Recently there has been much talk about the "hedge-funds", "private equity"-options and "shareholder value". Referring - and rigidly refusing - traditional theorists of financial capital, namely Lenin and Hilferding, Robert Kurz analyzes the new qualities of the financial capital as surface phenomenons of the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

The preface of the current publication "Das Weltkapital" indicates that a next volume with the working title "The political economy of the last world power" has been planned. In that volume Robert Kurz will discuss the hopes and laments of bourgeois theoreticians who see a looming "pacific century", that is the rise of China and India to real world powers, and in the case of China even to a new hegemon. Is that a realistic scenario? Or do these countries eventually have to succumb to the crisis steamroller of a globalized capitalism? Kurz answers this question with a foward look onto his new book project.

Interview with Robert Kurz - The crisis process of globalization provokes several reactions that follow crude patterns. In most cases they indulge in nostalgia for national states in their comfortable Fordist prosperity, or - complementary to that - they rave against the "locusts", often with an antisemitic subtext. A return to normal, that is back to the national state, and a respectable accumulation in a hegded zoo without the locusts is not possible any more. Robert Kurz explains why.

In "Das Weltkapital" the term globalization is strictly separated from that of the world system. In Kurz's new publication globalization appears as an ecompassing process of crisis induced by the micro-electronic revolution. For a detailed account see this second part of the interview.

A theoretical core element of the "value critique" ist the so-called "gender separation" that is co-constitutive for capitalism. Kurz explains what is meant by that and how this separation has negative effects on women in the crisis process of globalization in two ways.

Robert Kurz explains in his book taht capitalism as such is already designed as a world system. The author explains in this video-clip how this can be understood and how this fact can coexist with statehood as the other pole of capitalist socialization.