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Historical Materialism 22.3–4 (2014) 408–423

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Satanic Mills: On Robert Kurz

Esther LeslieDepartment of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London

[email protected]

Abstract

A critical overview of the contribution of German Marxist Robert Kurz (1943–2012), focussing in particular on The Black Book of Capitalism: A Farewell to the Market Economy (first ed. 1999) and War for World Order: The End of Sovereignty and the Transformations of Imperialism in the Age of Globalisation (2003). This review explores the genesis and the main tenets of Kurz’s theory – especially his concept of value, the automatic subject, crisis and anti-Semitism – and tracks how they are mobilised in his writings over time. It also touches on the legacy of these ideas in political groups such as the Anti-Germans.

Keywords

Kurz – value critique – Wertkritik – anti-Semitism – imperialism – Germany – capital – automatic subject – crisis – barbarism – death drive – irrationality

Ways into Value Critique

Robert Kurz was a prolific writer in German – with thirteen substantial works authored between 1991 and 2012, plus countless essays and edited volumes. His book titles were often excellent – sharp and nasty. They include The Collapse of Modernisation: From the Collapse of Barrack-Socialism to the Crisis of the World Economy (1991), Potemkin’s Return: Dummy Capitalism and Distribution War in Germany (1993), The Last One Out Turns Off the Light: On the Crisis of Democracy and Market Economy (1993), The World as Will and Design: Postmodernism, Lifestyle Left and the Aestheticisation of the Crisis (1999) and Bloody Reason: Essays for Emancipatory Critique of Capitalist Modernity and its Western Values (2004). In 1999, one work, a 850-page rant, was to be called Satanic Mills, but

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its name was changed by the publisher to Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus: ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft [The Black Book of Capitalism: A Farewell to the Market Economy] in order to plug into the existing furore around a much-publicised French book from 1997 detailing the crimes of the Eastern Bloc, titled The Black Book of Communism.

The Black Book of Capitalism was the book that brought Kurz to greater prominence in Germany and elsewhere (though apart from the appearance of essays and interviews online and in the London-based Chronos Publications imprint, his books have yet to be published in English).1 A relative lack of trans-lations into English over the period of Kurz’s life and the prominence of dif-ferent concerns in Anglo-American varieties of Marxism mean that until now Kurz has had little effect in the anglophone realm. Neil Larsen, at the University of California, has been one of the few academics to communicate Kurz’s think-ing in English, having encountered Der Kollaps der Modernisierung in the early 1990s in Portuguese translation, via the Brazilian Marxist Roberto Schwarz.2 One fruit of this is the ‘Dossier: Marxism and the Critique of Value’ in the jour-nal Mediations, which appeared, at the end of 2013, in homage to Kurz and to the nimbus of debates around him in the school of thinking called Wertkritik. It describes its contribution as ‘the first broadly representative collection in English translation of work from the contemporary German-language school of Marxian critical theory known as Wertkritik, or, as we have opted to translate the term, value-critique or the critique of value.’3 Value, in Kurz’s thinking – like other concepts adopted from Marxist economic analysis – is political, that is to say it is something to criticise, to penetrate, to understand as a capitalist concept, albeit full of contradictions. It needs such deep exploration because it is lethal as an operator, and, according to Kurz and other ‘value-theorists’ of the same or similar stripe, the big mistake is to imagine that value is something neutral – merely a ‘formal law of the social allocation of resources that can be influenced politically’,4 that is to say, value cannot be distributed back to those who produced it, despite the assumptions of many on the Left. Larsen locates the origin of Kurz’s own type of value-critique in an essay from 1986, ‘The Crisis of Exchange Value’, which was first published in the inaugural issue of the journal Marxistische Kritik, renamed Krisis in its eighth issue in

1 One good online source is <https://libcom.org/tags/robert-kurz>. See also <http://principia dialectica.co.uk/>.

2 ‘Dossier: Marxism and the Critique of Value’, Mediations, Volume 27, Issues 1/2, Fall/Spring 2013–14; available at: <http://www.mediationsjournal.org/toc/27_1>.

3 See Mediations 2013/14.4 Kurz 2013/14.

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December 1990 in acknowledgement of the fall of the Berlin Wall and its impli-cations for capitalism.5

Kurz’s ‘original’ ideas on the derivation of analysis from the value-form them-selves derive from debates that were had in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s.6 There was the body of thought known from the 1960s as the ‘New Marx Reading [Neue Marx-Lektüre]’, represented by the work of those who drew on Evgeny Pashukanis, I.I. Rubin and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and currently best represented in the work of Michael Heinrich. There were the contributions of Adorno’s stu-dents, Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, as well as of others who drew on Roman Rosdolsky’s The Making of Marx’s Capital in order to explore closely Marx’s theory and critique of value in Capital and the Grundrisse. Kurz was involved in the Kommunistischer Arbeiterbund Deutschlands (kabd) in 1970s and so was not a participant in or contributor to these debates. In the 1980s, having gathered a number of people around him, he came late to the discussions, or reinvented, or, less generously, cherry-picked from, an exist-ing body of thought. It might be said that elements of the various discussions on value were further conjoined to ideas of crisis theory as represented in the work of Paul Mattick and Henryk Grossman. There are many arguments about the precedence and genealogy of the Wertkritik approach – and many are bitter and territorial. It becomes further complicated even within Kurz’s own ambit as the body of the theory comes to be inflected differently in the writings of the theoretical-political groupings and split-offs with which Kurz had contact at different times, namely Krisis, pre- and post-1994, and Exit!. At the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s, ‘Wertkritik’ was a term bandied around by the Anti-Germans of the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum, who read Adorno and the council communists, and the Anti-German Bahamas journal in Berlin. Kurz’s Krisis co-operated with both of these groups in print and in meetings. Other aspects of the theory, such as the disappearance of the working class as subject or, more broadly, the death of the subject, also have precedents in post-structuralist thinking, or are at least not so far removed from its doxa.

The following thoughts revolve around two books: The Black Book of Capitalism, which, as a marker of its significance and influence, went through several edits, after its appearance in 1999, until it appeared in an expanded, second edition, in 2009; and Weltordnungskrieg: Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung [War for World Order: The End of Sovereignty and the Transformations of Imperialism in

5 See Mediations 2013/14.6 I am grateful to Alexander Locascio for some historical and theoretical clarifications on these

issues.



the Age of Globalisation], from 2003. It was these two works that projected Kurz onto a larger stage. They are also the books that are written in and for the his-torical moment marked out by, on one side, the aftermath of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, and, on the other, the emergence of the New World Order with its prime ‘enemy’ of Islam, ushering in the epoch of perma-war. Stalinism and post-Stalinism alike were an abomi-nation for Kurz. In some regards, Islamism became the new atrocity for him.7 In curious ways, Kurz, a devastating and forceful critic of the horrors of capi-talism, provided ammunition for those who, in the guise of opposition, sided always with the (until now) victorious side of the equation, the usa.

The Black Book of Capitalism

Rambling, stuffed with detail, capacious, with page-long quotations, Kurz’s work takes in broad views of history and attempted synthetic theories of the total development of capitalism. The world is in crisis, but, insists Kurz, in order to advance an alternative it is essential that the past be explored, so that an aftertime might be posited, or imagined. Capitalism has to be tracked back to its origins, before moving forwards. In line with this, The Black Book of Capitalism explored the ideologies of market capitalism in relation to his-torical experience since the sixteenth century. It begins with the first efforts, in the context of agrarianism, to establish a world market. Subsequently, mod-ernisation in the course of unleashing the first Industrial Revolution brings mass poverty and the ‘black utopia of total competition’. Later come the sys-tem of national empires and the ‘biologising of world society’, as the second Industrial Revolution gets underway, before ceding space to the System of the Totalitarian World and Market Democracies. The book ends with a descrip-tion of the current world market – in ‘the third Industrial Revolution’ – based on microelectronics and information technology. As in other writings by Kurz, modernisation is seen to have collapsed as a project in our epoch, because of the ever-deepening global crisis of capital accumulation and capitalist reproduction.

The Black Book of Capitalism was received to acclaim in Germany, securing broadsheet reviews. It was designed to cause a scandal: its criticism of capital-ism is scathing and its assault on the complacency of contemporary ‘analysts’ remorseless. The Introduction to the book is spiky: theorists who propound the thesis of the end of history are idiotic. Kurz has all the answers and all the

7 See, for example, the discussion in Kurz 2008.

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criticisms of everyone else too. The book has a polemical aspect: it seeks to make clear that the capitalist market economy and liberalism will never be in a position to abolish mass poverty. The dynamic of growth that has been at work over the last 200 years is now extinguished, and, in actual fact, living standards and quality of life for the vast majority were lower at Kurz’s point of writing than they were before the victory of the market. Kurz asserts that the enormous development of the productive forces has not brought with it social advances. Some extraordinary statistics demonstrate how workers in the middle ages were better off than the workers of the last quarter-millennium. The working day was shorter for fifteenth-century workers and more food could be bought for the money earned. The mechanism of this decline in liv-ing standards is the market economy itself. Kurz draws on Fernand Braudel for his picture of early trade-capitalism, and contends that, with the coming of the market in the sixteenth century, food standards declined. The impact of the market on the quality of life is immense, and not restricted to the realm of consumption. From then on, producers delivered commodities to anonymous markets and labour became abstract. Workers lost control over all aspects of production. Abstract labour is a necessary corollary of the market. Kurz’s eco-nomic analysis observes how human labour must constantly be substituted by machine labour. Humans are called upon to work less and less. And yet, Kurz also observes a countervailing tendency: those who are still in work graft for longer hours than ever before. That which is produced mechanically is of worse quality than that produced by hand, he insists. Once the process of marketisation is set in train, it is unstoppable. The system of the market econ-omy is an absolute, referred to by Kurz as ‘total’ and ‘totalitarian’. It is (like) a machine – mirror of the technologies on which it relies. In its image are cast all of the great ideologies – liberalism, social democracy, socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism.

Kurz takes a long view in his study of market capitalism. He wants to remind us in detail of the costs of capitalism, how it conquered the world and what existed before the market was established. He moves fluently between historical description and contemporary comparison. He makes links every-where. He makes links between philosophy, culture and the process of labour. He makes links between capitalism’s initial assumptions about the value of human beings and its now-contemporary naturalised assumptions about the value of human beings. A black book traditionally names names. Just as the infamous French black book of 1997 was designed to indict the criminals of Communism, Kurz here identifies the perpetrators of capitalism and its mar-ket. This begins with the most important theorists of liberalism and the free market: Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and so on, up to Friedrich von Hayek



and Milton Friedman. At stake are their anthropological considerations, their assumptions about the value of human life, or at least what type of life is fit for the mass of people, if not themselves. Liberals regard the market and the types of existence that it brings into being as a natural product. The apolo-gists of the market provide extensive and influential theories that illustrate the naturalness of competitive individualism. Many figures are put on trial by Kurz and accused of horrors and crimes. After Hobbes comes the Marquis de Sade who extends (or restricts) Hobbes’s war of all against all to the repres-sion of women by men, based on hyper-rationalism and machinic calculation. The move is reminiscent of Adorno and Horkheimer’s charge against bour-geois sadism in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Mandeville and Sade are revealed as apologists for competitive individualism, while Kant’s ‘Ideas for a General History from a Cosmopolitan Bourgeois Perspective’ propounds the divine law of individual competition. Continuities or recurrences across time feature. Energetic gestures of interpretation leap across time and space, such as when Kurz expounds Hobbes’s idea of the market as natural and then reveals how Václav Havel shares a similar conception. Adam Smith – with his naturalised price-mechanism – and Ralf Dahrendorf are portrayed as bedfellows. Kurz raids the classics of political economy and Enlightenment philosophy angrily, raging against their presuppositions as if he were an avenging angel, displaying an unusual degree of empathy with the ‘victims’ and human material of such thoughts, laws and conceptions.

Kurz mocks the naturalising of ideology, calling attention instead to the his-torical and social character of economic forms and categories of thought. In particular, the biologising of the world is seen to be one of the main generators of dreadfulness in capitalism: Darwinism, social-biologism, racial ‘science’ and anti-Semitism are all seen to be inevitable and irrational reflexes of competi-tion. Where Enlightenment philosophers were unable to understand the social stakes, poets sometimes succeed. William Blake, who was the source for the original title for the book, expresses the nightmare of the emergent factory sys-tem, the dark satanic mills of England that obstruct Jerusalem. Whether histor-icising or speaking of the present, Kurz seeks ways of expressing the physical and psychic experience of capitalist labour and competition. He seeks out unusual details. For example, the ideological considerations of Enlightenment philosophers are made relevant in a case-study of conditions on the British Royal Navy ship hms Bounty that led to the mutiny in 1789.

Kurz presents a history and analysis of three Industrial Revolutions, each of which he sees as promoting a ‘snowball effect’, that is, an unstoppable, ever-growing logic of expansion. The first Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century brings with it the building of factories and initial replacements of

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human labour by machine power, specifically steam and coal power. This epoch was marked by spontaneous social revolts and opposition to the commodity system and competition. The anti-human elements of the system find another form in Malthus’s ideas of population control. The different modes of intro-duction of the market into England and Germany are outlined (interwoven with reflections on relevant political theory and literature). E.P. Thompson’s work forms the basis of some of the study of conditions in England, especially in relation to questions of resistance through Luddism and Captain Swing’s movement. This comparative aspect is more than simply an exercise in evalu-ating similarities and differences. It is an important element in establishing the imbrication of different national economies though competition in the early nineteenth century. For example, Kurz discusses how the beginning of international competition in the 1840s was used as a means of social black-mail, in order to push the textile workers down to an even poorer level of exis-tence. Kurz makes this argument in its own terms, but also is quite consciously speaking to the present, for that system of competition is the same one as we have today, and the rhetoric and practice of the 1840s is echoed in the rheto-ric and practice of globalisation. The social-democratic Left, then as now, falls into the trap of bourgeois-liberal ideology. The nineteenth-century workers’ movement, he observes, was, for the most part, insufficiently critical of the liberal conception of human life, and adopted along with modes of thinking an acceptance of wage labour, the mode of production and the fact of competi-tion, even if it argued that these elements needed to be reformed in some way or other. The social democrats are swallowed up by the ideological machinery of the market completely as the twentieth century progresses.

Contemporary social democrats are contrasted with the participants in the first social revolts at the beginning of industrialisation. These at least under-stood, if only dimly, the social threat of ‘abstract labour’. According to Kurz, Marx is partially to blame for the decline in consciousness of this significance and root of abstract labour. Or at least, the reception of Marx, which was one-sided, fed into the degeneration of the workers’ movement. Marx theorised abstract labour and commodity fetishism, but his Hegelian roots allowed his criticism to appear to be immanent to the system. The workers’ movement imported more of the system-immanent critique than the deep and crucial understanding of capital’s modes of abstraction and fetishism. It consequently advocated an alternative concept of labour, equally abstract but with a social-ist or communist colouring, which reinforced an ontology of labour. The capi-talist was condemned as an exploiter, subjectively motivated, and an agent of the extraction of surplus value, rather than a puppet of a blind social relation. Marxists, after Marx, above all had (or have) forgotten that capital is a social



relation and this social relation is in reality the fetishistic and tautological rela-tion of abstract labour converted into an end in itself. This blind relation is an ‘automatic subject’ (Marx) that generates the agents and bearers of social roles as character-masks that act within its boundaries. This is one of a number of charges against Marxists who follow in Marx’s wake – though Marx himself is excoriated for not having focussed on method enough.

The second Industrial Revolution of the beginning and middle of the twen-tieth century is characterised by rationalisation, conveyor-belts and motorisa-tion. Through Henry Ford and F.W. Taylor, a notion of the efficient producer and conformist consumer is forged and finds champions amongst liberals, Nazis and Communists alike. The machine replaces the human in the work place but, at the same time, the human comes to be conceived in terms of machine parts and attributes. A recurrent theme in Kurz’s work is that of the intensifying dynamic that pushes towards the superfluity of the human. Humans are rationalised, in every sort of way. Kurz cites a chilling line from Gramsci in the 1930s in which he speaks of the elimination from the world of those workers who are unable to integrate themselves into the world of Fordist labour. In Kurz’s view, the Soviet system and the Eastern Bloc presented no type of alternative in the postwar period. The Eastern Bloc economy was a type of state capitalism directed towards rapid industrialisation and it presented no great distinction from the system in the West. There too was a form of dicta-torship by the market, albeit mediated through bureaucratic administration. The second Industrial Revolution finds a form in Keynes’s ‘hole-digging and pyramid-building’ and in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz in Kurz’s work remains, to the end, emblematic of the secret meaning of capitalism, which is wholly organised around anti-Semitism. Auschwitz is a ‘negative factory’, which means that nothing is produced there, but rather something is disposed of. Auschwitz becomes an emblem of an abstract system of generating something or nothing, regardless. Auschwitz is a consequence of Fordism. It is, further, the core of an industrial religion, which demands the sacrifice of the Jews on behalf of Germany. While capital might reformulate itself in the subsequent postwar period, Kurz does not relinquish the explanatory power of anti-Semitism, which brings his work into proximity with the analysis of the ‘Anti-Germans’ and their allergy to any sense in which finance capitalism, associated by the Nazis with the Jews, is to be more excori-ated than the capital that emerges out of the real world of industry.

The third Industrial Revolution, instituting a service economy, ‘casino- capitalism’ and a society organised around microelectronics and information technology, concludes the eradication of humans from the labour process, with fantastic dreams of full automation. The state recedes, as liberalism experiences

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an ideological upsurge and a new confidence in the wonders of the free market. Mass unemployment is structural and real wages are sinking. Mass consumerism is under threat and so the profit squeeze is on. (Perhaps here Kurz underestimates how, despite – or because of – the increasing gap between rich and poor, a smaller class of extremely wealthy people are able to sustain massive levels of consumption.) Fewer workers employed means reduced prof-its and surplus value. Consequently, investment in production does not occur, but rather there is an expansion of financial markets, leading to a speculative bubble that might burst at any time, bringing the whole market system down with it – here Kurz was certainly onto something at least, given the economic events of 2008.

Crisis: this is the privileged term in all of Kurz’s work. There is nothing but crisis and it is permanent. Herein lies something of the weakness of the theory. Crisis is the mode of the whole system. Crisis engulfs the totality, and yet crisis stems, or derives, only from one part of it. The whole crisis emerges from one aspect of the system – the commodity – and its motor is likewise partial – anti-Semitism. Financialisation, or indeed crisis itself, is not perceived as a mode of capitalist reproduction in a specific moment, but rather a symptom of its degeneracy and imminent collapse. Despite Kurz’s analysis of stages – first, second and third Industrial Revolutions – there is an absolutising of the pres-ent moment in his work, such that capital’s apparently ever-possible flexibility is not acknowledged. Flexible or not, able to recover new sources of profit or not, what Marxists have traditionally argued is that capitalism produces con-tradiction, that is to say, produces a motor of opposition, in the shape of class struggle. Kurz, however, broke with this view.

It is in the analysis of the present that this is seen most clearly. Certainly he spares no anger in describing the present. Kurz rages against developments in the Third World and the trade in body parts, as well as the existence of child labour and prostitution. Resources are in no way fairly distributed across the world. Democracy’s political expression is a ‘free choice between the plague and cholera’. There is no alternative but collapse and starting over again. (Though, at one point, he raises the possibility of an on-going generalised bar-barism, in which the final collapse never comes.) In the analysis of the contem-porary moment, there is a tendency to abstraction. No revolutionary subject is identified, because there is no longer one.

At the end of The Black Book of Capitalism comes the assertion that the world does produce enough food and goods to give all a decent standard of life. Whether this redistribution could take place is apparently a ‘question of con-sciousness’ (because of the internalisation of the anthropological norms of



bourgeois liberalism). Once the change of consciousness has occurred, then the machines have to be stormed, factories occupied and money abolished. A counter-society then needs to be established. All this can only be argued by Kurz as a set of desiderata. There is no means – and no agent – to achieve it. Kurz was pessimistic about the future – general barbarism awaited – and could not envisage the establishment of a counter-society. He settled for a more min-imal demand: those who can should participate in a ‘culture of refusal’ and they should carry out sabotage of capitalist firms wherever possible.

War for World Order

Some four years after the first edition of The Black Book of Capitalism another book appeared, written in the aftermath of the fall of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York in 2001: Weltordnungskrieg [War for World Order]. Here the focus was mainly on twentieth-century capitalism and imperial-ism, a major aim being to establish a new quality of contemporary imperi-alism (termed ‘ideal total imperialism’, a quality which is hitched to current economic exigencies in the context of a crisis of accumulation, a crisis that is rearticulated again and again in Kurz’s writings).

‘Ideal total imperialism’ is not based on territorial expansion, as in previous imperialisms. us imperialism is shown to be increasingly based on military-backed intervention. In the book, his vision of capitalism darkened further, as the possibilities of overcoming it in a positive, productive way became even more obscure.

With the accent on the contemporary moment, Kurz’s key claims about the redundancy of Marxist concepts come once more to the fore. ‘Old concepts’ – that is to say class-based ones – no longer fit the situation. At the same time, new global conflicts have emerged. These are cultural and military. They too can no longer be conceptualised within the terms of inherited economic and political theory. The globalisation debate, which began with the collapse of the Soviet Union, tried to take some of this on board, but was apparently unable to break with the reigning conceptual system. This led, notes Kurz, to a great deal of confusion about what contemporary politics is, and what the assumed ‘loss of the political’ means. New theories of imperialism and globalisation are also inadequate. Kurz criticises the work of the French doctor and political scientist Jean-Christophe Rufin (from Doctors Without Frontiers), who wrote a book on the ‘new barbarism’. He is equally critical of Hardt and Negri who are taken to task, in particular, for not understanding the value-form of capitalism,

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and for excluding from their purview labour, the commodity-form and money, as well as for not addressing competition and anti-Semitism. Both Rufin and Hardt/Negri misunderstand ‘ideal total imperialism’ completely, in as much as they perceive contemporary imperialism to be a positive political-economic constitution of an empire that is capable of continued reproduction. Their suggestions then result in the inadequate forms of ‘human-rights imperialism’ or a new positively re-valued barbaric ‘rebellious subjectivity’.

Kurz’s ‘value critique’ proceeds economically (though it melds the form of value to the form of thought in such a tight way that to proceed economi-cally is also to explore ideology). The argument is thus: during the 1990s an irreversible crisis came into being, at whose centre stands the meltdown of real capitalist-labour substance by the third Industrial Revolution. There is an increasing ‘incapacity to exploit’ capital, because of technological shifts and the desubstantialisation of money (e.g. the decoupling of financial markets from the real economy). The inner logic of the crisis has implications for glo-balised capital as well as issues of sovereignty and national self-determination. Transnational capital grows, but not without producing contradictions that are ultimately self-destructive. The new phenomena observed by Kurz are crisis-phenomena of an unprecedented type, because they lead to their own crisis of categorisation, and inherent in this is their self-destruction. The usa is the ‘final world power’, as it is victor in the third Industrial Revolution of micro-electronics. However it is now enmeshed in the contradictions of that form of capital reproduction, which is ultimately doomed. The crisis is manifest in the fact that ‘one region of the world after another proves itself to be incapable of capitalist reproduction’.

Kurz engages in a critical way with various theories, including Risk Society, contemporary gender politics, Enzensberger’s typology of the self and Habermasian concepts. These are all unmasked as inadequate theories. They gain occasional insights into contemporary subjectivity, but are unable to pin-point the cause of the crises that they identify and bewail – the crisis being the distortions of the self and modes of life and self-reproduction that the current world market exerts. He takes up the notion of the ‘clash of civilisations’ and also the ideology and logic of human-rights discourse. It continues the assault on postmodern thinking by delineating the move towards a culturalisation of economics (as in postmodern thought) or culturalisation per se (interest in lifestyles, the symbolic level etc.) at the same time as culture becomes exces-sively subjected to economic diktat.

The aerial attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 is presented as evidence of a new set of references and concepts, with its new form of sub-jective hate and potential for destruction. It is characterised as the product



of a blind, post-ideological and post-political anger, whose pseudo-religious blatherings prove, involuntarily, that any rationalistic legitimation of the process of so-called ‘modernisation’ is completely exhausted. Kurz analy-ses the contemporary ‘death drive’, a force manifest in Islam and in the West (e.g. the Columbine school massacre), which is evidence of the despera-tion of a humanity that is destroying itself and its world. Kurz uses the term ‘capitalism’s death drive’ (and other related terms such as ‘anomie’ and the like, identifying distorted forms of modern subjectivity) without reference to Freud or Marcuse or a broader context for these claims. They are hitched rather to economic form. Events on 11 September 2001 are a manifestation of a wider capitalist death drive, which demonstrates the collapse of the modern form of the subject on a planetary scale. The death drive inherent in capitalism ele-vates things to a hysterical plane.

Kurz gives a strong sense of the world as a vast negative space of economic and human movements, exploring refugee movements and border controls across the world. These include sea barriers: he highlights the case of the Norwegian cargo ship the mv Tampa, which had rescued refugees, mainly Afghan asylum seekers, from shipwreck in the Pacific in 2001, only to bring out abominable behaviour on the part of the Australian Prime Minister, who refused the refugees entry and strengthened Australia’s borders in response. Kurz also highlights various types of black-economy labour, including sexual exploitation, which happen within the context of ‘reconstruction’ of smashed economies such as the various ex-Yugoslavian states. He explores the exploi-tation and oppression of illegal immigrants in Western cities. Case-studies exemplify the brutality of contemporary policies. Kurz argues that effectively concentration camps exist within major capitalist democracies. This develops into a study of racism in various capitalist nations and likewise uses the form of the case-study to present a grim vision of violence from the state and on the streets. The affinities between democrats and the racist mob are revealed, because democratic subjectivity contains a racist content, as a moment of its death drive, which leads to world and self-annihilation, through competition. Anti-racists are also taken to task for not breaking fundamentally with bour-geois categories and forms and for not fully understanding the crisis of the working-class movement, which likewise has been unable to break with capi-talist assumptions.

Weltordnungskrieg culminates in reflections on military escapades for oil, the outcomes of the war in Afghanistan, the return to the paradigm of ‘rogue states’, and the meaning of the ‘war against terrorism’ and the ‘axis of evil’. Kurz reveals the illegitimacy of the then-claims that Iraq is a major and danger-ous military power; Iraq will collapse very quickly most probably, he claimed.

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There is a danger in this for the us. The more states it is able to roll over and yet not satisfy their basic demands, – demands in the name of which it fought – the harder it becomes for the us to assert itself as moral force in the world. In 1996 an mit think-tank promoted the concept of ‘ethno-zoos’ under us control. This is not seen to be a tenable solution for the Middle East region as it has implications for Turkey, whose leaders have stated that they will not countenance an autonomous Kurdistan in oil-rich Northern Iraq. So, the problems and dangers of the global situation are underlined, in relation to the wider schema of capital accumulation and its impediments. Kurz pre-dicted a sharpening of global contradictions, accelerated destabilisation and the collapse of financial markets. A capitalist rationality of interests crumples along with this. It is not national-imperialist interests that clash in the Caspian zone in order to get their hands on an endless capital accumulation in a new Oil-Dorado. Rather it is a desperate attempt on the part of the us, acting in the name of an ‘ideal total imperialism’ or, if needs be, on its own account, to inter-vene in the only relevant oil region through a ‘state of exception’ created by an open us military dictatorship over the whole strategic realm, so as to open up a final miraculous solution that prevents its own demise.

All these reflections segue with thoughts on the Arab Left, nationalist anti-imperialism and anti-Semitism. Kurz developed his theme through a critique of the 1930s Left and its inability to understand modern anti-Semitism, because of its continued commitment to bourgeois concepts of rationality and its insuf-ficient critique of the irrationality and capacity for self-destruction that inhab-its the bourgeois form of the subject. Anti-Semitism, essentially, is connected to the economic basis of bourgeois society and its commodity production. Any anti-Semitic ideology, Kurz argues, is essentially a defence of capitalism. The flip-side of this, according to Kurz, is the Left’s contemporary anti-Zionism, which is unable to recognise the Jewish state as a consequence of modern anti-Semitism, but rather negates Israel in preference to the anti-imperialist para-digm of national revolutionary movements of the Third World, despite the fact that these have or had a truncated criticism of capitalism. Kurz concludes that Israel is both a peripheral capitalist state, which exists in a region of crisis, and a marker of opposition against the anti-Semitic ideology of imperialism. For this reason, Kurz insists that Israel must be defended, for its existence is the precondition for the constitution of a transnational global movement of eman-cipation of a new sort, which does not organise itself around anti-Semitism.

It is this last theme that has fed powerfully into the debates of the German Left of the last decade, and compelled Kurz himself to clarify his stance criti-cally in relation to the ‘Anti-Germans’ in a polemical book published in 2003: Die antideutsche Ideologie. Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperialismus: Kritik



des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten [The Anti-German Ideology. From Antifascism to Crisis Imperialism: Critique of the Latest Left German Sect-Form in its Theoretical Prophets]. As the title, a pun on Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, suggests, Anti-Germans had neglected the critique of capitalism, in favour of the critique of ideology, but they had also failed to respond adequately to ‘labour-movement Marxism’, con-tinuing to posit, like it, a faith in Reason and ‘bourgeois civilisation’. Auschwitz’s horror, for them, is that it dismantles the bourgeois subject. Anti-German ide-ology is bourgeois ideology and it dichotomises, positing modernity as good, anti-modernity as bad, and attributes these labels to nations or states. Where the anti-Germans affirmed Enlightenment rationality, Kurz condemned it. It might be said that for Kurz, all cows are grey. All groupings, but his – or even his own too – make the same errors, being anachronistic in their analy-sis. Having broken definitively with the Anti-Germans, who had been polemi-cal on questions of ideology and consciousness, Kurz picked up the mantle of ideology-critique and concocted a worldview, a global analysis of economy, society and philosophy.

Anti-Semitism is the key. Anachronism is the charge. Anachronistic modes of thought, he argues, are used to ‘explain’ the contemporary situation. The legacy of 1968 and its thinkers in the New Left is characterised as ‘left- bourgeois idealism’, anti-imperialist romanticism about the Third World, which defends the concept of the nation, and Marxist – though this was a ‘workers’ movement’ Marxism which did not break with bourgeois categories. These ele-ments enabled the New Left to make its peace with capitalism by the 1970s, sometimes in the form of reactionary nationalism. The other legacy is a naive superstructure-oriented movementism, heavily influenced by postmodernism and poststructuralism. Anachronism runs deeply into the political rhetoric of all parties. He considers the repeated references in political discourse to the First World War and the Second World War, in particular Hitler and the search for new Hitlers, e.g. Milošević and Saddam Hussein. There is an exploration of the ways in which, in the 1990s, Germany was labelled a potential aggres-sive force – in the tensions over us and European hegemony in the former Yugoslavia for example. One effect of the events on 11 September 2001 was to destroy the assumption that aggression occurs according to a model familiar from the Second World War – a nationalist dictator with genocidal tenden-cies insisting upon sovereignty. There have been various ideological re-order-ings, including significantly the notion of ‘Islamic fascism’. More importantly, for Kurz something significant has changed and capitalism stands exposed. No longer can there be the illusion of good and bad capitalism, because there is no longer any possibility of accumulation. The contemporary Left, charges

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Kurz again and again, cannot grasp this in its sheer horror, for it is unable to perpetrate an emancipatory critique of the bourgeois form of subjectivity, adhering as it does to Enlightenment ideology and ‘Western values’.

Kurz’s final demand in War for World Order was for a renaissance of radical social criticism, for its previous forms are now paralysed. This criticism should equally criticise religion and Enlightenment thought. It must get beyond the split subjectivity of ‘career feminism’. Everything must be conceived in its interrelations in order to counter the post-sovereign violent subject. A third position that refuses the fake alternatives of the present is urgently required – such is the conclusion.

Kurz’s analyses here, as elsewhere, tended towards a kind of economic inev-itablism. Capitalism is doomed and barbarism – which exists already and is synonymous with capitalism – is the likely victor. This does not mean neces-sarily that capitalism will come to an end. It means rather that it will not be able to deliver wealth to wider groups of people any longer. It is the state of the economy that determines all in his thesis. The role of people, workers and other otherwise politically engaged subjects, is continually marginalised. In fact these are addressed only in relation to their ideological inadequacies. This polemical aspect is quite wearying – and ends up in a mantra, which asserts increasingly predictably that everyone else on the Left is wrong, especially in terms of their theory. The demand at the end of Weltordnungskrieg is, notably, for a re-invigorated theory, rather than for (new) social movements and revo-lutionary action. While that might have seemed like a plausible perspective in the confused environment of the 2000s, it became harder to assert it (though Kurz still did) in the following decade, which saw certain rebirths of popular protest movements worldwide.

In the years following the publication of this book, the work of the other ‘value theorists’ came into greater focus. The re-readings of Marx’s Capital and the analyses of the legacies of Marxist political economy by Michael Heinrich, Dieter Wolf and Ingo Elbe came into view, and not just within the academy. Books by Backhaus and Reichelt were republished and Kurz was compelled to engage to some extent with this body of work, which claimed a certain priority in questions of value critique. He was obligated to differentiate his own brand. Such is part of the history of proprietorial, political and philosophical aspects that dogs this field. Economic analyses and theoretical interventions, ques-tions of political form and expressions of sectarianism, all occurring against the fraught and historically-freighted backdrop of post-war, and then, post-Wall Germany.



Kurz’s work will continue to have an influence, owing to the efforts of those remaining who keep it in circulation and bring it into translation. Its capa-ciousness means that it has broad relevance for those seeking explanations of the grand sweep of capital’s movements over centuries. It is perhaps its philosophical stance, its political philosophy, in all its darkness, that makes it seductive: it articulates a scream of horror that echoes down the centuries and finds no resolution anywhere. In negative times, this finds further echo, but echoes do not make revolutions.

References

Kurz, Robert 1999, Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus. Ein Abgesang auf die Marktwirtschaft, Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn.

——— 2003a, Weltordnungskrieg. Das Ende der Souveränität und die Wandlungen des Imperialismus im Zeitalter der Globalisierung, Bonn: Horlemann.

——— 2003b, Die Antideutsche Ideologie. Vom Antifaschismus zum Krisenimperia-lismus: Kritik des neuesten linksdeutschen Sektenwesens in seinen theoretischen Propheten, Münster: Unrast.

——— 2008, ‘The War against the Jews: Why the Global Public is Turning against Israel during the Economic Crisis’, Exit!, available at: <http://www.exit-online.org/tex tanz1.php?tabelle=transnationales&index=1&posnr=150&backtext1=text1.php>.

——— 2013/14, ‘The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productive Force; Productive Labor; and Capitalist Reproduction (1986)’, Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 27, 1/2, available at: <http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/crisis-of-exchange-value>.

Mediations 2013/14, ‘Editors’ Note’, Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 27, 1/2, available at: <http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note- vol-27-no-1>.

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