Black Book Capitalism

The Black Book Capitalism (subtitle: A swan song on the market economy ) is a monograph by Robert Kurz published in 1999 that deals critically with the history and future of capitalism . It is considered the main work of the author, who can be attributed to the critique of value, and sparked a debate about the description of the history of the development of capitalism, its diagnosis of the present and the consequences of the criticism of the prevailing conditions.

overview

Basic idea

The “social question” of the present is at the center of the Black Book. Capitalism is currently driving towards a "hopeless situation"; the market economy is no longer able to cope with its leaps in productivity - automation and globalization . The standard of living of broad sections of the population is falling, unemployment is increasing and the way out to the service society is proving to be an illusion. If the necessary “leap in awareness” were not made, there would ultimately be a threat of “rationalization” of people and an increasing “ decivilization of the world ”.

Kurz believes that capitalism has a “devastating” overall balance sheet in terms of welfare growth (p. 7). It is true that capitalism accelerates the development of the productive forces , but an increase in welfare was "strangely enough only temporarily connected", limited to "certain social segments and regions of the world" (p. 7). Capitalism was never able to use the potentials it created to improve the lives of all people.

In order to be able to think again about a new, different alternative, the “capitalism that has apparently become ahistorical”, which appears as a natural fact, must be historicized (p. 5). To this end, Kurz analyzes the history of capitalism from its beginning in the 16th century to the present day. He assumes that there were three major industrial revolutions: the replacement of human muscle by machine power in the first , the rationalization of human labor in the second, and automation, which makes human labor superfluous, in the third industrial revolution .

For Kurz, the central motor of the story was man's self-submission to the economic process of increasing money, which he describes with Adam Smith's image of the "beautiful machine" (p. 41). Their “completely impersonal” (p. 41) and “blind mechanism” are presupposed unreflectedly as a quasi “natural law”. The only “goal” of the “beautiful machine” is the “utilization of value” (p. 85), the incessant accumulation of “money” and “quanta of abstract labor ” (p. 145). With this term, which was adopted from Karl Marx , Kurz characterizes the submission to a form of production which is ultimately "forgotten" (p. 16), since it no longer depends on its content, but only on the "expenditure of labor per se", the surrender to the "abstract end in itself of money", an "externally determined activity that is beyond one's own needs and beyond one's own control". The adherence to this principle of “ abstract work ” is ultimately what all societies and their critics have in common since the beginning of modern times. Even the representatives of the bourgeois revolutions and the labor movement could not have broken away from this paradigm.

classification

The work is to be seen in the context of the “Manifesto Against Labor” and other publications by authors of the capitalism-critical journal Krisis .

It is embedded in a collapse theory advocated by Kurz . The starting point is his publication Der Kollaps der Modernisierung (1991), in which Robert Kurz examines "the collapse of state socialism and the end of the traditional Marxist interpretation of the world". The Black Book Capitalism is here the processing of the “capitalist history” as a sequence of three industrial revolutions - with the focus on the representation of the “thrusts of the productive forces” and the “history of ideology”. The sequel to the “Black Book” is a trilogy on the process of globalization: “World Order War” is an analysis of the “traditional imperialism debate”, “World Capital” an analysis of the globalization debate. In addition, there is a previously unpublished account of the role of the USA in the world economy since the Second World War.

reception

Kurz's book and its fundamental critique of capitalism are provocative. The reception in particular by the press is correspondingly controversial and sometimes polemical. Some see the Black Book Capitalism as an important contribution to the criticism of the times and praise it for its wealth of historical details and especially for its comprehensive historical approach. It is criticized, however, that Kurz used the term 'capitalism' without reflection. The historicization he is striving for is also selective, sometimes falsifying or even the wrong approach at all. His conclusions also meet with contradiction. Despite his fundamental and historical accounting, he does not address the existing deficits of capitalism. His demand for a council system is problematic, as is that for the individual to refuse the system. Kurz did not draw any real practical consequences from his findings.

Theory and content

Basics of cultural history

Spiritual historical development

His historical analysis of capitalism begins briefly at the beginning of the 17th century, when a social model of “total competition” (p. 18) developed. In his opinion, the underlying conception of the world and man has become "hegemonic for all western thinking in modern times to this day".

The emerging market economy entrepreneurship has secured a strong social position. At the same time, however, it “no longer felt bound to the traditional structure of the authoritarian hierarchy” (p. 18) and developed its own “rule ideology” to legitimize its specific interests.

Cover picture from Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) - Hobbes saw human society as a "society of monsters"

For Kurz, the “great progenitor of liberalism” (p. 18) is Thomas Hobbes . According to Hobbes, there is a need, according to Hobbes, for a higher power, the state , since the latter regards humans as a principally naturally selfish being who is naturally in a "war of all against all" ( bellum omnium contra omnes ) (p the "should tame human predatory apes to negative sociality" (p. 21). According to Kurz, this concept of justification of the “absolute state” can still be found today (p. 22). For Hobbes, “freedom” consists primarily of “buying and selling and trading with one another” (p. 19), not the possibility of “cooperating in accordance with one's own needs and agreements”.

The turning of the striving for competition towards a positive characteristic - what Kurz describes as the “ revaluation of all values ” (p. 25) - was carried out by Bernard Mandeville . Through mutual competition, the naturally lazy, selfish and greedy for money could ultimately turn a society into a “flourishing community” (p. 25). The “sympathy and suffering in the misfortune and misery of others” is declared to be a feeling of the “weakest minds”, to which the “men of the market” should not give in (p. 27).

According to Kurz, this cynicism is surpassed by the Marquis de Sade , who advocates the ideology of the “ right of the fittest ” in a radicalized form up to and including murder (p. 31). Any social compassion is branded by De Sade as a negative "natural trait" of women (p. 32). By reducing sexuality to the performance of coitus , he transforms it “to a certain extent into a (analogous to the capitalist production process) machine execution” (p. 34).

According to Kurz, the views of Immanuel Kant represent a further increase, as in this case the competition of egoistic individuals is simply assumed as the development law of humanity. Kant regards the mechanism of global capital “as a work of the 'hand of God'”, as “the result of an overall context determined by divine providence, of a 'higher nature' of the system” (p. 38).

This thought of the “wise Creator” then leads to the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith's theory . According to Kurz, this symbol shows "how the worldview of modern economics is systematically based on that of mechanical physics". Smith asserts that "through the obsessive activism of the capitalist 'doers' the greatest possible improvement and the best possible distribution" is achieved, so that any criticism is superfluous. In doing so, the "independent and separate 'beauty of order' and the splendor of the economic 'machine', the regular and harmonious movement of the system '" are glorified. Smith developed the worldview of modern economics, which is ultimately based on that of mechanical physics . For Kurz, the activity of this new “ national economy” consists in researching capitalist economy with the claim of natural science and at the same time constantly “proving” its own necessity for existence.

The ethical principle of “the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number ” by Jeremy Bentham propagates a society “which gives or should give every human being the right to 'make his fortune'”, as it is also in the formula of the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence of the United States . Ultimately, the objective measure of happiness is money, whereby, according to Bentham, property rights should not be affected in any way.

Biological substructure

For Kurz, a central development in the 19th century is Darwinism , which has a character typical of modern natural science:

“A really great discovery completely merged with an irrational ideological impulse and unreflected interests of the capitalist fetish system, only to be charged with enormous destructive power” (p. 154).

Kurz sees Darwin in the tradition of the Enlightenment and its program of "natural science" of the world (p. 155). However, the free spirits had no real enlightenment in mind: the apparent abolition of religion by the natural sciences was reserved only for the intellectual elite or was only used for a more refined form of taming and self-disciplining the masses.

Darwin believed the mechanism for evolution , i.e. H. the gradual change and development of living beings, in the 'struggle for existence', d. H. to have found in the selection . The projection of this doctrine back onto society was a welcome “scientific” justification for the capitalist concept of competition. So-called “ social Darwinism ” was soon used by “imperialist ideologues like Friedrich Naumann , Walter Rathenau or Max Weber ” to formulate German claims to world power.

For Kurz, Darwinism and capitalism combine in the “ eugenics ” movements that would have wanted to develop a “scientifically” based human “selection”. Social Darwinism introduced “negative selection” to eliminate the “biologically inferior” in society, which particularly affected criminals and all those who were unfit for work in the “capitalist sense”. This ideology of social Darwinism was initially realized as a kind of "reproductive hygiene":

"While the 'inferior' and 'degenerate' were to be prevented by law and with police force from reproducing if necessary, the socio-political goal was to bring together 'hereditary' human material according to agricultural criteria” (p. 161).

Darwinism was also linked to modern racism , which would have ranged from Kant (“Race”) to Hegel to Auguste Comte (“ stage theory ”) and Joseph Arthur Graf de Gobineau had the “myth of the ' Aryan noble race '” invented .

The race theory, which was merged with Darwinism, had - so Kurz - assumed a direct biological character. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was said to have been the supplier of an interpretation of “the whole of history, including art forms, according to 'racial' points of view” (p. 164). This connection between Darwinism and racial madness in capitalism has led to a dualistic hierarchy between “ master men ” and biologically inferior “human material”. The social madness has found a projection surface for the “embodiment of its own negativity” and a “negative superman ” “in the form of the Jews ”; a development in which for Kurz the European tradition of anti-Semitism was transformed into capitalist modernity: above all in the idea of ​​a ' Jewish world conspiracy '. Kurz believes that the capitalist logic of the laws of the market would ultimately only have allowed the physical annihilation of the "competitor".

Kurz also sees anti-Semitic tendencies in the tradition of socialism, which he identified in Charles Fourier , whose 1808 book Theory des quatre mouvements represented an anti-Semitic view of the world. Even Pierre-Joseph Proudhon have reduced the concept of "capitalism" on interest-bearing capital of pure moneylenders, his critique of capitalism was therefore only an anti-Semitic interpretation of this form of society. Marx, too, began to "tend towards an identification of 'money in general' or 'haggling' and ' usury ' with the 'Jewish being'" (p. 178).

Historical analysis

First industrial revolution

Implementation of the business calculation

With the establishment of liberalism over absolutism in the First Industrial Revolution , Kurz began to "expand and moralize the goods-producing society and generalize the understanding of its necessity" (p. 57). The "capitalist machine for its own sake" is taken for granted and "bourgeois thinking" has "increasingly shifted its focus to organizational and natural science" and to "through technocratic intelligence" (p. 57). The competition between companies has now forced market participants to permanently develop their productive strength in order to keep their own offer marketable. In the struggle for prices there was a kind of "location debate" about the cheapest wages, and the incipient international competition served as a means of social blackmail (p. 59).

Soon capitalism was seen as a “natural social event”. The paradox that, on the one hand, he achieved a “previously never thought possible saving of labor through the machine system” but, on the other hand, was not able to use this “as an increase in social welfare and as a solution to social problems” (p. 59), was encountered afterwards Kurz's view is solely based on the hope of a “scientific-technical redemption that should someday come from the machine forces themselves”.

Kurz believes that the capitalist mode of production gets into an "insoluble logical self-contradiction", since on the one hand it transforms " abstract work " into goods, on the other hand it continuously replaces human work "with technical-scientific agents" and thus undermines the substance of "value creation" itself .

Victims and revolts

"The 'jobs' of the first industrial revolution were real hellholes" - the " iron rolling mill " by Adolph Menzel (1872–1875)

The consequences of this economic calculation at the beginning of the first industrial revolution were mass unemployment and the social desolation of entire regions. With the factory proletariat a new category of “working poor” had arisen, children and women were employed in factories at low wages . The victims resisted, which led to social revolts .

Briefly regards the new movement of the radical, also violent, " Luddites " as the core of the rebellion. Although they were backward-looking, they had "[sued] for elementary and universal conditions of human freedom that were fundamentally destroyed by the capitalist market and factory system". On the continent, the “ bread riots ” took place primarily in the period of Vormärz , “when the real existence of the social state of war and siege was degraded to a marginal phenomenon of the 'necessary' victims of modernization”.

The so-called population law of the pastor Thomas Robert Malthus represents for Kurz the beginning of the " biologization of the social crisis". With the thesis that humanity would always multiply more than the available food resources, Malthus had a kind of "final solution" for the Explanation of mass poverty and unemployment found. In this way, the problems of capitalism, which they had actually created themselves, were elevated to unchangeable laws of nature.

March Revolution and Social Democracy

According to Kurz, the revolution of 1848 that resulted from the spirit of nationalism - the search for an “identity-forming construction” - was caused by the goal of liberalism to occupy the two “poles” of state and market itself. The liberal bourgeoisie also fought against an impending social revolt. His defeat in the March Revolution contributed significantly to

"To forever tie the emerging left (or later socialism) to the problems of liberalism and let them run into a long historical dead end".

According to Kurz, modern socialism emerged from reform groups (including workers' associations ) that primarily tried to prevent or dampen social revolts and to attribute the contradictions and restrictions of capitalism to external influences. Only a few intellectuals - above all Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels  - were "turned around" by personal experiences. However, historical consequences have not materialized. Marx had always expressed his sympathy for the social uprisings, but "regarded their impulse essentially as an aberration against 'the productive forces'". Kurz accuses Marxism of adopting the “ positivist , technologically and scientifically abbreviated concept of progress of liberalism”. There has been no radical criticism of the history of modernization and its changed concept of work even in the “left” to this day.

Second industrial revolution

Until World War II

Kurz characterizes the beginning of the 20th century as one

"A peculiar schizophrenic mixture of belief in progress and fantasy of doom, technocratic feasibility thinking and biological 'veterinary philosophy', reason of state and market competition, individual claims and delusional collective subjectivity of 'nation' and 'race'".

The traditional binding forces of society, inherited from the agrarian society, had dissolved faster and faster, the ideas and programs of the socialist labor movement had become at the same time "hollow and implausible as a supposed historical alternative" because they were fundamentally "contaminated with capitalist forms of thought, patterns of action and categories of interests “Have been.

Kurz considers the First World War - based on George F. Kennan - to be the “ great catastrophe of the 20th century ”. It had caused “social democracy” to flourish: because the social democrats had “paid their blood toll”, they had now been granted “the long-awaited entry into the centers of power”; The marginalized socialist leaders have mutated into statesmanlike junior partners and become part of the "beautiful" machine.

Great Depression and Inflation

The economic crisis plunged many families into dire straits - impoverished migrant worker in California in 1936 (photography by Dorothea Lange )

In the 1920s a “new epoch of global capitalism of mass production and mass consumption” seemed to dawn, but the structural upheaval of the Second Industrial Revolution was overshadowed by the greatest “socio-economic transformation crisis” to date. Despite a new quality and quantity of mass consumption through the "investment means of consumption" automobile, Fordism was not able to follow up seamlessly with the first industrial revolution; Above all , there was a lack of the necessary infrastructure , the necessary investments and an intact world market with worldwide sales markets.

The state tried to offset the debts it had taken on during the war by increasing the money supply. The inflation crisis that this triggered disrupted the monetary system almost everywhere in Europe. Kurz sees here the “deep irrationality” of capitalism breaking out and the “fetishism” of this social system becoming visible. The impoverished masses now faced a small stratum of speculative profiteers from the crisis.

In Germany in particular, "the mixture of fear of crisis, phantasmagoric projections and speculative hunt aroused the old, deep-seated demon of anti-Semitism", especially in the form of the National Socialist German Workers' Party .

Speculation and the crisis of deflation

In this situation, the governments had succeeded in reducing inflation by taking drastic measures. Ultimately, this development resulted in the states violently apologizing to their citizens as creditors, which, as well as the measures to combat inflation, would have triggered a huge impoverishment. The subsequent upswing of the so-called Roaring Twenties took place primarily in the realm of speculation, with the result of an unprecedented wave of speculation on the stock and real estate markets, where numerous "stock artists" had come together "to drive up the price of a certain share ".

When the bubble of this “fictitious capital” burst in the New York stock market crash in 1929 , this was the prelude to the greatest depression in capitalist history to date. The result of this second world economic crisis was, according to Kurz, a "global deflationary shock ":

“In the USA, almost destitute masses wandered helplessly through the country in their Ford cars, the only remaining possession, looking for odd jobs to earn a little food and gasoline [...]. In addition to these bizarre mobile slums , huge new slums were also emerging in the suburbs that were never supposed to disappear entirely ”.

Kurz 'conclusion: the economic crisis quickly brought social standards back to the level of the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Dictatorship and capitalism

"Work makes you free" - the inhuman motto at the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp  - for short the embodiment of the ultimate consequence of the "liberal ideology" that can no longer be surpassed

In short, it is called “self-deception” and “misunderstanding of history” if the dictatorships of the 20th century were treated in the “bourgeois way of explaining” as the “other” and “foreign” per se, “that has risen from the depths of history and the dark , represents the anti-civilizing side of man in general ”. When looking at the entire history of modernization, Kurz believes that “capitalism, liberalism and market economy democracy should not be understood as an overarching positive”, but as “negative and repressive forced socialization through the monstrous 'beautiful machine' of 'valorisation'”.

For Kurz, the dictatorships of the 20th century are rooted in the capitalist mode of production and are manifestations of liberal capitalism. He further claims:

“From this negative, critical perspective, Auschwitz in particular can only be seen as the ultimate consequence of the liberal ideology in the tradition of Hobbes, Mandeville, de Sade, Bentham, Malthus and others, which cannot be surpassed. Co. are understood ",

whose “naturalization and biologization of the social” represent a “historical layer of Auschwitz”.

In the dictatorships of the 20th century “only the liberal terror of early capitalism was repeated on a higher level of development and with shifted ideological legitimation patterns”.

State Capitalism of the Soviet Union

Briefly looks at the history of the “ state capitalist Soviet Union ” as the “prototype of state economic 'catch-up modernization' in the 20th century”. In his opinion, the Soviet Union was in a double "historical predicament":

• Confronted with the “presence of the capitalist West, which was hurried ahead”, it was no longer able to take a fundamentally different path of development; rather, the 'world consciousness' had already been shaped by capitalism.
• In a world determined by the standards of contemporary capitalism, she was forced to enter directly at the level of the 20th century.

Kurz is therefore of the opinion that the “crimes of communism ” were nothing other than “the repetition of early capitalist horrors in a compressed manner”. The starvation of millions in the early 30s was the result of a rigid industrialization policy for the violent construction of (state) capitalist industrial systems, with the help of which one wanted to put oneself at the forefront of world development with early capitalist methods.

However, in the "Soviet 'catching up modernization'", as well as in the ideology of the "labor movement and the left in general", Kurz noted an "unredeemed moment" to this day: the "dream" of "free and conscious self-organization " which - even if only briefly - especially in the term " Soviet ", before these degenerated into "mere dummies".

Keynes and Keynesianism

After the global economic crisis, Kurz had lost faith in the “doctrine of the 'invisible hand'”, which was expressed in the transition “to a general state economic regulation, to the state as an essential economic subject”. For the USA, Roosevelt's New Deal represented the deepest turning point in its economic history. The state-economic approaches to crisis management went hand in hand with the creation of the hitherto inadequate logistical framework for the second industrial revolution. In Nazi Germany, the state economic interventions were "pushed far more strongly than in the New Deal". The actual “Fordist breakthrough” was achieved for short with the “financial methods of the war economy”, in which the absolute limit of the “capitalist self-contradiction” could have been pushed out again.

In parallel to these developments, the British economist John Maynard Keynes developed “the corresponding theory of ' deficit spending '”. Keynes considered Say's theorem , which had been valid until then, to be fundamentally wrong. Kurz comments critically that Keynes himself admitted that his theory “can basically only be a 'postponement' of the absolute limit of capitalist production. Just as involuntarily he reveals the absurdity of the logic inherent in the capital relation ”. The first round of 'Keynesianism' had resulted in a new arms race: once again the war was the father of all things, Hitler was, so to speak, the 'executor of this murderous' ruse '' of postponement.

Kurz sees the Second World War as the result of this development , about which he draws the following summary:

“This new triumph of the 'beautiful machine' cost a total of 55 million lives, large parts of Europe and Asia were devastated. But strange: the repeated and outrageous 'costs of modernization', which quantitatively and qualitatively exceeded all previous terror and horror of capitalism, no longer evoked the deep shock [...] It was as if the human material, demoralized to the core, was actually running indifferent and already robot-like cold through a wall of fire into the commercial, finally de-spiritualized dullness of the coming bleak consumer paradise. "

In the post-war period it was then a matter of "converting the war economic structures [...] into 'civil economic' forms of regulation and expanding them into a permanent system".

post war period

After the Second World War, capitalism seemed - so briefly - to rise like "a phoenix from the ashes". It seemed that a ' golden age ' would indeed dawn. This post-war prosperity was a more or less global phenomenon. In Germany even the “magic word” of the economic miracle was coined - although the term, in Kurz's view, already expresses the exceptional aspect of this development.

Until around 1950 the market was not uniformly capitalist. Only "post-war Fordism" created a "nationwide production and distribution of all consumer goods by Fordist industrial capital and its" working state "" and brought the "traditional sectors" (subsistence production, family production, agriculture) to almost complete disappearance. This means that the population as a whole was “at the mercy of the capitalist society machine to a greater extent”.

Capitalist totalitarianism and mobilization

Kurz sees the second industrial revolution essentially characterized by the term “ totalitarian ”. He accuses the current theories of totalitarianism that they define the term “totalitarian” only in the “state-political” sense, “while the economic is completely ignored”, although political totalitarianism has an economic basis. Thus "both the Stalinist and the Nazi dictatorship as well as Italian fascism arose on the basis of the goods-producing system".

In the post-war democracies, a “total mobilization ” is evident in the call for “constantly increasing, more and more nonsensical consumption of goods”, “performance” and “competition”, which particularly affects women through the “industrialization of housework” The job necessary to cover the costs for household electronics caused the double burden for the woman. Furthermore, Kurz perceives the massive car traffic as "total automobile production", as a war-like condition that claimed around 17 million deaths in the course of the 20th century. These “ human sacrifices ” would be portrayed as normal, necessary and fateful.

Kurz believes that the idea that more and more leisure and fun will be associated with capitalism should be relativized in terms of the connection with a “reduction in working hours”. Initially, this is limited to a few rich capitalist centers, above all the countries of continental Western Europe. Second, the reduction in working hours was only a temporary phenomenon in the phase of rapid economic growth. Third, the reduction in time would be overcompensated for by an excessive increase in the workload for the individual. On the other hand, leisure time is only "apparently freely disposable time" because in "leisure time consumption" - in mass tourism, for example, "mobilization" would also be extended to free time - the "capitalist conditioning" continues, so that ultimately there is no social one Give more space outside of this.

Totalitarian Democracy

Kurz is of the opinion that democracy also contains a totalitarian element. Erich Ludendorff had already recognized that "in no other form of government can the human material from the exploitation process be kept on a leash as free of contradictions and cheaply as in a democracy". The reason is that social life is ultimately not controlled by conscious joint decisions of the democratic members of society, since the democratic procedures of free expression, political decision-making and free elections are only downstream of the effects of the 'social physics' of anonymous markets: all democratic decisions are always determined in advance by the automatism of the economic system, which is understood according to natural law.

According to Kurz, behind the three state powers of the legislative , executive and judicial branches, there is always the structural (fourth) power of a totalitarian market system, which since Rousseau has been known as the abstract “ common good ” and to which the postulated “ popular sovereignty ” does not extend . A final totalitarian character is also evident in the total bureaucracy of human administration in democracies.

World destruction and crisis of consciousness

According to Kurz, at the turning point of economic prosperity in the early 1970s, the consequences of this became visible: the extensive destruction of the natural foundations of life. He traces this development back to the logic of “abstract work”, which shifts its costs onto society as a whole, the future and, of course, also onto nature. The latter was already noticed by the young Friedrich Engels in his analysis “ The Situation of the Working Class in England ”. However, it was only with the capitalist “total mobilization” that nature was completely at the mercy of the abstract business logic of exploitation.

In 1972 the “ Limits to Growth ” were debated worldwide for the first time, according to a study of the same name by the Club of Rome , in which the relationship between the need to grow and natural raw materials was discussed . Kurz criticizes this study for the fact that "the destructive character of business rationality is at best indirect", as a "regrettable side effect of 'industrial society'". Kurz thinks he recognizes that the official society only took up the debate about the limits and destructive ecological consequences of growth in order to be able to suppress the problem better: the actual cause of the ecological catastrophe was talked to death without consequences, or in the non-binding propaganda of a “reconciliation of Economy and Ecology ”.

Only the revolting student movement was able to dream of a world that was "released from the capitalist end in itself of the 'beautiful machine'" and that would reduce production activity to perhaps two or three hours a day.

“For the first time in many decades there was again such a thing as an attempt to dare to reformulate Marx's fundamental criticism of capitalism authentically. The Paris May seemed to shake the system to its foundations ”.

However, Kurz draws the balance that the “ movement of 1968 in the sense of social emancipation failed completely”. The radical criticism of the form of commodities and “abstract work” was ultimately not pursued any further, instead the students, like the labor movement before, “got on the wrong track of“ politics ””.

Third industrial revolution

The Third Industrial Revolution has short their technological base in the electronics and information sciences . In his view , the automation associated with it leads “to a qualitatively new level of mass unemployment and thus the systemic crisis”. The logically only possible form of automation in capitalism is mass unemployment. The main problem is that those people who are now “superfluous” are being expelled from the system of making money and competition, although this continues to be their inescapable livelihood. According to Kurz, the “end of the labor society” threatens to lead to a “real historical systemic collapse”, since work threatens to run out of the “substance of capital itself”.

According to Kurz, two innovations were essentially decisive for the third industrial revolution: cybernetics and the electronic calculating machine . Parallel to the rise of the microelectronic revolution after the Second World War - especially since the 1980s - the "mass unemployment described as 'structural'" developed:

"Unemployment had become structural insofar as it no longer increased or decreased in correspondence with the economic cycle, but grew continuously independently of it."

Kurz considers the attempts of contemporary liberalism to solve this problem to be grotesque. Ralf Dahrendorf's argumentation of radically lowering the level of real wages and social benefits is not only seen as a non-functioning solution, but even the suggestion of such unreasonable demands on wage workers is absurd. For Kurz, the “only sensible consequence” is, in line with technical progress, “demanding more leisure for everyone, with everyone fully participating in the fruits of the tremendously increased productivity”.

Kurz sees “the progressive dehumanization of capitalism” pulling up a “democratic gulag”. This gulag is divided into three sections:

1. The first division consists of people custody and confinement; Institutions in which more and more “superfluous”, “delinquent” or otherwise “useless” people would disappear, and which themselves had swelled to a huge cost factor: prisons, penitentiaries, drill centers, “homes” of all kinds, poor hospitals, psychiatric institutions, etc.
2. The second and largest department consists of the masses of the unemployed and those who have fallen out, who are bureaucratically kept in motion, harassed, humiliated and increasingly put on “hunger rations” by the democratic poverty and crisis administration.
3. The third department was made up of the homeless people, street children, immigrants, asylum seekers and other illegals who were “vegetating” on the fringes of society and who were no longer managed continuously, but only sporadic objects of police and occasionally even military operations (or in some countries by private death squads).

Kurz 'conclusion: in just under 20 years, the third industrial revolution brought about the greatest crisis since 1929, which not only brought back the mass unemployment that was believed to have been overcome, but also caused the money economy to collapse in many countries. Here the immanent self-contradiction of capitalism finally comes to light.

Social consequences

Situation in the nation state

Founding time and founder quarrel

The result of the wave of stock speculation in the German Reich after 1850 was the great " Founders Crash " in 1873. With this, galloping industrialization entered a creeping stagnation for almost two decades until the early 1990s.

In the return to the protective tariff system and increasing state activity (also known as Wagner's Law ), for Kurz, there is an inherent logic of “industrial capitalism”, which demands logistical structures that “are not themselves operated again capitalistically according to the laws of purely economic rationality can". However, since the state in the liberal-conservative understanding could no longer have been a profit-producing 'entrepreneur' itself, 'a' financing problem 'of its growing tasks in the industrial market economy "arose. The only solution was the moderate taxation of “market income” and increasing debt.

Welfare state

Liberal conservatism was inclined to avert social revolts, "to transfer a certain social responsibility to the state - of course [...] inextricably mixed up and linked to its repression function". Briefly describes this as the “remarriage” of liberalism with the “absolutist apparatus” that has taken place in all major European countries.

According to Kurz, Bismarck pursued a double strategy in his social legislation based on power-political calculations: the “bare natural law of the market” was to be supplemented by “state-managed social affairs”:

“In parallel to the pressure to prohibit in the old Leviathan style, his government took the paternalistic welfare state considerations of liberal conservatism seriously in a way that has become 'classic' and brought about a kind of ' white revolution ' from above in social legislation that became the prototype of the modern welfare state in the 20th century. Century should be ".

Kurz doubts an actual improvement in the social situation through Bismarck's social legislation, which for him only "normalized" mass poverty and prevented wage workers from solidarizing with one another. In precisely this situation the social democracy - which in his opinion stems from liberalism - has grown into a social force. Since the workers of the next generation no longer had any memory of pre-industrial conditions, the long-term goal of the socialist state had shifted into a “distant and unreal future”.

Present and Future

Living in and from affluent garbage - children in misery in a slum on a garbage dump in Jakarta (2004)

For Kurz, the economic crises of the last two decades of the 20th century, along with the state's withdrawal from social responsibility and the rise of neoliberalism, led to the greatest wave of mass impoverishment since the early 19th century. Most of the Third World was completely ruined, including the emerging Southeast Asian countries, as well as the states of the former Soviet Union and all of Eastern Europe. But even in the west, larger regions and population groups would succumb to mass impoverishment every year. Kurz draws the conclusion that the global capitalist system has completely failed.

Kurz explains the phenomenon of impoverishment using various examples. There is growing impoverishment of children worldwide: child labor in the Third World, but also in Germany and the USA, is increasing ; the phenomenon of street children has also expanded massively. Since the 1990s there has also been a worldwide rise in hunger . Malnutrition and the associated deficiency diseases are also increasing in the western industrialized countries. In medical care , the statutory health insurances would be converted into "poor pensions " everywhere. Beyond the major industrialized nations, in most eastern and southern countries medical help is only available for cash anyway. Increasingly, “money poverty is even being exploited to cannibalize the poor as real organ banks for the better-off”, for which the “third world ruined by the world market” would be ideal - for Kurz the “last conceivable stage of the supply economy”. The general “dehumanization of the capitalist medical and health care system” continues above all in how elderly people in need of care are dealt with. Even the closest relatives often only had the status of distant relatives as soon as they disappeared behind the walls of a care or storage facility. The old people's homes for the impoverished masses would take on a “concentration camp-like character” under increasing cost pressure.

Author's conclusion

In the book's epilogue, Kurz draws the conclusion that capitalism is approaching its own self-destruction, which could also end in the destruction of human society. To counter this danger, “radical theoretical criticism and rebellion must come together”. Kurz sees two possible ways to overcome the capitalist social system: the shortest way is "the occupation of the production plants, administrative institutions and social institutions by a mass movement that appropriates the social potential directly and operates the entire reproduction on its own, that is, the hitherto ruling" vertical 'institutions simply disempowered and abolished'. A “transition phase in which a kind of counter-society is formed that opens up certain social spaces against the capitalist logic from which the market and the state are driven” would also be conceivable. He sees the establishment of “councils” as a possible institutional structure of the future that “could replace the market economy and democracy”. H. “Consultative assemblies of all members of society at all levels of social reproduction”. For this purpose, a conscious “Palaverkultur” would have to be created in order to “discuss and weigh everything”.

Kurz sees three main tasks for such a future society:

• to use the "available resources of natural materials, operating materials and [..] human abilities in such a way that all people are guaranteed a good, enjoyable life free from poverty and hunger";
• "To stop the catastrophic misdirection of resources [...] into senseless pyramid projects and destructive productions";
• "To translate the social time fund, which has been enormously swollen by the productive forces of microelectronics, into an equally large amount of leisure for everyone".

The solution to these problems is ultimately "neither a material nor a technical or organizational problem, but only a question of consciousness". For Kurz, however, it is likely that the necessary “leap in consciousness” will no longer take place. Nevertheless, capitalism is not viable, which leads to “the unstoppable decivilization of the world”. The only alternative course of action is “a culture of denial”. This means "to refuse any joint responsibility for 'market economy and democracy', only to do 'service according to regulations' and to sabotage capitalist operations wherever possible".

reception

Kurz's provocative book, which is successful in terms of sales figures, is very popular with the general public and has hardly been received by scholars.

After its publication, there was a controversial argument about the work in daily and weekly newspapers. In the reception, the critical voices are sometimes very sharp, while the positive voices particularly welcome Kurz's approach of radical criticism of the economic system. Rejecting authors, on the other hand, accuse him of fundamental methodological deficiencies, (historical) falsifications and the call for a failed rebellion as well as the lack of practical consequences.

The undertaking of this “brilliant and radical criticism of the capitalist world system” is described in the Frankfurter Rundschau as a “bold undertaking”, at a time when “criticism of capitalism is taboo in society”. The positive contribution in the context of a “controversy” at the time considers the book by Kurz to be “the most important publication of the last ten years in Germany”. The detailed approach is also praised here. The WOZ welcomes the "wealth of materials". Despite its shortcomings, according to the FR, one could definitely agree with his “time-critical diagnosis of a hardening of the capitalist form of consciousness”. For the overall very laudatory contribution of the time , the book is “a great success, a truly necessary protest”, one of the most important findings of which is that “there were always only relatively short phases in which expanding capitalism produced something like mass prosperity, and only in Western Europe, Anglo America and Japan. "

On the other side, the basis of Kurz's argument is clearly criticized: His use of 'capitalism' is particularly problematic. He - so unanimously the strongly negative Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as the critical contribution in Die Zeit  - does not define the term, uses it in an undifferentiated way as a "battle term" and - as the fundamentally rather laudatory FR criticizes - asserts that capitalism is to blame for everything. Other aspects, which - as the negative article in the FAZ criticized  - would often be seen as the cause of problems in Africa, for example, would be ignored by Kurz or the undifferentiated concept of capitalism was blamed. As a result, he does not address the “deficits” of capitalism that can hardly be dismissed out of hand and “throws away the baby with the bathwater.” The SZ diagnoses an erroneous approach: “Instead of now asking why capitalism in particular has prevailed without any alternative, [...], Kurz bites into old thought patterns. Whether and how the mistakes and defects of capitalism can be corrected or at least absorbed through political shaping - none of that interests him. ”Kurz's approach and in particular the context that is too large due to the historical perspective and the postulation of necessary historical development paths are a meaningful fundamental analysis our economic system in the way.

Kurz's handling of the story is also rejected. The historical representation itself - so the SZ clearly - is "a hodgepodge of questionable analogies and presumptuous judgments". The Friday thinks it'll singled out Any of the history. In addition, the SZ lacks a discussion of approaches that did not fit into Kurz's view of the world.

The FAZ considers the council system called for by Kurz to be a “nineteenth-century slow seller”. Due to the differentiated society, there is no uniform popular will assumed by Kurz. The alternative of a revolution or a refusing rebellion mentioned by Kurz is also not convincing and his call for this “makes the book finally a scandal”.

Kurz's work also encounters sharp opposition from a Marxist critical of capitalism. In a detailed review of the journal object point approach is criticized Short '. Instead of analyzing capitalism, Kurz only wants to make “unpleasant truths” about capitalism “aware [...]”. Kurz's technique of using "association" to construct the necessary course of history as a confirmation of his image of capitalism is methodologically dubious. Finally, the article criticizes Kurz's criticism of capitalism as a "tickle of methodological opposition without claim and with explicit renunciation of theoretical criticism and practical consequences".

expenditure

• Robert Kurz: Black Book Capitalism. A swan song for the market economy . 1st - 4th edition, Ullstein-TB 36308, Munich / Berlin 2001-2005, ISBN 978-3-548-36308-0 ; extended new edition: Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 2009, ISBN 978-3-8218-7316-9 (Download exit-online.org (PDF; 2.4 MB) 257 pages. 2nd edition, Ullstein, Munich 2002).

Web links

• Black Book Capitalism . (PDF; 2.4 MB) exit-online.org
• Stephan Grigat : Robert Kurz "Black Book Capitalism" . In: Streifzüge , 2/2000
• Michael Heinrich : Bladder flying blind. Does Robert Kurz's “Black Book Capitalism” keep what the title promises? In: Konkret , March 2000, pp. 40–41

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ The quotation is based on the Ullstein paperback edition published in 2002.
2. ^ "Gruppe Krisis", various authors, June 1999: Manifesto against work .
3. ^ Alfred Baumann: A corpse rules society . Telepolis , January 8, 2000
4. ↑ On the following cf. Robert Kurz: Das Weltkapital , p. 7 f.
5. ↑ Quoted from John Kenneth Galbraith : The History of the Economy in the 20th Century. An eyewitness reports , Hamburg 1995.
6. ↑ Cf. Erich Ludendorff : The total war . Munich 1935.
7. ^ Friedrich Engels : The situation of the working class in England , Leipzig 1845.
8. ↑ Cf. allegedly in an unspecified article in: “ Der Spiegel 46/1996” - neither is there anything to be seen in this issue on an obvious topic, nor can the quotations be found in any other way than in this Wikipedia article.
9. ↑ 8th place on the ZEIT bestseller list “Non-Fiction”, Die Zeit , No. 2/2000 (first publications non-fiction. Determined from sales of Libri (January 24 to February 4, 2000) to bookshops worldwide).
10. ↑ ^{a b c} Günther Frieß, Frankfurter Rundschau , May 25, 2000.
11. ↑ ^{a b c} Hans-Martin Lohmann : Black Book Capitalism . In: Die Zeit , No. 51/1999.
12. ^ Stefan Zenklusen, Robert Kurz: Black Book Capitalism . ( Memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) In: Die Wochenzeitung , 07/2000.
13. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Michael Birnbaum: Who's Afraid of the Black Book?  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung .  
14. ^ Robert Heuser: Black Book Capitalism . In: Die Zeit , No. 51/1999.
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Ralf Altenhof: Militant and scandalous (review: non-fiction book). In: FAZ , January 24, 2000.
16. ↑ Balduin Winter: Thoughts are free - the derivation fanatic Robert Kurzen's cat concert on the market economy . In: Friday , January 5, 2001.
17. ↑ The intellectual primer for the swan song on criticism of capitalism . In: Item Point, 3/2000.