be ‘worth’ only one hour). Since its beginnings, capitalism lives the following
contradiction: competition drives each capitalist to replace living labour
with machines, which assures him an immediate advantage on the market
(lower sale-price). But in the process the entire mass of value diminishes,
while the expenditure on technological investment – which creates no new
value – increases. Consequently, the production of value may well throttle
itself and perish at any moment from lack of profitability. Profit – the visible
face of value, that which interests the agents of the commodity process – is
only feasible in the long run in a functioning regime of accumulation. For
a very long time, the internal and external expansion of the production
of commodities (towards other regions of the world and within capitalist
societies) was able to compensate for the diminished value of particular
commodities. But from the 1970s onward, the ‘third industrial revolution’, that
of microprocessing, has made labour ‘superfluous’ in such proportions that
no compensatory mechanism would ever again suffice. Today, it is not only
the rate of surplus-value that is falling, as the Marxist analysis has always said.
It is the actual mass of surplus-value that is diminishing, as the amount of
living labour finds itself being ever further reduced, while other types of work
that do not produce new value increase, since they are vital as presuppositions

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of value creation (all state expenditure, from health to military spending,

the construction and maintenance of infrastructure, education, advertising,
research, administration, etc.). The large profits that certain actors can still
realise at the expense of others should not obscure the fact that the cake of
surplus-value is continually shrinking. Ever since then, the commodity system
essentially survives thanks to ‘fictitious capital’, money that is not the result of
value creation obtained through the productive employment of labour-power,
but which is created by speculation and credit, and based only on future profits
that have yet to be realised (although their sheer magnitude rules out any
chance of this ever happening).

A Crisis That Can Never End . . . Within the Framework

of Capitalism

According to Kurz, this theory of inescapable crisis is present in the work of

Marx, but in a fragmentary and ambiguous manner (the ‘Fragment on Machines’
in the Grundrisse being the most significant passage): the accumulation
of capital is not a stable mode that could continue forever, checked only by
the ‘struggle of the oppressed’ as all Marxism has claimed after Marx. Kurz
demonstrates that far from enjoying a large consensus among Marxists as is
often asserted, ‘collapse theory’ was something that nobody took seriously. Its
alleged adoption was a matter for mutual recrimination among some theorists,
but almost no-one accepted that capitalism could stumble against its internal
limits prior to proletarian revolution. The only theories that analysed these
limits, those of Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1912) and of
Henryk Grossmann (The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist
System, 1929), were stuck, according to Kurz, half-way there and exercised no
real influence on the workers’ movement.
Kurz therefore presents his own crisis theory as something absolutely new –
made possible by the fact that the internal limit of value production, foreseen
by Marx on a theoretical plane, had actually been reached in the 1970s. After a
long period of being dismissed even on the left, this crisis has over the last few
years come out into the open. For Kurz, however, the explanations currently
given by ‘left economists’ (in reality, mere neo-Keynesians) that boil it down to
‘underconsumption’ do not go far enough. There has ceased to be any possible
solution within commodity society, which no longer fits into the straightjacket
of value given that technology has almost entirely replaced human labour.
When each commodity contains no more than a ‘small’ dose of value – and
therefore of surplus-value, and therefore of profit – nothing changes in terms

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Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 399

of their (eventual) usefulness for life. But for a mode of production based
on value, this situation is deadly; and in a society entirely subjugated to the
economy, the latter’s fall may well bring about the whole society’s descent into
barbarism.
Kurz does not stop at this overview, but analyses the development of the
crisis in detail. Reading between the lines of the official statistics, he proves,
among other things, that China will not save capitalism; that the German
recovery is based, like everything else, on new debt; that, after the crisis of
2008, private-sector ‘bad funds’ have merely been shifted on to the state; and
that services are generally ‘unproductive’ labour (in the sense that they do not
produce value) and cannot replace jobs that have been lost in industry, etc.
He shows why neither neo-Keynesian ‘recovery programmes’ nor austerity
measures stand any chance of resolving the crisis, and less than ever the
proposals for ‘job creation’: the fundamental problem – but also the reason for
hope! – consists precisely in the ‘end of work’. Labour and value, commodity
and money are not eternal factors of human life, but relatively recent historical
inventions. We are currently experiencing their demise which will not come to
pass overnight but will be a decades-long process as Kurz himself made clear
in a slight departure from his earlier, more pessimistic short-term forecasts.
The financialisation of the economy and speculation, far from constituting
the cause of the crisis, have for a long time helped to hold it back, and they
continue to play this role. But in this way, a potentially even greater crisis is
building up – and the prospect of a vast planet-wide inflation signalling the
devalorisation of money as such. According to Kurz, blaming ‘bankers’ or
some neoliberal conspiracy in the way that nearly all left-critiques do is to
make a complete fudge of the issue. Here is why he is rather sceptical about
the emancipatory potential of the new protest movements, which he severely
criticises too for their overt or implicit anti-Semitic intemperance. He often
accuses the entire left-spectrum of not really wanting to leave the capitalist
framework, which it regards in point of fact as eternal. A trifle ‘fairer’ distribution
of value and money is all therefore that the left is proposing, without taking
any account of either the negative and destructive role of these categories or
their historical depletion. Even worse, the different representatives of the left
often end up offering to joint-manage the slide towards barbarism and misery.
Instead of chasing after and praising protest movements, Kurz constantly
confronted them with the need to resume radical anti-capitalist critique (in
its content, and not only its form). Changing the management team is not
an option: capitalism is a fetishistic and unconscious system, governed by
the ‘automatic subject’ (Marx’s own expression) of the valorisation of value.
The personal domination of legal owners of the means of production over the

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sellers of labour-power is merely the superficial, ‘sociological’ expression of

the self-referential mechanism of capital accumulation.

Developing the Most Revolutionary Intuitions of Marx

In Geld ohne Wert [Money without Value] (2012), Kurz deployed the heavy
artillery of the critique of political economy on an essentially conceptual level.
Published a few days after the death of its author, this book is however neither
a comprehensive survey nor a theoretical testament: it was conceived as the
first part of a vast project to rework the critique of political economy. Here
Kurz deals with four great interlinked themes: the fundamental difference
between pre-capitalist, proto-capitalist and capitalist societies and the role
that money held in them; the birth of capital and commodity value from the
fourteenth century; the internal logic of capital when it is fully developed; the
internal contradiction and the internal logical limit of capitalist accumulation
over the course of its historical development up to the present day. While
advancing forward through a closely argued polemic with German Marxists
almost completely unknown outside of Germany (M. Heinrich, H.-G. Backhaus,
E. Altvater, W.F. Haug) and by way of fairly subtle expositions, Kurz arrives at
surprisingly simple results. He does not claim adherence to practically any other
author in the Marxist tradition, but only to Marx himself (the exceptions being
Adorno and the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness who seem to inspire
him in part, and mostly with regard to dialectical method). Kurz does not claim
to re-establish ‘what Marx really said’, but seeks to deepen the more radical
and innovative side of the latter’s thought. One part of his work – the ‘exoteric
Marx’ – remained, according to Kurz, within the sphere of Enlightenment
bourgeois philosophy and its belief in ‘progress’ and the benefits of labour. The
other part, which remained minor and fragmentary, saw the ‘esoteric’ Marx
carry out a genuine theoretical revolution, that for over a century virtually
nobody could understand or continue. These different aspects of Marx’s
theory are closely interlinked (it is not a question of successive ‘phases’). The
inmost core, based on the theory of value, became truly topical only with the
decline of capitalism. Kurz does not set out therefore to ‘interpret’ Marx, nor
to ‘correct’ him, but to re-use his most fruitful insights, even if this involves
conflict with other ideas of the master.
In relation to his own earlier works, Kurz embarks here on a deeper
exploration of two themes of a hitherto essentially implicit nature. He asserts
that what we call ‘value’ and ‘money’ did not exist before the fourteenth or
fifteenth century, and the phenomena that seem to us to be money or value in

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Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 401

pre-capitalist societies in reality fulfilled a different function. Capitalism did

not emerge as a specific outgrowth on the atemporal – or, in any case, very
old – existence of value and money, but at the same time as them. Kurz only
makes brief excursions into ‘factual’ history, but he examines in detail the
structure of the ‘categories’ of the critique of political economy. To this end,
it is necessary to demolish the ‘methodological individualism’ (identified with
‘positivism’) that he considers to be the foundation of all bourgeois thought and
that has also, in his view, managed to ‘contaminate’ Marxism in nearly every
way. Present in the thinking of Marx himself, alongside his most authentically
dialectical inspiration, it would serve to explain the contradictions in the
latter’s work. There is no suggestion here however of some return to a
1970s-style infatuation with the word ‘dialectic’ and its adoption as a universal
method. Kurz always levels his polemical energy at an adversary: in this
case the inability of bourgeois thought to go beyond isolated facts and their
eventual ‘reciprocal effects’. The ‘whole’ is not merely the sum of particular
elements, rather it possesses a quality all of its own; the particular elements
are not what they appear to be at first glance, as in empirical sight. They reveal
their true nature only when understood as determined by the whole. Kurz does
not devote himself, however, to methodological considerations in an abstract
way, rather he develops his own approach to a given object: it is not a matter
of analysing (as Marx often does himself, at least in the first volume of Capital)
the structure of a specific capital – not even of an ‘ideal average’ one – in order
then to conceive of the ‘total capital’ as the aggregate of specific capitals, which
would only reproduce the structure of that specific capital. Similarly, a specific
commodity can only be analysed as part of the total mass of commodities.

Did Money Exist before Capitalism?

Kurz begins his book by discussing a problem that appears to belong rather to
the field of Marxian philology. In the first chapter of Capital, Marx analyses the
commodity and its value in a purely logical way. The same chain of logic then
leads to the existence of money, with several additional steps still required to
arrive at the category of capital. Does this logical succession reflect an historical
succession? Marx is not clear on this and seems to hesitate. In contrast, for
Engels in his later writings and for later Marxists, it is a sure thing: the logic
corresponds to history. This is the ‘historico-logical’ approach. For them,
commodity value existed well before capital. For thousands of years ‘simple
commodity production’ took place without capital. From time immemorial or
very nearly so, men have attributed a value to their products based on the labour

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expended on their manufacture. Money has an equally venerable ancestry, but

it served only to facilitate exchange. Capitalism arrived only when money had
accumulated to the point of becoming capital and found itself faced with ‘free’
labour-power.
Kurz contends however that this approach ‘naturalises’ or ‘ontologises’ value
and labour by transforming them into eternal conditions of all social life. Even
post-capitalist society would then boil down to something like the ‘conscious
application of the law of value’ (this oxymoron was one of the stated objectives
of ‘real socialism’!) or to other forms of ‘market without too much capitalism’.
Kurz takes up where the ‘new reading of Marx’ propounded in Germany
after 1968 by some students of Adorno (H.-G. Backhaus, H. Reichelt) left off,
subjecting it to frequent revision. According to this interpretation, Marx,
in his analysis of the value-form, examines the categories of commodity,
abstract labour, value and money as they present themselves in a fully realised
capitalist regime ‘which runs under its own steam’. This signals a conceptual
reconstruction that begins with the simplest element, the ‘simple commodity-
form’, in order to arrive at the ‘logical’ genesis of money; the existence of
capital, which appears in this deduction as a consequence, is in reality already a
presumption of the analysis of the simplest form. Value as a quantity of abstract
labour exists only where money and capital exist. The intermediate stages of
Marxian construction, like the ‘developed value-form’ where the exchange of
commodities takes place without the mediation of commodity-money, are
merely stages in the demonstration – they do not correspond to anything real.
Without the existence of commodity-money (precious metals), values cannot
relate to one another as values. Therefore, commodity production without
money cannot exist, and the Marxian theory of the value-form is only valid
for capitalist society. The vagueness of the analysis of the value-form in Marx’s
own work corresponds just as much to the difficulties of its exposition (the
presumptions are at the same time consequences, and vice versa) as to Marx’s
oscillation between an historical and a logical perspective, between dialectic
and empiricism.
Therefore: no value without money, no money without capital. It will be
immediately countered, however, that commerce, markets and money – and
even struck coinage – have existed for thousands of years. For the traditional
historico-logical interpretation, this is not a problem: its mantra is that value
has always existed, as indeed has money from a certain period onward – but
as ‘niches’, i.e. for the exchange of surplus alone. As far as their structure is
concerned, they comprised the same money and the same value as today. The
gradual growth of these exchanges, above all at the end of the Middle Ages, led
to the formation of capital. Kurz criticises Marxism, when it reasons like this,
for not distinguishing itself from bourgeois science in its positivist approach,

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Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 403

which only considers the isolated facts: seeing somebody hand over a sack of
wheat in exchange for a nugget of gold in Ancient Egypt, in the Middle Ages
and today, it concludes that it must always come down to the same thing:
commodity in exchange for money, therefore commerce, therefore markets . . .
For Kurz, the empirical facts count for nothing without a ‘categorial critique’
that situates them in their context. Thus, if it has not been established what
money is in the capitalist mode of production (not only its practical functions,
but what it is), no decision can be reached as to whether the shells or gold
coins circulating in non-capitalist societies really are the same as money
in the modern sense. This is what Kurz resolutely denies. He contends that
historically, money preceded value. But what money? Money in the capitalist
sense emerged, Kurz says, following the spread of firearms, from the end
of the fourteenth century. What to us seems to be money in pre- and non-
capitalist societies had if anything a sacred function: arising from sacrifice,
the gift caused products to circulate within a network of obligations, where
people invested with a sacred power played a central role. It was another
form of fetishism. There was obviously production and circulation of goods,
but no ‘economy’, ‘labour’ or ‘market’, not even in its rudimentary or ‘not yet
developed’ forms (as Kurz affirms in opposition to Karl Polanyi, with whom he
agrees in other respects). Kurz embarks only briefly on an historical analysis of
the role of money (saving it for future works that unfortunately were never to
be) and cites only a few authors, among them the French medievalist Jacques
Le Goff who denies the existence of ‘money’ in the Middle Ages (and whom
Kurz pits against Fernand Braudel, for whom ‘the market is universal’). Pre-
modern money had no ‘value’: its importance did not derive from the fact of
being the measured quantitative representation of a general social ‘substance’
as is the case with labour in modern societies.
Capitalism does not therefore constitute, in the eyes of Kurz, an
intensification of previous social forms, but a violent break. The enormous
thirst for money kindled by the arms race from the start of the fifteenth century
represents modernity’s big bang, engendering in a few generations a system
based on money whose function changes totally: from a symbol in a personal
bond of obligation, it becomes the principle of universal social mediation as
material representative of abstract labour – labour-value, even abstract labour
itself, capital and, of course, the state (whose function also changes). Kurz has
opened up a vast field of enquiry here whose surface has so far merely been
scratched.
The rejection of ‘methodological individualism’ also bears fruit in the Kurzian
re-reading of Marx and in the critique of the adaptation of Marxism to the
criteria of (marginalist and neoliberal) bourgeois political economy. According
to Kurz, numerous difficulties in Marx’s theory (like the famous problem of the

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transformation of values into prices) disappear when the analysis of specific

commodities and capitals is given over to that of total capital (a category
that can only be understood by its concept and not on an empirical level)
whose specific commodities and capitals are merely ‘aliquot parts’. This shift
of the conceptual basis from specific capital towards the total level of capital
(Marx hesitated between the approaches and Kurz liberates him, so to speak,
from his uncertainty) effectively enables Kurz to throw a surprising light on
problems like the relationship between rate and mass of profit or the question
of productive labour. Certainly, many ‘Marxist economists’ will disagree, but
they will find it difficult to avoid tackling Kurz’s arguments. The debate goes far
beyond the limits of an erudite battle between Marxist economists when the
question is broached of the ‘internal limit’ of capitalist production caused by
the fall in the total mass of value. Kurz devotes the last part of his book to this,
clarifying arguments that he had long been putting forward.
While he recognises the importance of some conclusions arrived at by authors
such as Isaac Rubin or Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Kurz criticises them for situating
the origin of abstraction in the sphere of circulation and not production itself.
For him, a real expenditure of human energy is fetishised (the abstract side of
labour), thus denoting a ‘substance’, and not a ‘form’ arising from exchange.
This real expenditure necessarily possesses a quantitative character – this is
why in the long term it entails the exhaustion of value; whereas situating the
act of transforming concrete labour into abstract labour in exchange sees it
made into the object of a kind of social agreement and dispels the notion of
an inevitable crisis – Michael Heinrich for example has seen critical brickbats
heaped upon him by Kurz for propounding this very view. The basic error, Kurz
observes, is the ‘ontologisation’ of labour. Even the author with whom he shares
the closest affinity, Moishe Postone, does not entirely escape this criticism (as
well as that of having also sidestepped crisis theory). For Kurz, it is necessary
to recognise in the very concept of ‘labour’, as an erroneous homogenisation
of different activities, something specific to capitalism alone – in a way, the
concepts of ‘labour’ and ‘abstract labour’ coincide, and ‘concrete labour’ only
exists as a necessary ‘representation’ of abstract labour.
The end of Geld ohne Wert is somewhat unexpected: he wonders whether
we are not going back to the stage of ‘money without value’. While the nominal
quantity of money in the world (including shares, property prices, credit,
debt, financial derivatives) is constantly increasing, what money is supposed
to represent, i.e. labour, is decreasing into ever-smaller amounts. Thus money
has practically no ‘real’ value any more, and a gigantic devaluation of money
(firstly in the form of inflation) will be inevitable. But after centuries during
which money has constituted social mediation at an ever-higher level, its

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Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 405

unorganised, yet sustained devaluation can only trigger a gigantic social

regression and the abandonment of a large part of social activity that is no
longer ‘profitable’. Thus the end of capitalism’s historical trajectory may well
land us with a ‘perverse return’ of sacrifice and usher in a new and postmodern
barbarism. Indeed, capitalism is even currently abolishing the meagre ‘progress’
that it once brought and incessantly demands ‘sacrifices’ from men in order to
save the money-fetish. Cuts in public health budgets even remind Kurz of the
human sacrifices of ancient history practised in order to calm furious gods, and
he ends by asserting that ‘the bloodthirsty Aztec priests were a harmless and
humane bunch compared to the sacrificer bureaucrats of the global capital
fetish when it has reached its internal historical limit.’1

Resistance to an Overly Radical Critique?

Despite their undeniable intellectual power, why has the impact up to now
of Robert Kurz’s ideas been so limited on the critique of capitalism, at least
in the English-speaking world? Why have those that Kurz calls Marxist
‘dinosaurs’ (even in their postmodern versions) and the ‘alternative’ Keynesian
economists bound up in his view with the capitalist phase that is now over
for good and whose views have changed little over forty years, again become
reference points for those seeking to combat the devastation of life by
capital? Kurz always asserted that capitalism was disappearing along with
its old adversaries, notably the workers’ movement and its intellectuals
who completely internalised labour and value and never looked beyond the
‘integration’ of workers – followed by other ‘lesser’ groups – into commodity
society. Why is it such a struggle for the critique of value, which claims to
grasp the fundamentally new character of the current situation, to ‘come
across’ to the public?
The first and more minor reason is the lack of a strategic foothold in the
public arena. Neither academics nor media professionals, Kurz and the other
founders of the critique of value restrict themselves to those arenas placed at
their disposal.
Next, while indeed caustic and brilliant in his more ‘accessible’ writings,
Kurz’s more theoretical output boasts a prose style that is sometimes difficult
to follow and even more difficult to translate.
On a deeper level, crisis theory and any calling into question of the class
struggle tend to stir up particular resistance. For Kurz, we are not witnessing a

1 Kurz 2012, p. 413.

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‘cyclical’ or ‘growth’ capitalist crisis but experiencing the end of a long historical
era, without knowing if the future will be better, or if it will turn out to be a
descent into a situation where the vast majority of human beings will not even
be worth exploiting any more, but will just be ‘superfluous’ (to the valorisation
of capital). Moreover, nobody can control such a runaway machine. This point
of view finds itself quickly silenced since it is a frightening prospect, much
more frightening than some assertion that wicked speculators are stealing our
money (although, naturally, the state will restore justice for the people!).
The critique of value takes nearly all past and present forms of opposition
to task for remaining prisoner to the value-form, or even for contributing to its
full flowering. In the same way, Kurz had little time for the Marxist tradition
and frequently entered into arguments with its contemporary representatives,
breaking with the consensus and rituals of Marxist academe. He was thus met
with a ‘conspiracy of silence’ on the part of the latter for as long as possible.
But even those who can spot the heuristic power of the reading of capitalist
reality proposed by Kurz often take the critique of value itself to task for not
suggesting a possible ‘practice’. Kurz is clear on this score: theory is already
a form of praxis; it contributes above all to the denaturalisation of the
categories of capitalist life. But he distrusts movements marshalled against
the most superficial aspects of capitalism, like finance, which are liable to
degenerate into populism, just as much as the ‘false immediacy’ of projects
for an ‘alternative economy’. The creation of a society where the production
and circulation of goods no longer go through the autonomised mediation of
money and value, but are organised according to needs is the mammoth task
that is essential after centuries of commodity society. Although Kurz expresses
the need for this to happen, he does not explain how it might be achieved.
Nevertheless, few theories have come as close as his to the ‘heart of darkness’
of capital’s fetishistic system.

References

Kurz, Robert 1991, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung. Vom Zusammenbruch des
Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltökonomie, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
——— 1999, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft,
Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.
——— 2003, Weltordnungskrieg. Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des
Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bonn: Horlemann.

Historical Materialism 22.3–4 (2014) 395–407

Kurz, a Journey into Capitalism ’ s Heart of Darkness 407

——— 2005a, Avis aux naufragés: Chroniques du capitalisme mondialisé en crise,

French translation by Olivier Galtier, Wolfgang Kukulies, Luc Mercier and Johannes
Vogele, Paris: Lignes/Léo Scheer.
——— 2005b, Das Weltkapital. Globalisierung und innere Schranken des modernen
warenproduzierenden Systems, Berlin: Klaus Bittermann.
——— 2011, Vies et mort du capitalisme: Chroniques de la crise, French translation
by Olivier Galtier, Wolfgang Kukulies and Luc Mercier, Paris: Nouvelles Editions
Lignes.
——— 2012, Geld ohne Wert. Grundrisse zu einer Transformation der Kritik der politi-
schen Ökonomie, Berlin: Horlemann.

Historical Materialism 22.3–4 (2014) 395–407