In my thesis I aim at deducing crisis as a necessary consequence resulting from the dialectical value-form of modernity, manifesting in the tautological self-production of (i) labor and (ii) money.

Following accounts of value-form theory, the potential of the valorization of value – i.e. of realizing abstract value from concrete labor – continues to come to a halt after a critical threshold has been surpassed. My aim is to examine if linking the concept of the self-sublating value-form to a notion of modern ‘enlightenment’ as the “entrenchment of the spirit in matter” (Panajotis Kondylis) and the driving role of the concept of debt can help to understand the compulsory progressing abstraction from constitutive-yet-increasingly-irrelevant concrete labor as a consequence of the process of rationalization. To account for the dynamic of the value-form and its ‘progressive’ entrenchment of the abstract (~ value) within the concrete (~ labor) both are bracketed within Reinhart Koselleck’s hypothesis of accelerating history.

First, I will therefore deduct the historical trajectory of rationalization from Koselleck’s account of acceleration which itself epistemologically rests upon the form of rational logic and therefore is conceptually dependent on that which it entails. Secondly, I want to show how this framework of European rationalization brings with it the debt-driven dynamic of the “entrenchment of the spirit in matter” as the conceptual tradition of what in capitalism came to be the modern value-form. Following this course, I lastly aim to delineate two phenomena of crisis as necessary consequences of the dialectic of the value-form: The aporias of (i) the ‘autopoiesis of labor’ and (ii) the self-production of money. I thus want to demonstrate the increasing developments of physical fitness and financialization since the 1970s in capitalist centers to be the two sides of the coin of increasing irrationality: The divestment of (concrete) labor ultimately expresses itself as the application of labor power onto itself as the (relative) last ‘commodity’ left to produce and has the ghostly generation of valueless money as its backside.