Robert Kurz

Robert Kurz's best-known publication is Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus, published in 1999. The weekly newspaper Die Zeit published two controversial reviews, one of which called the Schwarzbuch "the most important publication of the last 10 years."

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.

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.

Robert Kurz (24 December 1943 – 18 July 2012) was a German Marxist philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit! He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism.

Robert Kurz was born on 24 December 1943 in Nuremberg 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, history and paedagogy at the university of Erlangen without taking a degree. He participated in the "student revolt" in 1968 and took part in the intense discussions within the New Left. He was a member of the Kommunistischer Arbeiterbund Deutschland, KABD (Communist Workers League of Germany; later, named the Marxist–Leninist Party of Germany) 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).