Robert Kurz
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Robert Kurz (24 December 1943 – 18 July 2012) was a German
philosopher Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
,
social critic Social criticism is a form of academic or journalistic criticism focusing on social issues in contemporary society, in respect to perceived injustices and power relations in general. Social criticism of the Enlightenment The origin of modern ...
,
journalist A journalist is a person who gathers information in the form of text, audio or pictures, processes it into a newsworthy form and disseminates it to the public. This is called journalism. Roles Journalists can work in broadcast, print, advertis ...
and
editor Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, a ...
of the journal '' Exit!'' He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of
value criticism Value criticism () is a social theory which draws its foundation from the Marxian tradition and criticizes the contemporary mode of production. Value criticism was developed partly by critical readings of the traditions of the Frankfurt School an ...
."Erneuerer des Marxismus: Robert Kurz ist tot"
''
Spiegel Online ' () is a German news website. It was established in 1994 as ''Spiegel Online'' as a content mirror of the magazine ''Der Spiegel''. In 1995, the site began producing original stories and it introduced ''Spiegel Online International'' for artic ...
''. 20 July 2012. Retrieved on 6 September 2012.


Life and work

Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in
Nuremberg Nuremberg (, ; ; in the local East Franconian dialect: ''Nämberch'' ) is the Franconia#Towns and cities, largest city in Franconia, the List of cities in Bavaria by population, second-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Bav ...
to a German working-class family. During his military service he was involved in pacifist propaganda and participated in the "Ostermärschen," protest marches against atomic weapons in the 1960s. Kurz studied
philosophy Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...
,
history History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...
and paedagogy at the
university A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly ...
of
Erlangen Erlangen (; , ) is a Middle Franconian city in Bavaria, Germany. It is the seat of the administrative district Erlangen-Höchstadt (former administrative district Erlangen), and with 119,810 inhabitants (as of 30 September 2024), it is the smalle ...
without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took part in the intense discussions within the
New Left The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...
.UTOPIE kreativ
Heft 121/122
(November/Dezember 2000), S. 1133-1155.
He was a member of the Communist Workers Union of Germany, which was later named the
Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany The Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany (, MLPD) is a communist political party in Germany. It was founded in 1982 by members of the Communist Workers Union of Germany (; KABD) and is one of the minor parties in Germany. The MLPD advocates fo ...
) during the 1970s, but then quit because of his critique of the leadership. He then multiplied the meetings in view of a renewal of the critical theory, which became concrete in the 1980s with the first attempts of the current of which he was to be the principal founder and theorist, the "critique of value" (Wertkritik). Starting in the 1980s, Kurz developed a fundamental critique of the basic forms of socialization in the modern world - based on the question of the structural causes of the inefficient Eastern bloc economy. He turned against the uncritical affirmation of the concept of labor by the Marxist workers' movement. His book ''Der Kollaps der Modernisierung'' (The Collapse of Modernization), published by Eichborn-Verlag in 1991, unfolds a theory of the collapse of modern world society, which assumes that, due to rationalization processes, wage labor is gradually disappearing and that the system as a whole is heading toward a "barbaric end." As in his later works, Kurz offers an outlook on a society that is no longer based on money-mediated commodity exchange. In order to overcome the crisis, he argues, a "sensual reason" is indispensable that is capable of seeing and using things outside their historically conditioned commodity character. As well as a categorical critique of the ontological categories of modernity. Kurz was a co-founder of the magazine '' Marxistische Kritik'' (''Marxist Critique'') in 1986 and participated in the creation of the Krisis group, around which Wertkritik concept was developed. Until April 2004 Kurz was co-editor of the journal Krisis. Then, the Krisis group split into two, and Kurz and several others formed a new group, EXIT! (along with the magazine of the same name). Both sides presented the causes of the split differently: While the Krisis editorial team, which continued under this name after the split, cited Kurz's style of communication, which they found hard to bear, as the cause of the split, the latter and Roswitha Scholz accused the "rest of Krisis," which they called "putschists," of using formal legal means to "seize power" in the editorial team. Documentation of the splitting process as well as the structural and personnel background can be found on the website of Exit! as well as on that of Krisis. In the book ''Die antideutsche Ideologie'' (The Anti-German Ideology), Robert Kurz deliberately polemically confronted what he called the "ideology-critical reductionism" of the Berlin magazine Bahamas. In the course of the inner-left controversy over the Iraq war, Bahamas had spoken out in favor of U.S. intervention. Kurz then accused the so-called "anti-Germans" of militant affirmation of Enlightenment ideals, "Western values," and Bellicism. Robert Kurz distinguished himself through a radical critique of the "labor and class struggle fetish" of traditional (labor movement) Marxism. The critique of value, which he was instrumental in conceiving, is directed against a sociologically truncated understanding of relations of domination, i.e. against deriving relations of domination exclusively from social relations. Kurz sees in the social role of value (value-socialization) a totalitarian tautology that subordinates ad infinitum the entire physical and social-symbolic world to a single abstract principle of form: the accumulation of "dead labor." Kurz's critical analysis of the "totalitarian" socialization principles of modernity crystallizes in his concept of commodity fetishism. Later, the "dissociation theorem" developed by EXIT! editor and philosopher Roswitha Scholz, to whom Kurz was married, occupied an increasingly broad space in Kurz's conception of theory. This synthesis of the early value critique as well as the post-feminist postulate of a structural difference between the genders currently goes by the name of the "critique of value-dissociation." Robert Kurz's best-known publication is ''
Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus The ''Black Book of Capitalism'' (Subtitle: ''A Farewell to Market Economy'') (Original title: Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus – Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft) is a book written by German philosopher and critical-theorist Robert Kurz and publis ...
'', published in 1999. (The book was originally meant to have been published as Satanic Mills). The weekly newspaper ''Die Zeit'' published two controversial reviews, one of which called the Schwarzbuch "the most important publication of the last 10 years." A regular contributor to important newspapers, notably in Brazil, and a renowned lecturer, Robert Kurz chose to stay out of universities and other institutions of knowledge, and chose to live a marginal life by working as a proletarian - notably as a cab driver for seven years and above all as a night worker in a print shop for the packaging of the local newspaper. In the daily newspaper ''
Neues Deutschland (, , abbr. nd) is a left-wing German daily newspaper, headquarters, headquartered in Berlin. For 43 years it was the official party newspaper of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), which governed East Germany (officially known as the ...
'', Kurz regularly wrote articles in the column Kurz, Nick, Luft & Hickel. This was assigned to the economics department. The other authors involved were
Harry Nick Harry Nick (15 August 1932 – 7 December 2014) was an East German Marxist economist. He was a 57-year-old professor and department head at the Central Committee Academy for Social Sciences (''"Akademie für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK ...
,
Christa Luft Christa Luft ( Hecht; born 22 February 1938) is a German economist and politician of the SED/ PDS. Luft joined the SED in 1958. From 18 November 1989 to 18 March 1990, she was the Minister of Economics in the Modrow government. From 1994 to ...
and
Rudolf Hickel Rudolf Hickel is a German economist and author. He transferred to the University of Bremen in 1971, accepting the chair in "Finanzwissenschaft" (''loosely, "public finance"'') in 1993. Between 2001 and 2009 he served as director of the unive ...
. He also published regularly in the weekly newspaper ''Freitag'' and the Brazilian daily ''Folha de S. Paulo''. He was a member of the PEN Center Germany. He died in Nuremberg from the consequences of an operational failure.


Selected bibliography


Author

*''The Collapse of Modernization: From the collapse of barracks socialism to the crisis of the world economy'' (1991) *''Honecker's Revenge: On the political economy of the reunified Germany'' (1991) *''Potemkin's Return: Dummy capitalism and distribution war in Germany'' (1993) *''The Last One Turns Off the Light: On the crisis of democracy and market economy'' (1993) *''The World as Will and Design: Postmodernism, lifestyle Left and the aestheticization of the crisis'' (1999) *'' The Black Book of Capitalism: A Farewell to the Market Economy'' (1999) *''Read Marx: The most important texts of
Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
for the 21st Century'' (2000) *''World Order War: The End of Sovereignty and the changes of imperialism in the era of globalization'' (2003) *''The Anti-German Ideology'' (2003) *''Bloody Reason: Essays for emancipatory critique of capitalist modernity and its Western values'' (2004) *''The World Capital: Globalization and internal barriers of modern commodity-producing system'' (2005) *'' Money Without Value: Plans to transform the critique of political economy'' (2012) *''The Substance of Capital (2004-2005), (English ed. Chronos publications'' ) ''(French ed.') (Spanish ed.'' '')''


See also

* Exit! *
Krisis (German magazine) ''Krisis'' is an anti-political German political magazine and discussion group (Krisis-Gruppe, or Crisis Group) formed in 1986 as a "theoretical forum for a radical critique of capitalist society." Its members (before split) includes Robert Kur ...
*
Manifesto Against Work Manifesto Against Work is a manifesto critical of work written by the authors who were active in the journal Krisis a group that had the German philosopher Robert Kurz as one of its main contributors. The Manifesto Against Work emerged during ...
*
Moishe Postone Moishe Postone (17 April 1942 – 19 March 2018) was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studi ...


References


External links


Robert Kurz / - Free texts at - libcom.org

Robert Kurz / - Free texts at - Exitinenglish.com
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kurz, Robert 1943 births 2012 deaths 20th-century German economists 20th-century German educators 20th-century German essayists 20th-century German male writers 20th-century German philosophers 21st-century German economists 21st-century German educators 21st-century German essayists 21st-century German male writers 21st-century German philosophers Anti-imperialists Anti-nationalists Frankfurt School philosophers Critics of political economy Critics of postmodernism German anti-capitalists 20th-century German journalists German male non-fiction writers German Marxists German philosophers of culture Philosophers of economics German philosophers of education 20th-century German educational theorists German philosophers of history Philosophers of social science Philosophers of war Theorists on Western civilization Writers about activism and social change Writers about globalization Critics of work and the work ethic Historiographers