Dear John Blazek,
> Given your enthusiasm for Michael Heinrich, and the
> fact that on your site (Negative Potential is you, >
right?) I have read a commentary or two on the
> Anti-Germans that (as I recall) made no reference
> to Kurz's 2003 book Die Antideutsche Ideologie, I
> had tentatively inferred that you are probably not >
in agreement with (a number of) Kurz's theoretical >
positions.
> Could you write something about your views on him
> and/or the orientation of the Exit group more
> generally? It would be of great interest.
Kurz, Krisis, and Exit have a played a role in my political and theoretical education, something I wouldn't wish to deny. Kurz's two major books, _Der Kollaps der Modernisierung_ and _Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus_, as well as Anselm Jappe's _Die Abenteuer der Ware_ impressed me greatly upon first reading them and I still consult them with some profit.
My main differences with the "Nuremberg value-critique" has to do with their theory of automatic capitalist collapse, a perspective I find to be unsupportable by reference to Marx. I think their whole theoretical edifice as far as this goes is based upon a faulty interpretation of a specific passage in the Grundrisse and a theoretical problem that Marx solved for himself when he developed his concept of relative surplus-value.
They really succumb to an almost quasi-physicalist understanding of value, a really unfortunate thing, since I think it tends to discredit and contradict their main contribution, namely, attempting to re-focus attention on Marx's critique of political economy as a study of the specific social form social relationships assume in capitalism.
Postone, AFAIK, does not advocate any sort of theory of automatic collapse.
Kurz, I think, is best appreciated as a feuilletonist and a publicist, rather than a systematic or scientific thinker like Heinrich and Postone. Kurz's main contributing is writing in a polemical, somewhat popular style for journals like _Die Zeit_ and the _Frankfurter Rundschau_ (or at least that was the case ten to fifteen years ago. These days his writings appear regularly in the weekly Freitag and in the daily Neues Deutschland).
It's fun to watch Kurz strut his stuff in a journalistic way, but often times he employs Marxian terminology outside of context and as a result terms get muddied (he plays far too fast an loose with phrases like "abstract labor", for example).
Kurz's book _Die Antideutsche Ideologie_ is fantastic, I think the best theoretical settling of counts with the version of Anti-German thought represented by the ISF Freiburg and the Berlin journal Bahamas. It doesn't really deal with "Anti-German" as it is understood by traditional Communist currents (like the monthly magazine Konkret) or Post-structuralists (like Günther Jacob and the defunct journal 17 Grad), but rather with the specific type of "value-critical" Anti-Germanism that dresses up it's pro-Israeli and pro-USA perspectives in the language of the critique of political economy.
Kurz is a very polemical guy, often downright abusive, and I think that played no small role in the Krisis split. When he wrote _Die Antideutsche Ideologie_, he didn't just critique ISF and Bahamas, an honorable task in itself, but also accused large swathes of the radical left of basically being "useful idiots". As a result, he sort of burned his bridges with some broad left journals like Konkret and Jungle World, and I've noticed that in some extra-parliamentary circles, Kurz and his school don't have the influence they once seemed to had.
I will note that I think it's definitely the case that when Michael Heinrich's introductory book on Capital was published (I am currently working on an English translation), Heinrich supplanted Kurz as an explainer of the critique of political economy in a lot of left circles. Kurz's polemical jabs at Heinrich in the first two issues of _Exit_ I think at least party exhibit a sort of bitterness about this.