Wertkritik

Wertkritik (German: [ˈveːɐ̯tkʁiˌtiːk]; "value critique" or "critique of value") is a school of Marxian critical theory that emerged in Germany in the 1980s. It sees itself as a continuation of Karl Marx's "esoteric" critique of the value-form, which it argues has been largely abandoned or misunderstood by "traditional" or "workers'-movement Marxism". The school's central figures include Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Norbert Trenkle, and Ernst Lohoff. Its main theoretical organs have been the journals Krisis and, following a 2004 split, Exit!.

The core of Wertkritik is a fundamental critique of the basic categories of capitalist society—value, commodity, money, and abstract labour—which it understands not as neutral economic concepts but as historically specific forms of social mediation that constitute a "real abstraction" governing social life. Unlike traditional Marxist analyses that focus on class struggle over the distribution of surplus value, Wertkritik identifies the value form itself as the object of critique. It argues that labour in capitalism is not a transhistorical source of wealth but a historically specific, "oppressive, inhumane, and antisocial activity" whose sole purpose is the endless accumulation of abstract wealth (value).

Wertkritik is primarily a theory of crisis, positing that capitalism possesses an absolute internal limit. It argues that the system's relentless drive to increase productivity through technology progressively expels living labour—the sole source of value—from production. This creates a fundamental contradiction: while material wealth increases, the production of value diminishes, ultimately leading to a "terminal crisis" of the capitalist mode of production. A major development within the school is Roswitha Scholz's theory of "value-dissociation" (Wertabspaltung), which posits that the value form necessarily dissociates and devalues activities, affects, and qualities coded as feminine, making this gendered dissociation a precondition of capitalist society. Wertkritik has had a significant reception in Brazil but remains largely unknown in the Anglophone world.