James Schmidt

“Racket,” “Monopoly,” and the Dialectic of Enlightenment 

The Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) concluded with a brief discussion of the collection of “notes and sketches” that closed the book, explaining that—though they formed “part of the ideas” explored in the book—they had not “found a place in them.”2 The 1944 draft of the work, which had been circulated in hectograph under the title Philosophical Fragments among friends and associates of the Institute for Social Research, went on to specify a group of texts that had been excluded in the interest of maintaining a “unity of language.” The list included a variety of works that had been written in English during Horkheimer and Adorno’s California sojourn. The second item on the list was “On the Sociology of Class Relations” (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 254).

One of the consequences of the exclusion of “On the Sociology of Class Relations” was that the so-called “racket theory” of society became a ghost in the machinery of Dialectic of Enlightenment. It had played a role in the initial formulation of the book, but vanished by the time of its publication.  “On the Sociology of Class Relations”, a text that offered one of the more extended discussions of the role of “rackets” in modern society, was banished from the 1944 edition on linguistic grounds. The word “racket” itself was, in turn, eliminated from the version of the book that was published in 1947.  It shared that fate with a few other terms that, while used repeatedly in the 1944 hectograph, were replaced in the 1947 book by somewhat more circumspect formulations.3

Gunzelin Schmid Noerr maintains that these alterations were a consequence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s effort to bring the argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment into line with a revised understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalism.  He argues that, persuaded by a line of argument sketched by their colleague Friedrich Pollock, they concluded that “monopoly capitalism” had been replaced by the new social formation that Pollock dubbed “state capitalism.” In the wake of this shift, they found themselves forced to make adjustments in the text.4 Noerr concludes that “the racket theory held an ambiguous position” in this transformation.

On the one hand, the identification of fascist rule as an unmediated form of power and at the same time the legitimate heir of bourgeois monopoly capitalism prepared the way for a generalized racket theory of domination which went beyond the limited model of the criminal gang. On the other hand, however, such a theory was in danger—as Horkheimer himself was aware—of merely replacing an oversimplified economic concept (“monopoly”) by an oversimplified political one (“racket”). (Noerr, 240-241)

Horkheimer and Adorno found a solution to their theoretical quandry by eliminating both “monopoly” and “racket” from the text that appeared in 1947.

There are, however, a few problems with this account. First, it runs the risk of overstating the degree to which Horkheimer and Adorno accepted Pollock’s discussion of the transition to state capitalism. Second, by focusing on internal discussions within the Institute for Social Research, it overlooks both the role that discussions of rackets and racketeering had played in American legal theory and social thought during this same period and the Institute’s long-standing interest in these discussions. Finally, it fails to address the continued presence of the terms monopoly and (to a lesser extent) racket in one crucial part of the book.

The Reception of Pollock’s “State Capitalism”

Shortly before Horkheimer and Adorno began work in earnest on the manuscript that would eventually be published as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Friedrich Pollock—Horkheimer’s lifelong friend and the book’s dedicatee—published a pair of articles in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung arguing that a new social order had begun to emerge in Europe and America. These articles proposed that the transition from monopoly capitalism to what Pollock called “state capitalism” marked “the transition from a predominantly economic to an essentially political era” (Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 207). The first article sketched a “model” or “ideal type” of this new order.  It focused on the authoritarian form of state capitalism that he saw emerging in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but entertained the possibility that ways might be found to bring this new social formation “under democratic control” (Pollock, “State Capitalism,” 224). The second article applied this model to Nazi Germany and argued that while the National Socialist State might not be “a fully developed state capitalism or a total command economy,” it nevertheless “comes closer to these economic concepts than to those of laissez faire or of monopoly capitalism.” While Pollock was confident that “Germany will suffer military defeats and that the National Socialist system will disappear from the earth,” he stressed that there was no reason to suppose that “inherent economic forces…would prevent the functioning of the new order.”5

Drawing out the implications of Noerr’s account of the consequences of Pollock’s articles for Horkheimer and Adorno’s book, Willem van Reijen and Jan Bransen see the theory of “state capitalism” as having forced a rethinking of the presuppositions on which the critical theory of society rested:

in the mid-1940s Horkheimer and Adorno, in keeping with Pollock’s analyses, had distanced themselves definitively from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. Instead, the importance of control though politics and the culture industry moves clearly into the foreground.6

Van Reijen and Bransen argue that evidence of Horkheimer and Adorno’s agreement with Pollock’s argument can be found in revisions made prior to the publication of the 1947 version of the book.  These revisions include the replacement of such terms as “monopoly,” “capital,” and “profit”—terms that had “become charged with specific meanings thought the debate over state capitalism”—with “less charged expressions” (van Reijen and Bransen, 251).

It is, however, not clear that the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment were entirely persuaded by Pollock’s argument. Indeed, Adorno’s reaction Pollock’s initial article was overwhelmingly negative. He found its talk of “models” and “ideal types” too far removed from material reality (its style reminded him of Husserl, a comparison that, coming from Adorno, was no compliment) and warned that its publication would be a blow to the Institute’s reputation. Anticipating the reaction of Franz Neumann (who had emerged as the best-known figure in the New York branch of the Institute) and the economist Alfred Löwe (a major figure at the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research), he cautioned Horkheimer that it would “unleash a malicious cry of triumph from all the lions [Löwen], new men [Neumänner] et tutti quanti.”7

Adorno was unconvinced by Pollock’s vision of a society that, having transformed the crises that plagued earlier form of capitalism into “mere problems of administration,” could hold out “the promise of security and a more abundant life for every subject who submits voluntarily and completely.” Though he conceded that Pollock might be correct in his pessimistic assessment of the ubiquity of political domination throughout history, he rejected what he characterized as Pollock’s “optimistic” belief that the new order would be any more stable than the one it replaced. He saw such a conclusion as resting on the “undialectical assumption that in an antagonistic society a non-antagonistic economy would be possible.” What Pollock had produced struck him as an “inversion of Kafka”: “Kafka presented the hierarchy of bureaucrats as Hell. Here Hell transforms itself into a hierarchy of bureaucrats” (Horkheimer, Briefe, 54).

Adorno’s prediction that Pollock’s article would draw fire from Neumann proved correct. Two weeks later Neumann sent Horkheimer a blistering evaluation (much of which would later reappear in Behemoth, his 1942 study of the Nazi state) arguing that the article “contradicts from the first to the last page” the theory the Institute had been developing since its arrival in the United States and that it represented nothing less than “a farewell to Marxism” that “documents a complete hopelessness.”8 Horkheimer succeeded in placating Neumann and (presumably) Adorno by crafting a Preface to the volume of the Zeitschrift in which Pollock’s essay appeared (an issue that also included contributions from A. R. L. Gurland, Otto Kirchheimer, Horkheimer, and Adorno) that characterized the articles as offering different perspectives on “problems implied in the transition from liberalism to authoritarianism in continental Europe.” In summarizing what was at stake in this transition, Horkheimer emphasized the political implications of the replacement of independent entrepreneurs by monopolies, a development that he saw as leading to a triumph of ruling elites and “cliques” whose cynical shuffling of ideologies translated “into open action what modern political theory from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Pareto has professed.”9 In the course of this discussion, Horkheimer managed to avoid (even when discussing Pollock’s article) the use of the term “state capitalism” at all. Neumann was pleased enough by the result to send Horkheimer a letter that praised him for having rendered Pollock’s contribution “completely harmless” by offering a “reinterpretation” of the article that wound up undermining its central argument.10

In framing his introduction to the issue in this way, it is conceivable that Horkheimer was merely attempting to play down the differences that separated Pollock (and, perhaps, Horkheimer himself) from other members of the Institute. But it is worth noting that the Preface’s emphasis in on the role of “elites” and “cliques” was a faithful reflection of what Horkheimer himself seems to have regarded as the defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism. For the aspects of Pollock’s argument Horkheimer chose to emphasize were precisely the parts that meshed with the account of the transformation of the relationship between the individual and society that he had been elaborating ever since his 1936 article “Egoism and Freedom Movements.”11 He would take up this theme once again in “The End of Reason,” the lead article in what proved to be the journal’s final issue.12 Though published under Horkheimer’s name, it had been edited and revised by Adorno, and was, in effect, the first product of their California collaboration. The “racket theory” played a central role in it.

From Class Struggle to Gang Warfare

Near the close of “The End of Reason,” Horkheimer suggested that the so-called “gangster theory” of National Socialism merited more serious consideration than it had received from those who saw Hitler’s triumph as a momentary deviation from a norm that would be restored “as soon as the fester has been removed” (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 374) He argued that the relations that had defined competitive capitalism, far from constituting the normal state of affairs, might better be understood as an “interlude” in a history defined by the reign of “procurers, condottieri, manorial lords, and guilds” engaged simultaneously in the protection and exploitation of their clients (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 374). The transition to monopoly capitalism had brought with it a regime of “rackets” that, like previous forms of domination, provided a measure of protection, but only at the price of individual autonomy. For this reason, alleged “border phenomena” such as “racketeering” might, in fact, offer “useful parallels for understanding certain developmental tendencies in modern society” (Horkheimer, “End of Reason,” 375).

It was left to Adorno to work out the implications of Horkheimer’s conjecture and, sometime prior to the circulation of “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” he sent Horkheimer a series of “Reflections on Class Theory.” Adorno text appears to have served as a preliminary draft for Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” which was subsequently circulated to Franz Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer, and Herbert Marcuse for comment. While the two texts are similar in substance, their style—as might be expected—diverged markedly.

Adorno’s manuscript opened with what amounted to a striking revision of Marx’s famous formulation from the Communist Manifesto:

In the image of the latest economic phase, history is the history of monopolies. In the image of the manifest act of usurpation that is practiced nowadays by the leaders of capital and labor acting in consort, it is the history of gang wars and rackets.13

Pace Marx, far from functioning as the motor of history class struggles might better be understood as the creature of a particular economic order: the “interlude” of liberal capitalism. With its passing, the struggles between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat took on a markedly different form.

Horkheimer’s manuscript was considerably more guarded in its assessment of the implications of triumph of monopoly capitalism for Marxian theories of class struggle. It stressed that the “concept of racket” was intended “only to differentiate and concretize the idea of the ruling class” and “not meant at all to replace it.” Yet, the very next sentence—which suggested that the racket theory promised “to overcome the abstract notion of class as it played a role in older theory”—betrayed that something more was afoot than an exercise in differentiation and concretization.

Horkheimer went on to argue that the transition from “liberal” to “monopoly” forms of capitalism forced the working class to find ways of “adapting itself to the monopolistic structure of society.” In this process, the “more or less spontaneous and radically democratic” struggles that had defined the labor movement of the nineteenth-century were replaced by struggles between “pragmatic totalities” in which the working class—abandoning its “fight against exploitation as such”—sought to find ways of integrating itself into a society populated by “wholly integrated and despotic totalities.”

Labor in monopolistic society is itself a kind of monopoly. Its leaders control labor supplies as the Presidents of Big Corporations control raw materials, machines, or other elements of production. Labor leaders trade at this kind of merchandise, manipulate it, praise it, try to fix its price as high as possible. Labor, becoming a trade among others, completes the process of the reification of the human mind.

Direct struggles between labor and capital had now been supplanted by a process of mimetic adaptation in which labor sought to beat capital at its own game.  As support for the claim that labor unions mimicked large corporations in both their organizational structure and in their quest to prevent government regulatory agencies from “mingling in their affairs,” Horkheimer offered an oblique reference to the testimony of Samuel Gompers before the Lockwood Committee (i.e., the 1922 New York hearings on union activities in the building trades).

Horkheimer and his colleagues had a long-standing interest in both the history of the American labor movement and in the implications of New Deal legislation. Earlier discussions of Gompers in the Institute’s journal had noted the “dictatorial” control he exercised over the American Federation of Labor.  His testimony before the Lockwood hearings had been presented as evidence that Gompers, like the heads of corporations, was committed to resisting public scrutiny of or interference in his activities.14 For Horkheimer, then, the chief difference between labor leaders and corporate heads was that the leaders of “the big capitalist trusts” were more adept at these tactics than labor leaders like Gompers.  They were capable of exercising a degree of control over public opinion that enabled them to shield their activities from public discussion.

Labor’s weakness in this struggle was reflected in the history of the terms “racket” and “racketeering” themselves. The marked upsurge in the use of both terms in the early 1920s was driven, at least in part, by the efforts of pro-business publicists such as Gordon Hostetter, the long-time head of the Chicago Employers’ Association, a staunch opponent of efforts at union organizing (among the resources his organization provided to its clients was a cadre of strike breakers), and a tireless author of anti-union polemics (among them, his 1929 book It’s a Racket). As a result of his efforts, “racket,” “racketeer,” and “racketeering”—terms that had previously been associated with the activities of Chicago criminal gangs—came to be associated with the activities of union officials. The usage of these terms peaked around 1940, at which point supporters of New Deal legislation aimed at institutionalizing collective bargaining sought to limit the scope of the concept to overt criminal activity.15

When viewed within this context, Horkheimer’s rhetorical strategy becomes somewhat clearer. While Hostetter and others sought to equate labor leaders with gangsters, Horkheimer attempted to extend the scope of the concept still further by maintaining that within the structure of monopoly capitalism, all social relationships had begun to take on an uncanny resemblance to protection rackets. In an August 1942 letter to Paul Tillich, written in response to Tillich’s criticism of the “dictatorial” style of “The End of Reason,” Horkheimer explained that his choice of “linguistic method” was “not made frivolously.” He went on to quote a text he had written during the previous year.

The style of theory is becoming simpler, yet only insofar as it thereby denounces the simplicity that, on the basis of the style, the theory consciously becomes the reflection of the barbaric process. The style approximates rackets with the force of hatred and thereby becomes its opposite. Its logic becomes as arbitrary as their justice, as clumsy as their lies, as lacking in conscience as their agents—and in this opposition to barbarism becomes specific, exact, and scrupulous. The indiscriminate designation of monopolistic society as the embodiment of rackets is infinitely differentiated, since it summarily denounces undifferentiated brutality against powerlessness.16

The closing pages of “On the Sociology of Class Relations” more than matched the already extravagant use of “racket” to which Tillich had objected by projecting the concept backwards into human prehistory. Broaching certain of the concerns of the opening chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer argued that the concept promised to shed additional light on “such remote and controversial problems as the initial rites and rackets of magicians in primitive tribes” and also might clarify the workings of the “terroristic Rackets in the 16th and 17th century Europe which tortured, murdered, robbed hundreds of thousands of unfortunates and wiped out the female population of whole provinces for their alleged intercourse with Satan.”17 The ubiquity of rackets throughout history also provided Horkheimer with a hint of the form that an emancipated society would have to take: it would be “a racketless society.”

Horkheimer’s dedication to the concept was such that, as late the autumn of 1942, he still hoped that first issue of the Institute’s projected “yearbook” (a publication intended to fill the void left with the demise of the Zeitschrift) would explore the concept further. But, plans for the yearbook were eventually abandoned, leading Rolf Wiggershaus to conclude that the “racket theory” remained “an unfinished torso.”

The most important ideas were incorporated into the Dialectic of Enlightenment, without Neumann or Kirchheimer or others having collaborated closely to check the extremely drastic, far-reaching assumptions involved against concrete economic, political and legal material.18

But it is unlikely that Kirchheimer would have been inclined to dampen Horkheimer’s enthusiasm for the term. In an article intended for the yearbook, but eventually published separately, he argued that the more limited legal usage of the term served merely “as a convenient tool for bringing the guilty to account and depriving them of the sympathies of the community at large.” For Kirchheimer, as for Horkheimer, it was the term’s polemical edge that made it worth preserving.

If somebody asks another, “What is your racket?,” he may intend merely to inquire about the other’s professional status, but the very form of the question refers to a societal configuration which constitutes the proper basis for any individual answer. It expresses the idea that within the organizational framework of our society attainment of a given position is out of proportion to abilities and efforts which have gone into that endeavor. It infers that a person’s status in society is conditional upon the presence or absence of a combination of luck, chance, and good connections, a combination systematically exploited and fortified with all available expedients inherent in the notion of private property.19

For Kirchheimer, as for Horkheimer, the one shortcoming of the concept was that it failed to consider the prospect of what would have to be done to create a society without rackets.

Monopoly, Rackets, and the Culture Industry

There is, however, one place in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the concept of racket continued to play a somewhat more circumscribed role and was grounded (albeit not always explicitly) in what would soon become an important set of legal arguments:  the chapter on the culture industry. It may also be significant that this is the one place in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the term “monopoly,” while deleted elsewhere, emerged from the editing process remarkably unscathed.

Though Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of the culture industry is sometimes regarded as evidence of its authors’ “mandarian” contempt for “popular culture,” its portrait of Hollywood as a world dominated by rackets, patronage relations, and grotesque forms of self-assertion on the part of those who controlled (however fleetingly) the commanding heights was hardly unique. Much the same picture can be found in the memoirs of those émigrés who found refuge in Hollywood, accounts that Horkheimer and Adorno would likely have heard at first hand.20 It bears remembering that Horkheimer was friends with William (née Wilhelm) Dieterle, the Weimar actor and director who managed to establish himself as one of Warner Brothers’ more reliable directors. Horkheimer’s correspondence suggests that he spent a fair amount of time at Dieterle’s house and he seems to have thought well enough of his to solicit an article from him on the impact of the war in Europe on the American film industry for the Zeitschrift and to enlist him as a member of the Institute’s Advisory Committee.21

The link between “On the Sociology of Class Relations” and the chapter on the culture industry is nowhere clearer than in a passage that took up an argument that Horkheimer had made in his 1941 article “Art and Mass Culture”:

in contrast to genuine art, which once confronted reality with truth, … all ingenious devices of the amusement industry serve nothing else but to reproduce over and over and without betraying the slightest revolt the scenes of life which are dull and automatized already when they happen in reality.22

Adorno had made the same point even more emphatically in his “Reflections on Class Theory” when he observed,

Under the monopoly system the process of dehumanization is perfected on the backs of the civilized as an all-encompassing reification, not as naked coercion; indeed, this dehumanization is what civilization is.… Thus domination becomes an integral part of human beings. They do not need to be “influenced,” as liberals with their ideas of the market are wont to imagine. Mass culture simply makes them again what they are thanks to the coercion of the system (Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory,” 99-100, 109).

On the basis of such formulations, van Reijen and Bransen conclude that “in keeping with Pollock’s analysis,” Horkheimer and Adorno “distanced themselves definitively from a form of Marxism which assumed the primacy of economics. … the importance of control through politics and the culture industry moves clearly into the foreground” (van Reijen and Bransen, 252).

But, paradoxically, it is precisely in the chapter devoted to the culture industry that the term “monopoly”—allegedly eliminated from the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment as a way of bringing the book into line with Pollock’s account of state capitalism—was not deleted. Monopol and its various derivatives appear ten times in the 1947 version of  Dialectic of Enlightenment; six of the ten occur in the chapter on the culture industry.23 The idea that the Hollywood film industry was engaged in monopolistic practices was, however, hardly radical. It had been the central claim in the extended legal battle that would culminate (a year after the book’s publication) in United States v. Paramount Pictures Inc., the Supreme Court decision mandating that studios divest themselves of their theater chains and cease other monopolistic arrangements. In this light, it is likely that the revisions of Dialectic of Enlightenment had far more to do with Horkheimer’s habitual concern during his American exile to avoid calling too much attention to the radical implications of the Institute’s work than it did with his alleged embrace of Pollock’s account of state capitalism.

While the culture industry disseminated a “culture” (and, in doing so, bound the oppressed ever closer to their oppressors), it bears remembering that it was very much an industry. As such, it was the site of struggles between labor and management in which the leaders of the former—according to the racket theory—would find itself forced to imitate many of the features of the latter.

Horkheimer was well aware that, in struggles such as these, labor operated under significant disadvantages. Indeed, in “On the Sociology of Class Relations” he speculated that

It is possible that once the strongest capitalist groups … have gained direct control of the state, the actual labor bureaucracy will be abolished as well as the governmental one, and replaced by more dependable commissioners for both groups.

Since the early 1980s, the ascent of “more dependable commissioners” to positions of power has proceeded along lines that would not have surprised the author of “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” bringing with it growing inequalities in wealth and political influence.

One convenient marker for the acceleration of efforts to replace the “labor bureaucracy” with less troublesome commissioners was the 1981 strike of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, which culminated in the firing of the striking workers and the dissolution of their union.  It would probably not have surprised Horkheimer that the chief executive officer who presided over the breaking of that strike had entered public life as the leader of one of the more important unions within the culture industry.  A few months before the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Ronald Wilson Reagan was elected President of the Screen Actors guild.  During his subsequent career in Hollywood and in Washington he proved a “dependable commissioner.”

John Lysaker

What’s that Racket? “Class” in an Age of Systematic Opportunism

The test of a critical social-theory is its ability to illuminate how social life reproduces itself—in what forms and, given the dynamism of the object, according to what principles or logic. For example, one might argue that the flow of capital underwrites (i.e. is a principal variable in) the emergence, transformation, and disappearance of social phenomena, from voting districts to inflated lips and bushy beards, each a modality of the commodity form. The theory proves “critical” if it can determinately articulate its own (and all theoretical activity’s) relation to those selfsame forms and processes, albeit without losing their active character, that is, their rationally mediated purposiveness. In this sense, the theoretical ventures of critical social theory involve practical reason striving to articulate a world enroute to its—the world and practical reason’s—transformation.

For Horkheimer, critical theory requires this dialectical conception of social phenomena. Social facts must be translated into social action, alienated as the latter may be.24 Without this twofold character (which dramatizes what its object has more or less lost), social theory reverts to positivism, forecloses any methodological self-understanding, and abandons the future to the very fate it set out to diagnose. With it, terms like class, commodity, and capital reflect a critical self-consciousness that interjects itself into what had been, until then, unconscious, quasi-mechanistic occurrences. One must avoid, however, casting these interjections within a bourgeois form, namely, that of self-consciousness confronting data, and irrespective of whether self-consciousness bears the name “Horkheimer,” “The Institute for Social Research,” or “The Party.” If the objectivities of social life remain unmediated objectivities for those who undergo them, reason has not interjected itself into the world. Said otherwise, if social acts remain mere data for inquiry rather than the work of social agents being addressed by inquirers who are fellow social actors, critical theory regresses into bourgeois explanatory science. Said in yet another way, the theoretical analysis of social life is something other than oil applied to the engine of revolt, as if social change were a mechanical process. Instead, critical theory purports to interject intersubjectively operative reason into insufficiently realized sites of social action. For critical theory to succeed, its object therefore must become as critical as its self-conception. Otherwise the critical orientation of the theorist, inseparable from his or her theoretical performance, reduces to a utopian longing even as it reifies its own bourgeois character, as if “critical insights” were not themselves underwritten by nested and capitally invested social relations.

I have hastily sketched the basic Gestalt of critical social theory because it contextualizes Horkheimer’s approach to the phenomenon of class. “Classes” not only purport to name the overlapping locations and fates of populations within the mode of production, but, particularly in the case of the working class, the ultimate addressee of whatever diagnostic and reconstructive power such concepts might engender. In other words, a class names both an object and a subject of history.25 But should the latter dimension splinter or be eclipsed by the former, one will have to generate new concepts to explain how population groups at varying socio-economic locations emerge, operate, and dissipate, and one will have to rethink how one presents such concepts and links them to social action. If one does not, one’s theoretical work will mystify the social scene one aims to interrupt and reconstruct. On a conceptual and performative level, one’s analysis will presume an addressee who neither exists nor can be massaged into existence by the dialogical energies of one’s address.

Horkheimer’s text of 1943 is mired in precisely this problematic. On the side of its social subjectivity, the workers (whose macro form he terms “labor”), have become a “mere accessory to the apparatus of production…defined exclusively by its standardized material interests.…It has assumed a form which fits into the monopolistic set-up, and consequently its relations to the different capitalistic groups are no longer so radically different from those prevailing among the latter.” (¶8) This is not to say that, to a person, narrow, short-term material interests, i.e. a piece of the pie, have fully colonized self-consciousness. Counter interests and insight are operative, but they do not find expression in a social-subject, which is the phenomenon that “class” purports to name.

It is still irrationality which shapes the fate of humans. This does not mean that reason is not put forth by any individuals or groups at all. There are more people who have real insight in the economic situation and the potentialities than in any period. But their chances, which seem to have improved by the progress of methods of production and planning, by the perspicacity of all social matters and the decomposition of all kinds of superstitions have deteriorated … (¶23)

One would expect “labor” to name precisely the social subject striving to realize in coordinated social action these insights and potentialities. But Horkheimer finds something else, and he reads “labor” (presumably unions and their political correlates) like Marx reads Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Instead of a flowing, general will, one finds a troubling form. The “elements of labor, primarily the mass of ordinary members, are not the forces which, by their own ideas and spontaneity, determine the course of the whole; they are not, to use a mathematical term, the constant value with regard to the whole as the fluctuating one.” (¶9)

It is important to note that Horkheimer’s worries concerns labor’s form as well as its interests. In the negotiations of big labor, executives call the shots on either side of the bargaining table, suggesting that both groups are structured in an analogous fashion, one drawn from the hierarchies of monopoly capital. Moreover, considered internally, labor names occasionally aligned (and unaligned) clusters of social agencies that seek relative advances defined primarily in terms of compensation packages, which marks a striking shift away from traditional working class goals, which, according to Horkheimer, were “…decidedly not concerned with the increase of its members’ income, nor the income or career or social position of its leaders.” (¶12) Not only does this shift indicate the colonization of worker interest by the commodity form, it also splinters a subject that, nationally and internationally, had once, at least aspirationally, “…represented the oppressed masses as such.” (¶11) In sum, given labor’s vertical structure and horizontally unorganized, even competitive character: “The antagonism between the classes is reproduced within the structure of labor and especially within the labor unions themselves and it is perhaps better veiled there than it ever was in society as a whole.” (¶21)26

Although Horkheimer believes that labor has taken on the prevailing forms of monopoly capitalism, thus splintering the social subjectivity of laborers (as well as the future of humanity), the objectivity of social labor remains bound to exploitation – workers continue to produce social wealth that, as it increases, correlates proportionately with the diminishment of their social power. (¶15) How then should one analyze this complex social fate? Exploited and bound to predictable fates at an aggregate level, workers form an objective class. But the social subject undergoing that fate has splintered and thus one has to wonder whether a class, to whom the analysis of objective trends is addressed, exists.

“Racket” is a possible response to this situation. It “refers to the big as well as to the small units, they all struggle for as great a share as possible of the surplus value. In this respect the highest capitalistic bodies resemble the little pressure groups working within or without the pale of law among the most miserable strata of the population.” (¶24) Got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. But not only in first-order connivances. Recalling 16^th and 17^th century witch hunts, and the counter-reformation more generally, Horkheimer finds rackets operative wherever corporate interests translate cultural life into commodified goods on the one hand while banishing counter-discourses and practices on the other. But if this is correct, then at least one class seems to have maintained its twofold character: the ruling class. And Horkheimer says as much. “The concept of the racket serves only to differentiate and concretize the idea of the ruling class, it is not meant at all to replace it.” (¶24) The spread of rackets, therefore, is but the spread of ruling class ideology into the very heart of what initially sought to cast it down.

Was this true? If so, does it remain true? Or was it not true but has become so? Answering these questions requires a long, sustained analysis integrating, among other things, a complex labor history. I have thus focused upon the formal structures of the analysis in order to clarify what is at issue: a splintering working a class threatening to disappear into the formal structures of monopoly capital subjectivity, exceptions to the rule offgassing in niche markets that succeed one another in a bad infinity. I hasten to add, however, that Horkheimer’s worries are more or less classic. One can almost hear the charge of “petty bourgeois opportunism” in his analysis, which Lenin levied against several rivals in the 1890’s. (See, for example, “What the Friends of the People Are.”) And given U.S. labor’s increasing reliance upon electoral politics to pursue (and protect) its interests, I would not have been surprised to find something like the following in Horkheimer’s text. “They not only plead with the government, they not only eulogize it, they positively pray to it.” (Lenin, CW 1, 262) But the heart of the matter is not merely acquiescence before an extant social order, which workers must wrest from ruling interests. The heart of the matter remains the narrow aims that lead to alliances with the state and an abandonment of a national, let alone an international worker’s movement. True social democracy, Lenin argues in 1899, will “…support every revolutionary movement against the existing system, champion the interests of every oppressed nationality or race, of every persecuted religion, of the disenfranchised sex, etc.” (Lenin, CW 4, 177)

But in 1943, Horkheimer no longer believes that revolutionary movements of any appreciable scale exist. Opportunism has become systemic, with competition of all against all defining the state of second nature. And he does not believe that a critical social theory can undo the damage. “Each sentence,” he writes, “which is not equivalent to an operation in that apparatus appears to the layman as meaningless.” (¶18) To use the language of a contemporary racket, unless an analysis can demonstrate the economic value that it adds, it is immediately suspect and subject to scorn on the lips of radio demagogues, “representatives,” and even industry wonks who will assail it as bad prose, folk psychology, utopian naiveté, etc. Surveying the state of collective subjectivity, Horkheimer claims: “Under the pressure of the pragmatic totalities of today, the self-expression of men has become identical with their functions in the prevailing system.” (¶18)

Lenin is not riddled by Horkheimer’s fear, which only avoids hopelessness through the fact of its annunciation. “Apropos of the Profession de Foi,” written at the end of 1899, states:

It is the task of Social-Democracy to develop the political consciousness of the masses and not to drag along at the tail-end of the masses that have no political rights; secondly, and this is most important, it is untrue that the masses will not understand the idea of political struggle. Even the most backward worker will understand the idea, provided, of course, the agitator or propagandist is able to approach him in such a way as to communicate the idea to him, to explain it in understandable language on the basis of facts the worker knows from everyday experience. (Lenin, CW 4, 291)

But what explains this difference? Whether the worker will understand the agitator is in large measure a social fact, as is what a given worker “knows from everyday experience.” And no critical theorist can understand let alone account for his or her praxis without some real feel for what the facts of the matter are. The force of Horkheimer’s text lies in the question it presses. Is there a genuine working class, or can one only ascertain the ongoing objectification of human labor? If the latter, does the pattern of a racket, what is really an alliance across strata of socio-economic status, help explain why opportunism has become the rule, why each social sector strategically seeks a greater share of globally generated surplus value? Even if Horkheimer’s analysis of U.S. labor politics is speculative, I can’t help but feel the force of such questions when I witness the alliances that congeal in each electoral cycle. Concerning Lenin’s Foi, and that is all it is for the present, what collective articulation might a re-emerging critical consciousness find, and where it mumbles or mutes, what forces are to blame? “There are more people who have real insight in the economic situation and the potentialities than in any period,” Horkehimer writes, and yet, “their chances…have deteriorated.” This deterioration requires ongoing analysis, and it precludes any simple return to a time when men were men and the women too wore red. Unless the reason for such alliances can function as a reason, the subjective will never find a foothold in the object, and any seismic change will again take recourse to cultural revolutions.

The questions that Horkheimer forces open do not only concern objects, however. They also recoil upon the practice of theory itself. If the working class has splintered qua class, what currently organizes the production and circulation of critical social theory, and how ought one to engage them? And again, initial answers will have to take the form of social facts that one then aims to interrupt, even if one does not share Horkheimer’s sense that everyone is subject to “conscious molding in a giant system of socio-psychological surgery.” (¶23) What public awaits, considers, and engages public intellectuals? As Universities strive to develop their brands, the current push to share research seems racketish, particularly given the compatible desire to turn research universities into R&D divisions of existing and bourgeoning markets. “Isn’t it all about a transfer of academic goods and services?” Another hope lies with the “organic intellectual,” but “organic” seems a telltale sign that the phenomenon is utopian, just as “sublimation” marks an opaque, speculative moment in The German Ideology. No doubt other models are available, from Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism to Foucault’s non-juridical intellectual labor. But it may be that something more basic is required, something closer to organizing the ‘we’ that any critical social theory must presuppose.

In driving the concept of “class” to something of a breaking point, Horkheimer reopens pertinent questions regarding the subject and object of critical social theory. No one but a metaphysician would seek more from a text written over seventy years ago. But questions require responses. The test of a critical social-theory is its ability to illuminate, transformatively, how social life reproduces. At present, the route toward transformation has been lost, if it ever existed, and the resulting disorientation can give one the sense that the task of illumination was itself mistaken, perhaps even to blame. But such a sense formally reassumes the task. Geist is liberal, even when it says that it no longer is.

Chris Cutrone

Without a Socialist Party, There is No Class Struggle, Only Rackets

Horkheimer’s remarkable essay is continuous with Adorno’s contemporaneous “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942) as well as his own “The Authoritarian State” (1940/42), which similarly mark the transformation of Marx and Engels’s famous injunction in the Communist Manifesto that “history is the history of class struggles.” All of these writings were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940), which registered history’s fundamental crisis. Instead, for Horkheimer and Adorno in the 1940s, history has become the history of “rackets.” As Horkheimer concludes his draft, parenthetically citing Marx on Hegelian methodology, “the anatomy of man is key to that of the ape”: the past is explicable from the present, in the form of clique power-politics. But this change is for Horkheimer a devolution—regression. It stemmed from the failure of proletarian socialist revolutionary politics after 1917-19. Without Marxism, there was no class struggle.

The significance of this change is the relation of the individual to the collective in capitalism. This affects the character of consciousness, and thus the role of theory: the critical theory of the capitalist totality—Marxism—is fundamentally altered. Specifically, the role of working-class political parties in developing this consciousness is evacuated. At stake is what Horkheimer later (in his 1956 conversation with Adorno translated as Towards a New Manifesto [2011]) called, simply, the “memory of socialism.” It disappears. This was Horkheimer’s primary concern, why he points out that the socialist party was not focused on fighting against exploitation, and was indeed indifferent to it. This is because exploitation does not distinguish capitalism from other epochs of history; only the potential possibility for socialism does. That is why, without socialist politics, the pre-capitalist past reasserts itself, in the form of rackets.

At the conclusion of “The Authoritarian State,” Horkheimer wrote that, “with the return to the old free enterprise system, the entire horror would start again from the beginning under new management.” Regarding the specific topic stated in the title of this essay in particular, we should note Horkheimer’s unequivocal observation in “The authoritarian state” that,

Sociological and psychological concepts are too superficial to express what has happened to revolutionaries in the last few decades: their will toward freedom has been damaged, without which neither understanding nor solidarity nor a correct relation between leader and group is conceivable.

If there was a “sociology of class relations” to be had, then it would be, as usual for the Frankfurt School, a “negative” and not positive phenomenon. The issue was how to grasp the significance of the original proletarian socialist revolutionary “will toward freedom” degenerating into a matter of mere “sociology” at all. We need to pay attention to the problem indicated by the “On…” in the title of Horkheimer’s essay. “Class” in Marx’s sense was not amenable to sociology; but “rackets” are. Sociology is about groups; but the proletariat for Marx was not a sociological group but rather a negative condition of society. The proletariat in capitalism was for Marx a negative phenomenon indicating the need for socialism. The political task of meeting that necessity was what Marx called “proletarian socialism.”

Horkheimer was in keeping with Marx on this score. As the former SYRIZA Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis pointed out in a recent interview (October 23, 2015), Marx was not concerned with “equality” or “justice,” but “liberty”—freedom. Moreover, as Varoufakis correctly observes, for Marx, capitalism is a condition of unfreedom for the capitalists and not only for the workers.

As Marx wrote, at least as early as The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), the capitalist class is constituted as such, as a class, only in response to the demands of the workers. It treats the demands of the workers as impossible under capitalism, as a more or less criminal violation of society. It is only in meeting the political challenge of a unified capitalist class that the working class constitutes itself as a class “in itself,” not only subjectively but also objectively. For Marx, the historical turning point in this development was Chartism in England, which inaugurates the “class struggle” of the working class per se.

Only in fulfilling the task of proletarian socialism, transcending not only the workers’ (competing, racket) economic interests in capitalism but also democracy in bourgeois society, that is, coming up against the limits of liberalism, does the proletariat become a class “for itself”—on the way to “abolishing itself” in overcoming the negative condition of society in capitalism: its politics is not about one group replacing another. But Chartism in the UK, like the revolutions of 1848-49 on the Continent, failed. For Marx, this is the need for “revolution in permanence” (1850) indicated by the failure of the democratic revolution and of the “social republic” in 1848. This is why Adorno characterized the critical concept of “society” itself, negatively, as originating “around 1848.” The Chartists’ last act was to translate Marx and Engels’s Manifesto.

So what, for Marx, was missing in 1848? This is key to what is missing for Horkheimer a hundred years later: an adequate political party for proletarian socialism; the means for making capitalism a political issue.

The role of the political party, specifically as non-identical with the workers’ consciousness, both individually and collectively, was to actually preserve the individuality of the workers—as well as of intellectuals!—that is otherwise liquidated in the corporate collectives of capitalist firms, labor unions  and nation-states. These rackets have replaced the world party of proletarian socialist revolution, which was itself a dialectical expression of the totality of market relations and of the otherwise chaotic disorder of the concrete conditions of the workers. For Horkheimer, workers related to the political party individually, and only as such constituted themselves as part of a class—in revolutionary political struggle to overcome capitalism through socialism. It was not that Lenin’s party caused the liquidation of the individual, but the later travesty of “Leninism” in Stalinism was the effect of a broader and deeper socially regressive history of capitalism—what Marx called “Bonapartism” in the 19th century—that the 20th century authoritarian state and its concomitant “sociological” problem of political “atomization” expressed.27

Liquidating the political party paves the way for conformism: individuality in society instead becomes individualism, whether of persons or corporate bodies. As Margaret Thatcher succinctly put it, “There is no such thing as society.” Not only as wish but in fact. By contrast, the party was the negative political discipline adequate to the societal crisis of liberal capitalism in self-contradiction. But for Horkheimer, now, instead positivity rules in an overt authoritarian manner that capitalism eludes. Avoidance of the party means avoiding capitalism—which suits the power of the rackets as such.

The problem of society’s domination by anonymous social forces was revealed by the struggle against exploitation, which demonstrated the limits of the power of the capitalists and hence the problem of and need to transform “society” as such. The “social question” dawned in the political crisis of 1848: the limits of the democratic republic. This becomes replaced by overt power relations that are mystified, by appearing to know no limits. For Horkheimer, following Lenin, the party’s struggle for socialism picked up where the struggle against exploitation reached its limits; without the party there is no struggle for socialism: no pointing beyond but only accommodating capitalism as nature—or at least as a condition seemingly permanent to society.

This is why Horkheimer likens the ideology of organized “racket” capitalism in the 20th century to traditional civilization, by contrast with the liberal capitalism of the 19th century mediated by markets. Indeed, the problem with the rackets is that they falsify precisely the universalism of ideology, which in liberalism could be turned into a negative critique, an index of falsity. Universality is no longer claimed, so the universal condition of domination by capital is rendered occult and illegible. As Adorno put it, “The whole is the false.” Only by confronting the negative totality of capitalism politically was class struggle possible. The power-struggles of rackets do not point beyond themselves. There is no history.

Nicholas Brown

Everybody Needs a Union

The core claim of Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations” is that organized labor “is itself a kind of monopoly,” one more exclusionary racket among the rest. It is hard not to be dismissive of the essay as a whole, which rhetorically prefigures right-wing attacks on labor from at least the 1980s to current public-sector pension-gutting schemes, and which theoretically prefigures radical liberalisms that prioritize the ethical or symbolic problem of exclusion over the structural or economic one of exploitation—all of which suggests that, at a level visible to neither party (the level at which history has its ruses) the two positions are in cahoots. But it is worth keeping in mind, at least provisionally, that any position that rejects the problem of exclusion—even in the name of extending the problem of exploitation to include the excluded—will appear, from the standpoint of exclusion, to be a version of the problem itself. Rather than dismissing Horkheimer’s essay then, we should take it as a goad to think exclusion and exploitation together: not to imagine there can be a compromise between an ethical-symbolic and a structural-economic analysis, nor to throw them together into a magic bag called “intersection,” but rather to ask if there is a standpoint from which exclusion and exploitation look the same.

This is the point of Marx’s category of the “industrial reserve army, which belongs to capital just as absolutely as if it had been battery-raised at capital’s own expense.” (K 661, C 784).28 I would not be the first to suggest in the pages of nonsite that the proletariat in Marx is not opposed to the “precariat” but rather identical with it: the tendency of industry to save labor directly implies that employment, underemployment, irregular employment, and unemployment are not separable phenomena but moments of the same process. “The overwork of the employed part of the working class swells the ranks of its reserve; conversely, the increased competitive pressure that the reserve thereby exerts on the employed workers forces them into overwork and submission to the dictates of capital” (K 665, C 789). In short, “the relative surplus population is the background against which the law of the supply and demand of labor does its work” (K 668, C 792) — a statement with which mainstream economics, in different terms and with a different spin, does not disagree. This is why Marx conceives of unionization as “systematic cooperation between the employed and the unemployed” (K 669, C 793). Unionization, on Marx’s account, seeks to relieve the mutual pressure of the unemployed and the employed upon each other by countering the “‘sacred’ law of supply and demand” (K 670, C 793) defended “by capital and its sycophant, political economy” (K 669, C 793). From the standpoint of labor, employed or not, the choice between labor “monopolization” and direct exposure to the labor market is pretty clear. From the standpoint of the economy as a whole, moreover, unionization is redistributive rather than accumulationist, and therefore not at all symmetrical with industrial monopolization.

In Marx’s argument, employment and unemployment are not just logical moments of a single process, but temporal moments as well: as we saw above, the life story of an individual worker will include both moments, not in a narrativizable progression from one to the other, but in a form whose logic is, from an individual perspective, chaotic and unpredictable: “The relative surplus population exists in all possible shades, and every worker belongs to it during the time when he or she is partially employed or wholly unemployed” (K 670, C 794). This much in Marx’s account merits revisiting. For while the logical moments have not become dissociated except in appearance, the temporal moments have become spatialized, which is a fancy way of saying that labor turnover has dramatically decreased since Marx’s time. More precisely, over the twentieth century the relative size of the de-casualized portion of the labor force increased dramatically in relation to the casualized portion—a trend which is both clear and uneven, and which is reinforced but not singlehandedly caused by the gains won by the labor movement in the middle third of the century. As we can currently witness in the direct and collateral effects of unionization on previously casualized service-industry labor in the U.S., decasualization of even a segment of a single sector is a small victory for humanity. At the same time, the relative stabilization of the employed part of the working class implies the relative stabilization of the unemployed part as well, and this spatialization of unemployment both gives rise to the plausibility of a concept like the precariat and supports the identitaian fissuring of the working class.

The effects of this spatialization are starkly thematized in the second season of The Wire, which divides its narrative energy between the excluded—mostly poor, mostly black, mostly low-level participants in the drug distribution racket—and would-be labor monopolists—a struggling union, a local of the fictional International Brotherhood of Stevedores.29 Now if The Wire is a murder mystery, there must be a death and responsibility must be assigned by the end. There are plenty of bodies—a spectacular discovery of a shipping container containing thirteen asphyxiated young women gets the plot moving—but as in Borges’s Death and the Compass, the death that motivates the story turns out to be the one that comes at the end, and the deceased has a hand in his own death. The mystery of The Wire is “What happened to the unions?” The answer, as will have escaped no viewer’s attention, revolves around the question of unemployment. At the most obvious level, there is not enough work to go around on the docks: because work is assigned by seniority—a first exclusion—the younger dockworkers are severely underemployed. This is the problem that gets the real plot moving, and it becomes clear that the culprit is just capitalism: to stay competitive, the docks have to further automate their operations. As with the great historical novels from Walter Scott to Chinua Achebe, the attempt to fight this logic with means inadequate to it ends up bringing about the end that had been resisted.

But of course “not enough work to go around” is true not just on the docks but in also Baltimore, in the post-industrial city. The logic of the second exclusion is identitarian; that is, in its everyday application racist. But there is nothing necessarily racist in its logic, which has nothing necessarily to do with color or culture and everything to do with the production of value. The Wire dramatizes this distinction in two ways. The first is the fact that power in the union is amicably shared between Black and Polish leadership. (That power is shared between two ethnic categories suggests an internecine identitarian struggle in the past, but by the show’s present this struggle has become a serious but collegial disagreement between two strategic agendas, a disagreement that is climactically trumped by loyalty to the union). The second is that when a confrontation does take place between a worker and (what he perceives as) a non-working drug dealer, the drug dealer is white.

But if the confrontation between Nick, a young underemployed dockworker, and Frog, a street-level dealer, does not take the form of a racial confrontation, it nonetheless takes place on the plane of the play of identities, as Nick’s diatribe produces two kinds of whiteness: “hang on the corner don’t give a fuck white” versus “Locust Point IBS Local 47 white”: lumpens versus working class. Nick, who understands himself to be within the circuit of capital valorization—“I don’t work without no fuckin’ contract”—understands Frog to stand outside it. (His epithet for Frog is “whigger,” which reminds us that if there is nothing necessarily racial about his logic, it is, as an identitarian logic, ripe for racialization).

What brings the two characters together, however, is a drug deal, which Nick has undertaken because there’s not enough work for him on the docks: that is, what brings the characters together is unemployment. So while Nick understands the difference between them as being one of identity, he is wrong in that nothing separates them—other than a purely ideological and obscurant play of identities, which renders their structural identity invisible, and any “systematic cooperation” between them unthinkable.

The third exclusion is patriarchal. The union is a “brotherhood” in more than name, which is dramatized not only by the current makeup of the union but in the nostalgic and productivist-heroic self-representation glimpsed in the stained-glass window donated to a church by Frank Sobotka, the union’s treasurer. Now, on one level The Wire might seem to be guilty of the same exclusion: the thirteen dead women (and a fourteenth) get the plot moving, but the show is interested in the fate of the man who, it turns out, bears some responsibility for their deaths. But this reading requires us to assume the perspective of Sobotka himself, who is stricken by their deaths and by the thought of his complicity in them, but can imagine no solidarity with them nor any connection with them beyond the purely accidental one of their being part of the contraband that he has agreed to let through the port. Not accidentally, it is Russell, the female port authority officer, who understands that these women were workers too—unemployed workers, desperately seeking sex work in the United States. (This third exclusion is not just patriarchal but also geographic). So the fourteen women are not the excuse for the story of the dockworker’s union, but a third version of the same story: unemployment at the docks, unemployment in Baltimore, and unemployment in Eastern Europe, which is to say unemployment in what we used to call the “global South” but now includes the former East. As Russell puts it, “What they need is a union.”

The standpoint from which exclusion and exploitation look the same—Marx’s standpoint—is not the standpoint of labor exactly, but rather the standpoint of the critique of value. As long as social being, including the right to subsistence, is tied, in however mediated a fashion, to laboring in the service of the production of exchange value—to employment—exclusion will be the backdrop against which exploitation operates. But exclusion cannot be eliminated by good intentions; if anything, good intentions distract us from the fact that exclusion is tied up with the value form.30 The identitarian attachment to the production of value—the division of the world into makers and takers, between breadwinning on one hand, and devalued and gendered affective-reproductive labor on the other—is a mistake to which the labor movement has not always been conspicuously immune. But what is required is not less unionization: lacking a plausible, existent alternative form of organization, the alternative to unionization is direct exposure to the labor market, which is none other than the post-Fordist dream of “flexibility,” which is none other than universal casualization. What is required rather is the “systematic cooperation of the employed and the unemployed”: universal unionization. What this would look like cannot be worked out in advance: this is (part of) what is meant by the “unity of theory and practice.” But it is not, like proposals for a global wealth tax or paeans to spontaneous resistance—indeed, even like calls for a revolutionary party, a formally necessary category for the Left but one whose invocation is in the current conjuncture not opposed to celebrations of spontaneity but strictly identical with them in the empty abstraction of its call to action—a utopian stance in the old derogatory sense: an organized social basis for it actually exists. Hic Rhodus, hic salta: the coordinated unionization of de-casualized labor (for example, tenure-track faculty) and casualized labor (non-TT faculty) is a small but real step in the right direction. Capitalists—the 1% is a new name but not a new class—“no matter how cutthroat their mutual competition, nonetheless construct a real freemasonry against the working class as a whole.”31 What everybody else needs is a union.

David Jenemann

Racket and Relevance

In what was to be the last year of his life, Theodor Adorno delivered a lecture somewhat blandly entitled “Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft?” (“Late Capitalism or Industrial Society”) to the 16^th German Sociolgical Congress. When the lecture found its way into English in the journal Diogenes in 1969, the events of the previous year in Europe and America precipitated a much more forceful title: “Is Marx Obsolete?”

The issue, Adorno insists, is a basic one: “[I]s the thesis that Marx is obsolete…correct?” He goes on to articulate the issue in terms of class-consciousness in a technologically mediated post-industrial era. “The world is so permeated by the previously undreamed–of development of technology that the social relation which once defined capitalism—the conversion of living work into goods, and the class separation which brought it about—has lost its relevance.”32 The problem, as it was for Marx in the 18^th Brumaire, is how class-consciousness can spring from what Marx refers to as discrete “homologous magnitudes,” social, political, and administrative units of greater or lesser size unable to understand their mutually shared aims within the context of the broader social relations–nation state and the overall competition for surplus value. This monadaolgical inability to see outside of one’s own subject position, Marx pithily explains, functions “much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.”33

Marx’s analogy is apt. Individual tubers are inert and incapable of communication. The only thing holding them together is the bag—the overall structure binding their relationship. The fact that the bag in this case says “potatoes” rather than “turnips” is only indicative of the economic interest the structure takes in identifying—and thereby monetizing—its contents. As Adorno sees it, although technological conditions may have changed—particularly insofar as they ostensibly democratize access to communications and means of cultural expression—the problem of structure and of “homologous magnitude” remains unchanged. “Men are still the same as they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the last century: appendages of machinery.”34 Access to technology and enhanced mobility have not ameliorated the need for class consciousness. Instead, the relative comfort afforded by the West has made class distinctions more opaque. What would at first blush appear to be the late capitalist “bourgeoisification” of the working classes instead reveals itself as the opposite—the near-universal “proletarianization” of each individual masked by a reasonably high standard of living and access to consumer and cultural goods in certain parts of the world: “The fact that one cannot speak of a proletarian class-consciousness in the foremost capitalist countries does not itself contradict—contrary to common opinion—the existence of classes,” Adorno claims. “Social being does not necessarily create class consciousness. Precisely because of their social integration, the masses have no more control over their fate than they did 120 years ago; and yet they must do without not only class solidarity but even the full consciousness of the fact that they are objects, not subjects of the social process, though they keep it going as subjects.”35

Whereas Marx, in the 18^th Brumaire, is caustic and feisty, Adorno’s tone is melancholy, weary and resigned, and he acknowledges the “crazy contradiction” of post-industrial proletariats: that to maintain the illusion of affluence in the West human beings “are compelled to starve over large parts of the earth.”36

Between Marx’s “homologous magnitude” and Adorno’s “crazy contradiction” lies Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” which attempts to understand why we remain a sack of potatoes on the one hand while on the other consent to be complicit in atrocities around the globe by virtue of our attachment to what in American political discourse is often referred to as “our way of life”—the vision of ourselves as subjective, participatory agents in the Affluent Society. As this special issue of nonsite reveals, Horkheimer’s intervention—a text excised from Dialectic of Enlightenment—is an examination of late capitalist subjectivity conceived in terms of the conundrum over why the proletariat can’t understand themselves as such.

If one of the boons of the Enlightenment is that the individual gets to think of itself as a self—a rational cogito for better or worse in command of its own alterity—in the concomitant development of the bourgeoisie as the subject of the Enlightenment, individuals capitulate their individuality to the identities that best serve their economic interests. “The development of capitalistic society according to its own inherent tendencies, “ Horkheimer insists, “caused the progressive elements of competition [individual subjectivity] to disappear: it secured the link between the needs of consumers and the profit-interest of the individual entrepreneur, it diminished the possibility, slight as it was, that an independent mind gained access to an independent position, it reduced the number of relatively autonomous economic subjects, who by the very fact of that plurality had an interest in the functioning of general law and its impartial administration.”

This tendency to think of oneself as an identity—be it with a team, a municipality, a state, or a corporation—Horkheimer articulates in a tentative theory of the Brechtian idea of the racket, the way late capitalism promotes an ideology of “us” and “them.” “The concept of racket,” Horkeimer explains, in a footnote:

refers to the big as well as to the small units, [as] they all struggle for as great a share as possible of the surplus value. In this respect the highest capitalistic bodies resemble the little pressure groups working within or without the pale of the law among the most miserable strata of the population. Emphasis is to be laid on the fact that the role of a group in production though determining to a great extend its part in consumption, has been in class society just a good strategic position for grasping as much goods and services in the sphere of distribution.

In the provocative essays that accompany Horkehimer’s in this issue of nonsite, the question of the suitability of the idea of the racket evoked in a number of registers. In James Schmidt’s illuminating account of some of the issues at stake behind the Adorno and Horkheimer’s work while in exile in the States, he traces the discursive history of the concept of “rackets“ and the term’s subsequent near-effacement from Dialectic of Enlightenment at the urging of Friedrich Pollock (“‘Racket,’ ‘Monopoly’ and the Dialectic of Enlightenment). As Schmidt expertly demonstrates, despite its elision, the appeal of “racket” as a conceptual category was that it crystallized the wars of position that characterize competition in the capitalist epoch. At the same time, Schmidt claims, imagining an alternative to the racket offered Horkheimer a potential out to the problem posed by the problem of identity. “The ubiquity of rackets throughout history,” Schmidt explains “also provided Horkheimer with a hint of the form that an emancipated society would have to take: it would be ‘a racketless society.’”

Todd Cronan, in his response to Daniel Zamora, provocatively suggests that the alternative to the racket, despite its problematic position in contemporary theory and economic thought is something like the Weltschmerz of “the Multitude” as yet coopted by identity. “Suffering is the defining trait of a heroic proletariat, the Multitude, that doesn’t know itself yet, but that the Left is helping to discover themselves—by making more of them, or at least providing the theoretical justification for their existence.” The notion of an “unidentified” body of subjects who refuse categorization is clearly implicit in “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” as well as in the late work of Theodor Adorno who equated identity with ideology.

This idea is echoed John Lysaker’s essay, “What’s the Racket?:” Class in an Age of Systematic Opportunism.” Lysaker finds certain pessimism at the heart of Horkheimer’s privileging of the idea of the “racket” as the constitutive mode of late capitalistic subjectivity. Instead of the radical opportunism of “the Multitude” Horkheimer sees the racket as the form of subjectivation most in tune with the go-getter Babbitry of the mid-20^th century where opportunism curdles into exploitation. “In 1943,” Lysaker claims “Horkheimer no longer believes that revolutionary movements of any appreciable scale exist. Opportunism has become systemic, with competition of all against all defining the state of second nature. And he does not believe that a critical social theory can undo the damage.”

The challenge of Horkheimer’s analysis of the racket is that he spares no form of identity—especially identification with the unions—in his critique. Indeed, for Horkheimer, the unions are the racket-exemplar par excellence. “The antagonism between the classes is reproduced within the structure of labor and especially within the labor unions themselves and it is perhaps better veiled there than it ever was in society as a whole.” Because the unions purport to be in opposition to the industrial, administrative class, laboring subjects throw themselves into the union sack without consideration of the way that this identification reproduces the relations of production. “Docilely and without a hint of any opposing interests,” Horkheimer continues, “the workers surrender part of their money to the mammoth trusts which trade in their own labor.” This is an unsettling charge, particularly for those who see labor under attack and the unions—dwindling as their power may be—as an alternative to the broader reification of capitalism. Against this charge, in “Everybody Needs a Union,” Nicholas Brown insists that it is precisely in the form of organized identity traditionally offered by the union that one can find the kernel of resistance to the opportunism—or as brown calls it, “flexibility”—of the late capitalist economy. According to Brown, “what is required is not less unionization: lacking a plausible, existent alternative form of organization, the alternative to unionization is direct exposure to the labor market, which is none other than the post-Fordist dream of ‘flexibility,’ which is none other than universal casualization. What is required rather is the ‘systematic cooperation of the employed and the unemployed’: universal unionization.”

In conjunction with these provocative and diverse takes on Horkheimer’s “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” I would like to provisionally offer my own—one which only crystallized when reading these excellent essays as a piece. In Lysaker’s essay, he suggests that one of the truisms of the contemporary racket is that it is actualized—and volatilized—within an increasingly rapid, ever-echoing network of communications. “To use the language of a contemporary racket,” he points out, “unless an analysis can demonstrate the economic value that it adds, it is immediately suspect and subject to scorn on the lips of radio demagogues, ‘representatives,’ and even industry wonks who will assail it as bad prose, folk psychology, utopian naiveté, etc.”

To put this a slightly different way, while the system of rackets is a fundamental part of the overarching structure of post capitalist society, any given racket is permitted only insofar as it doesn’t challenge that overall structure. In such conditions, one racket can be mobilized to protect and defend its carefully demarcated subject position and in so doing champion an entire “way of life” operating as a front for the ideology of competition and the exploitation of oppressed peoples. Lysaker’s evocation of radio demagogues provides a key clue to the ongoing relevance of Horkheimer’s use of the racket in the “Sociology of Class Relations” and helps provide a provisional answer to the question of relevance Adorno raises at the outset of “Is Marx Obsolete?” As James Schmidt explains, the concept of the racket was deftly excised almost completely from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Nevertheless, it emerges with a vengeance in the critique of fascist demagoguery Adorno, Horkheimer, and other members of the Institute for Social Research were engaged in during their exile in the United States. Adorno especially, in his analysis of The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses notes the rhetoric of the racket in right wing radio broadcasts. Thomas, like many radio demagogues, was quick to throw the term “racket” at any group who opposed him or whose politics or religion he disagreed with, but while Thomas claimed that Jews, Communists, and liberals are rackets, Adorno turns that assertion back on the radio personality himself to argue that he and his followers were the true racket, indulging in-group paranoia and apocalyptic cultishness. “The ‘if you only knew’ device,” Adorno explains, citing one of Thomas’s common techniques to draw in listeners, “promises to reveal the secret to those who join the racket and pay their tithe. But it also implies the promise that they will some day participate in the night of long knives, the Utopia of the racket.”37

Stephen Crook, in his Introduction to Adorno’s The Stars Down to Earth, incisively notes the importance of Adorno’s reversal: “It is the debunking function of the term ‘racket’ which appeals to Adorno: fascism loses its glamour and mystique if it is ‘just another racket.’ Thus, the frequent attacks which Thomas makes on established politics as a racket of the communists and Jews is a transparent defensive trick. ‘Fewer, he reasons, will believe him a racketeer, if he thus violently attacks racketeering.’”38

It is within this context that we can see that both Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the racket take on contemporary relevance. The racket is at once a term used to marginalize and disparage a perceived threat to the in-group. At the same time, it can be used to identify the perpetrators of hateful ideology. It is worth noting, hopefully as a historical footnote that today’s most notorious “racketeer,” presidential candidate Donald Trump, conforms almost exactly to this schema in his proclivity to call out perceived threats to the American way of life by calling out large classes of individuals as threats to American sovereignty. If the notion of the racket is the byproduct of a world in which the competition of groups for surplus capital is the accepted state of affairs, it is no wonder that this self-described master of the “Art of the Deal” would reproduce that spirit of overall competition by criminalizing his bogeys in his description of Mexican Immigrants as rapists and criminals and his insistence that when he’s president, there will be “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” That Trump is, as I write these words, leading in national polls suggests to us the appeal of the rackets and the crucial importance of Horkheimer’s insights in understanding the persistence of reactionary consciousness in our contemporary political discourse.

“On the Sociology of Class Relations” comes to us in fragmentary form, and its final paragraphs, full of illegible words and fractured sentences, are at once the most difficult to comprehend and at the same time, the most full of passion. Shining through the mangled draft is Horkheimer’s ringing defense of Democracy against the rhetoric of the rackets. In spite of the “distortions by which the rackets have adapted [Democracy] to their economic and political practice,” Horkheimer insists, “despite of their sly formulation of political concepts which makes of express political cliques dominating whole groups. Despite of all that the meaning of Democracy deeply connected with that of truth is not forgotten and it needs to be expressed against a world which is more repressive and diabolic than ever and against the [?most hardened] tactics of stupidity.” In the face of a near constant reminder of the way the racket is used as a tool of domination and the spectacle of our entire political discourse degenerating into reactionary finger pointing and “diabolical (!)” behavior, it is comforting to hear Horkeimer’s reminder that there is—still—a deeper, decent truth at the heart of Democracy. It’s up to us to bring that decency to light.