Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus

[10] Utilizing Karl Marx's terminology, Kurz describes this mode of production as "meaningless" since it no longer depends on its inherent content but solely on the "expenditure of labor power as such.

A central development in the 19th century, according to Kurz, is Darwinism, which exhibits a characteristic of modern natural science: "A truly great discovery became completely fused with an irrational ideological impulse and unreflective interests of the capitalist fetish system, eventually becoming charged with tremendous destructive power".

[14] However, the freethinkers did not have genuine enlightenment in mind: the apparent eradication of religion by the natural sciences was reserved for the intellectual elite or served as a more sophisticated form of mass control and self-discipline.

Social Darwinism introduced "negative selection" for eliminating the "biologically inferior" members of society, particularly criminals and those deemed unfit for work in the capitalist sense.

This ideology of social Darwinism was initially realized as a form of "reproductive hygiene": "While the 'inferior' and 'degenerate' were to be prevented from reproducing if necessary by legal means and police violence, it was considered a socio-political goal to bring together 'genetically healthy' human material according to agricultural criteria".

The "capitalist self-referential machine" became an unquestioned aspect of life, and bourgeois thinking increasingly focused on organizational and natural sciences, relying heavily on technocratic intelligence.

It presented a paradox: while machinery enabled unprecedented labor savings, there was a failure to utilize these advancements for societal welfare and as solutions to social issues.

On the continent, instances of "bread riots" primarily occurred during the Vormärz period, where the reality of social warfare and dire circumstances were reduced to peripheral phenomena deemed "necessary" sacrifices for the sake of modernization.

According to Kurz, the introduction of the so-called "population law" proposed by Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus marked the onset of the "biologization" of the social crisis.

Malthus posited that human population would perpetually outpace the availability of food resources, offering a kind of "final solution" to account for widespread poverty and unemployment.

Kurz argues that the revolution of 1848, born out of the spirit of nationalism and the search for an "identity-defining construction," had its cause in the goal of liberalism to occupy both the "poles" of the state and the market.

Their defeat in the March Revolution played a significant role in forever tying "the emerging Left (later socialism) to the problems of liberalism" and leading it into a long historical dead end.

Kurz characterizes the beginning of the 20th century as a "peculiar schizophrenic mixture of belief in progress and apocalyptic fantasies, technocratic thinking of feasibility and biologist 'veterinary philosophy,' state reason and market competition, individual claims, and delusional collective subjectivity of 'nation' and 'race'."

The traditional social bonds inherited from the agrarian society had been dissolving at an increasingly rapid pace, and the ideas and programs of the socialist labor movement had become both "hollow and incredible as a supposed historical alternative" as they had been fundamentally "contaminated with capitalist forms of thought, patterns of action, and categories of interest."

Especially in Germany, the combination of fear of crisis, phantasmagoric projections, and hunting down speculators rekindled the old deep-seated demon of anti-Semitism, particularly in the form of the nazi party.

According to Kurz, the result of this second Great Depression was a "global deflationary shock": "In the USA, nearly penniless masses roamed the country in their Ford cars, their only remaining possession, searching for odd jobs to earn a little food and gasoline [...].

Kurz considers it "self-deception" and "historical distortion" when the dictatorships of the 20th century are treated as the absolute "other" and "foreign" in the "bourgeois explanation," representing "what has emerged from the depths of history, embodying the dark, anti-civilizational side of humanity."

When examining the entire history of modernization, Kurz argues that it is more appropriate to understand capitalism, liberalism, and market economy democracy not as overarching positives but as "negative and repressive socialization through the monstrous 'beautiful machine' of the 'valorization of value.'"

In his view, the Soviet Union was trapped in a dual "historical predicament": Faced with the "presence of the capitalist-advanced West," it could no longer embark on a fundamentally different path; even its "world consciousness" had already been shaped by capitalism.

Kurz achieved the actual "Fordist breakthrough" through the utilization of "financial methods of war economy," effectively pushing back the absolute limit of the "capitalist self-contradiction" once again.

Kurz sees World War II as a result of this development and he concludes the following: "This renewed triumph of the 'beautiful machine' cost a total of 55 million lives, and large parts of Europe and Asia were devastated.

But strangely enough, the immense 'costs of modernization,' which quantitatively and qualitatively surpassed all the previous terror and horror of capitalism, no longer evoked any intellectual echo of deep shock [...] It was as if the deeply demoralized human material, completely indifferent and already robotically cold, ran through a wall of fire straight into the commercial, finally spiritless numbness of the coming bleak paradise of consumption."

Furthermore, Kurz perceives mass car traffic as "total automobilization," a state resembling war that has claimed approximately 17 million lives throughout the 20th century.

Kurz believes that the notion that capitalism would bring more leisure and fun for humans needs to be relativized in relation to its connection with "reduced working hours."

He argues that Erich Ludendorff recognized that "the human material of the exploitation process can be led on a leash in no other form of government as docilely and inexpensively as in democracy."

As a possible institutional structure of the future that could "replace market economy and democracy," he envisions the establishment of "councils," i.e., "consultative assemblies of all members of society at all levels of social reproduction."

Critical authors, on the other hand, accused him of fundamental methodological flaws, distortions (including historical ones), and advocating a misguided rebellion, as well as lacking practical consequences.

The projects "impressive and radical critique of the capitalist world system" is described in the Frankfurter Rundschau as a "bold endeavor" during a time of "social taboos surrounding criticism of capitalism."

The Zeit's overall very positive review sees the book as "a great achievement, a truly necessary protest," and highlights one of its key insights that "there have only ever been relatively short periods in which expanding capitalism produced something like mass prosperity, and that only in Western Europe, Anglo-America, and Japan."

The article concludes that Kurz's critique of capitalism is a "tickling of methodical opposition without claim and with an explicit renunciation of theoretical criticism and practical consequences."