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 Nrnberg 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 Nrnberg 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
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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 Nrnberg 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-Lektre, made during a few years
around 1970 by some students of Adornos (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 Nrnberg. Around 1968 he got engaged in Germanys
maoist movement and during the 1970s 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 Strmung. 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 ones 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 Nrnberg.
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 worlds financial

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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 ones opponent is about to lose it.
This objection indicates that Michael Heinrich is underestimating the ambitions of the
Nrnberg 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.

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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 Streifzge, 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.

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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 iek.
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 Nrnberg, at a time where capitalist
modernity is showing signs of collapse, may be received outside Germany.