In German published in exit Nr. 20. More english translations see exitinenglish.com.

Fetish Labor: Marxism and the Logic of Modernization

Robert Kurz

1. “Labor” as the Historical Identity of Modernity

A theory that has become historically powerful can no longer be dismissed as “error and mistake,” not even when certain historical manifestations that were related to it have exhausted themselves and disappear into the abyss of the past. For history is not a scientific process of falsification of a dead objectivity, but a human development. Real history is “overcoming” [Aufhebung] in Hegelian terminology, not falsification. This also applies to all great theories as inner moments of this history. In this respect, Marx’s theory can only be overcome, not declared false. The current manner of historical opportunism, which hastens to put an end to Marx, Marxism and any critique of capitalism at all under the pressure of an external history of events that has not yet been grasped, and to proclaim the positive “end of history” (Fukuyama 2006), has already immortally disgraced itself after a short time. After the collapse of a state socialism legitimized by Marxism in the East, we are not experiencing the worldwide upswing of market-based democracy, but the embarrassing crisis of the West itself: not only economically and socially, but also ideologically and in terms of legitimization.

In dialectics as well as in mysticism and in the esoteric, cabalistic systems, there is the doctrine of the identity of opposites. This identity of opposites can be deciphered in real history and theory as the overarching, general social form that determines the essence of a historical configuration of society that is common to all participants and factions “within” this form, relativizes their opposites and presents them as polar determinations within an identical whole. Such an insight, however, is only possible when the gun smoke of the immanent battles has cleared, when the formation becomes visible as an identical whole only at the moment of its sinking, whereas before, this identity had to remain hidden from the participants: otherwise they would not have been able to fight their battles, to drive the historical formation to its maturity and eventual “abolition.”