EXIT! (or alternatively: Exit!) is a German journal of social criticism, and discussion group formed in 2004.[1][2][3] The journal is published by the publishing house Zu Klampen Verlag.[2][4] The journal has a value-critical (German: Wertkritik) approach, both to the contemporary mode of production, and its critique of traditional marxism, as well as their critique of political economy.[5][6][7][8][9]
EXIT! thereby subjects "abstract labour" and its expressions of value, commodity, money and market to a categorical critique. The value dissociation criticism (German: Wertabspaltungskritik) of the philosopher Roswitha Scholz occupies a large space in the journal.[10]
Some of the authors featured in the journal include Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Claus Peter Ortlieb, Tomasz Konicz, Anselm Jappe etc.[3][7][16] The journal originated in the German speaking world, but have had all the more influence internationally due to translations to Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and others.[1][3][17][18][19] There has also been a rather rich translation of the works of the EXIT! group, with 15 languages being covered only on their own site.[20] There has been a especially high amount of translation specifically to portuguese and spanish with several scholars and institutions adopting the theories of EXIT! in Brazil.[19][21][22][23][3]
The group Exit! emerged from a split in the Krisis group. Krisis was founded by the philosopher Robert Kurz and others in 1986.[19] Kurz was to become its most active and prominent author, and the group were to become instrumental in the development of value dissociation criticism.[19] Before the split of the group occurred in 2004, Kurz had already managed to publish his seminal work Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus, which Die Zeit had proclaimed one of the most important publications of the decade.[3][24] However, when the group split, Robert Kurz ended up co-founding the new group with the name of Exit!.[3][25][26] According to those who would become involved in Exit!, the split was the result of a putsch by a minority of the editorial staff of Krisis.[27] But those who remained with Krisis claimed that it had to do with personal reasons between the members.[28] A few members of EXIT! published a communiqué stating among other facts, that a theoretical conflict had developed due to Kurz critical engagements with anti-Germans. They noted that the majority of the old editorial board from Krisis would start a new project, that was to become EXIT![27] They also stated that they wanted to keep developing theory that was free of "an ideology of the pro-western ¡hurrah!", as well as expressed an aim to "we want to offer to the rising social movements a useful critical-solidary reference, instead of the pattern of "left populist" and anti-Semitic thought".[27]
1 2 Marxism and the Critique of Value, Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, MCM' Publishing, 2014, p.xi,xii,xiv,xxv,xvl,xlvii,
Krisis is an anti-political German political magazine and discussion group formed in 1986 as a "theoretical forum for a radical critique of capitalist society." Its members includes Robert Kurz, Roswitha Scholz, Nobert Trenkle, Ernst Lohoff, Achim Bellgart and Franz Schandl.
Helmut Reichelt is a German Marxian critic of political economy, sociologist and philosopher. Reichelt is one of the main authors of the “Neue Marx-Lektüre” and considered to be one of the most important theorists in the field of Marx's theory of value.
Gruner + Jahr is a publishing house headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. The company was founded in 1965 by Richard Gruner, John Jahr, and Gerd Bucerius. From 1969 to 1973, Bertelsmann acquired a majority share in the company and gradually increased it over time. After 2014, the company was a fully owned subsidiary of the Gütersloh-based media and services group. Under the leadership and innovation strategy of Julia Jäkel, Gruner + Jahr evolved into a publishing house producing cross-channel media products for the digital society.
Hans G Helms was a German experimental writer, composer, and social and economic analyst and critic.
Neue Marx-Lektüre or NML is a revival and interpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, which originated during the mid-1960s in both Western and Eastern Europe and opposed both Marxist–Leninist and social democratic interpretations of Marx. Neue Marx-Lektüre covers a loose group of authors primarily from German-speaking countries who reject certain historicizing and empiricist interpretations of Marx's analysis of economic forms, many of which are argued to spring from Friedrich Engels role in the early Marxist workers' movement.
Arnold Hauser was a Hungarian-German art historian and sociologist who was perhaps the leading Marxist in the field. He wrote on the influence of change in social structures on art.
The Revolutionary Internationalist Organization (RIO) is a political group in Germany advocating for the dissemination of socialist and internationalist ideas. It is the publisher of the online newspaper Klasse Gegen Klasse and part of the international newspaper network La Izquierda Diario. The RIO aims to achieve societal changes toward a classless society and supports social movements internationally. Its ideology is based on Marxist, Trotksyist, and internationalist principles.
Gerhard Stapelfeldt is a German sociologist. He was a university teacher at University of Hamburg until December 2010.
Robert Kurz was a German philosopher, social critic, journalist and editor of the journal Exit! He was one of Germany's most prominent theorists of value criticism.
Post-Marxism is a perspective in critical social theory which radically reinterprets Marxism, countering its association with economism, historical determinism, anti-humanism, and class reductionism, whilst remaining committed to the construction of socialism. Most notably, Post-Marxists are anti-essentialist, rejecting the primacy of class struggle, and instead focus on building radical democracy. Post-Marxism can be considered a synthesis of post-structuralist frameworks and neo-Marxist analysis, in response to the decline of the New Left after the protests of 1968. In a more broader sense, post-Marxism can refer to Marxists or Marxian-adjacent theories which break with the old worker's movements and socialist states entirely, in a similar sense to post-Leftism, and accept that the era of mass revolution premised on the Fordist worker is potentially over.
Value criticism is a social theory which draws its foundation from the Marxian tradition and criticizes the contemporary mode of production. Value criticism was developed partly by critical readings of the traditions of the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Prominent adherents of value criticism include Robert Kurz, Moishe Postone and Jean-Marie Vincent.
Volker Stanzel is a retired German diplomat and the former ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to Japan and China as well as former Political Director. Since 2015 he works and publishes on political topics in Berlin, Germany.
State derivation has been understood since the 1970s as an attempt within Marxism and neo-Marxism to explain the emergence and extent of the state and its law within the bourgeois, modern economic system and therewith to derive the relationship between economics and politics from the structure of capitalist production.
Claus Friedrich Wisser was a German businessman and philanthropist, a patron of music and the arts. He was head of the service company Wisag which he founded, and was chairman of its supervisory board since 2011, and honorary chairman of that board from 2022.
Peter Václav Zima is a literary critic and a social scientist born in Prague 1946. He is of Czech-German origin and has dual nationality such as Austrian and Dutch. He is emeritus professor of the Alpen-Adria-Universität in Klagenfurt (Austria) where he held the chair of General and Comparative Literature from 1983 to 2012.
Claus Peter Ortlieb was a German mathematician (PhD), critic of work, critic of political economy, and a critic of contemporary science, especially regarding its use of mathematics. He was an editor for the journal EXIT!.
Michael Heinrich is a German historian of philosophy, political scientist, and mathematician, specialising in the critical study of the development of Marx's thought. Heinrich's work, influenced by Elmar Altvater and the Neue Marx-Lektüre of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt is characterised by its focus on the points of ambivalence and inconsistency in the work of Marx. Through this theme, Heinrich challenges both the closed system he identifies with "worldview Marxism", as well as teleological narratives of Marx's intellectual development throughout his life. He is best known for his 1991 study of the theoretical field of classical political economy The Science of Value, his introductory text to the critique of political economy An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital, and his ongoing project to produce a multi-volume biography of Marx, of which the first volume of a projected four was published in 2020.
Andrea Voßhoff is a German former lawyer who switched to full-time politics in mid-career (CDU). She served as a member of the Bundestag between 1998 and 2013 when, as a "party list" candidate, she narrowly failed to secure re-election in the Brandenburg-Potsam electoral district.
Tomasz Konicz is an author and journalist.
Roswitha Scholz, born in Germany in 1959, is a philosopher and a social theorist. She works as a editor for EXIT! journal, which she co-founded in 2004, after participating in the Krisis group and magazine.
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