Robert Kurz

Robert Kurz (24 December 1943 – 18 July 2012) was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit!

[4] 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).

[1] 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.

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.

[5] 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.

In the book Die antideutsche Ideologie (The Anti-German Ideology), Robert Kurz deliberately polemically confronted what he called the "ideology-critical reductionism" of the Berlin magazine Bahamas.

Kurz sees in the social role of value (value-socialization) a totalitarian tautology that subordinates ad infinitum the entire physical and social-symbolic world to a single abstract principle of form: the accumulation of "dead labor."

"[8][1][9] A regular contributor to important newspapers, notably in Brazil, and a renowned lecturer, Robert Kurz chose to stay out of universities and other institutions of knowledge, and chose to live a marginal life by working as a proletarian - notably as a cab driver for seven years and above all as a night worker in a print shop for the packaging of the local newspaper.