By charting these inescapable connections with war, Wertkritik runs against the grain of the classic bourgeois thought of the likes of Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith and Thomas Paine. In particular it challenges the idea that capitalist society emerged from, or is synonymous with, peaceful barter, entrepreneurial industriousness or a ‘Protestant ethic’. For Wertkritik, the idea that war, violence and the free market are incompatible, and that the extension of trade and commerce guarantee a world at peace, is an illusion generated by the fact that capitalism was initially associated with the confinement of violence and war as matters of state. But the latter’s guarantees of Liberty, Fraternity and Equality ultimately rest on what is only a temporary and partial suspension and sublimation of violence, carried over in the marketisation of violence and its regimentation in state hands.
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