Robert Kurz - A Honra Perdida do Trabalho

In this pioneering and provocative text, published in the magazine Krisis in 1991 (and written in the fall of 1989, while thousands of Germans were escaping real socialism), Robert Kurz presents the critique of labor as an indispensable condition for the critique of capitalism.

To do this, he analyzes the categories of “work” and “exchange” in detail, while outlining some of the ideas he would explore in the following decades. Firstly, the question of the “double Marx”, which would become an essential principle of the critique of value. Secondly, the critique of the subject, as a historically specific social form of the commodity society. Thirdly, the critique of the Enlightenment, understood as a legitimizing ideological expression of the categories of capitalism. Fourthly, the critique of money, taking up the Marxian critique of money as a “separate commodity” and in frontal opposition to petty-bourgeois ideological critiques. And finally, the question of the ecological crisis, already thought of in connection with the destructive indifference of the fetish of abstract labour.