World Crisis: Robert Kurz's annotated Interview - Paperback

by Charles Odevan Xavier (Author)

This book is aimed at the common reader minimally acclimated with the Critique of Political Economy of the German philosopher Karl Marx.The book is an interview with the German philosopher and historian Robert Kurz. The interview was conducted by Graziela Wolfart and Patricia Fachin.The German philosopher starts from the observation that the current global crisis is not about a cyclical crisis from which capitalism will recover further, but it is actually a reflection of the inner economic barrier of capitalism - According to Kurz, the internal barrier of valorization of the value and the beginning of the external ecological barrier was reached.Thus, in the author's thesis, defended in his works and in this interview reproduced and annotated here, capitalism has nowhere to expand. For to him, the substance of capital (value) has lost substance. Kurz, anchored in Karl Marx, says that the substance of value is abstract labor. And this with the microelectronics revolution started in 1980, has lost its aspect of living labor - the abstract work of human wage earners; Was and is being continually replaced by the dead labor of the machines. In this way, the value valorisation circuit, that is, transformation from abstract to value-added work, is not closed.The world economy, which is increasingly based on an illusion of financially driven growth, is actually involved in the collapse of mortgage credit. Catalyst of a process of devaluation of all financial capital.And the apparent exit of appeal to the state will not result in anything, because the state can not stop the devaluation, but only manage it. Or in the case of Brazil 2016, adopt increasingly restrictive and repressive measures, such as PEC 55.Thus, the World Crisis, which broke out in 2008 with the bursting of the financial bubble, is also simultaneously a political, fiscal, economic, social, institutional, moral, psychological, sexual and civilizational crisis. That is, for Robert Kurz - German representative of an international movement known as Criticism of Value-Dissociation - the current crisis represents, in fact, the very collapse of capitalism.Thus, it is good to reiterate to the reader, according to the paradigm adopted in this book: the present crisis presents itself as the final or terminal crisis of capitalism, the crisis of the value-form itself and not only of its secondary aspects.The rationalization of the extraordinary productive chain reached in the 3rd industrial revolution with the microelectronics eliminated work. The living labor of wage-workers replaced by machines. The increasing levels of rationalization of production do not immediately equate to the expansion of markets.The commodity-producing society thus lives the devaluation of value. For value, a social relation and not just an economic criterion, is the substance of capital. And the substance of capital is labor. If this has been eliminated with technology, there will increasingly be a desubstantiation of capital and a de-substantialization of money.Thus, this money-based society, which is not a sign or a ballot, but a relationship, a mediation, is in ruins and collapses.Capitalism reaches its historical internal economic barrier and its external natural barrier. Kurz assumes that the current crisis is not a cyclical crisis, but a final and terminal crisis of the capitalist system. Whatever comes, if one insists on this model of sociability, it will be chaos, violence and barbarism. He proposes a rupture with this model and an exit or alternative transcendent to this model. A new society that still has no name, Maybe the Society of Human Emancipation.

Author Biography

Charles Odevan Xavier graduated in Portuguese Language from the Federal University of Ceará. He received 14 credits of the Master's Degree in Brazilian Literature from the Federal University of Ceará. He studied some subjects of the baccalaureate in Social Sciences of the Federal University of Ceará - enrolled in the special student modality. He does not have an academic background in economics, but he thinks he is interested in the subject because of the social militancy. It has broad academic interests ranging from research on the symbolic systems of the religiosities of African matrix, bequeathed by the particular form that the black diaspora was configured in the three Americas and the Caribbean; As well as being interested in the theory of the fetishism of the commodity of the German philosopher Karl Marx and the theory of fetishism of the value of the German philosopher Robert Kurz. He is also interested in Robert Kurz's hypotheses about what he calls "World Order Wars."