Wertkritik
Description
Mediations:
"We use “Wertkritik,” “value-critique” (and variations, e.g., “critique of value,” “value critical,” and so on) to refer specifically to the theories represented in the output of the journals Exit!, Krisis, and Streifzüge. (Since its founding in 2004, Exit! has tended, following the work of Roswitha Scholz, to refer exclusively to Wertabspaltungskritik, or the “critique of value-dissociation” — a term that effectively labels the same systematic theoretical and critical standpoint, although Exit! would argue that their theoretical understanding of it differs from that of the post-2004 Krisis.) This is to an extent a label of convenience that goes back to before 2004, up until which time most of the figures associated with Wertkritik in Germany were to a greater or lesser extent affiliated with and in many cases involved in the production of the “first” Krisis, of which, between 1986 and the end of 2003, twenty-seven issues had been published, the first seven under the title of Marxistische Kritik. The publication of Krisis 28 in 2004 marked the beginning of a resolution, however unsatisfactory, to a conflict-ridden and at times highly polemical public split in the pre-2004 Krisis that saw two of its central figures, Robert Kurz and Roswitha Scholz, along with others including Hanns von Bosse, Petra Haarmann, Brigitte Hausinger and Claus Peter Ortlieb, found the jounral Exit! as an alternative project, which began publication later in that same year. We are of course aware that this term, as well as references in English to “value-critique” or “critique of the value form,” can and often are taken to refer much more broadly to works of Marxian critical theory and of advanced Marx scholarship written mainly in German and as well as in some fewer cases to works and authors writing in English, French, Portuguese and a scattering of other languages. Principal among these works are those of Hans-Georg Backhaus, Helmut Reichelt and some others who, influenced by such seminal works as Roman Rosdolsky’s landmark study, The Making of Marx’s Capital (first published in English in 1977), began the task of a serious re-examination of Marx’s theory of value (and his critique of value) in Capital and the until then little-known or -studied Grundrisse This early work, acknowledged as a crucial source for, if also subject to critique by, the self-designating representatives of what we here designate as value-critique or Wertkritik, can also be traced through to the work on Marxian theory and critique of the value form associated with the neue Marx-Lektüre or “new reading of Marx.” The latter began to emerge in the 1960s (drawing inspiration from Evgeny Pashukanis and Isaak Rubin, as well as from the German-language critical Marxist traditions) and is now probably most prominently represented by the important Marx scholarship as well as critical and polemical writings of Michael Heinrich. As can be seen from several of the texts in this collection, an intense polemic has sprung up between leading theorists associated with both current value-critical journals Krisis and Exit! and Heinrich himself, who has also become probably the most prominent of contemporary Germanophone critics of crisis theory à la Wertkritik. Our decision to employ the term “Wertkritik” in this more restricted sense is not to deny that their are interconnections between Wertkritik more narrowly defined and the neue Marx-Lektüre, but rather to recognize that within this context there exist a range of tendencies, of which Wertkritik, the subject of this dossier, is one."
(https://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/editors-note-vol-27-no-1)